( 2014 ) They'll tell you it was abortion. Sorry, the historical record's clear: It was segregation.
The Real Origins of the Religious Right
They’ll tell you it was abortion. Sorry, the historical record’s clear: It was segregation.
By RANDALL BALMER
May 27, 2014
( Authors bio: Randall Balmer is the Mandel family professor in the arts and sciences at Dartmouth College. His most recent book is Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter. )
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’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing abortion. 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.
This myth of origins is oft repeated by the movement’s 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 Lynchburg News: “I sat there staring at the Roe v. 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.
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.
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, 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’s real motive: protecting segregated schools. So much for the new abolitionism.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133/
( ***** 5 stars. ) Throughout history and in the context of today's continued ill-treatment of black people, this remains accurate, imo.
= new reply since forum marked as read
It wasn't long after I graduated and moved out of my parents' house that I started growing my hair.
The few that are left are well past my shoulders still. 
Scary times it must have been.
Thankfully I had sane grandparents who got to me enough over the years to plant seeds of goodness that the fundies would have stamped out hard if they had known they were there.
But at the time I was just a kid getting a long road trip with my friends and adults who were supposed to be people who were guiding me to adulthood. We weren't allowed any outside secular influences and the bubble we lived in told us we were superior humans as white, straight male christians and when everyone around you, even the straight, white girls, fed into that it was hard to look too far out of the bubble to find reality.
Jerry Falwell brought a lot of votes to the Repukes, and he was given way more political credit than he ever deserved. I'm glad they're shining a spotlight on this now, but it would have been way more helpful about 40 (or so) years ago.
