Racism at the Start: History of the Religious Right (re-issue)
During the first half of this episode Brad and Dan trace the racist and nationalistic origins of white evangelical politics. On the second half, Brad talks with Dartmouth scholar Randall Balmer, who is perhaps the world's leading scholar of the history of the Religious Right in American politics. He explains that racism in the form of opposition to the integration of schools and segregated churches was the catalyst for the rise of the Religious Right.
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I am officially running for President of the United States.
The American dream is dead.
Please, please, it's too much winning.
We can't take it anymore.
We have to keep winning.
We have to win more.
We're going to win more.
Okay, welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I am Brad Onishi, Associate Professor of Religion at Skidmore College.
And I'm Dan Miller, Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Last episode, we called it 81% and we were looking at how and why 81% of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump.
And we left the discussion with a key question.
We had put forward, or at least I had put forward, the thesis that Republican or politically conservative identity is a part of the religious identity of contemporary white evangelical Christians.
But it brought up the question of how did that happen?
There was a time in our relative lifetime when there was no religious right as we now experience it.
And so what we want to look at today is how that came to be.
How do we get from a time when to be an evangelical Christian was not necessarily to be a Republican or politically conservative and vice versa?
How did that develop?
We're going to take a look at that, and then we're going to turn to Brad's conversation with Professor Randall Balmer, a Dartmouth scholar who has spent decades studying evangelicalism in America, and is one of the world's, not just in the U.S., but in the world's authoritative voices on the subject.
And so that's going to be our focus today.
How did we get to this contemporary situation, this contemporary socio-political formation?
And so Brad, I'm going to throw it over to you.
Where does the story of what we now call the religious right begin?
Yeah, I mean, as a scholar, you know, we only have so much time.
And so, as a scholar, I feel like it's my duty to always preface any conversation with a disclaimer, right?
It's complicated.
People spend their lives studying these things.
We could fill—and people have—10 or 12 volumes on the subject.
Let me just say this.
The story—the modern story begins at the end of the 19th century, and that's a time of, you know, rapid industrialization.
The USA becomes, at that point, right, in the end of the 19th century, what we might call a modern nation.
And this sort of transition to a modern era brings with it growing pains, and it brings with it new ideas and new factors for Americans.
One of those is the arrival of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.
I mean, this is something that is still raging today.
There are still debates about teaching evolution and creation all over the country.
Another is, and this is something that's really important to note, is the development of what's now called biblical studies.
And what that means, and this is really important for the ongoing discussion, is that scholars begin to study the Bible like they would have studied other texts.
Okay, so they took the blinders off and said, okay, let's study this book historically.
Let's study this text from a literary perspective.
Let's look at the archaeology of this text.
And by doing that and by deconstructing this sort of sacred text, they opened up a whole new can of worms.
Okay, so we have these things happening.
And again, if you want to read about all of those sort of movements and all of those phenomena, there's fantastic text that happens.
But by the end of the century, there's a major split between Protestants in this country.
Okay, so there's kind of two types of American Protestants that emerge into the 20th century.
One are often referred to as mainline Protestants or liberal Protestants.
And on the whole, and again, this is a characterization.
But on the whole, this group is urban, socially oriented, meaning they participate in politics and see it as part of their religion.
They see the gospel of Jesus Christ as fundamentally about improving society, helping the vulnerable, the sick, those who are most in need.
They see Christianity as accommodating modern culture, not at odds with it.
They're open to science, and they're open to biblical criticism.
On the other side, you have what emerge are those who are called fundamentalists or, later on, evangelicals.
On the whole, and again, a characterization, this is a group that is largely rural.
It's individual-oriented.
It sees the gospel as saving individual souls rather than sort of bettering society.
It shuns compromise with modern culture.
It's suspicious of things like media, newspapers, eventually the movies, etc.
They reject the authority of science, and they are suspicious of academics.
Yeah, one of the things that you're highlighting here with these terms is there are a lot of ways that scholars will map these groups, but you hit on it.
This one group is known as the Fundamentalists, and that's a term probably everybody's familiar with, but it gets its name in this period.
There was a series of pamphlets called the Fundamentals, the idea being that they're fundamentals of faith that would argue against that academic study of the Bible that you're talking about.
That would argue against evolutionary theory, that would argue in favor of a literal reading of, say, the creation account in Genesis, and those other sort of mainline Protestants who were more open to modern culture came to be known as the modernists.
So if people are looking into this, you'll often see this whole period as the so-called modernist-fundamentalist controversy, or the battles between modernism and fundamentalism within American Christianity.
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