Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right

A surprising and disturbing origin storyThere 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.