Tuesday, June 10, 2014 8:43:36 AM
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
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.
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Today, evangelicals make up the backbone of the pro-life movement, but it hasn’t always been so. Both before and for several years after Roe, evangelicals were overwhelmingly indifferent to the subject, which they considered a “Catholic issue.” In 1968, for instance, a symposium sponsored by the Christian Medical Society and Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of evangelicalism, refused to characterize abortion as sinful, citing “individual health, family welfare, and social responsibility” as justifications for ending a pregnancy. In 1971, delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention in St. Louis, Missouri, passed a resolution encouraging “Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.” The convention, hardly a redoubt of liberal values, reaffirmed that position in 1974, one year after Roe, and again in 1976.
When the Roe decision was handed down, W. A. Criswell, the Southern Baptist Convention’s former president and pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas—also one of the most famous fundamentalists of the 20th century—was pleased: “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,” he said, “and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.”
Although a few evangelical voices, including Christianity Today magazine, mildly criticized the ruling, the overwhelming response was silence, even approval. Baptists, in particular, applauded the decision as an appropriate articulation of the division between church and state, between personal morality and state regulation of individual behavior. “Religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision,” wrote W. Barry Garrett of Baptist Press.
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So what then were the real origins of the religious right? It turns out that the movement can trace its political roots back to a court ruling, but not Roe v. Wade.
In May 1969, a group of African-American parents in Holmes County, Mississippi, sued the Treasury Department to prevent three new whites-only K-12 private academies from securing full tax-exempt status, arguing that their discriminatory policies prevented them from being considered “charitable” institutions. The schools had been founded in the mid-1960s in response to the desegregation of public schools set in motion by the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. In 1969, the first year of desegregation, the number of white students enrolled in public schools in Holmes County dropped from 771 to 28; the following year, that number fell to zero.
In Green v. Kennedy (David Kennedy was secretary of the treasury at the time), decided in January 1970, the plaintiffs won a preliminary injunction, which denied the “segregation academies” tax-exempt status until further review. In the meantime, the government was solidifying its position on such schools. Later that year, President Richard Nixon ordered the Internal Revenue Service to enact a new policy denying tax exemptions to all segregated schools in the United States. Under the provisions of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which forbade racial segregation and discrimination, discriminatory schools were not—by definition—“charitable” educational organizations, and therefore they had no claims to tax-exempt status; similarly, donations to such organizations would no longer qualify as tax-deductible contributions.
On June 30, 1971, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia issued its ruling in the case, now Green v. Connally (John Connally had replaced David Kennedy as secretary of the Treasury). The decision upheld the new IRS policy: “Under the Internal Revenue Code, properly construed, racially discriminatory private schools are not entitled to the Federal tax exemption provided for charitable, educational institutions, and persons making gifts to such schools are not entitled to the deductions provided in case of gifts to charitable, educational institutions.”
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Paul Weyrich, the late religious conservative political activist and co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, saw his opening.
In the decades following World War II, evangelicals, especially white evangelicals in the North, had drifted toward the Republican Party—inclined in that direction by general Cold War anxieties, vestigial suspicions of Catholicism and well-known evangelist Billy Graham’s very public friendship with Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. Despite these predilections, though, evangelicals had largely stayed out of the political arena, at least in any organized way. If he could change that, Weyrich reasoned, their large numbers would constitute a formidable voting bloc—one that he could easily marshal behind conservative causes.
“The new political philosophy must be defined by us [conservatives] in moral terms, packaged in non-religious language, and propagated throughout the country by our new coalition,” Weyrich wrote in the mid-1970s. “When political power is achieved, the moral majority will have the opportunity to re-create this great nation.” Weyrich believed that the political possibilities of such a coalition were unlimited. “The leadership, moral philosophy, and workable vehicle are at hand just waiting to be blended and activated,” he wrote. “If the moral majority acts, results could well exceed our wildest dreams.”
But this hypothetical “moral majority” needed a catalyst—a standard around which to rally. For nearly two decades, Weyrich, by his own account, had been trying out different issues, hoping one might pique evangelical interest: pornography, prayer in schools, the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, even abortion. “I was trying to get these people interested in those issues and I utterly failed,” Weyrich recalled at a conference in 1990.
The Green v. Connally ruling provided a necessary first step: It captured the attention of evangelical leaders, especially as the IRS began sending questionnaires to church-related “segregation academies,” including Falwell’s own Lynchburg Christian School, inquiring about their racial policies. Falwell was furious. “In some states,” he famously complained, “It’s easier to open a massage parlor than a Christian school.”
One such school, Bob Jones University—a fundamentalist college in Greenville, South Carolina—was especially obdurate. The IRS had sent its first letter to Bob Jones University in November 1970 to ascertain whether or not it discriminated on the basis of race. The school responded defiantly: It did not admit African Americans.
Although Bob Jones Jr., the school’s founder, argued that racial segregation was mandated by the Bible, Falwell and Weyrich quickly sought to shift the grounds of the debate, framing their opposition in terms of religious freedom rather than in defense of racial segregation. For decades, evangelical leaders had boasted that because their educational institutions accepted no federal money (except for, of course, not having to pay taxes) the government could not tell them how to run their shops—whom to hire or not, whom to admit or reject. The Civil Rights Act, however, changed that calculus.
Bob Jones University did, in fact, try to placate the IRS—in its own way. Following initial inquiries into the school’s racial policies, Bob Jones admitted one African-American, a worker in its radio station, as a part-time student; he dropped out a month later. In 1975, again in an attempt to forestall IRS action, the school admitted blacks to the student body, but, out of fears of miscegenation, refused to admit unmarried African-Americans. The school also stipulated that any students who engaged in interracial dating, or who were even associated with organizations that advocated interracial dating, would be expelled.
The IRS was not placated. On January 19, 1976, after years of warnings—integrate or pay taxes—the agency rescinded the school’s tax exemption.
For many evangelical leaders, who had been following the issue since Green v. Connally, Bob Jones University was the final straw. As Elmer L. Rumminger, longtime administrator at Bob Jones University, told me in an interview, the IRS actions against his school “alerted the Christian school community about what could happen with government interference” in the affairs of evangelical institutions. “That was really the major issue that got us all involved.”
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Weyrich saw that he had the beginnings of a conservative political movement, which is why, several years into President Jimmy Carter’s term, he and other leaders of the nascent religious right blamed the Democratic president for the IRS actions against segregated schools—even though the policy was mandated by Nixon, and Bob Jones University had lost its tax exemption a year and a day before Carter was inaugurated as president. Falwell, Weyrich and others were undeterred by the niceties of facts. In their determination to elect a conservative, they would do anything to deny a Democrat, even a fellow evangelical like Carter, another term in the White House.
But Falwell and Weyrich, having tapped into the ire of evangelical leaders, were also savvy enough to recognize that organizing grassroots evangelicals to defend racial discrimination would be a challenge. It had worked to rally the leaders, but they needed a different issue if they wanted to mobilize evangelical voters on a large scale.
By the late 1970s, many Americans—not just Roman Catholics—were beginning to feel uneasy about the spike in legal abortions following the 1973 Roe decision. The 1978 Senate races demonstrated to Weyrich and others that abortion might motivate conservatives where it hadn’t in the past. That year in Minnesota, pro-life Republicans captured both Senate seats (one for the unexpired term of Hubert Humphrey) as well as the governor’s mansion. In Iowa, Sen. Dick Clark, the Democratic incumbent, was thought to be a shoo-in: Every poll heading into the election showed him ahead by at least 10 percentage points. On the final weekend of the campaign, however, pro-life activists, primarily Roman Catholics, leafleted church parking lots (as they did in Minnesota), and on Election Day Clark lost to his Republican pro-life challenger.
In the course of my research into Falwell’s archives at Liberty University and Weyrich’s papers at the University of Wyoming, it became very clear that the 1978 election represented a formative step toward galvanizing everyday evangelical voters. Correspondence between Weyrich and evangelical leaders fairly crackles with excitement. In a letter to fellow conservative Daniel B. Hales, Weyrich characterized the triumph of pro-life candidates as “true cause for celebration,” and Robert Billings, a cobelligerent, predicted that opposition to abortion would “pull together many of our ‘fringe’ Christian friends.” Roe v. Wade had been law for more than five years.
Weyrich, Falwell and leaders of the emerging religious right enlisted an unlikely ally in their quest to advance abortion as a political issue: Francis A. Schaeffer—a goateed, knickers-wearing theologian who was warning about the eclipse of Christian values and the advance of something he called “secular humanism.” Schaeffer, considered by many the intellectual godfather of the religious right, was not known for his political activism, but by the late 1970s he decided that legalized abortion would lead inevitably to infanticide and euthanasia, and he was eager to sound the alarm. Schaeffer teamed with a pediatric surgeon, C. Everett Koop, to produce a series of films entitled Whatever Happened to the Human Race? In the early months of 1979, Schaeffer and Koop, targeting an evangelical audience, toured the country with these films, which depicted the scourge of abortion in graphic terms—most memorably with a scene of plastic baby dolls strewn along the shores of the Dead Sea. Schaeffer and Koop argued that any society that countenanced abortion was captive to “secular humanism” and therefore caught in a vortex of moral decay.
Between Weyrich’s machinations and Schaeffer’s jeremiad, evangelicals were slowly coming around on the abortion issue. At the conclusion of the film tour in March 1979, Schaeffer reported that Protestants, especially evangelicals, “have been so sluggish on this issue of human life, and Whatever Happened to the Human Race? is causing real waves, among church people and governmental people too.”
By 1980, even though Carter had sought, both as governor of Georgia and as president, to reduce the incidence of abortion, his refusal to seek a constitutional amendment outlawing it was viewed by politically conservative evangelicals as an unpardonable sin. Never mind the fact that his Republican opponent that year, Ronald Reagan, had signed into law, as governor of California in 1967, the most liberal abortion bill in the country. When Reagan addressed a rally of 10,000 evangelicals at Reunion Arena in Dallas in August 1980, he excoriated the “unconstitutional regulatory agenda” directed by the IRS “against independent schools,” but he made no mention of abortion. Nevertheless, leaders of the religious right hammered away at the issue, persuading many evangelicals to make support for a constitutional amendment outlawing abortion a litmus test for their votes.
Carter lost the 1980 election for a variety of reasons, not merely the opposition of the religious right. He faced a spirited challenge from within his own party; Edward M. Kennedy’s failed quest for the Democratic nomination undermined Carter’s support among liberals. And because Election Day fell on the anniversary of the Iran Hostage Crisis, the media played up the story, highlighting Carter’s inability to secure the hostages’ freedom. The electorate, once enamored of Carter’s evangelical probity, had tired of a sour economy, chronic energy shortages and the Soviet Union’s renewed imperial ambitions.
After the election results came in, Falwell, never shy to claim credit, was fond of quoting a Harris poll that suggested Carter would have won the popular vote by a margin of 1 percent had it not been for the machinations of the religious right. “I knew that we would have some impact on the national elections,” Falwell said, “but I had no idea that it would be this great.”
Given Carter’s political troubles, the defection of evangelicals may or may not have been decisive. But it is certainly true that evangelicals, having helped propel Carter to the White House four years earlier, turned dramatically against him, their fellow evangelical, during the course of his presidency. And the catalyst for their political activism was not, as often claimed, opposition to abortion. Although abortion had emerged as a rallying cry by 1980, the real roots of the religious right lie not the defense of a fetus but in the defense of racial segregation.
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The Bob Jones University case merits a postscript. When the school’s appeal finally reached the Supreme Court in 1982, the Reagan administration announced that it planned to argue in defense of Bob Jones University and its racial policies. A public outcry forced the administration to reconsider; Reagan backpedaled by saying that the legislature should determine such matters, not the courts. The Supreme Court’s decision in the case, handed down on May 24, 1983, ruled against Bob Jones University in an 8-to-1 decision. Three years later Reagan elevated the sole dissenter, William Rehnquist, to chief justice of the Supreme Court.
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 [ http://www.amazon.com/Redeemer-The-Life-Jimmy-Carter/dp/0465029582 ].
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AP WAS THERE: Original 1954 Brown v. Board story
FILE - This May 17, 1954 file photo shows, from left, George E.C. Hayes, Thurgood Marshall, and James M. Nabrit joining hands as they pose outside the Supreme Court in Washington. The three lawyers led the fight for abolition of segregation in public schools before the Supreme Court, which ruled today that segregation is unconstitutional. On May 17, 1954, a hushed crowd of spectators packed the Supreme Court, awaiting word on Brown v. Board of Education, a combination of five lawsuits brought by the NAACP's legal arm to challenge racial segregation in public schools. The high court decided unanimously that "separate but equal" education denied black children their constitutional right to equal protection under the law, effectively removing a cornerstone that propped up Jim Crow, or state-sanctioned segregation of the races.
(AP Photo, File)
Updated: 3:10 p.m. Friday, May 16, 2014 | Posted: 3:08 p.m. Friday, May 16, 2014
EDITOR'S NOTE: On May 17, 1954, a hushed crowd of spectators packed the Supreme Court, awaiting word on Brown v. Board of Education, a combination of five lawsuits brought by the NAACP's legal arm to challenge racial segregation in public schools. The high court decided unanimously that "separate but equal" education denied black children their constitutional right to equal protection under the law, effectively removing a cornerstone that propped up Jim Crow, or state-sanctioned segregation of the races.
AP reporter Herb Altschull chronicled the court's decision and what it meant for segregation, which in 1954 permeated many aspects of American life. Using the style and language of journalists of his era, including a reference to Asians as "Orientals," Altschull captured the uncertainty hanging over a society on the brink of seismic change. He noted that Dean Acheson, former secretary of state, and Herbert Brownell, the current attorney general, were in the courtroom. He reported the immediate, steely resistance of Gov. Herman Talmadge and Sen. Richard Russell of Georgia, where opposition to integration was strong. He described how Chief Justice Earl Warren departed from procedure and read the decision before distributing copies, and he quoted an optimistic Thurgood Marshall, the "Negro attorney from New York" who argued part of the case, as saying he believed Southerners would honor the Brown decision.
More importantly, Altschull explained that segregation wouldn't disappear overnight, and "a lengthy delay" in implementing Brown was likely — a statement that proved prescient.
Additional action by the Supreme Court was required before integration finally took hold in U.S. classrooms, and vestiges of segregation linger to this day. Among the justices who heard those cases was Marshall, who was head of the NAACP's legal operation at the time of the Brown decision and went on to become the Supreme Court's first black justice in 1967.
Sixty years after its initial publication, The AP is making Altschull's compelling report available to its subscribers.
By HERB ALTSCHULL
The Associated Press
May 17, 1954
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled today that the states of the nation do not have the right to separate Negro and white pupils in different public schools.
By a unanimous 9-0 vote, the high court held that such segregation of the races is unconstitutional.
Chief Justice Warren read the historic decision to a packed but hushed gallery of spectators nearly two years after Negro residents of four states and the District of Columbia went before the court to challenge the principle of segregation.
The ruling does not end segregation at once. Further hearings were set for this fall to decide how and when to end the practice of segregation. Thus a lengthy delay is likely before the decision is carried out.
Dean Acheson, secretary of state under former President Harry Truman, was in the courtroom to hear the ruling. He called it "great and statesmanlike."
Atty. Gen. Brownell was also present. He declined comment immediately. Brownell and the Eisenhower administration, like Truman's, opposed segregation.
For years 17 southern and "border" states have imposed compulsory segregation on approximately two-thirds of the nation's Negroes. Officials of some states already are on record as saying they will close the schools rather than permit them to be operated with Negro and white pupils in the same classrooms.
In its decision, the high court struck down the long-standing "separate but equal" doctrine first laid down by the Supreme Court in 1896 when it maintained that segregation was all right if equal facilities were made available for Negroes and whites.
Here is the heart of today's decision as it deals with this hotly controverted doctrine:
"We come then to the question presented: Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other 'tangible' factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal education opportunities?"
"We believe that it does."
James C. Hagerty, presidential press secretary, told a news conference the White House would have no comment at this time. He noted that Warren's opinion said formulation of specific decrees must await later hearings.
Gov. Herman Talmadge, one of the most outspoken supporters of segregation, hit back from Atlanta that the court's decision had reduced the constitution to "a mere scrap of paper."
"It has blatantly ignored all law and precedent and usurped from the Congress and the people the power to amend the Constitution and from the Congress the authority to make the laws of the land," Talmadge said.
Thurgood Marshall, Negro attorney from New York who had argued the case against segregation last December, said he was highly pleased that the decision was unanimous and that the language used was unequivocal.
"Once the decision is made public to the South as well as to the North," Marshall said, "The people will get together for the first time and work this thing out."
He said he was not in any way fearful lest the final decree nibble away at the principles in the decision. Marshall said, too, he believes the people of the South will abide by the ruling. "The people of the South are just as law abiding as any other good citizens," he said.
Marshall is a special counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which has spearheaded the drive against segregation. He said NAACP people will meet this week to discuss "what we are going to do."
Today's decision was the first major ruling of the Supreme Court since Warren became chief justice last October, succeeding the late Fred Vinson.
The court confined its ruling to the question of the segregation of Negro public school pupils, but it obviously is applicable to the exclusion from public schools of any minority group-- Orientals, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans and so on.
Today's decision was the latest in a series of court rulings wiping out legal restrictions on Negroes.
In previous cases the Supreme Court had:
1. Ruled that colleges must admit Negroes to study professional courses not open to them in Negro colleges.
2. Ruled that Negroes may not be excluded from train and bus coaches operated in interstate travel.
3. Ruled that Negroes may not be barred from eating in restaurants in the District of Columbia.
The "separate but equal" doctrine was set forth in a 7-1 decision on May 18, 1896 in a case involving Homer Adolph Plessy, who was part Negro.
Plessy boarded a train for a ride from New Orleans to Covington, LA., and took a seat in a coach assigned to white passengers in violation of a Louisiana law which required segregation of whites and Negroes on trains.
The conductor asked Plessy to leave the white coach but he refused. A policeman arrested Plessy and took him to jail in New Orleans.
That set off a vigorous legal battle in which the Louisiana Supreme Court eventually upheld the state law. Plessy appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States and the decision went against him.
Justice Henry Billings Brown, who wrote that decision, said the Louisiana law was not in conflict with the U.S. Constitution since Plessy was not refused the right to ride in trains so long as he stayed in a coach restricted to Negroes.
Thus grew up the philosophy of "separate but equal" facilities. Warren, in today's decision, wrote that the Plessy case involved transportation, not public schools. Inasmuch as he called special attention to the distinction, it is apparent that the court is not now dismissing all forms of segregation.
Warren said that when the 14th Amendment was enacted, "education of Negroes was almost non-existent, and practically all of the race were illiterate. In fact, any education of Negroes was forbidden by law in some states."
"Today, in contrast, many Negroes have achieved outstanding success in the arts and sciences as well as in the business and professional world."
Warren noted that in the early 1870's when cases dealing with segregation first went to the Supreme Court, "compulsory education was virtually unknown" and that for this reason the question of school segregation was unimportant.
After the 1896 decision, Warren wrote, American courts began using it as a basis for decisions on all matters dealing with separation of Negroes and whites.
But it was not until the present cases were brought before the court, Warren said, that the "separate but equal" doctrine was challenged insofar as it might deal with public school education.
Warren noted that the lower courts, in finding against Negro appellants on the basis of the 1896 decision maintained that the Negro and white schools involved had, in fact, been equalized "with respect to buildings, curricula, qualifications and salaries of teachers and other 'tangible' factors."
But, the Chief Justice said, "our decision. cannot turn on merely a comparison of these tangible factors in the Negro and white schools involved in each of the cases. We must look instead to the effect of segregation itself on public education."
The Warren opinion recalled that in an earlier decision dealing with the question of whether Negroes should be admitted to graduate courses in segregated universities, the court had said this:
"To separate them (Negroes) from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone."
Reaction from Capitol Hill was swift and in some cases strongly critical.
Sen. Russell of Georgia, leader of Southern Democrats in the Senate, termed the decision "a flagrant abuse of judicial power." He said questions like that of segregation should be decided by the lawmakers, not the courts.
Other Southerners were plainly unhappy, but they did not go so far as Russell. Sen. Daniel (D-TEX) said the verdict was "disappointing" and that he couldn't see how the court could arrive at such a decision.
Sen. Ellender (D-LA) said, "I am of course very much disappointed by this. But I don't want to criticize the Supreme Court. It is bound to have a very great effect until we readjust ourselves to it."
He said there would be "violent repercussions" if enforcement were ordered too quickly.
Rep. Keating (R-NY), a strong backer of civil rights legislation, said "There is no doubt about the soundness of the court's decision."
Gov. William B. Umstead of North Carolina said in a statement put out by his office that he was "terribly disappointed."
J.M. Hinton, South Carolina conference president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), said:
"Christianity and democracy have been given a great place in America through the elimination of segregation in public school and communism has lost a talking point."
The appeals from the four states - Kansas, Delaware, Virginia and South Carolina - challenged the legality of segregation on the ground that it violated the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. The District of Columbia complaint alleged violation of the 5th Amendment.
The 14th Amendment, put through shortly after the end of the Civil War, was designed to reinforce the rights of the newly freed slaves. It said that no state may deprive any person of due process or equal rights under the law.
The 5th Amendment gives all persons involved in court cases dealing with federal matters the right to due process of law.
Actually, the court did not decide the question purely on the basis of these amendments.
Warren wrote that the court "cannot turn the clock back" to the enactment of the 14th Amendment in 1868 or the imposing of the "separate but equal" doctrine in 1896.
"We must consider public education," Warren wrote, "In the light of its full development and its present place in American life throughout the nation. "
"Only in this way can it be determined if segregation in public schools deprives these plaintiffs of the equal protection of the laws."
"Today, education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments... It is the very foundation of good citizenship... In these days it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education."
"Such an opportunity where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms."
The court minced no words in applying the "equal rights" section of the 14th Amendment to the issue of school segregation. It said:
"We hold that the plaintiffs and others similarly situated for whom the action has been brought are, by reason of the segregation complained of, deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment."
It disposed of the "due process" section in this way:
"This disposition makes unnecessary any discussion whether such segregation also violates the due process clause..."
That was for the cases of the four states. But in the District of Columbia case, the court applied the due process provisions of the 5th Amendment, saying:
"We hold that racial segregation in the public schools of the District of Columbia is a denial of the due process of law guaranteed by the 5th Amendment to the Constitution."
Warren's opinion noted that enforcement of the court ruling raised "problems of considerable complexity."
It was for this reason that the court ordered further arguments in the fall. Brownell and the attorneys general of all states where segregation is now permitted were invited to take part, so that appropriate decrees can be worked out.
Briefs must be filed by Oct. 1.
The decision was made public in a highly unusual manner. Normally, copies of Supreme Court rulings are given to reporters simultaneously with the start of their reading from the bench.
In this case, no copies were given out until after Warren had finished reading the opinion. Thus it was not until he was well into it was the full import of the court's decision known— that segregation had been ruled unconstitutional.
No reason was announced for this departure from the usual practice.
The court had weighed the issues for a long time. The first arguments on the cases were held in December, 1952. Rearguments were heard in December, 1953, after the Eisenhower Administration took over.
EDITORS NOTE: On May 17, 1954, AP reporter Herb Altschull reported on the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education, a lawsuit brought by the NAACP to challenge racial segregation in public schools. The high court ruled that segregated schools were unconstitutional. Using the style and language of journalists of his era, including a reference to Asians as "Orientals," Altschull noted the magnitude of this decision and captured the uncertainty hanging over a society on the brink of seismic change with the downfall of Jim Crow. Sixty years after its initial publication, The AP is making this report available to its subscribers.
© 1954, 2014 Associated Press
http://www.ajc.com/news/ap/top-news/ap-was-there-original-1954-brown-v-board-story/nfx9j/ [comments apparently disabled]
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The Perceptions of Race That Hinge on Stress
Jon Westra/Flickr
A new study found that when resources were scarce, white people had different definitions of "black" and were less generous toward people with darker skin tones than toward people with lighter skin.
Olga Khazan
Jun 9 2014, 3:00 PM ET
The Labor Department said on Friday that employers hired 217,000 [ http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/07/business/labor-department-releases-jobs-data-for-may.html ] workers last month, bringing the job market back to 2008 levels.
It took more than four years to get back to this point after the recession wiped out more than 8.7 million jobs [ http://money.cnn.com/2014/06/06/investing/may-jobs-report/ ] in just two years. And most economists think we’re not out of the woods yet: As my colleague Derek Thompson points out, the labor force participation rate [ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/06/the-us-economy-finally-hit-a-big-economic-milestoneand-it-doesnt-matter/372331/ ] is still at a multi-decade low.
But according to a new study, jobs and wealth weren’t the only things we lost in the recession. All of those economic woes might have also influenced how people perceive other races and have made people less generous toward those who look different from them.
For the study [ http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/06/04/1404448111.abstract ] published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, David Amodio, a psychology professor at New York University and Amy Krosch, a graduate student, performed a series of experiments that showed that their predominantly white study subjects tended to view biracial people as “more black” when they were primed with economic scarcity, and that the subjects were stingier toward darker-complexioned people overall.
First, the researchers asked 70 people to fill out a questionnaire that assessed their concern about economic competition between races. (The statements included things like, “When blacks make economic gains, whites lose out economically.”) They were then asked to identify the races of an array of images of faces, which had been created by fusing different percentages of a picture of a white person with an image of a black person.
PNAS
The authors found that the more the subjects believed that whites and blacks were locked in a zero-sum rivalry, the likelier they were to see the lighter-complexioned faces as “blacker.”
Then, in a second test, 63 subjects primed with words suggesting a lack of resources, such as "scarce," saw mixed-race faces as more “black” than they actually were. For example, they considered a face that consisted of two-thirds a picture of a white person meshed with one-third an image of a black person as fully “black.”
Finally, in a money-allocation game, the subjects were given $15 and told to split it between two versions of one image—one lighter and one darker in skin tone. They gave about 70 cents less to the darker face.
Of course, past studies have also shown that scarcity and resource competition fosters distrust between groups. The ingroup/outgroup cognitive bias [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingroups_and_outgroups ] theory holds that we prefer people who resemble us. But this research suggests that financial strain can cause the very definition of the “out” group to change, as well, by nudging us to view people of other races as even more dissimilar to ourselves.
Black Americans were especially hard-hit by the recent economic slump: From 2007 to 2009, median household wealth decreased by 16 percent for whites and 53 percent for blacks. In hard times, it could be that minority groups are disadvantaged not just by structural economic factors, but also by our attempts to alienate those who look different from us.
“At a broader level, it shows that the effects of scarcity on these socioeconomic patterns might be driven by psychological processes at the individual level,” Amodio said. “The fact that resources are scarce in society is enough to change the way an individual looks at other people.”
Krosch and Amodio write that although many people harbor subtle prejudice on some level, those negative thoughts are “kept in check through effortful cognitive control.” But economic scarcity is mentally taxing [ http://www.citylab.com/work/2013/08/how-poverty-taxes-brain/6716/ ] – poverty makes it harder to maintain socially acceptable beliefs and allows ugly prejudices to sneak through.
And that’s a critical thing to keep in mind, since attitudes toward race can literally make or break lives [ http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations/361631/ ] and communities [ http://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/371360/the-story-of-clyde-ross-and-the-contract-buyers-league/ ]. Past studies have found [ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16683924 ], for example, that in death-penalty cases with white victims, the more “stereotypically black” the suspect looks, the more likely he or she is to be sentenced to death.
“This would play out in one-on-one situations – like when someone is applying for a bank loan, or dealing with their mortgages, or interviewing for a job,” Amodio said. “These are all situations where the mindset of the person in power could affect how they're seeing this person and forming impressions of this person.”
Copyright © 2014 by The Atlantic Monthly Group
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/how-economic-scarcity-affects-perceptions-of-race/372438/ [with comments]
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The bitter tears of the American Christian supermajority
Why Christians — America’s most populous religious group — feel so victimized
by Chase Madar
March 30, 2014 7:00AM ET
The most persecuted minority in the United States is not Muslims, African-Americans or immigrants. It’s our Christian supermajority that’s truly oppressed.
Verily, consider three anecdotes from the past few weeks.
On March 2, three Baptist ministers in Akron, Ohio, arranged for the local police to mock-arrest [ http://www.ohio.com/news/break-news/fake-arrests-of-pastors-cause-real-grief-for-summit-county-sheriff-1.470836 ] them in their churches and haul them away in handcuffs for the simple act of preaching their faith. A video [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owOZOG1_vgA (next below)]
On Feb. 26, Arizona’s conservative Gov. Jan Brewer vetoed a bill that would have allowed businesses to refuse services to people who violate their sincerely held religious beliefs — for example, gays and lesbians. Fox News pundit Todd Starnes tweeted [ http://mediamatters.org/research/2014/02/26/conservative-media-are-outraged-that-arizonas-a/198248 ] that Christians have been demoted to second-class citizenship in Arizona, an opinion widely shared on the right-wing Christian blogosphere, which sees Brewer’s veto as a harbinger of even greater persecution to come.
And the feature film “Persecuted [ http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Persecuted-movie-Christian-Fred-Thompson/2014/03/10/id/557015/ ],” a political thriller about a federal government plan to censor Christianity in the name of liberalism, is due out in May. Featuring former Sen. Fred Thompson and Fox News host Gretchen Carlson, the movie received a rapturous reception at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference on March 10 and is of a piece with other Christian films such as “God’s Not Dead [ http://godsnotdeadthemovie.com/ ],” about a freshman believer bullied into proving the existence of god by an atheist professor.
Far from reality
Needless to say (or maybe not) this news ticker of persecuted American Christians floats far and free from reality. More than 75 percent of the United States identifies [ http://religions.pewforum.org/affiliations ] as Christian; 57 percent believe [ http://cdn.yougov.com/cumulus_uploads/document/vhyn6fdnkp/tabs_exorcism_0912132013%20%281%29.pdf ] in the devil, and nearly 8 in 10 Americans believe [ http://www.gallup.com/poll/148427/say-bible-literally.aspx ] the Bible to be either the “inspired word” or literal word of God. Despite the constitutional separation of church and state, the government began under President George W. Bush to outsource social welfare programs to faith-based organizations (more than 98 percent, according to one 2006 study [ http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/bush%E2%80%99s-faithbased-initiative-in-the-age-of-obama/11500-bush%E2%80%99s-faithbased-initiative-in-the-age-of-obama ], of them Christian churches), and schools with religious ties (mostly Christian) in several states are now well fed by direct public subsidies. But then, American places of worship (again, most of them Christian) have long enjoyed a de facto public subsidy as tax-exempt 501(c)3 organizations funded by tax-deductible contributions. Last month President Barack Obama himself held forth [ http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/02/06/remarks-president-national-prayer-breakfast ] at National Prayer Breakfast about the importance of Jesus in his life.
To be sure, there are Christians in the world who face persecution, from Copts in Egypt to Catholics in northern Nigeria. But in the U.S., the Christian faith and its institutions have never been more pampered by the state.
And yet the persecution complex of American Christianity blares its sirens, well beyond the surly hype about a “war on Christmas” that has become as much a part of the yuletide season as eggnog. Take the Catholic bishop of Peoria, Ill., Daniel R. Jenky, sermonizing in 2012 against the Affordable Care Act, blasting it as of a piece with governments that “have tried to force Christians to huddle and hide within the confines of their churches,” not skimping on comparisons to Stalinism and Nazism. Texas Gov. Rick Perry asserted that “Satan is attacking the great institutions of America” and vowed to “end Obama’s war on religion” during his 2012 presidential campaign. Another former presidential candidate, Mitt Romney also accused [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/post/romney-obama-waging-war-on-religion/2012/08/09/192c4e02-e213-11e1-a25e-15067bb31849_blog.html ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMv28sYQzCY {next below})]
Overdogs
What accounts for this orgy of self-pity? Part of it is hard-wired into Christianity itself, says Candida Moss, a biblical scholar at Notre Dame University and the author of the recent book “The Myth of Christian Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom [ http://www.amazon.com/The-Myth-Persecution-Christians-Martyrdom/dp/0062104527 ; http://www.harpercollins.com/web-sampler/9780062104526 ].”
The persecution of Christians is the historical equivalent of a false memory, she argues. Early Christians were persecuted by Rome only sporadically, less for religious heterodoxy than for political insubordination in an empire that was draconian across the board. Early Christian writers Irenaeus, Justin Martyr and Tertullian chronicled such incidents as proof of the faith’s righteousness, laying a scriptural basis for a self-image of eternal persecution.
But it was Eusebius, bishop of Caesaria and the first important historian of the church, who “encoded the understanding of the church as persecuted into the history of Christianity itself.” His martyrdom stories and those of other fourth century hagiographers were written to shore up orthodoxy (writers used martyrs as sock puppets to denounce heretics) and drum up tourism for local shrines. These tales of persecution — full of blood, cruelty and dodgy “facts” — were enjoyed at the time, Moss writes, much in the way that modern audiences take in horror movies, and the lowbrow gore has long been justified by embarrassed exegetes as a response to the strain of persecution. Except, as Moss argues, the textual evidence indicates all these tales of persecution were composed after, not before, Christianity had become the favored religion of the Roman Empire in the early fourth century. In short, they belong to an invented tradition of victimization.
Historical record aside, who can resist the deliciousness of having both the upper hand of power and the righteousness of the oppressed? Such persecution mania is dangerous, writes Moss, because “martyrdom is easily adapted by the powerful to cast themselves as victims and justifying their polemical and vitriolic attacks on others,” as freshly empowered Christians swiftly proved by trashing pagan temples and punctuating the centuries since with internecine bloodbaths and the odd crusade.
Moss’ study has earned favorable reviews for its scrupulous scholarship; it has also aroused much nastiness from Christian critics. Even before the book was released, she told me via email, it was denounced by conservative Christian commentators and she has since received hundreds of angry messages, letters and phone calls. She wrote:
Most of these people appear not to have actually read the book but, rather, have heard about it and see it as a further example of persecution. Many of them write to the university and ask it to fire me. An alarming number think that I deserve to be beaten, raped or killed (although blessedly very few of them threaten me directly). Many of the comments are about my character and appearance, but I hear that’s very common for female writers. I’ve been called a “female Judas Iscariot”, a “demon,” possessed by Satan, evil, the Antichrist and a Holocaust denier.
All of which only confirms Moss’ point about how belligerent some Christians can be in their dealings with heterodoxy — always under the pretense of a righteous response to an alien threat.
Apart from its roots in church history, this persecution complex also stems from day-to-day experience in 21st century America. The United States is, after all, a frequently humiliating place to work and live, with fewer social protections and weaker labor laws, compared with other rich countries, and an increasingly thuggish criminal justice system. “If all the cross marked was someone’s humiliation, then the pavement would be so thick with crosses, there would be no space to walk,” as the parish newsletter of St. Brigid’s [ http://brooklyncatholic.blogspot.com/2008/08/st-brigid-bushwick_26.html ] in Brooklyn, N.Y., once put it — and quite accurately too.
With mass alienation from both major political parties and a labor movement that, bright spots aside, appears to be expiring, the only institutional outlet for the shared grievances of millions of Americans is their church. A great many Christian churches and other places of worship channel these social energies into mutual support and good works that add to the commonweal. But some of these energies also find expression in a centuries-old persecution mania, with its distinctly belligerent edge.
Chase Madar is an attorney in New York and the author of “The Passion of [Chelsea] Manning: The Story Behind the WikiLeaks Whistleblower [ http://www.amazon.com/The-Passion-Bradley-Manning-Whistleblower/dp/1781680698 ]” (Verso, 2013).
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America's editorial policy.
© 2014 Al Jazeera America, LLC
http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/3/christians-persecutioncomplex.html [with comments]
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They’ll tell you it was abortion. Sorry, the historical record’s clear: It was segregation.
By RANDALL BALMER
May 27, 2014
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.
*
Today, evangelicals make up the backbone of the pro-life movement, but it hasn’t always been so. Both before and for several years after Roe, evangelicals were overwhelmingly indifferent to the subject, which they considered a “Catholic issue.” In 1968, for instance, a symposium sponsored by the Christian Medical Society and Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of evangelicalism, refused to characterize abortion as sinful, citing “individual health, family welfare, and social responsibility” as justifications for ending a pregnancy. In 1971, delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention in St. Louis, Missouri, passed a resolution encouraging “Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.” The convention, hardly a redoubt of liberal values, reaffirmed that position in 1974, one year after Roe, and again in 1976.
When the Roe decision was handed down, W. A. Criswell, the Southern Baptist Convention’s former president and pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas—also one of the most famous fundamentalists of the 20th century—was pleased: “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,” he said, “and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.”
Although a few evangelical voices, including Christianity Today magazine, mildly criticized the ruling, the overwhelming response was silence, even approval. Baptists, in particular, applauded the decision as an appropriate articulation of the division between church and state, between personal morality and state regulation of individual behavior. “Religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision,” wrote W. Barry Garrett of Baptist Press.
*
So what then were the real origins of the religious right? It turns out that the movement can trace its political roots back to a court ruling, but not Roe v. Wade.
In May 1969, a group of African-American parents in Holmes County, Mississippi, sued the Treasury Department to prevent three new whites-only K-12 private academies from securing full tax-exempt status, arguing that their discriminatory policies prevented them from being considered “charitable” institutions. The schools had been founded in the mid-1960s in response to the desegregation of public schools set in motion by the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. In 1969, the first year of desegregation, the number of white students enrolled in public schools in Holmes County dropped from 771 to 28; the following year, that number fell to zero.
In Green v. Kennedy (David Kennedy was secretary of the treasury at the time), decided in January 1970, the plaintiffs won a preliminary injunction, which denied the “segregation academies” tax-exempt status until further review. In the meantime, the government was solidifying its position on such schools. Later that year, President Richard Nixon ordered the Internal Revenue Service to enact a new policy denying tax exemptions to all segregated schools in the United States. Under the provisions of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which forbade racial segregation and discrimination, discriminatory schools were not—by definition—“charitable” educational organizations, and therefore they had no claims to tax-exempt status; similarly, donations to such organizations would no longer qualify as tax-deductible contributions.
On June 30, 1971, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia issued its ruling in the case, now Green v. Connally (John Connally had replaced David Kennedy as secretary of the Treasury). The decision upheld the new IRS policy: “Under the Internal Revenue Code, properly construed, racially discriminatory private schools are not entitled to the Federal tax exemption provided for charitable, educational institutions, and persons making gifts to such schools are not entitled to the deductions provided in case of gifts to charitable, educational institutions.”
*
Paul Weyrich, the late religious conservative political activist and co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, saw his opening.
In the decades following World War II, evangelicals, especially white evangelicals in the North, had drifted toward the Republican Party—inclined in that direction by general Cold War anxieties, vestigial suspicions of Catholicism and well-known evangelist Billy Graham’s very public friendship with Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. Despite these predilections, though, evangelicals had largely stayed out of the political arena, at least in any organized way. If he could change that, Weyrich reasoned, their large numbers would constitute a formidable voting bloc—one that he could easily marshal behind conservative causes.
“The new political philosophy must be defined by us [conservatives] in moral terms, packaged in non-religious language, and propagated throughout the country by our new coalition,” Weyrich wrote in the mid-1970s. “When political power is achieved, the moral majority will have the opportunity to re-create this great nation.” Weyrich believed that the political possibilities of such a coalition were unlimited. “The leadership, moral philosophy, and workable vehicle are at hand just waiting to be blended and activated,” he wrote. “If the moral majority acts, results could well exceed our wildest dreams.”
But this hypothetical “moral majority” needed a catalyst—a standard around which to rally. For nearly two decades, Weyrich, by his own account, had been trying out different issues, hoping one might pique evangelical interest: pornography, prayer in schools, the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, even abortion. “I was trying to get these people interested in those issues and I utterly failed,” Weyrich recalled at a conference in 1990.
The Green v. Connally ruling provided a necessary first step: It captured the attention of evangelical leaders, especially as the IRS began sending questionnaires to church-related “segregation academies,” including Falwell’s own Lynchburg Christian School, inquiring about their racial policies. Falwell was furious. “In some states,” he famously complained, “It’s easier to open a massage parlor than a Christian school.”
One such school, Bob Jones University—a fundamentalist college in Greenville, South Carolina—was especially obdurate. The IRS had sent its first letter to Bob Jones University in November 1970 to ascertain whether or not it discriminated on the basis of race. The school responded defiantly: It did not admit African Americans.
Although Bob Jones Jr., the school’s founder, argued that racial segregation was mandated by the Bible, Falwell and Weyrich quickly sought to shift the grounds of the debate, framing their opposition in terms of religious freedom rather than in defense of racial segregation. For decades, evangelical leaders had boasted that because their educational institutions accepted no federal money (except for, of course, not having to pay taxes) the government could not tell them how to run their shops—whom to hire or not, whom to admit or reject. The Civil Rights Act, however, changed that calculus.
Bob Jones University did, in fact, try to placate the IRS—in its own way. Following initial inquiries into the school’s racial policies, Bob Jones admitted one African-American, a worker in its radio station, as a part-time student; he dropped out a month later. In 1975, again in an attempt to forestall IRS action, the school admitted blacks to the student body, but, out of fears of miscegenation, refused to admit unmarried African-Americans. The school also stipulated that any students who engaged in interracial dating, or who were even associated with organizations that advocated interracial dating, would be expelled.
The IRS was not placated. On January 19, 1976, after years of warnings—integrate or pay taxes—the agency rescinded the school’s tax exemption.
For many evangelical leaders, who had been following the issue since Green v. Connally, Bob Jones University was the final straw. As Elmer L. Rumminger, longtime administrator at Bob Jones University, told me in an interview, the IRS actions against his school “alerted the Christian school community about what could happen with government interference” in the affairs of evangelical institutions. “That was really the major issue that got us all involved.”
*
Weyrich saw that he had the beginnings of a conservative political movement, which is why, several years into President Jimmy Carter’s term, he and other leaders of the nascent religious right blamed the Democratic president for the IRS actions against segregated schools—even though the policy was mandated by Nixon, and Bob Jones University had lost its tax exemption a year and a day before Carter was inaugurated as president. Falwell, Weyrich and others were undeterred by the niceties of facts. In their determination to elect a conservative, they would do anything to deny a Democrat, even a fellow evangelical like Carter, another term in the White House.
But Falwell and Weyrich, having tapped into the ire of evangelical leaders, were also savvy enough to recognize that organizing grassroots evangelicals to defend racial discrimination would be a challenge. It had worked to rally the leaders, but they needed a different issue if they wanted to mobilize evangelical voters on a large scale.
By the late 1970s, many Americans—not just Roman Catholics—were beginning to feel uneasy about the spike in legal abortions following the 1973 Roe decision. The 1978 Senate races demonstrated to Weyrich and others that abortion might motivate conservatives where it hadn’t in the past. That year in Minnesota, pro-life Republicans captured both Senate seats (one for the unexpired term of Hubert Humphrey) as well as the governor’s mansion. In Iowa, Sen. Dick Clark, the Democratic incumbent, was thought to be a shoo-in: Every poll heading into the election showed him ahead by at least 10 percentage points. On the final weekend of the campaign, however, pro-life activists, primarily Roman Catholics, leafleted church parking lots (as they did in Minnesota), and on Election Day Clark lost to his Republican pro-life challenger.
In the course of my research into Falwell’s archives at Liberty University and Weyrich’s papers at the University of Wyoming, it became very clear that the 1978 election represented a formative step toward galvanizing everyday evangelical voters. Correspondence between Weyrich and evangelical leaders fairly crackles with excitement. In a letter to fellow conservative Daniel B. Hales, Weyrich characterized the triumph of pro-life candidates as “true cause for celebration,” and Robert Billings, a cobelligerent, predicted that opposition to abortion would “pull together many of our ‘fringe’ Christian friends.” Roe v. Wade had been law for more than five years.
Weyrich, Falwell and leaders of the emerging religious right enlisted an unlikely ally in their quest to advance abortion as a political issue: Francis A. Schaeffer—a goateed, knickers-wearing theologian who was warning about the eclipse of Christian values and the advance of something he called “secular humanism.” Schaeffer, considered by many the intellectual godfather of the religious right, was not known for his political activism, but by the late 1970s he decided that legalized abortion would lead inevitably to infanticide and euthanasia, and he was eager to sound the alarm. Schaeffer teamed with a pediatric surgeon, C. Everett Koop, to produce a series of films entitled Whatever Happened to the Human Race? In the early months of 1979, Schaeffer and Koop, targeting an evangelical audience, toured the country with these films, which depicted the scourge of abortion in graphic terms—most memorably with a scene of plastic baby dolls strewn along the shores of the Dead Sea. Schaeffer and Koop argued that any society that countenanced abortion was captive to “secular humanism” and therefore caught in a vortex of moral decay.
Between Weyrich’s machinations and Schaeffer’s jeremiad, evangelicals were slowly coming around on the abortion issue. At the conclusion of the film tour in March 1979, Schaeffer reported that Protestants, especially evangelicals, “have been so sluggish on this issue of human life, and Whatever Happened to the Human Race? is causing real waves, among church people and governmental people too.”
By 1980, even though Carter had sought, both as governor of Georgia and as president, to reduce the incidence of abortion, his refusal to seek a constitutional amendment outlawing it was viewed by politically conservative evangelicals as an unpardonable sin. Never mind the fact that his Republican opponent that year, Ronald Reagan, had signed into law, as governor of California in 1967, the most liberal abortion bill in the country. When Reagan addressed a rally of 10,000 evangelicals at Reunion Arena in Dallas in August 1980, he excoriated the “unconstitutional regulatory agenda” directed by the IRS “against independent schools,” but he made no mention of abortion. Nevertheless, leaders of the religious right hammered away at the issue, persuading many evangelicals to make support for a constitutional amendment outlawing abortion a litmus test for their votes.
Carter lost the 1980 election for a variety of reasons, not merely the opposition of the religious right. He faced a spirited challenge from within his own party; Edward M. Kennedy’s failed quest for the Democratic nomination undermined Carter’s support among liberals. And because Election Day fell on the anniversary of the Iran Hostage Crisis, the media played up the story, highlighting Carter’s inability to secure the hostages’ freedom. The electorate, once enamored of Carter’s evangelical probity, had tired of a sour economy, chronic energy shortages and the Soviet Union’s renewed imperial ambitions.
After the election results came in, Falwell, never shy to claim credit, was fond of quoting a Harris poll that suggested Carter would have won the popular vote by a margin of 1 percent had it not been for the machinations of the religious right. “I knew that we would have some impact on the national elections,” Falwell said, “but I had no idea that it would be this great.”
Given Carter’s political troubles, the defection of evangelicals may or may not have been decisive. But it is certainly true that evangelicals, having helped propel Carter to the White House four years earlier, turned dramatically against him, their fellow evangelical, during the course of his presidency. And the catalyst for their political activism was not, as often claimed, opposition to abortion. Although abortion had emerged as a rallying cry by 1980, the real roots of the religious right lie not the defense of a fetus but in the defense of racial segregation.
*
The Bob Jones University case merits a postscript. When the school’s appeal finally reached the Supreme Court in 1982, the Reagan administration announced that it planned to argue in defense of Bob Jones University and its racial policies. A public outcry forced the administration to reconsider; Reagan backpedaled by saying that the legislature should determine such matters, not the courts. The Supreme Court’s decision in the case, handed down on May 24, 1983, ruled against Bob Jones University in an 8-to-1 decision. Three years later Reagan elevated the sole dissenter, William Rehnquist, to chief justice of the Supreme Court.
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 [ http://www.amazon.com/Redeemer-The-Life-Jimmy-Carter/dp/0465029582 ].
© 2014 POLITICO LLC (emphasis in original)
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133.html [ http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133_full.html ] [with (over 5,000) comments]
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AP WAS THERE: Original 1954 Brown v. Board story
FILE - This May 17, 1954 file photo shows, from left, George E.C. Hayes, Thurgood Marshall, and James M. Nabrit joining hands as they pose outside the Supreme Court in Washington. The three lawyers led the fight for abolition of segregation in public schools before the Supreme Court, which ruled today that segregation is unconstitutional. On May 17, 1954, a hushed crowd of spectators packed the Supreme Court, awaiting word on Brown v. Board of Education, a combination of five lawsuits brought by the NAACP's legal arm to challenge racial segregation in public schools. The high court decided unanimously that "separate but equal" education denied black children their constitutional right to equal protection under the law, effectively removing a cornerstone that propped up Jim Crow, or state-sanctioned segregation of the races.
(AP Photo, File)
Updated: 3:10 p.m. Friday, May 16, 2014 | Posted: 3:08 p.m. Friday, May 16, 2014
EDITOR'S NOTE: On May 17, 1954, a hushed crowd of spectators packed the Supreme Court, awaiting word on Brown v. Board of Education, a combination of five lawsuits brought by the NAACP's legal arm to challenge racial segregation in public schools. The high court decided unanimously that "separate but equal" education denied black children their constitutional right to equal protection under the law, effectively removing a cornerstone that propped up Jim Crow, or state-sanctioned segregation of the races.
AP reporter Herb Altschull chronicled the court's decision and what it meant for segregation, which in 1954 permeated many aspects of American life. Using the style and language of journalists of his era, including a reference to Asians as "Orientals," Altschull captured the uncertainty hanging over a society on the brink of seismic change. He noted that Dean Acheson, former secretary of state, and Herbert Brownell, the current attorney general, were in the courtroom. He reported the immediate, steely resistance of Gov. Herman Talmadge and Sen. Richard Russell of Georgia, where opposition to integration was strong. He described how Chief Justice Earl Warren departed from procedure and read the decision before distributing copies, and he quoted an optimistic Thurgood Marshall, the "Negro attorney from New York" who argued part of the case, as saying he believed Southerners would honor the Brown decision.
More importantly, Altschull explained that segregation wouldn't disappear overnight, and "a lengthy delay" in implementing Brown was likely — a statement that proved prescient.
Additional action by the Supreme Court was required before integration finally took hold in U.S. classrooms, and vestiges of segregation linger to this day. Among the justices who heard those cases was Marshall, who was head of the NAACP's legal operation at the time of the Brown decision and went on to become the Supreme Court's first black justice in 1967.
Sixty years after its initial publication, The AP is making Altschull's compelling report available to its subscribers.
By HERB ALTSCHULL
The Associated Press
May 17, 1954
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled today that the states of the nation do not have the right to separate Negro and white pupils in different public schools.
By a unanimous 9-0 vote, the high court held that such segregation of the races is unconstitutional.
Chief Justice Warren read the historic decision to a packed but hushed gallery of spectators nearly two years after Negro residents of four states and the District of Columbia went before the court to challenge the principle of segregation.
The ruling does not end segregation at once. Further hearings were set for this fall to decide how and when to end the practice of segregation. Thus a lengthy delay is likely before the decision is carried out.
Dean Acheson, secretary of state under former President Harry Truman, was in the courtroom to hear the ruling. He called it "great and statesmanlike."
Atty. Gen. Brownell was also present. He declined comment immediately. Brownell and the Eisenhower administration, like Truman's, opposed segregation.
For years 17 southern and "border" states have imposed compulsory segregation on approximately two-thirds of the nation's Negroes. Officials of some states already are on record as saying they will close the schools rather than permit them to be operated with Negro and white pupils in the same classrooms.
In its decision, the high court struck down the long-standing "separate but equal" doctrine first laid down by the Supreme Court in 1896 when it maintained that segregation was all right if equal facilities were made available for Negroes and whites.
Here is the heart of today's decision as it deals with this hotly controverted doctrine:
"We come then to the question presented: Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other 'tangible' factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal education opportunities?"
"We believe that it does."
James C. Hagerty, presidential press secretary, told a news conference the White House would have no comment at this time. He noted that Warren's opinion said formulation of specific decrees must await later hearings.
Gov. Herman Talmadge, one of the most outspoken supporters of segregation, hit back from Atlanta that the court's decision had reduced the constitution to "a mere scrap of paper."
"It has blatantly ignored all law and precedent and usurped from the Congress and the people the power to amend the Constitution and from the Congress the authority to make the laws of the land," Talmadge said.
Thurgood Marshall, Negro attorney from New York who had argued the case against segregation last December, said he was highly pleased that the decision was unanimous and that the language used was unequivocal.
"Once the decision is made public to the South as well as to the North," Marshall said, "The people will get together for the first time and work this thing out."
He said he was not in any way fearful lest the final decree nibble away at the principles in the decision. Marshall said, too, he believes the people of the South will abide by the ruling. "The people of the South are just as law abiding as any other good citizens," he said.
Marshall is a special counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which has spearheaded the drive against segregation. He said NAACP people will meet this week to discuss "what we are going to do."
Today's decision was the first major ruling of the Supreme Court since Warren became chief justice last October, succeeding the late Fred Vinson.
The court confined its ruling to the question of the segregation of Negro public school pupils, but it obviously is applicable to the exclusion from public schools of any minority group-- Orientals, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans and so on.
Today's decision was the latest in a series of court rulings wiping out legal restrictions on Negroes.
In previous cases the Supreme Court had:
1. Ruled that colleges must admit Negroes to study professional courses not open to them in Negro colleges.
2. Ruled that Negroes may not be excluded from train and bus coaches operated in interstate travel.
3. Ruled that Negroes may not be barred from eating in restaurants in the District of Columbia.
The "separate but equal" doctrine was set forth in a 7-1 decision on May 18, 1896 in a case involving Homer Adolph Plessy, who was part Negro.
Plessy boarded a train for a ride from New Orleans to Covington, LA., and took a seat in a coach assigned to white passengers in violation of a Louisiana law which required segregation of whites and Negroes on trains.
The conductor asked Plessy to leave the white coach but he refused. A policeman arrested Plessy and took him to jail in New Orleans.
That set off a vigorous legal battle in which the Louisiana Supreme Court eventually upheld the state law. Plessy appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States and the decision went against him.
Justice Henry Billings Brown, who wrote that decision, said the Louisiana law was not in conflict with the U.S. Constitution since Plessy was not refused the right to ride in trains so long as he stayed in a coach restricted to Negroes.
Thus grew up the philosophy of "separate but equal" facilities. Warren, in today's decision, wrote that the Plessy case involved transportation, not public schools. Inasmuch as he called special attention to the distinction, it is apparent that the court is not now dismissing all forms of segregation.
Warren said that when the 14th Amendment was enacted, "education of Negroes was almost non-existent, and practically all of the race were illiterate. In fact, any education of Negroes was forbidden by law in some states."
"Today, in contrast, many Negroes have achieved outstanding success in the arts and sciences as well as in the business and professional world."
Warren noted that in the early 1870's when cases dealing with segregation first went to the Supreme Court, "compulsory education was virtually unknown" and that for this reason the question of school segregation was unimportant.
After the 1896 decision, Warren wrote, American courts began using it as a basis for decisions on all matters dealing with separation of Negroes and whites.
But it was not until the present cases were brought before the court, Warren said, that the "separate but equal" doctrine was challenged insofar as it might deal with public school education.
Warren noted that the lower courts, in finding against Negro appellants on the basis of the 1896 decision maintained that the Negro and white schools involved had, in fact, been equalized "with respect to buildings, curricula, qualifications and salaries of teachers and other 'tangible' factors."
But, the Chief Justice said, "our decision. cannot turn on merely a comparison of these tangible factors in the Negro and white schools involved in each of the cases. We must look instead to the effect of segregation itself on public education."
The Warren opinion recalled that in an earlier decision dealing with the question of whether Negroes should be admitted to graduate courses in segregated universities, the court had said this:
"To separate them (Negroes) from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone."
Reaction from Capitol Hill was swift and in some cases strongly critical.
Sen. Russell of Georgia, leader of Southern Democrats in the Senate, termed the decision "a flagrant abuse of judicial power." He said questions like that of segregation should be decided by the lawmakers, not the courts.
Other Southerners were plainly unhappy, but they did not go so far as Russell. Sen. Daniel (D-TEX) said the verdict was "disappointing" and that he couldn't see how the court could arrive at such a decision.
Sen. Ellender (D-LA) said, "I am of course very much disappointed by this. But I don't want to criticize the Supreme Court. It is bound to have a very great effect until we readjust ourselves to it."
He said there would be "violent repercussions" if enforcement were ordered too quickly.
Rep. Keating (R-NY), a strong backer of civil rights legislation, said "There is no doubt about the soundness of the court's decision."
Gov. William B. Umstead of North Carolina said in a statement put out by his office that he was "terribly disappointed."
J.M. Hinton, South Carolina conference president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), said:
"Christianity and democracy have been given a great place in America through the elimination of segregation in public school and communism has lost a talking point."
The appeals from the four states - Kansas, Delaware, Virginia and South Carolina - challenged the legality of segregation on the ground that it violated the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. The District of Columbia complaint alleged violation of the 5th Amendment.
The 14th Amendment, put through shortly after the end of the Civil War, was designed to reinforce the rights of the newly freed slaves. It said that no state may deprive any person of due process or equal rights under the law.
The 5th Amendment gives all persons involved in court cases dealing with federal matters the right to due process of law.
Actually, the court did not decide the question purely on the basis of these amendments.
Warren wrote that the court "cannot turn the clock back" to the enactment of the 14th Amendment in 1868 or the imposing of the "separate but equal" doctrine in 1896.
"We must consider public education," Warren wrote, "In the light of its full development and its present place in American life throughout the nation. "
"Only in this way can it be determined if segregation in public schools deprives these plaintiffs of the equal protection of the laws."
"Today, education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments... It is the very foundation of good citizenship... In these days it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education."
"Such an opportunity where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms."
The court minced no words in applying the "equal rights" section of the 14th Amendment to the issue of school segregation. It said:
"We hold that the plaintiffs and others similarly situated for whom the action has been brought are, by reason of the segregation complained of, deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment."
It disposed of the "due process" section in this way:
"This disposition makes unnecessary any discussion whether such segregation also violates the due process clause..."
That was for the cases of the four states. But in the District of Columbia case, the court applied the due process provisions of the 5th Amendment, saying:
"We hold that racial segregation in the public schools of the District of Columbia is a denial of the due process of law guaranteed by the 5th Amendment to the Constitution."
Warren's opinion noted that enforcement of the court ruling raised "problems of considerable complexity."
It was for this reason that the court ordered further arguments in the fall. Brownell and the attorneys general of all states where segregation is now permitted were invited to take part, so that appropriate decrees can be worked out.
Briefs must be filed by Oct. 1.
The decision was made public in a highly unusual manner. Normally, copies of Supreme Court rulings are given to reporters simultaneously with the start of their reading from the bench.
In this case, no copies were given out until after Warren had finished reading the opinion. Thus it was not until he was well into it was the full import of the court's decision known— that segregation had been ruled unconstitutional.
No reason was announced for this departure from the usual practice.
The court had weighed the issues for a long time. The first arguments on the cases were held in December, 1952. Rearguments were heard in December, 1953, after the Eisenhower Administration took over.
EDITORS NOTE: On May 17, 1954, AP reporter Herb Altschull reported on the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education, a lawsuit brought by the NAACP to challenge racial segregation in public schools. The high court ruled that segregated schools were unconstitutional. Using the style and language of journalists of his era, including a reference to Asians as "Orientals," Altschull noted the magnitude of this decision and captured the uncertainty hanging over a society on the brink of seismic change with the downfall of Jim Crow. Sixty years after its initial publication, The AP is making this report available to its subscribers.
© 1954, 2014 Associated Press
http://www.ajc.com/news/ap/top-news/ap-was-there-original-1954-brown-v-board-story/nfx9j/ [comments apparently disabled]
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The Perceptions of Race That Hinge on Stress
Jon Westra/Flickr
A new study found that when resources were scarce, white people had different definitions of "black" and were less generous toward people with darker skin tones than toward people with lighter skin.
Olga Khazan
Jun 9 2014, 3:00 PM ET
The Labor Department said on Friday that employers hired 217,000 [ http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/07/business/labor-department-releases-jobs-data-for-may.html ] workers last month, bringing the job market back to 2008 levels.
It took more than four years to get back to this point after the recession wiped out more than 8.7 million jobs [ http://money.cnn.com/2014/06/06/investing/may-jobs-report/ ] in just two years. And most economists think we’re not out of the woods yet: As my colleague Derek Thompson points out, the labor force participation rate [ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/06/the-us-economy-finally-hit-a-big-economic-milestoneand-it-doesnt-matter/372331/ ] is still at a multi-decade low.
But according to a new study, jobs and wealth weren’t the only things we lost in the recession. All of those economic woes might have also influenced how people perceive other races and have made people less generous toward those who look different from them.
For the study [ http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/06/04/1404448111.abstract ] published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, David Amodio, a psychology professor at New York University and Amy Krosch, a graduate student, performed a series of experiments that showed that their predominantly white study subjects tended to view biracial people as “more black” when they were primed with economic scarcity, and that the subjects were stingier toward darker-complexioned people overall.
First, the researchers asked 70 people to fill out a questionnaire that assessed their concern about economic competition between races. (The statements included things like, “When blacks make economic gains, whites lose out economically.”) They were then asked to identify the races of an array of images of faces, which had been created by fusing different percentages of a picture of a white person with an image of a black person.
PNAS
The authors found that the more the subjects believed that whites and blacks were locked in a zero-sum rivalry, the likelier they were to see the lighter-complexioned faces as “blacker.”
Then, in a second test, 63 subjects primed with words suggesting a lack of resources, such as "scarce," saw mixed-race faces as more “black” than they actually were. For example, they considered a face that consisted of two-thirds a picture of a white person meshed with one-third an image of a black person as fully “black.”
Finally, in a money-allocation game, the subjects were given $15 and told to split it between two versions of one image—one lighter and one darker in skin tone. They gave about 70 cents less to the darker face.
Of course, past studies have also shown that scarcity and resource competition fosters distrust between groups. The ingroup/outgroup cognitive bias [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingroups_and_outgroups ] theory holds that we prefer people who resemble us. But this research suggests that financial strain can cause the very definition of the “out” group to change, as well, by nudging us to view people of other races as even more dissimilar to ourselves.
Black Americans were especially hard-hit by the recent economic slump: From 2007 to 2009, median household wealth decreased by 16 percent for whites and 53 percent for blacks. In hard times, it could be that minority groups are disadvantaged not just by structural economic factors, but also by our attempts to alienate those who look different from us.
“At a broader level, it shows that the effects of scarcity on these socioeconomic patterns might be driven by psychological processes at the individual level,” Amodio said. “The fact that resources are scarce in society is enough to change the way an individual looks at other people.”
Krosch and Amodio write that although many people harbor subtle prejudice on some level, those negative thoughts are “kept in check through effortful cognitive control.” But economic scarcity is mentally taxing [ http://www.citylab.com/work/2013/08/how-poverty-taxes-brain/6716/ ] – poverty makes it harder to maintain socially acceptable beliefs and allows ugly prejudices to sneak through.
And that’s a critical thing to keep in mind, since attitudes toward race can literally make or break lives [ http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations/361631/ ] and communities [ http://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/371360/the-story-of-clyde-ross-and-the-contract-buyers-league/ ]. Past studies have found [ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16683924 ], for example, that in death-penalty cases with white victims, the more “stereotypically black” the suspect looks, the more likely he or she is to be sentenced to death.
“This would play out in one-on-one situations – like when someone is applying for a bank loan, or dealing with their mortgages, or interviewing for a job,” Amodio said. “These are all situations where the mindset of the person in power could affect how they're seeing this person and forming impressions of this person.”
Copyright © 2014 by The Atlantic Monthly Group
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/how-economic-scarcity-affects-perceptions-of-race/372438/ [with comments]
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The bitter tears of the American Christian supermajority
Why Christians — America’s most populous religious group — feel so victimized
by Chase Madar
March 30, 2014 7:00AM ET
The most persecuted minority in the United States is not Muslims, African-Americans or immigrants. It’s our Christian supermajority that’s truly oppressed.
Verily, consider three anecdotes from the past few weeks.
On March 2, three Baptist ministers in Akron, Ohio, arranged for the local police to mock-arrest [ http://www.ohio.com/news/break-news/fake-arrests-of-pastors-cause-real-grief-for-summit-county-sheriff-1.470836 ] them in their churches and haul them away in handcuffs for the simple act of preaching their faith. A video [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owOZOG1_vgA (next below)]
was posted on YouTube to drum up buzz for an upcoming revival show. A few atheist blogs object to uniformed police taking part in a church publicity stunt, but far more people who saw the YouTube video (24,082 [now 26,153] views), in Ohio and elsewhere, took this media stunt as reality — confirmation of their wildest fears about a government clampdown on Christianity.
On Feb. 26, Arizona’s conservative Gov. Jan Brewer vetoed a bill that would have allowed businesses to refuse services to people who violate their sincerely held religious beliefs — for example, gays and lesbians. Fox News pundit Todd Starnes tweeted [ http://mediamatters.org/research/2014/02/26/conservative-media-are-outraged-that-arizonas-a/198248 ] that Christians have been demoted to second-class citizenship in Arizona, an opinion widely shared on the right-wing Christian blogosphere, which sees Brewer’s veto as a harbinger of even greater persecution to come.
And the feature film “Persecuted [ http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Persecuted-movie-Christian-Fred-Thompson/2014/03/10/id/557015/ ],” a political thriller about a federal government plan to censor Christianity in the name of liberalism, is due out in May. Featuring former Sen. Fred Thompson and Fox News host Gretchen Carlson, the movie received a rapturous reception at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference on March 10 and is of a piece with other Christian films such as “God’s Not Dead [ http://godsnotdeadthemovie.com/ ],” about a freshman believer bullied into proving the existence of god by an atheist professor.
Far from reality
Needless to say (or maybe not) this news ticker of persecuted American Christians floats far and free from reality. More than 75 percent of the United States identifies [ http://religions.pewforum.org/affiliations ] as Christian; 57 percent believe [ http://cdn.yougov.com/cumulus_uploads/document/vhyn6fdnkp/tabs_exorcism_0912132013%20%281%29.pdf ] in the devil, and nearly 8 in 10 Americans believe [ http://www.gallup.com/poll/148427/say-bible-literally.aspx ] the Bible to be either the “inspired word” or literal word of God. Despite the constitutional separation of church and state, the government began under President George W. Bush to outsource social welfare programs to faith-based organizations (more than 98 percent, according to one 2006 study [ http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/bush%E2%80%99s-faithbased-initiative-in-the-age-of-obama/11500-bush%E2%80%99s-faithbased-initiative-in-the-age-of-obama ], of them Christian churches), and schools with religious ties (mostly Christian) in several states are now well fed by direct public subsidies. But then, American places of worship (again, most of them Christian) have long enjoyed a de facto public subsidy as tax-exempt 501(c)3 organizations funded by tax-deductible contributions. Last month President Barack Obama himself held forth [ http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/02/06/remarks-president-national-prayer-breakfast ] at National Prayer Breakfast about the importance of Jesus in his life.
To be sure, there are Christians in the world who face persecution, from Copts in Egypt to Catholics in northern Nigeria. But in the U.S., the Christian faith and its institutions have never been more pampered by the state.
And yet the persecution complex of American Christianity blares its sirens, well beyond the surly hype about a “war on Christmas” that has become as much a part of the yuletide season as eggnog. Take the Catholic bishop of Peoria, Ill., Daniel R. Jenky, sermonizing in 2012 against the Affordable Care Act, blasting it as of a piece with governments that “have tried to force Christians to huddle and hide within the confines of their churches,” not skimping on comparisons to Stalinism and Nazism. Texas Gov. Rick Perry asserted that “Satan is attacking the great institutions of America” and vowed to “end Obama’s war on religion” during his 2012 presidential campaign. Another former presidential candidate, Mitt Romney also accused [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/post/romney-obama-waging-war-on-religion/2012/08/09/192c4e02-e213-11e1-a25e-15067bb31849_blog.html ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMv28sYQzCY {next below})]
Obama of waging a war on religion. Right-wing Christians have even had the gall to conscript anti-Nazi Protestant martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer to their cause, comparing [ http://www.foxnews.com/story/2010/12/06/glenn-beck-why-dietrich-bonhoeffer-matters/ ] his persecution to their hysterical simulacrum.
Overdogs
What accounts for this orgy of self-pity? Part of it is hard-wired into Christianity itself, says Candida Moss, a biblical scholar at Notre Dame University and the author of the recent book “The Myth of Christian Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom [ http://www.amazon.com/The-Myth-Persecution-Christians-Martyrdom/dp/0062104527 ; http://www.harpercollins.com/web-sampler/9780062104526 ].”
The persecution of Christians is the historical equivalent of a false memory, she argues. Early Christians were persecuted by Rome only sporadically, less for religious heterodoxy than for political insubordination in an empire that was draconian across the board. Early Christian writers Irenaeus, Justin Martyr and Tertullian chronicled such incidents as proof of the faith’s righteousness, laying a scriptural basis for a self-image of eternal persecution.
But it was Eusebius, bishop of Caesaria and the first important historian of the church, who “encoded the understanding of the church as persecuted into the history of Christianity itself.” His martyrdom stories and those of other fourth century hagiographers were written to shore up orthodoxy (writers used martyrs as sock puppets to denounce heretics) and drum up tourism for local shrines. These tales of persecution — full of blood, cruelty and dodgy “facts” — were enjoyed at the time, Moss writes, much in the way that modern audiences take in horror movies, and the lowbrow gore has long been justified by embarrassed exegetes as a response to the strain of persecution. Except, as Moss argues, the textual evidence indicates all these tales of persecution were composed after, not before, Christianity had become the favored religion of the Roman Empire in the early fourth century. In short, they belong to an invented tradition of victimization.
Historical record aside, who can resist the deliciousness of having both the upper hand of power and the righteousness of the oppressed? Such persecution mania is dangerous, writes Moss, because “martyrdom is easily adapted by the powerful to cast themselves as victims and justifying their polemical and vitriolic attacks on others,” as freshly empowered Christians swiftly proved by trashing pagan temples and punctuating the centuries since with internecine bloodbaths and the odd crusade.
Moss’ study has earned favorable reviews for its scrupulous scholarship; it has also aroused much nastiness from Christian critics. Even before the book was released, she told me via email, it was denounced by conservative Christian commentators and she has since received hundreds of angry messages, letters and phone calls. She wrote:
Most of these people appear not to have actually read the book but, rather, have heard about it and see it as a further example of persecution. Many of them write to the university and ask it to fire me. An alarming number think that I deserve to be beaten, raped or killed (although blessedly very few of them threaten me directly). Many of the comments are about my character and appearance, but I hear that’s very common for female writers. I’ve been called a “female Judas Iscariot”, a “demon,” possessed by Satan, evil, the Antichrist and a Holocaust denier.
All of which only confirms Moss’ point about how belligerent some Christians can be in their dealings with heterodoxy — always under the pretense of a righteous response to an alien threat.
Apart from its roots in church history, this persecution complex also stems from day-to-day experience in 21st century America. The United States is, after all, a frequently humiliating place to work and live, with fewer social protections and weaker labor laws, compared with other rich countries, and an increasingly thuggish criminal justice system. “If all the cross marked was someone’s humiliation, then the pavement would be so thick with crosses, there would be no space to walk,” as the parish newsletter of St. Brigid’s [ http://brooklyncatholic.blogspot.com/2008/08/st-brigid-bushwick_26.html ] in Brooklyn, N.Y., once put it — and quite accurately too.
With mass alienation from both major political parties and a labor movement that, bright spots aside, appears to be expiring, the only institutional outlet for the shared grievances of millions of Americans is their church. A great many Christian churches and other places of worship channel these social energies into mutual support and good works that add to the commonweal. But some of these energies also find expression in a centuries-old persecution mania, with its distinctly belligerent edge.
Chase Madar is an attorney in New York and the author of “The Passion of [Chelsea] Manning: The Story Behind the WikiLeaks Whistleblower [ http://www.amazon.com/The-Passion-Bradley-Manning-Whistleblower/dp/1781680698 ]” (Verso, 2013).
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America's editorial policy.
© 2014 Al Jazeera America, LLC
http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/3/christians-persecutioncomplex.html [with comments]
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Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
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