One of the convenient myths evangelicals have long put forward to explain the rise of the so-called "Religious Right" in the late 1970's is that it was a principled response to the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion. Not so, argues Balmer. [2] Indeed, as he demonstrates convincingly, evangelicals, by and large, understood abortion to be a Catholic issue, and were generally tolerant of the practice and supportive of the Roe decision. Balmer cites, not only successive editors of Christianity Today magazine, the redoubtable Carl F. H. Henry and Harold Lindsell, but First Baptist Dallas's famous fundamentalist Pastor W. A. Criswell and, most shocking of all, Focus on the Family's James Dobson, who, noting the Bible's silence on the matter of abortion, considered it plausible for an evangelical to believe that "a developing embryo or fetus was not regarded as a full human being." Even Jerry Falwell admitted to not preaching his first anti-abortion sermon until February 26, 1978, five years after the Roe decision was promulgated. Indeed, the first evangelical anti-abortion voice Balmer finds was that of the liberal (!) Republican Senator from Oregon, Mark Hatfield, in 1973.
The evidence Balmer adduces fits my lived experience. Like Balmer, I am a son of evangelicalism: he, the son of a 40-year pastor in the Evangelical Free church, I the son of an evangelical Bible professor; in the '70's, he went to college at Trinity College and seminary at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, I did my undergraduate work at Philadelphia College of Bible (now Cairn University) and, in 1979, started seminary in Dallas. Abortion, in both our circles, simply was not an issue. When Harry Blackmun wrote the Roe v. Wade decision for the 7-2 majority, it made the splash of a Chinese platform diver. The issue of "life," so prominent and heated in today's partisan world, was a non-issue. Indeed, in Protestant circles an embryo, even a fetus, was generally considered to be a potential life, not a full human being in its own right. [3]
Even more astonishing, at least to those who were not alive at the time, is the realization that "evangelicals" did not constitute a reliable, nation-wide voting bloc. Balmer, as he has done for years, makes much of 19th century evangelicals' activism concerned with those on the margins of society. Though, as he well knows, this is only part of the story, like many he points to the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 as a turning point, after which evangelicals, particularly those who preferred to be called "fundamentalists," turned inward, away from the world, developing their own subculture of schools, denominations, camps, mission boards, Bible Institutes, and so forth, which came into their own in the middle decades of the 20th century. Indeed, most evangelicals and fundamentalists of my youthful acquaintance―remember, this was an overwhelmingly white, suburban, middle class demographic―were reliably Republican, if indeed they voted at all. But the Republicans of the 1960's and early 1970's were not the Republicans of the post-Reagan years, let alone the MAGA-hoards of the 2020's. Indeed, what truly characterized the evangelical political attitude of my youth was distrust of human government, a distrust motivated, at least in part, by the pessimistic dispensationalist theology which was de rigueur in those circles. The present world was, in the words of St. Paul, "passing away" (1 Cor 7:31). The world was heading, so we were taught, toward an antichristian climax of a "one world government," and so "big government" of any kind was viewed as a harbinger of that bleak forecast. It was the return of Christ (the "rapture") for which we were waiting, not social improvement, let alone the realization of God's kingdom on earth. In any case, any notion that we could change the world for the better was nothing but a pipe dream. Our job in this dualistic worldview, so we were taught, was to evangelize: "witness" by preaching the gospel so that people could be saved out of the world when Christ returns.
But then, in the late 1970's, everything changed. And it changed seemingly overnight. What happened? Balmer's book provides the definitive answer. And this answer is as important as it is disheartening and ugly: From the beginning, it was always a matter of racism, pure and simple. Balmer tells the remarkable personal story of a gathering he was invited to attend in Washington in November 1990, ostensibly to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of Ronald Reagan's election to the presidency, in which one of the founding pillars of the Religious Right, Paul Weyrich, vociferously claimed―against the received wisdom and/or the approved narrative―that abortion had nothing to do with the emergence of the movement. Instead, as Balmer skillfully tells us, the catalyst occurred on January 19, 1976, when the IRS, based on the Green v. Connally decision of June 30, 1971 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia [4], rescinded the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University because of its racially discriminatory policies. This got the attention of one Jerry Falwell, who had founded his own segregation academy. Falwell then got together with Weyrich and other like-minded conservatives to fight the IRS so as to try to preserve their tax-exempt status and to frame the issue as one of the schools' religious freedom, as schools that didn't take any federal money, to discriminate (my word, not theirs) as they pleased. Balmer's narrative, and the sketches he provides of the major players in the story, are in equal parts compelling and troubling. His main point is clear, and the evidence he uses to back it up is beyond dispute: it is a movement generated to defend racial segregation in evangelical institutions―and to place the blame for Bob Jones's loss of its status at the hands of the Democratic Carter Administration, even though it had originally been the Republican Nixon Administration that had taken action against the school.
Where, then, does the abortion issue, enter the picture? Here Balmer points to the aforementioned Weyrich, the evil genius, as it were, behind the movement, who had been looking, as far back as the 1964 Barry Goldwater Presidential campaign, for an issue to mobilize evangelical voters, but had come up empty. Realizing that he would need an issue more "respectable" than defense of segregation academies to serve as the requisite "wedge"― he hit upon his winner by happenstance on the eve of four Senate races in 1978, when he directed pro-lifers to leaflet church parking lots on the Sunday before the election; in each of them, the heavy underdog pro-life Republican emerged victorious in a low turnout election. Voila. Weyrich had his issue. [5] And by 1980, the turning point had come. Evangelical voters, now largely united under the umbrella of the "Religious Right," massively supported the divorced-and-remarried, former Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan, who, while Governor of California, had signed the Therapeutic Abortion Act of 1967, over the evangelical Christian Jimmy Carter. And abortion was now becoming the driving force in their political logic. [6]
Responding to Balmer's evidence is no easy thing, especially for a Christian who lived through the events involved. At one level, one is disgusted by the racism, corruption, duplicity, and sheer "sinfulness" of the characters involved, especially considering the self-righteousness and "morality" in which such wickedness was deliberately clothed (so as to be hidden from public view). Then again, I never had any respect for people like Jerry Falwell, let alone Paul Weyrich, to begin with. And in my family, headed as it was by a self-proclaimed fundamentalist Bible professor and theologian with spiritual integrity, Bob Jones University was always an object of contempt because of its racist beliefs and practices. Then again, I was raised in Philadelphia, seemingly light years away culturally from the rural south where "segregation academies" flourished to benefit white so-called "Christians." This cultural disconnect somewhat explains my disorientation when, as I wrote earlier this year, I heard a fellow member of my church in Dallas worried about the consequences of televangelist Jim Bakker's fall from grace for "us," i.e., "evangelical" Christians. What I didn't realize then, buried as I was in the midst of my Ph.D. studies, is that my intellectualist/theological (and naively urban and Northeastern) understanding of what "evangelicalism" entailed was already passé. "Evangelicalism" had already been largely swallowed up, at least in the public mind, by the Religious Right. The goals of the so-called "New Evangelicals" of the 1940's and 1950's had been entirely left behind. And what was becoming clear at that time has only gotten worse in the in the subsequent decades. Indeed, what Balmer demonstrates is that there is a direct line between the founding of the Religious Right and today's Trumpified, xenophobic, anti-CRT "evangelical" Christianity. The dots aren't that difficult to connect.
Upon further reflection, however, I can't let the circles in which I was raised off the hook so easily. It's all too easy for a Philadelphian such as I to stand in judgment on southern Christians for their blatant racism. After all, the Christian college I attended had African American students, some of whom were my teammates on the basketball team! But how many African American Professors were there at the college? (Answer: 1, and he was buried in the Social Work Department) What about the subtle racism of low expectations? How many Christians did I hear using the "n word" in casual conversation? How many, ensconced in their tidy, middle class neighborhoods on the Main Line looked down and sat in judgment on less well-to-do black folks living in run-down neighborhoods in West Philly? ("they should pick themselves up by their bootstraps, blah blah, blah" [Pelagianism 101]). And what really was the reason pious white church folk condemned the rock and roll, blues, and jazz music I loved so much (and still do) in my youth? Was it really the "lifestyle" of the performers? It's funny, I never heard them claim the "lifestyle" of Leonard Bernstein or Peter Tchaikovsky disallowed their music from being played. And what was their response when one of their white youth tried dating an African American? Hint: It wasn't pretty.
And I wish things were completely different today. To be sure, in some cases, they are. But old attitudes die hard, if at all. To give one example, a couple of years ago, we had just returned from a week in Atlantic City and were talking to an old Christian lady. When we told her about our trip, she said, "You should have gone to Ocean City. There's more of our kind of people down there." Of course, she could have been referring to "Christians," because Atlantic City is famously a city of casinos, and Ocean City, a famously dry town that bills itself as "America's Greatest Family Resort," was founded as a Methodist retreat. But somehow I don't think so. I didn't say anything, but what I should have said is that the relentless whiteness of Ocean City is its one drawback; Atlantic City, for all its troubles, looks like America, and I like it for that reason. Indeed, the only reason I can live the somewhat middle class life I now do is due to the White Privilege she, and no doubt most evangelicals in America today, relentlessly resist acknowledging exists. I hate to admit it, but racism is baked into the DNA of American evangelicalism.
If this is so, is there any hope for evangelicalism? Can they reverse the course they have trod over the past 40+ years? Balmer, always the optimist, tells Camp he sees a flicker of hope in Jesus' resuscitation of Lazarus (John 11) after decay had already started to set in. If God can do that, then maybe he can prod evangelicals to reconsider other aspects of their political agenda and thus see the disconnect between the far-right precincts GOP to which they have given fealty and Jesus' directive, in Matthew 25, to care for "the least of these." He is a realist, however, and in a moment of honesty, says that the 2016 election "really represents the end of evangelicalism, at least in any meaningful sense." If 81% of evangelicals could vote for Donald Trump, and an almost identical percentage do the same four years later, it is past time to give up the charade that they actually care about "life" or "family values." No one any longer is fooled by such nonsense, except perhaps the self-deluded.
[1] Randall Balmer, Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2021). Helpful podcasts in which he discusses the book may be found with Lee Camp at https://www.tokensshow.com/blog/bad-faithrace-and-the-rise-of-the-religious-right-randall-balmer?fbclid=IwAR2vKtXEDwxz8twVjqBSg47-1OsNC2IOmFsxPU-kHWwrROmM6ZwIt_T5O9w; and with Frank Schaeffer at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkkXQAMU89k&ab_channel=FrankSchaeffer.
[2] Balmer first made this argument, briefly, in Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America. An Evangelical's Lament (New York: Basic Books, 2006), ch. 1: "Strange Bedfellows: The Abortion Myth, Homosexuality, and the Ruse of Selective Literalism."
[3] Fred Clark brought this home with utmost clarity by citing the 1971 and 1975 editions of my teacher Norm Geisler's Ethics: Alternatives and Issues, in which he argues that, because an embryo is an undeveloped human, abortion is not murder, and that, since "an actual life (the mother) is of more intrinsic value than a potential life (the unborn)," abortion is justified in cases of rape and danger to the life and health of the mother. cf. "A groovy relic of the forbidden evangelical past," https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2017/06/08/groovy-relic-forbidden-evangelical-past/. In later editions of the books, he had changed his stance. Indeed, he had changed his stance by the time I took him for a class in the fall of 1979 at Dallas Seminary. Of course, not all Christian theologians argued thus. Among Protestant theologians, the most important to argue for the full personhood of the fetus was John Calvin. Cf. his Commentary on the Four Last Books of Moses, on Exodus 21:22.
[5] Though Balmer, interestingly, recounts how Ronald Reagan, speaking to between 10,000-20,000 evangelicals at Reunion Arena in Dallas on August 22, 1980, referred to creationism and tax exemption for Christian schools, but said nothing about abortion.
[6] The politics of abortion is an issue I hesitate to wade into for multiple reasons, not the least of which is that the inherent emotionalism associated with its tends always to produce more heat than light. The issue must be dealt with at multiple levels: the hermeneutical/exegetical level, dealing with texts in the Hebrew Bible including Exodus 21:22-25 and such poetic passages as Psalm 139:13-18 and Jeremiah 1:5; the theological level, considering the potential or necessary implications of such texts for matters such as the nature and termini of human life; and the level of contextualization, for for the life of the church and how the church should strive to live in the world. The matters are exceedingly complex, more so than partisans of the left or the right are wont to admit. Suffice it to say that, in my view, the strict anti-abortion position (i.e., abortion = murder) is a weight too heavy to be borne by the texts themselves or by necessary deductions from them. Norm Geisler, in other words, was right before he changed his mind: the embryo is a potential human life (which begs the question, why did he change his mind? And why did so-called "evangelical" Bible translations like the NIV and ESV, and most subsequent evangelical commenters on the passage, go against traditional interpretations [and the LXX] and translate Exodus 21:22-25 as if the issue were premature birth rather than miscarriage? Certainly the 1979 work of Francis Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop in excoriating the practice of abortion [Whatever Happened to the Human Race] ultimately was influential, though that wouldn't explain the NIV; as a mere New Testament scholar, I have no clue; it would make a fine topic for a Ph. D. dissertation). As such, however, one should consider the sanctity of this life and not cheapen it by using the language of "choice." Cf. the nuanced discussion of Tremper Longman III, The Bible and the Ballot: Using Scripture in Political Decisions (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020) 135-54. As far as how this works out politically, I have heard Balmer say frequently (and I am in total agreement), that abortion should be dealt with as a moral rather than as a legal issue, i.e., that one can be "pro-life" and work toward making abortion unthinkable rather than illegal. Certainly the least fruitful road to take is the one most frequently traveled, to wit, to be stridently "pro-life" vis-à-vis abortion, and yet inconsistently, if not hypocritically, ignoring genuine life concerns in terms of health care, poverty, treatment of immigrants and their children, and war.
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