BAD FAITH: RACE AND THE RISE OF THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT by RANDALL BALMER -A REVIEW

The Christian Right had its origins in racism and its embrace of Trump is no surprise.

It is no exaggeration that evangelical Christians were ecstatic about Donald Trump. Some polls indicate that 81% of white evangelicals voted for Trump in the 2020 election. For outsiders, the contradictions could not be more gaping. Ostensibly Bible-based believers, God-obsessed and moralistic, white evangelicals have embraced as their leader a thrice-married, religiously indifferent, and ill-informed chronic liar, a foul-mouthed adulterer who engages in affairs with porn stars, and is a racist besides. How could they?

When it comes to Trump's racism, the historian of American evangelicalism, Randall Balmer, explains that there is no contradiction to be found. The contemporary evangelical movement, the Christian Right in its political manifestation, was forged out of racism. Embracing racism was its original sin and it only gets worse from there.

Balmer's brief treatise is an expansion of an article that he originally penned for Politico. I suspect that Balmer wanted to publish a brief and accessible text given the urgency of our times. His thesis pivots around the abortion myth, namely the popularly held presumption that the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973, which federally legalized a woman's right to a safe and legal abortion, was the incident that re-politicized the evangelical subculture. That presumption, as Balmer makes clear, is false.

The political commitments of today's evangelicals provided Balmer with the opportunity for a brief survey of the history of the American evangelical movement. It began with the Second Great Awakening, a fervent religious movement that swept through various regions of the United States. Its impact on shaping American society cannot be overstated. As Balmer notes, “Aside from the Civil War, the Second Great Awakening was arguably the most consequential event in American history.” I recall historian, Jill Lepore, the author of These Truths, a magisterial history of the United States, stating what surprised her most in her research was the influence evangelical Christianity had in animating our nation's political culture.

From the progressive standpoint, the role of the early evangelical movement could be construed as benign. Evangelicals then were committed to promoting women's rights, prison reform, education, advocacy for the poor, and many sided with the abolitionist movement, especially in the North. Though it seems like a regressive issue, evangelicals were in the forefront of the temperance movement. They were concerned with the destructive role of excessive alcohol consumption, as husbands and fathers drank their earnings away in the saloon to the great detriment of their wives and families.

As Balmer notes, New England was a center of evangelical religion. So was western New York State. But it was in the Cumberland Valley of Kentucky, where evangelical enthusiasm, replete with revival meetings, was most dramatic. It caught on among Baptist churches and the Methodist movement most of all.

Evangelical reformism then was rooted in its theology. Believers held to a doctrine referred to as “postmillennialism.” This entailed the belief that Jesus would return after a millennium, a thousand-year period of peace and righteousness predicted in the book of Revelation. This belief was a spur to creating through human agency social conditions that would enable Jesus' Second Coming.

Unfortunately, a benign earthly condition did not emerge as had been hoped. The extraordinary ferocity of the Civil War, with more than 750,000 Americans slaughtered on blood-soaked battlefields, defied optimistic religious hopes. Moreover, as Balmer notes, “Teeming, squalid tenements roiling with labor unrest, hardly resembled the precincts of Zion that evangelicals had so confidently predicted earlier in the century”

Such conditions left evangelicals open to accepting a new doctrine. That doctrine was espoused by John Nelson Darby, who came from England to preach the message of dispensational millennialism, which inverted the understanding of when Jesus would make his return. History was divided into specific stages or dispensations, and rather than return after a millennium of social reform, Jesus would make his return before the millennium. Practically speaking, this freed believers from absolving social ills. Social obligation yielded to an emphasis on individual salvation. To again cite Randall Balmer, “If Jesus was going to return at any moment, why bother making the transitory world a better place?... Preachers would often cajole their congregants into making a profession of faith—what Billy Graham called 'making a decision for Christ' -by warning that if they died suddenly or if Jesus returned, as he could at any moment, those who were not 'saved' would face judgment and be consigned to hell.”

“The doctrine of dispensational premillennialism-Jesus will return imminently-effectively absolved American evangelicals of responsibility to reform society and redirected their energies toward individual regeneration. With very few exceptions, evangelicals remained outside the political fray in the final decades of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth.”

The evangelical retreat from society was given an exponential boost by the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925. Having been ridiculed as country bumpkins, they increasingly saw the secular and political realms as corrupt and the devil's work, and so took a deeper parochial turn into their religious subculture. As a result, in the middle decades of the century evangelicals became politically quietistic.

This changed in the late 1970s as evangelicals became re-politicized and thereby shifted the entire American political landscape far to the right. It has arguably never been the same since.

This brings us to the heart of Balmer's thesis. The presumption is that evangelicals were politically galvanized by Roe v. Wade and the Supreme Court's legalization of abortion. This is false. As he points out, in the mid-70s evangelical ministers discussed abortion and concurred that it was a “Catholic issue” which evoked little concern among them. As Balmer notes, “Abortion simply failed to gain traction among evangelicals, and some groups with historic ties to evangelicalism pushed for legalization.”

“Baptists, in particular, applauded the Roe decision as an appropriate articulation of the line of division between church and state, between personal morality and state regulation of individual behavior.”

“The overwhelming response to Roe v. Wade on the part of evangelicals was silence, and the voices that spoke on the matter were ambivalent.”

If not abortion, what was the incident that propelled evangelicals into the political fray? The issue was another court decision that ruled that any organization engaging in racial segregation or racial discrimination was not, by definition, a charitable institution, and therefore had no claims to tax exemption status.

After the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, that integrated the public schools, many white evangelicals established their own Christian academies in order to evade integration. The most salient of segregated Christian schools was Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina. In 1970, Richard Nixon enacted a policy that had the Internal Revenue Service deny tax exemptions to all segregated schools in the United States. This move escalated in the late 1970s under the presidency of Jimmy Carter, who staunchly believed in the separation of church and state. For evangelicals under the leadership of Paul Weyrich and Jerry Falwell, this was the last straw, which they construed as an assault on the integrity of the evangelical subculture. As evangelicals increased their migration to the Republican Party they saw this issue as one around which to politically organize, and so they did.

An irony is that having initially applauded Jimmy Carter's presidential victory, who as a born again Christian was one of their own, they turned their backs on Carter and supported Ronald Reagan who was of dubious religious identity and never went to church.

Evangelical opposition to abortion came later. But as Balmer points out, sustaining the myth that opposition to abortion galvanized evangelicals to reenter politics serves their interests in that it masked the racism which characterized the birth of the Christian Right, and still does.

Here my review takes a personal turn. Randall Balmer was a colleague of mine at Columbia University with whom I developed a long and productive acquaintanceship. We studied for our doctorates in religion in parallel, he at Princeton and I at Columbia. Randy went on to become a pre-eminent scholar, and long served as the chair of the Religion Department at Barnard College. I continued my professional work as a leader in the Ethical Culture Movement and have taught human rights at Columbia for the past 21 years.

Randall Balmer is himself an evangelical, as he recounts in this volume, who identifies with the progressive wing of evangelicalism. It is hardly a secret that he feels betrayed by the hard-core reactionary move that evangelical Christianity has taken, especially in the past four decades. I quote his conclusions at length:

“For decades, leaders of the Religious Right have assured us that theirs was a movement devoted to 'family values', a statement that is difficult to reconcile with support of a thrice-married former casino operator and self-confessed sexual predator who cavorts with a porn star. Could it be – could it be? - that the 2016 election finally allowed the Religious Right to abandon the pretext that the embrace of family values lay at the core of their movement, that the support for Donald Trump represents the movement coming full circle to the charter principle behind its formation?”

“Sadly, the Religious Right was never about the advancement of biblical values. The modern, politically conservative evangelical activism we see today is a movement rooted in the perpetuation of racial segregation, and its affiliation with the hard-right fringes of the conservative movement beginning in the late 1970s produced a mutant form of evangelicalism inconsistent with the best traditions of evangelicalism itself.”

“...having...forfeited their prophetic voice, leaders of the movement and the Religious Right itself have become little more than a political interest group.”

For those of us on the outside, this hardly comes as a surprise. We may conclude, in addition, that this hard-hitting critique, coming from an extremely knowledgeable insider and authority, is, therefore, especially worthy of our acceptance.

One related question that Balmer's essay does not address, and remains an issue of speculation, is why the Christian Right selected and raised abortion to the height of its political program. As is often noted, both the New Testament and the Hebrew Bible fail to say a word about abortion. Jesus is completely silent on the issue. Though, as noted, opposition to abortion has long been a Catholic issue, for Protestants it is a cause sown exclusively from political cloth.

I recall many years ago, posing this question to my colleague. Randy's speculation veered into the socio-psychological. He opined that perhaps, given their social status of feeling under the hegemony of elites, evangelicals somehow harbor an identity with the helplessness of the fetus.

Speculation, to be sure. Whether it pertains to the specific issue of abortion, I believe, is a matter deserving further inquiry. But one conclusion that is assuredly more germane in our times is that the divisions of power and prestige among diverse groups in American society, be they religious, racial, ethnic, or economic, have grown increasingly strident, and are flashpoints for political strife that is more acrimonious, hateful and dangerous.