From “The False White Gospel: Rejecting Christian Nationalism, Reclaiming True Faith, and Refounding Democracy” by Jim Wallis
The beginnings of the religious right, as Dartmouth religion professor Randall Balmer dramatically demonstrates in his insightful book Bad Faith, were anchored in racism. There was great anger and protest by conservative white evangelicals at the federal defunding of segregated Christian schools. SOme of that IRS defunding came under Jimmy Carter and he was never forgiven for denying federal funds to Christian schools like the infamous Bob Jones University, a school based on racial discrimination. Abortion, Balmer points out, was an issue that only came later, as it was determined to be a better overt organizing tool than race – but the core of the movement has remained the same and has continued now into white Christian nationalism. It’s worth taking a look at the history as, for example, the Southern Baptist Convention was initially supportive of Roe v. Wade.
The new evangelical hero, Ronald Reagan, announced his presidential candidacy in the town of Philadelphia, Mississippi. Why would this new presidential hopeful decide to speak where three young civil rights workers – James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman – had been brutally murdered? Was he suggesting that he was standing with white former Democrats in the South? Reagan even supported the apartheid regime in South Africa, while his chief presidential chaplain, Jerry Falwell, Sr., called South Africa archbishop Desmond Tutu a “fraud.”
Donald Trump is the culmination of this religious right political strategy, drawing a majority of white evangelicals while he exemplifies the worst of the immoral, dishonest, unethical, corrupt, and selfish personal and sexual values that would have anathema in my evangelical home church. Author and political scientist Robert P. Jones sums up what happened:
The one remarkable thing to me is that, since Reagan, if you want a shorthand for understanding the religious landscape in politics, it is that white Christian groups tend to lean toward or strongly support Republican candidates, and everybody else in the country – non-white Christians, non Christian religious groups, religiously unaffiliated – lean toward or strongly support Democratic candidates. That is the divide we have been living with since Reagan. When the Democratic party became the party of civil rights, whites in the South went to the Republican party.
So, ultimately, the shift to the religious right had nothing to do with theological discourse. It was all politics.