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Originally Posted by EADGBE
I think the commonly accepted historical narrative is that White Evangelicals began to ally themselves with the GOP as a direct result of Roe v. Wade and the formation of the Moral Majority in the 70's, as you point out. However, the immediate reaction to Roe by Evangelicals was mixed before the issue became intentionally politicized by church leaders. I think I subscribe more to the narrative that the White Evangelical/Conservative alliance has its roots not in any religious issue, but racial, ie Brown v Board of Ed.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/st...origins-107133
Decent piece if you have the time.
I think the framing in that article is misleading, presenting its conclusion as an either/or when it is actually a both/and. As Balmer points out, opposition to desegregation of private religious schools was a primary reason some early leaders of the Religious Right became politically active. However, in order to become a mass movement, it had to broaden its concerns to appeal to religious social conservatives more generally, hence abortion (and other religious issues).
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Randall Balmer:
But Falwell and Weyrich, having tapped into the ire of evangelical leaders, were also savvy enough to recognize that organizing grassroots evangelicals to defend racial discrimination would be a challenge. It had worked to rally the leaders, but they needed a different issue if they wanted to mobilize evangelical voters on a large scale.
By the late 1970s, many Americans—not just Roman Catholics—were beginning to feel uneasy about the spike in legal abortions following the 1973 Roe decision. The 1978 Senate races demonstrated to Weyrich and others that abortion might motivate conservatives where it hadn’t in the past. That year in Minnesota, pro-life Republicans captured both Senate seats (one for the unexpired term of Hubert Humphrey) as well as the governor’s mansion. In Iowa, Sen. Dick Clark, the Democratic incumbent, was thought to be a shoo-in: Every poll heading into the election showed him ahead by at least 10 percentage points. On the final weekend of the campaign, however, pro-life activists, primarily Roman Catholics, leafleted church parking lots (as they did in Minnesota), and on Election Day Clark lost to his Republican pro-life challenger.
He goes on to discuss other influential religious leaders like Francis Schaeffer whose initial political focus was on abortion. I just think it is silly to deny that that opposition to abortion was integral to the rise of the religious right. I agree it wasn't the only issue, and of course, as with any mass movement, there are leaders who use the passion of the movement for their own ends. But it was abortion that has persisted most as an issue, even now four decades later.
However, my main point here is not to muse about the origins of the religious right in the 1970s, but about the religious right as it exists today. I see few religious right people advocating for or defending legal racial segregation in schools. You don't see racial polarization in support for current conservative education policy priorities like school choice or charter schools. But I have lived through decades of religious conservatives being very publicly concerned about abortion, homosexuality, women serving in the military, sex in the media, and a bunch of other traditional social conservative ideas associated with evangelical Christianity. I don't buy into the progressive racial hermeneutics of suspicion, so I mostly just believe them.
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Again, I think your saying 'Christian' in your points is not totally accurate, as Catholics did not defect to the Conservative side en masse as did the White Evangelicals, so clearly it cannot be due totally to religious concerns.
Notice I said "conservative Christians" had this view of social changes being in opposition to traditional Christianity. This is true among (religiously) conservative Catholics as well as Protestants, even if their political opposition sometimes takes different forms.