Race, Xenophobia, and the History of White Evangelicalism with Randall Balmer
Dartmouth professor and pre-eminent scholar of Evangelicalism Dr. Randall Balmer returns to talk about his new book, Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right. He and Brad discuss how over the course of the 20th century, race and xenophobia have been the drivers of Evangelical theology and politics. Balmer explains how Evangelicals once invested in social reform, but over the last century have undergone a transformation at the hands of conservative political operatives and fear of ethnic and racial others.
Bonus: The open race-baiting of Ronald Reagan's 1980 presidential campaign
Bonus: Balmer explains the Abortion Myth and how race, rather than reproductive rights shaped the Religious Right
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB, and I am joined today by an extra special guest.
I feel like every person who comes on the show, I'm always just honored to have them, but this person was my very first interview on this show, and that is pretty cool.
Also, the very first interview on the Orange Wave.
So if you listen to this show, This is our first interviewee.
If you listen to The Orange Wave, the very first episode, you get to listen to the one and only Dr. Randall Balmer.
And Dr. Balmer is, along with being an Episcopal priest, the John Phillips Professor in Religion at Dartmouth College, the author of more than a dozen books, including Evangelicalism in America, Redeemer, The Life of Jimmy Carter, and Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory, A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America.
That last book is now in its fifth edition and was made into an award-winning PBS series.
Dr. Balmer, this is your third time back.
It's always great to have you.
Thanks for being here.
I never get tired of it, Brad.
Thank you.
All right.
Well, we're glad for that.
Well, we're going to talk about your new book, and that is Bad Faith, Race and the Rise of the Religious Right.
And I had a chance to get an advance copy, and I was excited to see this book for a number of reasons.
One of them is just the format.
I really feel like Sometimes the casual fan out there can get kind of intimidated by the 700 page book that they're not sure they can finish.
This is a short text.
It's very accessible.
The kind of thing that if you're flying cross country or sitting on the beach on vacation, you can really make some good headway through.
And it really hits on a lot of the themes and questions you have just continued to ask and explore throughout your long and illustrious career.
I want to dig into just some of those.
We're not going to get to all of them, but one of the things I really appreciated about Bad Faith was just the very accessible way you explain what happens in the 19th century and before that with evangelicals and their commitment to social reform.
This shocks a lot of people because when they think of evangelicals today, they just don't put those two together.
So let me ask this.
Can you help us understand that despite the current climate, many evangelicals once saw social justice as a core part of their religious practice?
Well, they did.
And first of all, thank you for your kind words, Brad.
I really do appreciate that.
But one of the things that I was trying to show in the book is that, well, I guess in a broader sense, I'm trying to explode several myths.
I think one of the myths, as you suggested, was the myth that evangelicals have always listed toward the right of the political spectrum.
And that is simply not the case.
If you look at the record of 19th century evangelical political and social activism, and it's important to point out that evangelicals really did set the agenda for much of the 19th century in terms of social and political reforms.
By today's standards, that agenda would list decisively toward the left of the political spectrum.
That is to say, evangelicals were very much involved in the whole agenda and whole enterprise of social reform, particularly in the antebellum period, Coming out of the Second Great Awakening, this wonderful series of revivals that took place in the decades surrounding the turn of the 19th century.
So evangelicals were involved, for example, in the common school movement, public education, the early years of public education, which as we know it today, evangelicals were very much involved in that, very often as leaders of the public school movement.
Because they recognized that those on the lower rungs of society needed an education in order to make their way up the social and economic ladder.
They were supporters of prison reform in the antebellum period.
They were involved in peace crusades.
I've even run across an instance of evangelical crusade against or in favor of gun control in the 19th century, believe it or not.
But also rather significantly on the issues of race, Northern evangelicals were involved in the abolitionist movement, working for the abolition of slavery.
I won't deny that there are some Southern theologians who offered a theological defense That's clearly the case.
I don't want to suggest otherwise.
But if you look at the overall agenda, and particularly on the issue of women's rights, women's equality, evangelicals were very much in favor of that in the antebellum period, and even voting rights for women, which was considered a rather radical movement at the time.
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