Bad Faith Quotes

“Sadly, the Religious Right was never about the advancement of biblical values. The modern, politically conservative evangelical activism we see today is a movement rooted in the perpetuation of racial segregation, and its affiliation with the hard-right fringes of the conservative movement beginning in the late 1970s produced a mutant form of evangelicalism inconsistent with the best traditions of evangelicalism itself.”
― Randall Balmer, Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right

“The real catalyst for the Religious Right was a court decision, but it was not Roe v. Wade. It was a lower court ruling in the District Court for the District of Columbia in a case called Green v. Connally. On June 30, 1971, the court ruled that any organization that engaged in racial segregation or racial discrimination was not by definition a charitable institution, and therefore it had no claims on tax-exempt status. The Supreme Court’s Coit v. Green decision upheld the district court, and the Internal Revenue Service then began making inquiries about the racial policies of so-called segregation academies as well as the fundamentalist school Bob Jones University, in Greenville, South Carolina, which boasted a long history of racial exclusion.”
― Randall Balmer, Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right

“Single-issue voting on abortion makes white evangelicals complicit on a whole range of policies that would be anathema to nineteenth-century evangelical reformers, not to mention the Bible itself. How is a ruthless exclusionary policy toward immigrants and refugees in any way consistent with scriptural mandates to welcome the stranger and treat the foreigner as one of your own? How does environmental destruction and indifference to climate change honor God’s creation? One of evangelicals’ signature issues in the nineteenth century was support for “common schools” because they provided a boost for the children of those less fortunate; Trump’s secretary of education (who professes to be an evangelical) spent her adult life seeking systematically to undermine, if not destroy, public education.”
― Randall Balmer, Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right

“There is a kind of tragic continuity in the Religious Right’s embrace of Donald Trump. A movement that began with the defense of racial segregation in the late 1970s climbed into bed with a vulgar demagogue who recognizes “some good people” among white supremacists, who equivocates about denouncing a representative of the Ku Klux Klan, and who admonished a white supremacist terrorist group to “stand by” in advance of the 2020 election. If racism is America’s original sin, politically conservative evangelicals, with their continuing support for their champion, have been loath to seek redemption.”
― Randall Balmer, Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right

“I mention all this only incidentally to establish my evangelical credentials. The real purpose is to say that I don’t recall abortion being a topic of conversation in evangelical circles in the middle decades of the twentieth century, so Weyrich’s declaration struck me as credible. During the 1970s, the decade when the Religious Right began to emerge, I attended and graduated from an evangelical school, Trinity College in Deerfield, Illinois, and then worked in the development department for its sister institution, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, while completing a master’s degree in church history as a part-time student. As it happens, a single member of the seminary faculty, Harold O. J. Brown, became exercised about abortion, what most evangelicals considered a “Catholic issue,” in the latter part of the 1970s. But he was regarded as an outlier, an exception that proved the rule, on a faculty more interested in recondite doctrines such as biblical inerrancy, the notion that the Scriptures are entirely without error in the original (no longer extant) manuscripts.”
― Randall Balmer, Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right

“Once evangelicals come to terms with the abortion myth and the racism baked into the Religious Right, I dare to hope that they might then reexamine other aspects of their political agenda, an agenda that has been inordinately dictated by the fusion of the Religious Right with the far-right precincts of the Republican Party. A fresh reading of Jesus’s injunctions to feed the hungry and welcome the stranger or an appreciation for evangelical social reform in the nineteenth century might prompt evangelicals to reconsider their views on immigration and public education, their attitudes about prison reform and women’s rights, or their support of tax cuts for the affluent. Jesus, after all, enjoined his followers to care for “the least of these,” and taking those words seriously could very well prompt a redirection of evangelical political energies, even a rethinking of single-issue voting in favor of a broader, more comprehensive appraisal of political agendas. Such a reconsideration might also provide an opening for rapprochement with black evangelicals and other evangelicals of color.”
― Randall Balmer, Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right