Bishops Rile Up the Religious Right, Then and Now

Bishops Rile Up the Religious Right, Then and Now June 5, 2014
There’s been a lot of discussion lately of the ideological roots of the Christian Right. Sarah Posner dissected Nebraska Senate candidate Ben Sasse’s dissertation here on RD, noting that according to Sasse, the “roots of the modern religious right lie in the 1962 and 1963 Supreme Court decisions striking down mandatory public school prayer and Bible reading.” According to Sasse, those decisions “touched a nerve” among the grassroots, which led to the subsequent rise of the right as a “spontaneous” response to “judicial tyranny.”
In Politico, historian Randall Balmer takes another view, deconstructing the right’s creation myth, which centers on Roe v. Wade as the catalyst for the Moral Majority. He reiterates that it was anger over the removal of federal tax exempt status from segregationist Christian academies in the South, which had been created as an end-run around the desegregation of public schools, that politically activated the right.
Sensing that “he had the beginnings of a conservative political movement,” political strategist Paul Weyrich and “other leaders of the nascent religious right blamed” President Jimmy Carter “for the IRS actions against segregated schools—even though the policy was mandated by Nixon.”
But, “having tapped into the ire of evangelical leaders,” says Balmer, Weyrich was “savvy enough to recognize that organizing grassroots evangelicals to defend racial discrimination would be a challenge.” So he turned to a more palatable issue—abortion.
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