Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [17]
Christian conservatives of the evangelical and fundamentalist type had been told for years—ever since the Scopes Trial—that they should not be involved in politics, that it was a sin to be involved in politics. That you would lose your soul if you were involved in politics.24
Years later, Falwell and others promulgated a myth that the shock of Roe v. Wade finally woke the slumbering religious right—enraging Christians across the country and prompting Falwell to launch his influential political organization, the Moral Majority. The chief problem with this story is that it’s false. Many fundamentalist organizations, including the Southern Baptist Convention to which Falwell belonged, were originally pro-choice and viewed abortion as a “Catholic issue.” W. A. Criswell, former president of the SBC, declared after Roe v. Wade:
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, and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.25
And W. Barry Garrett of the Baptist Press wrote, “Religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision.”26
Moreover, Falwell did not found the Moral Majority because of his outrage against the Supreme Court. The Moral Majority was Paul Weyrich’s brainchild. Weyrich was certainly concerned about abortion, but his primary objective in founding the organization was to unite fundamentalists, evangelicals, Catholics, and even Jews in a variety of social and political causes. Weyrich believed that the new organization needed a popular Protestant figurehead. He first tried to recruit Pat Robertson, who turned him down. Falwell, his second choice, accepted—but it took some persuading. In addition, Ed Dobson, a former Falwell associate, explicitly dismissed the significance of abortion in the early planning of the Moral Majority, recalling:
The Religious New Right did not start because of a concern about abortion. I sat in the non-smoke-filled back room with the Moral Majority, and I frankly do not remember abortion ever being mentioned as a reason why we ought to do something.27
According to Weyrich, even fundamentalists and evangelicals who opposed legalized abortion did not originally see the need for a political response to Roe v. Wade and other Supreme Court decisions:
Their attitude was “If there are abortions and if there’s no prayer in the public school and there are all these problems, we’re living in our own little communities, and there’s not going to be any abortions among our kids, and we have opened Christian schools and prayer will be recited there, and we simply don’t need to be involved.”28
The issue that did finally propel the religious right into action was not abortion but the 1978 IRS proposal to crack down on segregated schools. Weyrich explained:
What galvanized the Christian community was not abortion, school prayer, or the ERA. I am living witness to that because I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed. What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter’s intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation.29
Richard Viguerie, who along with Weyrich has been credited with founding what was once called the New Right, claimed that the IRS desegregation proposal “kicked the sleeping dog. It galvanized the religious right. It was the spark that ignited the religious right’s involvement in real politics.”30
Thus, in a crucible of racism and piety, baked red-hot by the fear of corrupted youth, a movement was born. The role of the IRS desegregation proposal in the birth of the religious right has been well documented. Less discussed has been the fiction—the fuel—that fired the imaginations of