The schools had been founded in the mid-1960s in response to the desegregation of public schools set in motion by the Brown v.
Cult animosity shows no up full#
In May 1969, a group of African-American parents in Holmes County, Mississippi, sued the Treasury Department 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. So what then were the real origins of the religious right? It turns out that the movement can trace its political roots back to a court ruling, but not Roe v. “Religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision,” wrote W. Baptists, in particular, applauded the decision as an appropriate articulation of the division between church and state, between personal morality and state regulation of individual behavior. This sign-up form is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.Īlthough a few evangelical voices, including Christianity Today magazine, mildly criticized the ruling, the overwhelming response was silence, even approval. You can unsubscribe at any time and you can contact us here. Criswell, the Southern Baptist Convention’s former president and pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas-also one of the most famous fundamentalists of the 20th century-was pleased: “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person,” he said, “and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.”īy signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or updates from POLITICO and you agree to our privacy policy and terms of service. When the Roe decision was handed down, W. Louis, Missouri, passed a resolution encouraging “Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.” The convention, hardly a redoubt of liberal values, reaffirmed that position in 1974, one year after Roe, and again in 1976. In 1971, delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention in St. Both before and for several years after Roe, evangelicals were overwhelmingly indifferent to the subject, which they considered a “Catholic issue.” In 1968, for instance, a symposium sponsored by the Christian Medical Society and Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of evangelicalism, refused to characterize abortion as sinful, citing “individual health, family welfare, and social responsibility” as justifications for ending a pregnancy. Today, evangelicals make up the backbone of the pro-life movement, but it hasn’t always been so. Why? Because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right’s real motive: protecting segregated schools.
In fact, it wasn’t until 1979-a full six years after Roe-that evangelical leaders, at the behest of conservative activist Paul Weyrich, seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a rallying-cry to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term. 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.īut the abortion myth quickly collapses under historical scrutiny. Wade story,” Falwell writes, “growing more and more fearful of the consequences of the Supreme Court’s act and wondering why so few voices had been raised against it.” Evangelicals, he decided, needed to organize. 23, 1973, edition of the Lynchburg News: “I sat there staring at the Roe v. In his 2005 book, Jerry Falwell, the firebrand fundamentalist preacher, recounts his distress upon reading about the ruling in the Jan. This myth of origins is oft repeated by the movement’s leaders. The tale goes something like this: Evangelicals, who had been politically quiescent for decades, were so morally outraged by Roe that they resolved to organize in order to overturn it. One of the most durable myths in recent history is that the religious right, the coalition of conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists, emerged as a political movement in response to the U.S. His most recent book is Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter.
Randall Balmer is the Mandel family professor in the arts and sciences at Dartmouth College.
0 kommentar(er)
