How Segregation Found a Better Issue

The standard story of the American religious right is that Roe v. Wade in 1973 awoke a sleeping evangelical giant, which mobilised in defence of unborn life and reshaped the Republican party. Almost every element of that story is wrong, and we know it is wrong because the men who built the movement said so, in public, while they were building it.

This chapter has two strands that eventually braid together: the political history of how a defence of segregated schools became a moral crusade, and the theological history of a nineteenth-century apocalyptic system that made a certain kind of American Christian into an unconditional partisan of a foreign state.

What evangelicals actually thought about abortion

Begin with the evidence that the mobilisation could not have been about abortion, because for most of the 1970s American evangelicals did not have the position now attributed to them.

• In 1971 the Southern Baptist Convention (the largest Protestant body in the United States) passed a resolution calling for legislation permitting abortion in cases including rape, incest, fetal deformity, and damage to the emotional, mental or physical health of the mother. It reaffirmed the position in 1974 and 1976, after Roe.
• W. A. Criswell, the SBC's most prominent pastor, said after Roe that he had always felt that a person did not become an individual until birth, and that what was best for the mother and the family should prevail.
• Opposition to abortion was understood at the time as a Catholic position. Protestant commentary frequently treated it as such, and some of it was explicitly anti-Catholic on that ground.

Something changed between 1973 and 1979, and it was not the theology.

What actually mobilised them

The trigger was the tax status of segregated Christian schools.

After Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and the Civil Rights Act (1964), white families across the South withdrew children from integrating public schools into new private academies, very often church-affiliated. They were widely known as segregation academies, and there were thousands of them. They were tax-exempt.

Then the courts moved. In Green v. Connally (1971) a federal court held that an institution practising racial discrimination is not "charitable" in law and cannot hold tax exemption. The IRS began applying that principle. Its most conspicuous target was Bob Jones University in South Carolina, which at the time refused to admit Black students, then admitted only married Black students, then admitted single Black students under a rule prohibiting interracial dating and marriage, a rule the university did not drop until 2000. The IRS revoked its exemption in 1976, and the Supreme Court upheld the revocation in Bob Jones University v. United States (1983).

Paul Weyrich (the movement's chief political architect, co-founder of the Heritage Foundation and the man who gave the Moral Majority its name) spent years trying to interest evangelical leaders in various issues without success. His own account, repeated at conferences and recorded by the historian Randall Balmer, is that what finally galvanised them was not abortion, school prayer, or pornography, but the IRS action against segregated Christian schools. Balmer has published the account and Weyrich never disowned it.¹

Abortion was then selected. It had obvious advantages: it was morally unambiguous in a way that defending segregation academies was not, it recruited Catholics into a Protestant-led coalition, and it made participants feel righteous rather than defensive. Francis Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop's 1979 film series Whatever Happened to the Human Race? did the theological retrofit, and Jerry Falwell (who had founded a private academy in Lynchburg in 1967 and who had preached in 1958 against integration) became the public face of a movement about life.

1980, and what the coalition delivered

Ronald Reagan (divorced, not notably religious, and the governor who had signed one of the most liberal abortion laws in the country in California in 1967) became the movement's candidate. In August 1980 he opened his general election campaign at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi, a few miles from where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964, and told the crowd he believed in states' rights.

The euphemism was not accidental, and the strategy behind it had been described with brutal clarity by the Republican operative Lee Atwater in an interview given in 1981: you start out saying the openly racist word, he explained, and by the later stages you are saying tax cuts, and it is all entirely abstract, and a by-product of it is that Black people get hurt worse than whites.²

That is the mechanism of this chapter in one paragraph: the same political constituency, the same underlying interest, and a sequence of successively more respectable public issues.

The other strand: an apocalyptic system from 1830

Now the theology, because it explains a foreign policy.

John Nelson Darby, an Anglo-Irish minister who left the Church of Ireland for the Plymouth Brethren, worked out in the 1830s a system called dispensationalism. It divides history into distinct epochs, or dispensations, in which God deals with humanity on different terms; it holds that biblical prophecy is to be read literally; it insists that the promises to Israel are separate from and not fulfilled by the church; and it introduced the doctrine of a rapture, the removal of true believers before a period of tribulation, followed by the return of Christ.

Darby toured North America repeatedly between 1862 and 1877. His system was popularised through Bible conferences and through the Scofield Reference Bible (1909), which printed the interpretation as annotations on the same page as the text. For millions of readers, Scofield's notes and scripture became difficult to distinguish. Institutions followed: Moody Bible Institute, Dallas Theological Seminary, a network of Bible colleges.³

The relevant consequence is this: in dispensational prophecy, the restoration of the Jews to the land of Israel is a required precondition for the end-time sequence. Support for a Jewish state is therefore not a matter of politics or sympathy. It is participation in the prophetic schedule.

Christian Zionism came first

The chronology surprises people. In 1891, the Chicago businessman and evangelist William Blackstone presented President Benjamin Harrison with a memorial urging an international conference to restore Palestine to the Jews, signed by more than four hundred prominent Americans: financiers, editors, clergy, congressmen, including J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller. That was five years before Theodor Herzl published Der Judenstaat and six before the First Zionist Congress.⁴

American Christian Zionism therefore predates political Jewish Zionism as an organised American cause, and its motives were, from the beginning, eschatological rather than humanitarian.

The 1948 founding of Israel and, far more, the 1967 capture of the Old City of Jerusalem read to dispensationalists as prophecy visibly executing. Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth (1970) turned the framework into a mass-market paperback and was reportedly the best-selling non-fiction book of the decade in the United States; the Left Behind novels sold tens of millions more from 1995.

The third temple, and its strange coalition

One branch of the prophecy requires a rebuilt temple on the site now occupied by the Al-Aqsa compound. From the 1980s a small Israeli movement dedicated to preparing for a third temple (vessels, priestly garments, training) found funding and enthusiasm among American evangelicals, including the well-documented involvement of Christian ranchers in breeding unblemished red heifers for the purification rite described in Numbers 19.⁵

This is a coalition between two groups whose ultimate expectations are incompatible: the dispensationalist scenario ends with mass conversion or destruction of the Jews who do not accept Christ, a fact that has been pointed out from within Jewish communities for decades, and which functions anyway, because in the short run both want the same policies. Christians United for Israel, founded in 2006, now claims a membership in the millions and is a significant lobbying force.

The mechanism, stated generally

Strip the specifics and a repeatable political technique remains, and it is the reason this chapter sits where it does in the chronicle.

1. A political coalition has an interest it can no longer state openly, because the open statement has become socially unacceptable.
2. Its organisers look for an issue that mobilises the same voters, confers moral standing rather than shame, and can be presented as a defence of children, family or the natural order.
3. The issue is then backfilled with theology, and within a decade participants sincerely believe it was always the core commitment.
4. The original interest is served throughout, because the coalition it holds together votes as a bloc on everything else.

Balmer's account and Weyrich's own words are the documentation for step two in the 1970s case. The chronicle's contention is that this is a general technique rather than a one-off.

Forward

By 1980 the coalition was assembled: an economic elite that wanted deregulation and tax cuts, a Southern political base reorganised around race but speaking about morality, and a theological constituency with an apocalyptic interest in the Middle East. Chapter 18 follows what that coalition did at home for the next forty years, and what it means that a country this rich still cannot build things it would have to share.

Footnotes

1. Randall Balmer, Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorted the Faith and Threatens America (New York: Basic Books, 2006), and Balmer, "The Real Origins of the Religious Right," Politico Magazine, 27 May 2014. On the schools themselves, Joseph Crespino, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Princeton, 2007). ↩
2. Lee Atwater, interview with Alexander P. Lamis, 1981, published anonymously in Lamis, The Two-Party South (Oxford University Press, 1984) and attributed after Atwater's death; the audio was released by The Nation in 2012. ↩
3. Ernest R. Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism, 1800–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 2006). ↩
4. Yaakov Ariel, An Unusual Relationship: Evangelical Christians and Jews (New York: NYU Press, 2013); Robert O. Smith, More Desired than Our Owne Salvation: The Roots of Christian Zionism (Oxford, 2013). ↩
5. Motti Inbari, Jewish Fundamentalism and the Temple Mount (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009); Gershom Gorenberg, The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount (New York: Free Press, 2000). ↩