Randall BALMER, Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2021. Pp. 141. $16.99. ISBN 978-0-8028-7934-9. Reviewed by Ann S.F. SWANER, Barry University, Miami Shores, FL 33138.

Randall Balmer has had a long career of explaining American Evangelicals. In Bad Faith he traces their history from their origins in the Great Awakenings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to their wholehearted support for Donald Trump in the twenty-first century. In Part One he reminds us that they were not always conservative; before the Civil War they were progressives with a broad program of social reform, including public education, prison reform, women’s rights, temperance, and opposition to slavery. This program of reform was undergirded by their theological commitment to postmillennialism, the doctrine that Jesus will return to earth after the millennium. This worldview implied that the faithful had to work to improve society to make way for the Second Coming of Jesus. However, the carnage of the Civil War, along with the disruption brought by industrialization, urbanization, and immigration, undercut the optimism of postmillennialism and it was replaced by dispensational premillennialism, which holds that Jesus will return before the millennium, at any moment, so there is no point to social reform. Evangelicals then shifted their focus from social reform to individual salvation.

The next turning point in the Evangelical evolution was the Scopes “Monkey trial” in 1925. Thomas Scopes was convicted of breaking a law against teaching about evolution in Tennessee public schools, but public opinion turned against the Evangelicals. This pushed them into withdrawing from society and creating their own overarching subculture (which Balmer grew up in and has written extensively about). From the time of the Scopes trial until the 1970’s the Evangelicals were largely apolitical. The presidential campaign of the ‘born-again’ Jimmy Carter brought many of them out to vote again, but they were not yet an organized political force.

In Part Two Balmer debunks the ‘origin myth’ of the political movement he calls the “Religious Right” (as opposed to the “Christian Right”). The myth is that it was the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade legalizing abortion that galvanized the Evangelicals into a political movement. Balmer argues, based on his own experience as an Evangelical youth during the 1970’s and on his research at the Ford, Carter, and Reagan presidential libraries, the archives at Bob Jones and Liberty universities, and Religious Right leader, Paul Weyrich’s, papers at the University of Wyoming, that abortion was just not a defining issue for Evangelicals at that time. It was considered a ‘Catholic issue.’

The real catalyst for the Religious Right was a different Supreme Court decision, Green v. Connally, which held that any organization that engaged in racial discrimination was, by definition, not a charitable organization and therefore had no claim to tax-exempt status. This was a threat to so-called “segregation academies,’ such as Bob Jones University and Jerry Falwell’s Liberty Christian School and was seen as a government assault on private education. Paul Weyrich saw this decision as an opportunity to create a new political Moral Majority around the issue of “religious freedom.” Balmer says, “Weyrich’s sleight of hand brilliantly shifted perceptions of the movement away from racism toward a more high-minded defense of religious freedom” (p. 44).

But Weyrich and other Religious Right leaders realized that they needed another emotionally charged issue to solidify the support of their movement. Before they got to abortion, they tried out anti-gay rights with Anita Bryant’s Save Our Children campaign in Florida. But in the 1978 midterm elections Catholic antiabortion activists convinced Weyrich of the populist power of the anti-abortion issue. Finally, Evangelicals were coming around to the abortion issue, five years after Roe v Wade.

In Part Three Balmer addresses the question of why the  Abortion Myth matters. His answer is that “unacknowledged and unaddressed racism has a tendency to fester” (p.67).  He does not claim that all Evangelicals are racists but suggests that even those who do not know this history are nevertheless shaped by it. He recounts how the Religious Right abandoned Jimmy Carter and elected Ronald Reagan in 1980. He then asks if there is something about Ronald Reagan that prefigured the racism of the Religious Right. He examines Reagan’s record as governor and  as president and finds racist tropes throughout. He also finds blatant racism in the statements of the leaders of the Religious Right. And he suggests that no one has mastered racially coded language better than Donald Trump, whom Evangelicals overwhelmingly voted for in 2016 and 2020. He finds racism at the beginning and at the core of the Religious Right.

Balmer concludes:
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 in the late 1970’s produced a mutant form of evangelicalism inconsistent with the best traditions of evangelicalism itself (p. 79).

This is a concise, clearly written, well-researched, account of a fascinating history which is very important for understanding contemporary politics.