Bad Faith by Randall Balmer

Bad Faith by Randall Balmer

A surprising and disturbing origin story

There is a commonly accepted story about the rise of the Religious Right in the United States. It goes like this: with righteous fury, American evangelicals entered the political arena as a unified front to fight the legality of abortion after the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.

The problem is this story simply isn't true.

Largely ambivalent about abortion until the late 1970s, evangelical leaders were first mobilized not by Roe v. Wade but by Green v. Connally, a lesser-known court decision in 1971 that threatened the tax-exempt status of racially discriminatory institutions--of which there were several in the world of Christian education at the time. When the most notorious of these schools, Bob Jones University, had its tax-exempt status revoked in 1976, evangelicalism was galvanized as a political force and brought into the fold of the Republican Party. Only later, when a more palatable issue was needed to cover for what was becoming an increasingly unpopular position following the civil rights era, was the moral crusade against abortion made the central issue of the movement now known as the Religious Right.

In this greatly expanded argument from his 2014 Politico article The Real Origins of the Religious Right, Randall Balmer guides the reader along the convoluted historical trajectory that began with American evangelicalism as a progressive force opposed to slavery, then later an isolated apolitical movement in the mid-twentieth century, all the way through the 2016 election in which 81 percent of white evangelicals coalesced around Donald Trump for president. The pivotal point, Balmer shows, was the period in the late 1970s when American evangelicals turned against Jimmy Carter--despite his being one of their own, a professed born-again Christian--in favor of the Republican Party, which found it could win their loyalty through the espousal of a single issue. With the implications of this alliance still unfolding, Balmer's account uncovers the roots of evangelical watchwords like religious freedom and family values while getting to the truth of how this movement began--explaining, in part, what it has become.

Randall Balmer (Ph.D., Princeton University), a prize-winning historian, Emmy Award nominee and ordained Episcopal priest, is the John Phillips Professor in Religion at Dartmouth College. He was professor of American religious history at Columbia University for twenty-seven years, and he has been a visiting professor at Princeton, Yale, Drew, Emory, and Northwestern universities and in the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including Evangelicalism in America and Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter. Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America, now in its fifth edition, was made into a three-part series for PBS. He is writing and will host his third PBS documentary, a history of the Orthodox Church in Alaska. His commentaries about religion in America appear in newspapers across the country.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780802879349
ISBN 10	0802879349
Title	Bad Faith
Author	Randall Balmer
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	William B Eerdmans Publishing Co
Year published	2021-08-10
Number of pages	141
Prizes	Commended for Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards (Political/Social Sciences) 2021
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable