The GOP Circles Back to Its One True Love

You Guessed It: Racism

Apr 28, 2024

This article was originally published to Medium on 04 July 2023.

Contrary to much of evangelical mythology, the rallying cry of the Religious Right, the Moral Majority, and all the rest of the crew on the right was not abortion. There was essentially zero opposition to the landmark 1973 Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion in the United States. (It’s a bit more complicated than that, but in practical terms, that’s what Roe did.) Magazine articles and publications from across the Protestant spectrum at the time actually lauded the highest court’s decision. The only real opposition came from the more conservative Catholic corners of society, and it was seen specifically as a “Catholic issue” by evangelicals rather than a more broadly Christian one.

If the merging of anti-choice, right-wing reactionary politics with evangelicalism wasn’t due to abortion, then what was it? Well, the real answer is probably not going to surprise members of the younger generations, those who grew up in predominantly White evangelical churches, or those who have read a lot about this type of Christianity. (I belong to all three demographics.) It was not the right of women/birthing people to control our own reproductive health, choices, and rights. It was, and always has been, the defining issue of race in the United States. Racism. Segregation. White supremacy. White nationalism. Call it whatever you like, but that is the tie that binds this GOP’s reactionary politics together in the United States. And has since at least 1980.

How did racism play such a key role in creating the evangelical voter bloc that is currently wreaking havoc on BIPOC, women, LGBTQIA+, immigrants, and basically anyone else in the United States who is not a conservative straight White cis male? The first part of the answer has to do with Brown v. Board of Education. This 1954 Supreme Court ruling mandated that “separate but equal” was unconstitutional. Segregated public schools had to be dismantled, and racist Americans were PISSED about it. Since there really was no way around the ruling, conservatives, particularly in the South, began building networks of private religiously-affiliated schools that could either discriminate based on race or simply raise their tuition rates enough to dissuade students of color from attending. These were colloquially known as “segregation academies” and were rampant in the South just after Brown was decided. These Southern evangelicals were essentially saying, “Fine, put your Black kids in our schools. We’ll go elsewhere so our White children won’t be sullied by their presence.” Instead of the government segregating its citizens, White racists began segregating themselves into their own private spaces. A lot of the conservative obsession with privatization stems from deep-seated anger over desegregation.

The second part of the answer occurred in the 1970s when Bob Jones University lost its tax-exempt status because it continued to refuse to admit non-White students. Bob Jones University is an extremely conservative fundamentalist/evangelical school, and losing their religious exemption from paying taxes was construed by White evangelicals as government persecution. (It wasn’t.) These were the twin government actions that drove evangelicals, hard-right conservatives, reactionaries, and all the rest into the arms of the waiting GOP in the late 1970s. However, they couldn’t overtly run on racism, segregation, or undoing the accomplishments of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Most Americans, and probably even a large chunk of evangelicals at the time, would not have been comfortable with such explicit hate-mongering. They would also have had a difficult time attracting independent voters to such a platform to win national elections. No, they had to figure out an acceptable alternative to serve as their call to arms. As the story goes, the masterminds of this coalition were just sitting around brainstorming ideas, jotting them down on a blackboard, and sorting through the ones that could best be used to manipulate their flocks and followers. They landed on abortion, but it could easily have been any number of issues. It was honestly little more than a whim. But in the end, American women of all colors were chosen to be sacrificed on the altar of White supremacy.

Most evangelicals today have no idea of this history. I had certainly never heard any of this when I was attending church multiple times a week as a teenager and university student in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The fight for conservative politics was ALWAYS framed as “saving babies” or “sexual ethics” or “building a Christian nation.” We had to flood the Supreme Court with pro-life justices so they could vote to save babies from being murdered. That was the rhetoric and reasoning employed, although the movement itself had been founded several years beforehand in response to the desegregation and civil rights efforts of the federal government. The entire evangelical movement from about 1980 onward is little more than a backlash against progress. It is regressive Christianity, and most American evangelicals are so thoroughly steeped in it that they cannot see how filthy the water has become. They have been lied to and manipulated their entire lives by the spiritual leaders who were supposed to be looking after their best interests. It isn’t so much a personal failing on the part of many individual evangelicals as it is a collective grievance against BIPOC, women, and other minority groups in the United States. American evangelicalism has far more to do with Whiteness and political power than historical Christianity or universal Christian theology. It formed in the womb of European colonization, was born from the cinders of the Civil War, and metastasized into the Lost Cause, the KKK, Nixon’s Southern Strategy, Reagan’s “welfare queens,” and eventually Trumpism.

The Religious Right and the GOP have worked hard over the past several decades to make us forget how intrinsically racist their entire movement actually is. They focused so much on restricting abortion access, passing laws to ban women’s health care, demonstrating at women’s health clinics, harassing women and girls seeking any kind of medical care, and even murdering doctors that we forgot that racism is central to evangelicalism’s fight for Supreme Court seats and anti-government sentiment. After all, “saving babies” appears to have far more nobility than re-segregating society based on race. However, most rank and file evangelicals are quite unaware, at least consciously, of just how central these beliefs are. I have normally found most conservative Christians, in both the comments sections of social media and in real life, to be completely ignorant of how much racism and White supremacy have been weaponized within their churches and subcultures. And what is worse, evangelicalism often seals itself away into its own thought bubbles. Insular churches, private Christian schools, homeschooling, Christian music, Christian TV channels, Christian movies, Christian books and novels, and so on. Even without FOX News and all the rest of the political right-wing echo chamber, conservative American Christianity is often an echo chamber all on its own.

The Supreme Court’s June 2022 ruling which overturned Roe surprised almost no one. Most of the surprise actually came from the leaked memo and the appalling sources Justice Alito cited in his majority opinion. The conservative justices who contributed to the Dobbs decision had always been vague enough in their Senate confirmation hearing responses that anyone who wasn’t completely naive or totally new to politics would have known that they would jump at the first chance to dismantle women’s rights. Your average American knows that evangelicalism is synonymous with anti-choice activism, but a lot of Americans forgot just how centrally racist this entire branch of Christianity is as well. It’s what their political activism was founded on. Not abortion. Not “saving babies.” No, it was ensuring that White kids would not have to mix with any of the non-White population who now make up more than half of the younger generations and will soon outnumber White Americans overall. The future is diverse — from BIPOC to LGBTQIA+ to women to neurodivergence — and White evangelicalism cannot abide this diversity.

Within the past week, the Supreme Court has demolished two components of higher education in the United States: affirmative action and student debt relief. Affirmative action was meant to alleviate centuries of historical racial discrimination, segregation, and violence. It was never true reparations; it had always been a bandaid. But it was something. Since BIPOC are also more likely to be poorer than their White counterparts and thus more likely to take on loans for school, student debt relief would have disproportionately benefitted the non-White population. These twin decisions will roll back the advances of decades for minorities in the United States and make their lives even more difficult because that is the aim of White evangelicalism and always has been. White Christians must hold all the power and control the nation’s wealth, institutions, and societal structures. Allowing BIPOC to advance into the realms of government, business, literature, and the arts, and to become pillars of society in their own right is the antithesis of everything White American Christianity stands for. Evangelicalism is obsessed with hierarchies and power structures, and both affirmative action and debt relief aimed to mitigate each of them. And that was unacceptable.

Whatever their moniker or nickname — the Religious Right, the Moral Majority, the GOP, Trumpers, evangelicals, Christian nationalists, White supremacists — they are simply returning to the issue that drew them all together in the first place over 40 years ago. They have spent decades building shadow institutions (the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation), manipulating government (gerrymandering, voter suppression, holding SCOTUS seats open), and creating an alternate universe of hate media (FOX, Breitbart, talk radio) to fuse reactionary politics and White supremacy with a toxically individualistic form of Western Christianity. They have been so successful that many of their own members who are just everyday people are not even consciously aware of the toxicity they’ve been stewing in for decades.

Just as the evangelical political movement formed around issues of race rather than abortion, they are now circling back to their one true love. They are using institutions and government structures to rescind the promises of the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution: forming a more perfect Union, establishing Justice, insuring domestic Tranquility, promoting the general Welfare, and most importantly, that all of us are created equal. But no, too many of the wrong people were finally beginning to benefit from these promises. And their fictional idol and mascot, White Jesus, would not want that. It would be a sacrilege against their mythology of a pure White Christian nation. We must all be reined in to satisfy evangelicalism’s obsession with power and control.

The GOP Circles Back to Its One True Love

You Guessed It: Racism

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