Thread by @pleasesaveour

‼️Thread‼️

The Real Origins of the Religious Right

The myth handed down through 2 generations now is that the Religious right became a group, after Roe V. Wade. Wrong, they've been around longer than that. This story ain't pretty, and nothing to be proud of.

Evangelicals push

this narrative constantly. In his 2005 book, Jerry Falwell claimed it to be so.

Some of these anti- Roe crusaders even went so far as to call themselves “new abolitionists,” invoking their antebellum predecessors who had fought to eradicate slavery.

politico.com/magazine/story…
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But the abortion myth quickly collapses under historical scrutiny. In fact, it wasn’t until 1979—a full six years after Roe—that evangelical leaders seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a rallying-cry to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term. Why? Because the

anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right’s real motive: protecting segregated schools.

In fact a 2 full yrs before Roe the biggest white evang group in America Southern Baptist Conv supp its legalization! The group continued that support through
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much of the 70s. They considered it a "Catholic issue"

Hypocrisy is the Evangelical's middle name. It was politics that made them anti-abortion.

So what then were the real origins of the religious right?

bostonglobe.com/opinion/2018/0…
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@CornellWBrooks said: “For Christian conservatives who put abortion at the top of their list, the challenge becomes objecting to the loss of life in the womb but also objecting to the loss of life beyond the womb, You cannot segregate your compassion."
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The religious right, who liked to call themselves the “moral majority” at the time, actually organized around fighting to protect Christian schools from being desegregated.

In May 1969,

slate.com/human-interest…
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a group of African-American parents in Holmes County, MS sued the Treas Dept to prevent three new whites-only K-12 private academies from securing full tax-exempt status, arguing that their discriminatory policies prevented them from being considered “charitable” institutions 8/

In 1970, Nixon ordered the IRS to enact a new policy denying tax exemptions to all segregated schools in the US

Anger about forced desegregation of private schools galvanized conserc Christians. Bob Jones University stalled and resisted admitting black students, forcing
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the IRS to strip its tax exempt status in 1976, an event that spurred evangelical leaders to action

Jerry Falwell and Paul Weyrich were the daddies of the Religious Right.

slate.com/human-interest…
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The argument they used to defend school segregation will sound familiar to anyone following the lawsuits against mandatory contraception coverage in health insurance plans or the battles over whether businesses have a right to refuse gay customers: “religious freedom.”
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So what changed? How did abortion eclipse pro-segregation as the rallying cause of the evangelical right? Weyrich was a sharp enough political thinker to realize that pro-segregation sentiment was enough to get the ball rolling, “but they needed a different issue if they
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wanted to mobilize evangelical voters on a large scale.” They took their new coalition of evangelicals and pointed them in the direction of fighting abortion

Why were conserv Christians more interested in hearing about the supposed evils of abortion in the late ’70s than in
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the early 70s “the spike in legal abortions” after Roe was the shock to their system that made them realize that women really were going to use this new right they’d been granted.
This lead to the modern day Evangelical religious right

Racism was just the beginning.
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@threadreaderapp unroll please.

threadreaderapp.com/thread/1126888…