{"id":655,"date":"2014-05-28T08:09:00","date_gmt":"2014-05-28T08:09:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2014\/05\/the-real-origins-of-the-religious-right.html"},"modified":"2014-05-28T08:09:00","modified_gmt":"2014-05-28T08:09:00","slug":"the-real-origins-of-the-religious-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2014\/05\/the-real-origins-of-the-religious-right.html","title":{"rendered":"The Real Origins of the Religious Right"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>
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. Supreme Court\u2019s 1973\u00a0Roe v. Wade<\/em>\u00a0ruling legalizing abortion. The tale goes something like this: Evangelicals, who had been politically quiescent for decades, were so morally outraged by\u00a0Roe<\/em>\u00a0that they resolved to organize in order to overturn it.<\/span><\/div>\n

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This myth of origins is oft repeated by the movement\u2019s leaders. In his 2005 book, Jerry Falwell, the firebrand fundamentalist preacher, recounts his distress upon reading about the ruling in the Jan. 23, 1973, edition of the\u00a0Lynchburg News<\/em>: \u201cI sat there staring at the\u00a0Roe v. Wade<\/em>\u00a0story,\u201d Falwell writes, \u201cgrowing more and more fearful of the consequences of the Supreme Court\u2019s act and wondering why so few voices had been raised against it.\u201d Evangelicals, he decided, needed to organize.<\/span><\/div>\n

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Some of these anti-Roe<\/em>\u00a0crusaders even went so far as to call themselves \u201cnew abolitionists,\u201d invoking their antebellum predecessors who had fought to eradicate slavery. But the abortion myth quickly collapses under historical scrutiny. In fact, it wasn\u2019t until 1979\u2014a full six years after\u00a0Roe<\/em>\u2014that 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. Why? Because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right\u2019s real motive: protecting segregated schools. So much for the new abolitionism.<\/span><\/div>\n


<\/span>Read the rest here<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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. Supreme Court\u2019s 1973\u00a0Roe v. Wade\u00a0ruling legalizing abortion. The tale goes something like this: Evangelicals, who had been politically quiescent for decades, were so morally […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-655","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Real Origins of the Religious Right<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"One of the most durable myths in recent history is that the religious right, the coalition of conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists, emerged as a\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2014\/05\/the-real-origins-of-the-religious-right.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" 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