Wednesday, July 27, 2022

USAmerican white evangelicals' anger at desegregation led to their anti-abortion cause

Immediately following 1969 desegregation law in Holmes County, some white parents started white-only private schools. They were 501(c)(3) non-profits that didn't have to pay taxes, and donors didn't have to pay income tax on money they donated to these schools. Green v. Kennedy (1970) ruled against these private schools and Nixon changed the IRS code too. Evangelicals like Jerry Falwell were unhappy with the ruling.

Up to this point in USAmerican history, white evangelicals hadn't been a voting bloc, and conservative political organizers realized that this could be a turning point to seize the evangelical vote. But they didn't want to take up the explicitly racist cause of segregation academies, which is what the white evangelicals really cared about in the moment. Instead, they wanted to channel evangelical outrage toward another cause.

Similarly, see also this July 25, 2022 article from FiveThirtyEight: "How The Fight To Ban Abortion Is Rooted In The ‘Great Replacement’ Theory." It says:

"The movement to end legal abortion has a long, racist history... Throughout colonial America and into the 19th century, abortions were fairly common with the help of a midwife or other women and could be obtained until the point that you could feel movement inside... But the dynamics surrounding the procedure changed by the mid-19th century... Laws limiting abortion, it was believed, would ultimately force middle- and upper-class white women — who had the most access to detect and terminate unwanted pregnancies — to bear more white children. ... Declining white birth rates, along with the rising eugenics movement — a now-discredited pseudoscience focused on the genetic fitness of white Americans — were connected to the practice of abortion, and this helped bolster flawed, racist arguments for a total ban of the procedure. ... Their tactics worked. By the 1900s, abortion was illegal in every U.S. state. ... while the [1973] decision in Roe overturned the nation’s remaining abortion bans, it didn’t address the underlying forces that had helped establish them, which brings us to today, as the anti-abortion movement is once again front and center following the court’s decision to overturn Roe."
Billy Graham praying outdoors

Jonathan Poletti wrote this for Medium about Charles Stanley:

"The Encyclopedia of Evangelicalism noted that 'as late as the 1970s he had guards stationed outside the church to keep African-Americans out.'

Charles Stanley was an architect of the 'Religious Right.'

He was a founding member of the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition. He worked to get Ronald Reagan elected.

I realized: Charles Stanley was not a pastor, really, so much as a political activist with a vision of a white supremacist Christian nation.

* * *

And so ‘Evangelicals’ were born.

It was a movement that surprised Billy Graham himself. But from then on, Charles Stanley was at the wheel."

Christianity Today Editor Rips Republicans For Lacking 'Moral Vision' In Abortion Stances: Russell Moore, who calls himself “pro-life and anti-Trump,” took aim at conservatives who let "declining poll numbers" impact their messaging. Ben Blanchet, HuffPost, Apr 13, 2024

See also: "American history to explain ‘How did we get here?’" (7-minute read) and "The Butter-Pie Effect" (9-minute read). Medium lets you read a certain number of stories for free every month. You may also consider a paid membership on the platform.

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