Published by Eerdmans on January 24, 2025
Genres: Non-Fiction
Buy on Amazon
Goodreads
Balmer, a Dartmouth University religion professor, delivers a reassessment of "the alliance between white evangelicals and the far-right precincts of the Republican party." Balmer says that the court case that galvanized Evangelical political action was not the 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion, but the 1971 decision in Green v. Connally, which threatened the tax-exempt status of religious institutions that discriminated on the basis of race.
Evangelicals emerged as a political force in the 1970s after decades of retreat from secular society following the 1925 Scopes trial, according to Balmer, who details how opposition to state interference in "segregation academies" such as Jerry Falwell's Lynchburg Christian Academy and Bob Jones University (which had its tax-exempt status revoked in 1976) sparked the formation of the "religious right." Paul Weyrich and other political activists then "brilliantly shifted public perception of the movement away from racism toward a more high-minded defense of religious freedom," setting the stage for conservative Christians, further galvanized by the abortion issue and fears of "secular humanism," to turn against Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential election.
Growing up within the sphere of the Religious Right, I had been taught that the political mobilization of conservative evangelicalism could be traced back to Roe v. Wade and the legalization of abortion. This was the constant drumbeat of the Moral Majority for several decades from the 1970s and into the 2000s. The other issues of homosexuality, evolution, religious freedom, and school choice were all bundled in there, but the publicly stated genesis of right-wing evangelical politics was the issue of abortion. In Bad Faith, Randall Balmer convincingly argues that was a life. Rather, he says, the evangelicals got into politics to preserve racial segregation.
The first couple chapters of Bad Faith sets the stage. Balmer begins with a discussion of the progressive evangelicalism of the 19th and early 20th century, contrasting the social reforms attempted by Charles Finney and others with the Religious Right that was to come. Evangelicals of the time supporting public education, opposed Jim Crow, were anti-war—and some even campaigned for gun control!
But then came dispensationalism and two world wars, which dampened social reformers hopes at a better world and gave a vision of an apocalyptic future of despair. Balmer argues that the belief that Jesus will return imminently essentially absolved American evangelicals of their responsibility to reform society and let to a stepping back of evangelicalism within the political sphere.
Decades pass and eventually evangelicals return to politics. The story promoted by Jerry Falwell and others was that it was the abortion issue that did it for them. But Balmer suggests something different. He carefully picks through history, showing that evangelicals were rather apolitical on abortion until well after Roe. He points out that that WA Criswell, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, publicly stated he agreed with Roe in 1973. Even James Dobson said that Scripture was silent on the matter and he could see how Christians could support it.
Now I say all of this not to support abortion (I don’t) but to show how the abortion reasoning for the Religious Right isn’t true. It was never about abortion. It was about race. Balmer argues that it was Green v. Connally that got the Religious Right going—a case that declared that no organization that racially discriminated could be tax exempt…like churches or Christian universities. Opposition to abortion became a lynchpin only because the stated goal of saving innocent babies was more palatable and emotionally-charged than maintaining tax breaks for racists.
The second half of the book moves from a discussion of this history to an explanation of why it matters. Balmer’s takes are brief and incisive, laying out clearly how the politics of the Religious Right was motivated by pragmatism and emotional manipulation. And this matters, Balmer writes, because refusing to acknowledge the racist roots of the Religious Right is what has allowed it to fester within much of white evangelicalism today.
My only criticism of Bad Faith is that it’s entirely too short. This is a pocket-sized book of 88 pages, maybe 10k words total. There’s a strength in brevity, but when countering such an established propaganda, there’s also strength in numbers. The size forces Balmer to give very truncated views of perspectives that readers might not have seen before. Just getting these glimpses might not be enough to sway their mind.
As a full-length book, this would have been amazing. As is, it reads almost like a prospectus or proposal for one. I wanted something a bit deeper. Balmer introduces the topic but his reflections simply can’t go into the depth that I think the topic deserves. It’s a great overview and my criticism is probably that the book isn’t something it didn’t want or intend to be, but I think it’s brevity kneecapped its potential to make an impact.