TOKENS PODCAST: S4E4
Like something out of a Dan Brown novel, Randall Balmer—an Episcopal priest, historian, and professor of Religion at the Ivy League's Dartmouth College—tells of being invited to a meeting in Washington, DC. That meeting changed the course of his academic career, and set him on a journey to make sense of the Religious Right. The origin, he claims, of the Religious Right in American politics is not to be located in a reaction to Roe v. Wade. It is instead, he says, “a movement that was begun to defend racial segregation.”
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ABOUT THE GUEST
A prize-winning historian and Emmy Award nominee, Randall Balmer holds the John Phillips Chair in Religion at Dartmouth, the oldest endowed professorship at Dartmouth College. He earned the Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1985 and taught as Professor of American Religious History at Columbia University for twenty-seven years before coming to Dartmouth in 2012. He has been a visiting professor at Princeton, Yale, Northwestern, and Emory universities and in the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He was a visiting professor at Yale Divinity School from 2004 to 2008.
Dr. Balmer has published widely in both scholarly journals and in the popular press. His op-ed articles have appeared in newspapers across the country, including the Los Angeles Times, the Des Moines Register, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Dallas Morning News, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Hartford Courant, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, the Anchorage Daily News, and the New York Times. His work has also appeared in the New Republic, the New York Times Book Review, Christian Century, the Nation, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Washington Post Book World.
He is the author of more than a dozen books, including Evangelicalism in America and Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter. His second book, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America, now in its fifth edition, was made into a three-part documentary for PBS. Dr. Balmer was nominated for an Emmy for writing and hosting that series. His most recent book is Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right, and his study of religion and sports, To Everything a Season: How Team Sports became America’s New Religion, will be released early in 2022.
ABOUT TOKENS SHOW & LEE C. CAMP
Tokens began in 2008. Our philosophical and theological variety shows and events hosted throughout the Nashville area imagine a world governed by hospitality, graciousness and joy; life marked by beauty, wonder and truthfulness; and social conditions ordered by justice, mercy and peace-making. We exhibit tokens of such a world in music-making, song-singing, and conversations about things that matter. We have fun, and we make fun: of religion, politics, and marketing. And ourselves. You might think of us as something like musicians without borders; or as poets, philosophers, theologians and humorists transgressing borders.
Lee is an Alabamian by birth, a Tennessean by choice, and has sojourned joyfully in Indiana, Texas, and Nairobi. He likes to think of himself as a radical conservative, or an orthodox liberal; loves teaching college and seminary students at Lipscomb University; delights in flying sailplanes; finds dark chocolate covered almonds with turbinado sea salt to be one of the finest confections of the human species; and gives great thanks for his lovely wife Laura, his three sons, and an abundance of family and friends, here in Music City and beyond. Besides teaching full-time, he hosts Nashville’s Tokens Show, and has authored three books. Lee has an Undergrad Degree in computer science (Lipscomb University, 1989); M.A. in theology and M.Div. (Abilene Christian University, 1993); M.A. and Ph.D. both in Christian Ethics (University of Notre Dame, 1999).
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TRANSCRIPT
Lee Camp: This is Tokens. I'm Lee C. Camp.
Randy Balmer: This was actually in November of 1990 and I got this strange request.
Lee Camp: That's Randall Balmer, an Episcopal priest, historian, and Professor of Religion at the Ivy League's Dartmouth College.
Randy Balmer: I was invited to Washington, DC for a gathering that was ostensibly a celebration of the 10 years anniversary of Ronald Reagan's election to the presidency.
Lee Camp: This invitation turned out to be the beginning of Randall's work piecing together the origins of the so-called religious right. What he has uncovered over the years is as eye-opening as it is, well... troubling.
Randy Balmer: In the middle decades of the 20th century, many evangelicals didn't bother to vote. Certainly not in any organized way until the 1970s. Nothing got their attention until the IRS in the 1970s began coming after so-called segregation academies.
His findings are compiled in his new book Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right, in which he comes to the surprising conclusion...
This movement that is the political mobilization of evangelical voters. And I, hate to say this. I always clutch when I start to complete the sentence. It was a movement that was begun to defend racial segregation.
Lee Camp: Randy has some stories to tell. Our interview in just a moment.
INTERVIEW
Lee Camp: Our guest today is Randall Balmer. Randall Balmer graduated from Trinity College and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School then earned his PhD from Princeton University. He was a professor of American Religious History at Columbia University for 27 years before moving to Dartmouth College in 2012, his commentaries have appeared in newspapers and online publications around the country.
He was ordained an Episcopal priest in 2006 and he and his wife, Catherine reside in Vermont and New Mexico today, we're discussing his new book coming out from Eerdmans press entitled, Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right. Welcome back again, Randy. Good to see you. Always great to have a conversation with you. So this new book you described in the start how a meeting you thought about not going to change the course of your, of your academic career.
Randy Balmer: It makes kinda makes you believe in Providence, doesn’t it?
Lee Camp: Indeed. It also terrifies me to think about the no’s I've said to invitations that maybe I should have said yes to.
Randy Balmer: Exactly. Yeah. This was actually in November of 1990 and I got this strange request. Actually, I thought it was strange at the time, I guess in retrospect, I do understand why I was invited, but I was invited to Washington, DC for a gathering that was ostensibly a celebration of the 10 years anniversary of Ronald Reagan's election to the presidency.
And it sounded kind of interesting. And as I said I almost did not go because you know, I was, an assistant professor at the time, teaching, trying to care for a young family.
And so only at the last minute I decided, well, I'll go. And I found myself in a conference room with the titans really of the religious right. Paul Weyrich who's the architect of that whole movement. Ed Dobson, who had been one of Jerry Falwell's acolytes at Moral Majority before he went on to become a mega church pastor in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Donald Wildmon who had started the American Family Association to protest bad things on television. Carl F. H. Henry, the founding editor of Christianity Today magazine was there. Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition was there. Richard Viguerie. It was kind of a who's who of the religious right. And I was in this room thinking, why am I here?
And it just turned out to be an eye opening experience.
Lee Camp: So what did you learn there that was so significant to you?
Randy Balmer: Well in the first session, the very first session. There was, uh conversation actually, there were a couple of historians there as well. The wonderful friends of mine Grant Wacker and George Marsden. And George Marsden had given a paper to kind of open the conversation, providing kind of a historical overview of evangelicals in politics and that sort of thing.
And in the course of the discussion thereafter, Paul Weyrich gave a rather impassioned soliloquy. And he said, let's remember abortion had nothing to do with the emergence of this movement. That is the political mobilization of evangelical voters. And as I listen to this, all of a sudden, just kind of clicked with me. Yeah, you're absolutely right. Because I spent the 1970s immersed in what I call the evangelical subculture. I was a student, as you said, at Trinity College. And then at Trinity Divinity School, I was working in the development office for the Divinity School and abortion simply wasn't part of the conversation.
And so during the break, after that first session, I went up to Weyrich and I said, I want to make sure I understood you correctly. Abortion had nothing to do with the genesis of this movement. He said, absolutely not. I'd been trying since the Goldwater Campaign in 1964 to get evangelicals interested in politics and mobilized as a political group, he said, I tried everything.
I tried the abortion issue. I tried the school prayer issue. I tried the equal rights amendment to the Constitution. I tried the pornography issue. Nothing got their attention until, and here was the breakthrough, until the IRS in the 1970s began coming after so-called segregation academies and Bob Jones University challenging their tax exempt status because of racial segregation. So that moment was for me a breakthrough. And it really was the catalyst for my interest in this topic. And I've spent far more years Lee than I care to tally that tried to run this down. And I've determined that Weyrich was absolutely right. Abortion was not part of this. This was a movement that was generated to defend, and I, hate to say this. I always clutch when I start to complete the sentence. It was a movement that was begun to defend racial segregation in evangelical institutions, notably Bob Jones University.
Lee Camp: I do want to come back to that and dig into that a bit. But before we do, I want to step back in history as you do in your book and note that as you kind of sketch out the history of evangelicalism in the United States you note that what we call evangelicalism looked like in the 19th century and even the early 20th century was very, very different than what the religious right has become. So would you describe a bit for us it did look like in the 19th century?
Randy Balmer: Sure. I began to get a glimpse of this when I was an undergraduate history major at Trinity College a long, long time ago. But as I looked into it further as a scholar, as a historian myself what was striking to me and is striking to me is that the thrust of the agenda is so much different from the religious right today.
In fact, it's 180 degrees different in many respects. What strikes me about evangelical political activism in the 19th century is that evangelicals were concerned with those on the margins of society. Those Jesus called the least of these. And so you have this robust agenda of social reform in the 19th century that is directed toward the abolition of slavery.
Obviously in the North, there were Southern evangelical defenders of slavery. I'm not trying to gloss over that point. That's a very important point, but in the North evangelicals were opposed to slavery evangelicals generally were interested in prison reform. The whole idea of a penitentiary begins to emerge early in the 19th century, a place where a social deviant or a criminal can go, not merely to be segregated from society, but to be rehabilitated, to become penitent so that he, or perhaps she could at some point constructively re-engage in society. Peace crusades in the early part of the 19th century were populated by evangelicals. I've even run across a gun control, uh, organization sponsored by evangelicals in the 19th century. Public schools known as common schools in the 19th century were very much an evangelical obsession because evangelicals recognized that education was the way for the children of those less fortunate to become upperly mobile and move into the middle class. And prominently women's equality, including voting rights, which in the 19th century was a radical idea, but evangelicals were very much behind these sorts of movements.
So when I juxtapose that social agenda and look at the political agenda of the religious, right, I see this massive disconnect between these two movements. These two entities.
Lee Camp: You point as do quite a number of scholars to Tennessee, at least a historical episode in Tennessee as a kind of a turning point between 19th century emphases in American evangelicalism and then what began to be predominant in the latter part of the 20th century with The Scopes Trial. Right?
Randy Balmer: Exactly. I don't want to over emphasize The Scopes Trial but it is a kind of symbolic turning point at least I think it was a turning point. And that is not to discount the fact that there were forces and factors that were kind of moving in that direction anyway.
But what happens with The Scopes Trial? Again, at least symbolically is that evangelicals begin to withdraw from the larger society. And there are several reasons for that. Kind of the background reason was the embrace of dispensational pre-millennialism.
Lee Camp: Just a quick definition for those of you who might need a refresher on American church history: "pre-millennialism" is the theological doctrine which claims that human history will continue to devolve, grow more and more ungodly, until Christ returns and establishes the millennium, the thousand year reign of Christ on earth. Jesus could return at any moment, and little can be done to ameliorate or mitigate, it's thought, social evil. More on the definition of this term in a moment. Back to the interview:
Randy Balmer: But the embrace of pre-millennialism by evangelicals in effect, absolve them from the task of social reform. Why reform society if Jesus is going to come back at any moment. I call it a theology of despair because it says in effect, there's nothing we can do to make this world a better place. All we can do is hope to convert as many people as we can and wait for Jesus to come back and reign judgment on our enemies and take us out of here. So it's a kind of escapist sort of ideology. And so that was very much in play among evangelicals in the 1920s. Perhaps even more in the North than in the South, but was still part of their ideology.
And then The Scopes Trial itself and the kind of scorn heaped upon evangelicals by H. L. Mencken from The Baltimore Sun who had this wicked wit that, uh…
Lee Camp: Searing, searing, ugly wit, yeah.
Randy Balmer: It really was. And, and the effect was, that evangelicals after 1925 begin to withdraw into their own world and begin constructing what I call the evangelical subculture in America, which is this vast and interlocking network of denominations congregations, Bible camps, Bible institutes, seminaries, missionary societies, publishing houses. And this subculture, especially in the North where I grew up and maybe a little bit less so in the South where you have the Southern Baptist convention, which is sort of the established religion the South, but in the North, it was possible to grow up within that subculture and have very, very little commerce with anyone outside of that world.
Now I went to public schools and I'm proud of that. I'm a product of public education. Then I'm a fierce defender of public education. But, my network of friends was dictated by my church and those networks rather than larger world. So that was fairly typical for evangelicalism in the middle decades of the 20th century.
And politically what it meant is that many evangelicals didn't bother to vote. Certainly not in any organized way until the 1970s. Many of them were not even registered to vote. Politics was regarded as Satan's domain and nothing good can come of it. And besides Jesus is coming back at any moment. So let's not worry about this president world. Let's focus on the world to come and try to convert as many people as possible before Jesus returns.
Lee Camp: Two things I want to point to quickly. One is that you referred to pre-millennialism a moment ago and acknowledged that, you know, lots of people don't have the slightest idea, perhaps what pre-millennialism is or designates these days. But you've got post-millennialism in the 19th century pre-millennialism coming in early 20th century.
And it's just worth noting that public ignorance of theology really doesn't do anybody any good when you have huge cultural and social implications from something like post-millennialism and pre-millennialism, right?
Randy Balmer: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, this is massive shift that takes place over the course of the 19th century. The social reform efforts were animated by post-millennialism and just to provide a gloss on that without getting too deeply into the weeds. Post-millennialism holds that we can with God's help construct a godly society, bring about the kingdom of God here on earth and in the 19th century, more particularly here in America by reforming society according to the norms of godliness. What happens over the course of the 19th century of course, is that evangelicals begin to lose confidence in that process. And that had to do with a lot of things going on in the 19th century, the civil war, the ravages of the civil war. And you look at the casualties of the civil war. I mean, it's just staggering when you think about the numbers. Historians now estimate something like three quarters of a million casualties in the civil war. And on top of that, subsequent to that, you have urbanization industrialization, the influx of non-Protestant immigrants, who by the way, did not share evangelical scruples about temperance.
And so by the late 19th centuries, by 1880 1890, certainly evangelicals are saying, wait a minute, we thought we were building this godly society by reforming society, according to the norms of godliness, but the tenements on the lower East side of Manhattan, don't exactly resemble the precincts of Zion.
So maybe we need to rethink this. And then along comes this British interpreter of the Bible, John Nelson Darby, who says to American evangelicals that you've been interpreting the Bible all wrong. Jesus is not going to come back after you construct this millennial kingdom. Jesus is coming back before the millennium that is pre-millennialism. And so that just changed the whole dynamic and evangelicals at that point began to say, wait a minute, let's not waste our time trying to feed them poor or take care of the needy. Let's instead look toward this coming kingdom and forget about reforming society.
Lee Camp: And there's almost oftentimes a presumption that things are going to naturally get worse before the return of Christ and pre-millennials, right?
Randy Balmer: He said exactly that, he said, I don't find anywhere in there. I'm paraphrasing here, but I don't find anywhere in the Bible where it says things are going to get better. Things are going to get worse and worse until Jesus returns and that sets the tone for pre-millennialism.
Lee Camp: I’ll insert another parenthetical here about the ways in which anti-intellectualism that refuses to take history seriously. And that refuses to take theological education seriously. Can't see the way in which major historical and theological movements do impact the way we read the Bible.
And if you're not aware of that stuff, then you can get wrought up in, yeah, one more thing, rolling down the pike without having any sort of resources to deal with some sort of major shift like this.
Randy Balmer: No, you're absolutely right about that. And I think that's what is is fueling some of this conspiracy thinking, on the part of many of evangelicals today. They're not taking account of historical contingencies and historical circumstances.
Lee Camp: So, let's move then forward to the perceived origins myth as you call it other religious right? That it's Roe V. Wade is the assumption. That is the reason behind the rise of the religious right?
You sketch out, I think, what too many people and was to me before reading some of your work on this and hearing you talk about this in years past. I think a lot of people are surprised that there was a lot of diversity among evangelicals about the issue of abortion even into the 1970s.
Randy Balmer: Oh, absolutely. In 1968, Christianity Today, which is kind of the flagship magazine for evangelicalism, together with another evangelical group called the Christian Medical Society, had a conference. And they invited the top theologians and ethicists from the evangelical world to discuss the whole issue of abortion and also contraception.
But abortion was prominent in their conversations. And these heavyweight theologians met over several days. And at the end of that gathering, they issued a statement saying, eh, we really can't come to any conclusion on whether or not abortion is morally justified, but we're inclined to think it is. And it should be allowed.
Two successive editors of Christianity Today magazine, both Carl F. H. Henry and his successor Harold Lindsell, issued statements that countenance the legality of abortion. The Southern Baptist Convention. I think you've heard of that, right? Haven't you?
Lee Camp: We have heard that. We have heard of that in, in Nashville. Yes.
Randy Balmer: Not exactly a readout of liberalism passed a resolution at their gathering in 1971 in St. Louis, Missouri, calling for the legalization of abortion, a resolution they reaffirmed. In 1974, again in 1976, this is of course after the Roe V. Wade ruling, when the Roe V Wade decision was handed down W. A. Criswell, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas, issued a statement praising the Roe V. Wade ruling. I could go on and on. There are other examples as well. And all of that, cite in the book as a way of saying, wait a minute, abortion was not the catalyst here for political movement. Jerry Falwell by his own admission did not preach his first anti-abortion abortion sermon until February 26th, 1978.
That's more than five years after the Roe V. Wade ruling. So actually in the course putting this book together, what I found is that the first prominent evangelical voice against abortion was Mark Hatfield, U.S. Senator Republican from Oregon, who, again like William Jennings Bryan, would be considered a leftist today with his politics, including his pacifism.
Mark Hatfield was the first prominent evangelical voice to oppose abortion. And that I think tells you something about, uh, about that particular issue.
Lee Camp: If I remember correctly, in me of those sources that you cite from those late sixties and seventies, there wasn't a move to see abortion as just a flippant exercise, right? It wasn't advocated for say contraception, but there were certain exceptions within which they thought abortion could be legitimate, including the mental and psychological health of a mother. Am I understanding that correctly?
Randy Balmer: Yeah, that was the language of the Southern Baptist convention. Certainly. Yes.
Lee Camp: Yeah. Yeah.
Randy Balmer: Yes no evangelical that I have encountered was saying, hey, abortions this kind of guilt-free, as you say, contraceptive action. Nobody was saying that, but the larger context here let's be clear about it.
Was that evangelicals considered abortion a Catholic issue throughout the 1970s. And, it was not something that they were terribly concerned about.
Lee Camp: So, what really happened you suggest is Green V. Connally, right? Which is a court case that probably most of us have no idea what that is.
Randy Balmer: Yeah. The catalyst for the religious right was a court case, but it was not Roe V. Wade in January, 1973. It was instead a lower court ruling district court district of Columbia that was issued on June 30th, 1971 in a case called Green V. Connally. The background for Green V. Connally or the deep background of course, was the, uh Brown V. Board of Education ruling of May 17th, 1954, that mandated public schools to be desegregated with all deliberate speed in the phrase of the Supreme court. And then the second historical background for that would be the civil rights act of 1964, signed into law by Lyndon Johnson, that forbade discrimination in public institutions. As various school districts throughout the country, mainly in the South, but not exclusively in the South, began to desegregate there was a movement or a rise of so-called segregation academies. Most of them church sponsored that would provide an all white education for students. And in Holmes County, Mississippi, the first year of desegregation, the number of white students in the public schools dropped from over 600 to 28.
Lee Camp: Wow.
Randy Balmer: The second year of desegregation, the number of white students in the public schools dropped to zero. At the same time in Holmes County, there were three church-related segregation academies that applied to the IRS for tax exempt status and a group of parents in Holmes County said, yeah, this isn't right.
We need to challenge this. And so they filed suit to stop the IRS from granting tax exempt status to these segregation academies. That suit was joined with another suit. There's long judicial history here, but the case finally ends up in the district court for the district of Columbia. And on June 30th, 1971, the district court said, in effect that any organization that engages in racial segregation or racial discrimination is not by definition under the law a tax exempt organization, and therefore it should be denied tax exempt status. Similarly, any contributions coming into such organizations would no longer qualify for tax exemption.
As the IRS over the course of the 1970s began to enforce that Green V. Connally ruling from 1971, it focused on such places as for example, Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina, which famously and defiantly from its origins had been racially segregated. I mean, not even segregated, they didn't allow black students into the student body at all. What happens then, and again, there's a lot more detail here, but let me just kind of get to the point. What happens then is that after years of warnings, the IRS finally rescinds the tax exemption for Bob Jones University on January 19th, 1976. That is what gets the attention of people like Jerry Falwell, who had his own segregation academy in Lynchburg, Virginia.
And he begins to band together with the encouragement of Paul Weyrich, with other evangelical leaders to form a political movement to oppose the IRS. That was the catalyst for the religious right. It had nothing whatsoever to do with abortion. And we can talk about our abortion gets figured into this agenda a little bit later, but my point here and the big point behind the book is to substantiate that abortion had nothing to do with the Genesis of the religious, right.
It was added only later in the 1970s, frankly, to provide a bit of respectability to the movement, because Paul Weyrich and others recognized that if they were going to mobilize grassroots evangelicals, they needed an issue other than defensive segregation to rally the faithful.
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This is our interview with Randall Balmer on his new book Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right. Coming up, we'll hear more about the surprising and troubling origins of the so-called religious right in the 1970s and 80s.
Part two in just a moment.
HALFWAY POINT
Lee Camp: You're listening to Tokens and our interview with Randall Balmer.
What would you say in response to someone who might reply to the narrative you just shared? Imagine that they say something like, okay, I, I hear what you're saying, but it's one thing for someone to be defending segregation as such. And it's another thing for someone to be concerned about the federal government telling us what we might be able to do as a private Christian institution.
And that by the time this gets to a broader audience set, a lot of people are ignorant or unaware of the fact that there's racial undertones or racial roots to this particular concern with the intrusion. Well, I'll put that in scare quotes, the intrusion of the federal government.
Randy Balmer: Yeah, I take that point and I think that was part of the genius of Paul Weyrich and others was to reframe that conversation. And let me deepen your observation here by recalling that. I remember many times during my childhood growing up, my father was a minister in the evangelical free church for 40 years.
And I recall many, many times when there would be a pastor of a Bible institute or a Bible school who would come by, usually on a Sunday evening for a Sunday evening service. And he would present his school, trying to recruit students, raise money for the school and so forth. And one of the appeals was always, we don't accept any money from the federal government, therefore the government can’t tell us how to run our shop, who to hire and fire who to admit or not to admit to our school. That was always a point of pride. So I understand that, but let's also remember that tax exemption is a form of public subsidy. If a church or, or a university or a Bible institute does not pay taxes as they don't as tax exempt institutions.
That means they're not paying for national defense. They're not paying for national parks. They're not paying the local government for fire protection or police services or, local parks and so forth. It means the other tax payers have to subsidize these non-profit institutions and I'm not taking an issue with that.
I think the founders recognized the value of voluntary associations and sought to encourage that. And so I'm not taking issue with that, but for those same institutions to turn around and say, the federal government can't have any say whatsoever in how we run our institutions, I think is disingenuous.
So that would be my response to you.
Lee Camp: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. So let's go back to what you began to allude to a moment ago, and that is how does abortion then become such a major issue for the evangelical right?
Randy Balmer: What happens is in the 1978 midterm elections, Paul Weyrich this individual who was really the genius behind the religious right. He goes to the head of the Republican National Committee who was Bill Brock, former Senator from Tennessee.
Lee Camp: Yeah.
Randy Balmer: And he goes to Brock because he wants money to try to mobilize these evangelical voters. And Brock says, who are these people? I'm not going to give you this money. And Weyrich became rather defiant at that point and he said, I'm going to go out, and elects some rather improbable people in 1978. So he focuses on the four Senate races. One of them is in New Hampshire.One of them is in Iowa and then two of them are in Minnesota. One of them for unexpired term of Walter Mondale. And of course it was Jimmy Carter's vice-president. And in all four of those Senate races, the democratic candidates were considered the front runners by the polls, by the pundits, everybody, they all thought... in Iowa, for example, the incumbent Senator was Dick Clark.
Not that Dick Clark, but Dick Clark, who had won election six years earlier with 55% of the vote. No poll going into the midterm election in 1978, showed him leading by fewer than 10 percentage points. But on the final weekend of the campaign, pro-lifers, Roman Catholics, leafleted church parking lots in those States. And two days later in election with a very low turnout, which tends to be the case for midterm elections, all four of those leading democratic candidates lost to antiabortion Republicans.
I remember going through Paul Weyrich’s papers, actually they're on at the University of Wyoming and Laramie. And looking at his correspondence around election day, 1978. It's almost like the papers start to sizzle because he realizes he's got the issue.
Lee Camp: He’s got the issue.
Randy Balmer: This is going to work for him politically, and he doesn't have to kind of flog this new political movement on the basis of defending racial segregation. He can have a more high minded issue that would work with evangelical voters. That said, I have to add that even as late as August, 1980 during the Carter Reagan campaign, when Carter is running for reelection, Reagan addresses this group of evangelicals, somewhere between 10 and 20,000, that I've seen different estimates at reunion arena in Dallas on August 22nd.
This is where he famously said, I know this group can't endorse me, but I want you to know that I endorse you and what you're doing brought down the house and probably sealed the evangelical vote.
Lee Camp: Brilliant rhetoric. Yeah.
Randy Balmer: Brilliant rhetoric. He was coached extensively, believe me, but he delivered his lines flawlessly. He's an actor. So he was very good. I went through his address out at the Reagan presidential library. And in that address, he talks about creationism. He says that if he were on desert Island, the one book you would want with him was the Bible. He decries the internal revenue service for trying to enforce anti segregation statutes at these evangelical institutions. He does not mention abortion even once. That's August 22nd, 1980. Even by then, the Reagan Bush campaign was not certain that abortion would work for them as a political issue.
Lee Camp: So two quick notes here. One. What is it? You said that those four Senate races, those were New Hampshire, Iowa, and two in Minnesota. So the religious right, really with its concern about abortion really comes out of the North, It doesn't come from the South.
Randy Balmer: Yep. Nope.
Lee Camp: That's amazing. And here's the second thing we just recently have on our podcast to interview with Bill Cavanaugh, who had a fascinating recent article, what was it in, America, the Jesuit magazine. And Cavanaugh, who's a good pro-life Catholic. His article is something like Roe V. Wade hasn't worked, it’s time we change our strategy. And he talks about how 50 of the last 51 years there's been a majority of Republican appointee Supreme court justices. And that in 1973, when Roe V. Wade passed or was ruled on. It was a seven to two vote. The Republican had six appointees on the Supreme court and that seven to two vote. And one of the votes against Roe V. Wade was one of the Democrat appointees. And then how all these years you have a majority of Supreme court appointees by the Republicans and yet they've never changed the policy. And so it points to this sort of thing that you're pointing to, I think, with Paul Weyrich, is that this seems to be more an issue of trying to galvanize a voter base. And even I might use stronger language of use a group of people, as opposed to having a commitment to amoral practice in pro-life. Do you think that's a fair way to put it?
Randy Balmer: I do. And I think one of the tragedies of the religious right, and it tethering itself to the abortion issue, is that the debate around abortion has become so stale. And so I would even say morally bankrupt because it has become so politicized and Weyrich is in part, he may be the one more than anyone else is responsible for that.
That is to make this kind of bedrock connection between the far right reaches the Republican party and the anti-abortion movement. In the early years as Daniel Williams from Georgia State University has pointed out in the early years of the abortion debate in the 1970s. It was by no means skewed along Party lines or even along ideological lines.
And I mean, one of the reasons we know is that people like Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden himself were against abortion initially in the early 1970s. It's only because of the kind of crass politicization or partisan-zation of the movement that you have, these sort of party lines determining, how the vote goes.
And I'm not blaming only the Republican party too, on this. I think the democratic party is also responsible for not engaging in a robust, moral debate over this. And the bottom line for me as a Christian, as a believer, is I think abortion is a moral issue. It's not a legal issue, it's a moral issue.
And if we're serious about reducing the incidents of abortion in this country, the way to approach it is not through the law, but through morality and through moral persuasion. My shorthand on this, I know we're getting off topic here, but my shorthand on this is I have no interest in making abortion illegal.
I would like to make it unthinkable. And that's a different approach to the entire issue. And, you know, just, we're getting a little bit off topic here and I'm sorry about this, but, you know, the Catholic bishops recently coming after Joe Biden for the abortion issue and talking about denying him access to holy communion and that sort of thing.
Well, Catholic teaching also prohibits capital punishment. When is the last time the bishops went after Catholic politicians who support the death penalty? I understand the arguments that there's not a total moral parody between abortion and capital punishment, but still consistency, I think has a place.
Lee Camp: Yeah. What do you hope for going forward?
Randy Balmer: Yeah, that's a really good question. I guess when I look at my career, at least the last couple of decades in my career, one of my overriding aspirations has been to call evangelicals back to their better selves and say, look, you have a history, you have a tradition that is really quite noble. When you think about evangelical activism in the 19th and early 20th centuries. And somehow you've gone off the rails. And you know, again, I think 1980 is really the turning point for that. And I at least until recently I've held out hope that the course could be reversed. I've written elsewhere that 2016 really represents the end of evangelicalism, at least in any meaningful sense.
The 2016 election. Having said that I'm also, you know, as you pointed out a minister, a preacher, and I read in the New Testament that Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, even though his body had become distinct. And if Jesus can do that, Jesus can, Jesus can resurrect evangelicalism as well. I have to allow for that possibility.
So what I hope, first of all, I hope that readers will come to terms with this movement, the genesis of this movement. Now, it's legitimate to ask, even though this movement has rather, specious origins, does that mean the movement itself is entirely compromised? And no, I'm not going to be willing to say, I'm not willing to say that, but nevertheless, you could have this very, very beautiful structure with all sorts of architectural bobbles and you know, it looks magnificent from afar.
But if it's constructed on faulty rotten timbers in this case, racism, I think the entire structure is compromised. And I think we need to come to terms with that. So I guess the initial takeaway would be for evangelicals to come to terms with, to acknowledge, the real origins of this movement.
And then to consider very carefully how such an acknowledgement will affect their attitude toward and their participation in such a movement. And I think the Trump presidency kind of brought it all to light in many ways. And allowed the religious right finally to abandon the fiction that this was a movement based in any way on family values. You just can't make that argument then go to the voting booth and pull the lever for Donald Trump. There's just no moral credibility to that argument. So that's the first step, I think.
Lee Camp: Let me ask, one or two more personal questions. You earlier alluded to early 20th century pre-millennialism is something like a theology of despair with regard to sociopolitical change. And I wonder, for you as an academic who has done the kind of work that you've done. And you're looking carefully at the growth of social developments and seeing the complexity and oftentimes the ugly underbelly of these things.
Do you find yourself getting tempted towards despair?
Randy Balmer: I've tried to resist that. I think anybody who is a parent does not have the luxury of despair. That is to say I think I have responsibility for trying to leave the world, at least a marginally better place than when I found it. And particularly because I have children, I think I have to work toward that end.
And despair is a lovely sort of readout. I think it's very comfortable, but I don't think it is a realistic alternative, especially for a person of faith. And we have to, I think, Jesus calls us toward making a better world. And so that's what I've tried to do. I think in my own very, very modest way. You can see how well it's working in terms of redirecting evangelicals away from what I consider their misbegotten, political activity or the last several years.
But you know, Jacques Ellul says that, it's incumbent on the believer to preach the gospel. And even though we don't control in any way, how that gospel is received, we still have to preach the gospel.
Lee Camp: Well, Jacques Ellul's always a fine place to end. So we thank you. We've been talking with Randall Balmer on his new book, Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right. Randall it’s always a pleasure to get to talk to you. Thank you for your work and thanks for the conversation.
Randy Balmer: Lee you're terrific. Thanks so much. Enjoyed the conversation.
Lee Camp: Thank you.
Lee Camp: You've been listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, the good life, and our interview with Randall Balmer on his new book Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right.
If you're interested in additional episodes related to American politics and the religious right, you might want to check out our episode with Kristin Du Mez on her book Jesus and John Wayne, as well as our interview with Beth Barr on her book The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth.
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Our thanks to all the stellar team that makes this podcast possible. Executive producer and manager, Christie Bragg of Bragg Management. Co-producer Jacob Lewis of Great Feeling Studios. Associate producers Ashley Bayne, Leslie Thompson, Tom Anderson, and Brad Perry. Engineer Cariad Harmon. Music beds by Zach and Maggie White. And our live event production team at Stonebrook Media led by Phil Barnett.
Thanks for listening, and peace be unto thee.
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