Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right
Digital Logos Edition
Overview
A surprising and disturbing origin story.
There is a commonly accepted story about the rise of the Religious Right in the United States. It goes like this: with righteous fury, American evangelicals entered the political arena as a unified front to fight the legality of abortion after the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.
The problem is this story simply isn’t true.
Largely ambivalent about abortion until the late 1970s, evangelical leaders were first mobilized not by Roe v. Wade but by Green v. Connally, a lesser-known court decision in 1971 that threatened the tax-exempt status of racially discriminatory institutions—of which there were several in the world of Christian education at the time. When the most notorious of these schools, Bob Jones University, had its tax-exempt status revoked in 1976, evangelicalism was galvanized as a political force and brought into the fold of the Republican Party. Only later, when a more palatable issue was needed to cover for what was becoming an increasingly unpopular position following the civil rights era, was the moral crusade against abortion made the central issue of the movement now known as the Religious Right.
In this greatly expanded argument from his 2014 Politico article “The Real Origins of the Religious Right,” Randall Balmer guides the reader along the convoluted historical trajectory that began with American evangelicalism as a progressive force opposed to slavery, then later an isolated apolitical movement in the mid-twentieth century, all the way through the 2016 election in which 81 percent of white evangelicals coalesced around Donald Trump for president. The pivotal point, Balmer shows, was the period in the late 1970s when American evangelicals turned against Jimmy Carter—despite his being one of their own, a professed “born-again” Christian—in favor of the Republican Party, which found it could win their loyalty through the espousal of a single issue. With the implications of this alliance still unfolding, Balmer’s account uncovers the roots of evangelical watchwords like “religious freedom” and “family values” while getting to the truth of how this movement began—explaining, in part, what it has become.
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- The Emergence of Progressive Evangelicalism
- The Diversion of Dispensationalism
- The Making of the Evangelical Subculture
- The Chicago Declaration and Jimmy Carter
- The Abortion Myth
- What Really Happened
- What about Abortion?
- The 1980 Presidential Election
- Why the Abortion Myth Matters
Part One: Evangelicalism before the Religious Right
Part Two: The Abortion Myth and the Rise of the Religious Right
Part Three: So What?
Bad Faith is a fantastic primer on one of the most potent and controversial political forces of the past half century—the Religious Right. Bad Faith upends the tidy narrative that protesting abortion was the issue that rallied evangelicals in the political realm. Randall Balmer’s historical research helps restore the true and infuriating story, that racism, once again, played a central role in shaping the political and religious landscape of the nation. Before you read another headline or write another social media post about religion, race, or politics, read this book.
—Jemar Tisby
Forget whatever you’ve always heard about the beginnings of the Religious Right. Balmer’s highly engaging and provocative book pulls back the curtain to reveal how race, not abortion, was the key issue in the birth of what has become a powerful and disturbing alliance.
—The Most Rev. Michael B. Curry
This brilliant, readable detective story demonstrates that the Religious Right, far from speaking for all evangelicals, has masked its recent—and deviant—origin among groups advocating white supremacy. Here Randall Balmer, our most influential historian of American evangelical Christianity, sets forth the evidence and calls for evangelical Christians to return to their actual sources—the teachings of Jesus.
—Elaine Pagels
- Title: Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right
- Author: Randall Balmer
- Publisher: Eerdmans
- Print Publication Date: 2021
- Logos Release Date: 2022
- Pages: 120
- Era: era:contemporary
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Logos Reader Edition
- Subjects: Religious right › United States--History; Evangelicalism › Political aspects--United States--History; Abortion › Political aspects--United States--History; Racism › United States--Religious aspects
- ISBNs: 9780802879349, 0802879349
- Resource ID: LLS:BDFTHRCRLGSRGHT
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2024-10-09T22:37:25Z
Reviews
1 rating
Alan Myatt
11/20/2025
For one who was actually there in the late 70s - early 80s, as a college student in the south, Balmer’s argument comes across as an agenda motivated caricature, rather than a fair and comprehensive treatment of the data. It simply doesn’t comport with the electrifying impact of Francis Schaeffer on my generation. Disillusioned with the dehumanizing effects of 60s radical leftism, Schaeffer’s message of the value of all human life, created in God’s image, offered hope with real answers. A direct result of this was a severe conscientization of Evangelicals out of their indifference towards abortion into a clear understanding of its full moral implications. The How Should We Then Live film series made this concrete. Whatever Happened to the Human Race was our call and catalyst to social action. I vividly recall being at the film screening and lectures. It was a defining moment for us. None of that is to deny or downplay the racial issues Balmer brings up that motivated some of the elder founders of groups like Moral Majority. Looking back, we can see that they were painfully real. However, those of us on the ground, the young people, the rank and file, not only had no awareness of this, we would have found it abhorrent. There was no hint of this, certainly not in Schaeffer’s teaching nor in our motivation. Documenting the racist motives and lack of interest of much of the previous generation of Evangelicals in abortion is certainly an important contribution to our understanding of that era. But it is not sufficient to explain the origin of the religious right. Implying that abortion was merely a front for hiding the ‘real’ issue of racism is a theory in search of supporting facts. This is quite evident in the frankly absurd notion that Francis Schaeffer was recruited by the fathers of the religious right to obfuscate their racist motivations. Indeed, it’s nothing short of libelous to impute such a role to Schaeffer. He wasn’t about to be recruited by anyone for any political purpose. He was much too critical of his own generation of Evangelicals for its compromised baptism of secular values. Pro-life activism was not, as Balmer implies, just a smokescreen. That abortion was decisive in propelling the religious right into national prominence is no myth. To be clear, I speak not only from the perspective of a young college and seminary student who lived these event. I also am evaluating Balmer’s thesis as a theologian trained in sociology of religion and the historiography of American religion. There are significant methodological problems with Balmer’s research that render his conclusions specious at best. Specifically, there is the common error of identifying the thinking of the elite in a movement with the motivations and intentions of the masses on the ground. This creates a highly selective and misleading reading of entire movements. A robust application of broad qualitative research among all levels of active participants would remedy this defect. It would provide much more accurate insight into the dynamics of the movement’s development. Such research is absent here. There are significant historical anomalies with the kind of reductionist theorizing presented in this little book. It doesn’t do justice to the role of conservative white southern Evangelicals in electing Jimmy Carter to the presidency. More problematic is Balmer’s attributing their subsequent rejection of Carter entirely to racism. The rampant inflation of his failed economic policies and his incompetent handling of the hostage crisis in Iran are not treated. This is a flagrant ignoring of highly relevant facts, giving Balmer’s narrative the appearance of serious bias. It’s been many years since my youthful activism in the politics of the religious right. Long ago I began to see the problems of its flawed and naive collapse of Christian social ethics into partisan politics. The effects this unfortunate marriage still continue to afflict and divide the church to this day. But that doesn’t entail seeing the movement as merely a veiled attempt to maintain the racial status quo of previous generations. In some ways I should be sympathetic with Balmer’s project. Peeling back the external layers and showing the underlying reality of a movement that, in the end, was destined to collapse under the weight of its own superficiality is a worthy endeavor. But such peeling ought to be done with the twin blades academically sound historical and sociological analysis. The reality is that social movements of this size are immune to simple black and white explanations. Human social interaction is highly complex. Understanding it requires an accurate analysis of the data, unimpeded by partisan narratives. There is as much danger in inaccurately denigrating the past as there is in wrongly idealizing it. Responsible historical and sociological analysis will avoid them both.
