Thanks to reader Joel Herman for pointing out this important article about the real origins of the religious right.
It did not become organized because of the legalization of abortion by Roe v. Wade. When that decision was announced, evangelicals barely responded.
The issue that mobilized the religious right was segregation. Racism. Read the article.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I recently read–and recommend–Jeff Sharlet’s “The Family,” which is an impressively researched and documented history of American theocratic thought. Opposition to labor unions was also a key element in the rise of this element of our polity.
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Good point, markstextterminal.
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AlterNet, published, on June 12, 2003, a follow-up interview with the writer, who went “undercover among America’s theocrat” politicians, for the Harper magazine article about the “The Family”.
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Well, that sounds pretty accurate to me.
And apparently, the Evangelical, segregated colleges that lost their tax exemption, never heard of the First Amendment and the separation of church and state.
Having jumped also upon the anti-abortion wagon in order to garner more support among Catholics and Evangelicals, the Evangelicals et al, also have never stopped to consider that the way to dramatically reduce abortions is to have comprehensive sex education in the public schools (which most of them oppose- they favor “abstinence only” curricula) and to make birth control widely available, either very inexpensive or even free. But many of them are opposed to birth control, too.
PS. In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that I am opposed to tax exempt status for any church, synagogue, mosque, temple, etc. I would allow a tax exemption for any money that they actually (and provably) spend doing real charitable work- feeding the hungry, clothing people who cannot afford clothes, helping with housing for the poor, educating economically disadvantaged children, etc, as long as there are no religious requirements or restrictions for those in need to receive that help.
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Agreed all
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KKK = Religious Right
When the KKK came under attack and lost in court, its members did not vanish. They quietly found another base, the Religious Right.
KKK leader quoted in The Christian Post on March 24, 2014
“We’re a Christian Oranization”
http://www.christianpost.com/news/kkk-leader-were-a-christian-organization-claims-the-klan-is-not-a-hate-group-116614/
In 1915, white Protestant nativists organized a revival of the Ku Klux Klan near Atlanta, Georgia, inspired by their romantic view of the Old South as well as Thomas Dixon’s 1905 book “The Clansman” and D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film “Birth of a Nation.” …
The Great Depression in the 1930s depleted the Klan’s membership ranks, and the organization temporarily disbanded in 1944. The civil rights movement of the 1960s saw a surge of local Klan activity across the South, including the bombings, beatings and shootings of black and white activists.
http://www.history.com/topics/ku-klux-klan
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Thank you for the brief history lesson, Lloyd. It’s entirely accurate.
And I wish that D.W. Griffith had never been born. His film did untold damage to this nation.
If there is a Hell, I hope he’s roasting in the lowest depths of it. Along with many others.
People are just people. We need to accept our fellow humans as they are, regardless of race, creed, sexual orientation, or whatever. Except for their behavior towards others. If they are prejudiced jerks, call them out, and work for causes and elected officials who will work against them.
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Hell did exist but originally went by another name. I’ve read that the original hell, several thousand years ago, was a garbage dump outside of Jerusalem where the garbage was burned. Some Christians have argued this is false, but the evidence says otherwise.
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Gehenna
“Gehenna is sometimes translated as Hell (in English).”
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Lloyd, the Greeks, the Egyptians, and many other earlier, proto Indo-European religions had the idea of Hell (they didn’t call it that, of course), also thousands of years ago.
Some of the early religions conceived of the afterlife as a place of punishment for miscreants, some believed that the punishment, if any, involved just having your “soul” or whatever “erased,” so to speak, some believed that you just sort of wandered around after death, no particular bliss and no punishment. Some believed that you would come back into another body, a human one if you were “good,” and perhaps an insect or snake or something if you had not been.
I think that early Christianity picked up a whole lot of their beliefs, not just about the afterlife, but other things, as well, from more ancient beliefs floating around the Middle East at that time.
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Robert Jones, who wrote The End of White Christian America”, stated that race clearly trumps religion in determining voting patterns, etc.
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I don’t know that I would include Jimmy Carter in with right wing evangelicals. Carter is a Baptist, but he is more of a “left wing evangelical.” The Carters sent Amy to the Washington public schools, and Jimmy Carter still works with Habitat for Humanity. Carter is not a hypocrite like many of the right wing evangelicals; he practices what he preaches.
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Excellent example. In fact, I don’t know why we use the term “Religious Right.” It should be the “Right” or “Radical Right” because their supposed religiosity is almost completely stripped of ethical consistency.
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Baptists support separation of church and state.
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The entire “education reform/choice” movement, too, has from its beginnings been rooted in racism. The movement, of which charter schools are the profit-making part, has always had resegregation of America’s schools as its core agenda:
The first calls for “reform” in the guise of vouchers arose immediately after the 1954 Supreme Court ruling on Brown v. Board of Education in which the Court declared that separate but equal was inherently unequal and ordered racial integration of the public schools. That ruling triggered “white flight” from public schools to private schools — but parents quickly realized that the tuition cost of private schools was more than they wanted to pay out-of-pocket. That realization led political and private resegregationists to the concoct the “reform” of vouchers, and to sell it to eager parents by deceptively marketing it then —and still today — as merely giving parents free “choice.”
But the 1950’s voucher reform faded away when it became clear that because of school attendance boundaries no more than a few token blacks would be attending formerly all-white public schools. In 1972 when the Supreme Court finally ordered busing to end the ongoing de facto segregation, the reform movement rose from its grave and has been alive ever since then trying new tactics to restore racial segregation because it’s unlikely that the Court’s racial integration order can ever be reversed. When it became clear in the 1980’s that vouchers would never become widespread, the segregationists tried many other routes to restore racial segregation, and the most successful has been charter schools because charter schools can be sold to blithely unaware do-gooder billionaires as well as to unscrupulous profiteers who recognized charter schools as a way to divert vast amounts of tax money into their own pockets and into the pockets of supportive politicians at every level of government.
Reports from the NAACP and ACLU reveal the facts about just how charter schools are resegregating our nation’s schools, as well as discriminating racially and socioeconomically against American children, and now the NAACP Board of Directors has ratified a resolution calling for a moratorium on charter school expansion and for the strengthening of oversight in governance and practice. Moreover, a very detailed nationwide research by The Center for Civil Rights Remedies at UCLA shows in clear terms that private charter schools suspend extraordinary numbers of black students and students with disabilities.
An essential part of the strategy to mask their underlying motives has been for segregationists to sell the public on the necessity for charter schools because public schools are allegedly “failing.” With all manner of “research” that essentially compares apples to oranges against foreign nations’ students, and with the self-fulfilling prophecy of dismal public school performance generated by drastic underfunding of public schools, and with condemnation of public school teachers based on statistically invalid student test scores, the segregationists are succeeding in resegregating education in America via what are basically private charter schools that are funded with public money.
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Yes, Scisne, ^^this^^. Multiple “likes” for your comment.
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Agree and add children with disabilities into the mix
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Paul Weyrich (mentioned in the linked article) and, his disciple, Eric Heubeck, wrote Machiavellian plots that included, “public schools, countered with parallel schools…charter schools”. Weyrich co-founded Koch’s ALEC. In the 80’s, Donald Rumsfeld chaired ALEC’s Business Policy Board. Currently, Rumsfeld is featured at the Walton’s Gen Next site, which states a goal of privatized schools.
A Congressman from Ohio, Donald Lukens, was involved, in ALEC’s founding. Years later, after being scrubbed from ALEC’s history, he was arrested for unseemly involvement with a too young, Black woman. There were racial overtones to the
role-playing activities, as media reported it, at the time.
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Lukens, there’s a blast from the past I had forgotten. Thanks for the history lesson.
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Does the religious right think their “invisible” friend is better than anyone else’s?
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Well, of course they do, Yvonne. All religions believe that their deity or deities are better than anyone else’s. That’s a huge part of their religions.
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It’s sickening. Religious wars are really stupid.
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Tomorrow, if people in the religious right (although it gives religion a bad name to use the term for them) spread the PR message that “tested positive” with audiences, “If you hate Trump more than love America, you never loved America”, it’ll be clear they are part of the authoritarian regime that is leading the nation into the dark depths of belligerent nationalism, racism, militarism- in other words, fascism
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This article is brief. I think this account minimizes the influence of Supreme Court rulings in the early 1960s that “took prayer and the Bible out of public schools.” In Engel v. Vitale (1962) and in Abington School District v. Schempp (1963), the Supreme Court established what is now the current prohibition on state-sponsored prayer in schools. http://religionandpolitics.org/2012/06/25/when-the-court-took-on-prayer-the-bible-and-public-schools/
Long before the 1960s there were battles over the power of church and state in educating children. Anti-Catholic views shaping many of these battles, especially who had “rights” to use public school space and time for religious instruction. By the late 1800s, state legislatures were supressing these disputes. The failed Blaine amendment to the Constutution lead more states to set boundaries on public support for religious instruction and related activities.
Here is the text of the 1875 Blaine amendment.
“No state shall make any law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; and no money raised by taxation in any State, for the support of the public schools or derived from any public fund, shall ever be under the control of any religious sect, nor shall any money so raised ever be divided between religious sects or denominations.”
In any case, those Supreme Court rulings in the early 1960’s fueled some fears already in place after WW II—the “red scare,” McCarthy era, and threat of “godless communism” insinuating its way into American life, that wild counterculture of “flower childen”–all provided fuel for evangelicals to organize. Here is a brief paper on some of this history. http://www.americanpopularculture.com/journal/index.htm
I think that DeVos and fellow travellers will never give up the idea that public schools are “godless,” and that all hell broke loose when the Supreme Court took prayer and the Bible out of public schools. That was too much on top of the 1954 federal law to desegregate public schools (Brown versus the Board of Education). In 1971, there was more piling on when the Supreme Courtruled that private schools that practiced racial discrimination (segregation academies spawned by Brown) could not qualify for an IRS. Then came Roe vs Wade and the current drive to proclaim that “religious liberty is threatened by the gov’ment” including public schools.
This account constructed around Bob Jones University documenst is useful. So are other comments. Too little of this complicated history is brought into
I think that DeVos and fellow travellers will never give up the idea that public schools are “godless,” that all hell broke loose when the Supreme Court took prayer and the Bible out of public schools. That this was too much on top of the 1954 federal law to desegregate public schools in Brown versus the Board of Education. There was more piling on from the Supreme Court. In 1971, the Supreme Court ruled that private schools that practiced racial discrimination could not qualify for an IRS. In 1973, Roe vs Wade helped to build new alliances of religious groups who claimed that their “religious liberty” was threatened… a claim that gets attached to “godless” public schools.
Public schools do have some legal guardrails on permissible religious activities, but they also have a lot of “you must allow this” rules on relgious expression. Indictrination is off the table. That is what DeVos and followers really want, along with keeping schools well segreagted by race and social class, add gender and gender identity too. Here is an excellent resource on permissible activities bearing on religion in public schools and prohibitions established by law.
https://www.aclu.org/other/joint-statement-current-law-religion-public-schools
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Hit “post” before final edit. Sorry.
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Here’s how a dominant religion in an area can sidestep the Constitution. My wife came to work in the East Valley of the Phoenix Metropolitan area in the 70s. Most public schools had land across the street set aside for an LDS seminary. Students went to class there as part of their public school schedule, with “seminary” written alongside Algebra and History. But when students came to have my wife, a counselor, change their schedules or the seminary would call over and ask the counselors to level their classes for them, my wife objected. Her job, funded by taxpayers, did not include making schedule changes for a religious institution supposedly unconnected to the school. She was the first person, apparently, to ever challenge the practice. Don’t forget, too, the LDS church did not change its teachings on Blacks until 1978, so the fact that my wife is Black lent a tang to her obstructionism to what had always been accepted practice. By the way, plenty of Mormons told her they agreed with her, but the hierarchy was aghast. (she also started the first Black Student Union in the East Valley). Eventually, as part of a grudge against her, she was repeatedly transferred and eventually physically assaulted and had to retire early. The assault had no direct connection to her stand on the separation of church and state but the hostility toward her allowed things to get out of hand’ she was fair game.
No one meant any harm having counselors change seminary schedules, it was just common practice in a heavily LDS community (our school was about 16% LDS in the late 80s). Be assured, this is no attack on the LDS folks, who are good people and very civic minded and great supporters of education (note the Mormons who denied Trump their support). It is just an example of power corrupting.
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Thanks for describing your wife’s school experience.
IMO, the Mormon Tabernacle choir should not have been at Trump’s inauguration.
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Agreed. It’s a TERRIBLE example that is being set.
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