But, if this is the route they want to go, I’m excited Politico is interested in pieces on the potentially questionable history of current political organizations. Surely this must mean they have run a substantial story on the well-known links between Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger and eugenics. For some reason though, after searching for her name on their site, I didn’t find any such pieces.
Depending on what day it is, the Religious Right is viewed as being full of unintelligent buffoons incapable of grasping simple facts of science or they are shrewd political geniuses secretly leading our nation to become a full-fledged theocracy. Some days, they’re both.
Apparently, that was the case when Politico decided to run Randall Balmer’s piece on conservative evangelicals – “The Real Origins of the Religious Right.”
While one would think Politico would be interested in running balanced journalism, Balmer’s disapproval of those he considers to be the Religious Right drips from every paragraph. He literally has written books about the evils of conservative evangelicals who have led people “astray from the gospel of Jesus Christ to the false gospel of neoconservative ideology and into the maw of the Republican Party.”
In this article at Politico, Balmer attempts to make the case that the Religious Right was founded on a support for segregation and not opposition to abortion. To do so, he highlights Bob Jones University as characteristic of broader conservative evangelicalism and ignores much of the nuance involved in the historical developments.
Take for instance his point about Southern Baptists not being very vocal about abortion and, in some cases, even somewhat supporting the practice. It is true that many evangelicals came around latter on the issue than Catholics, but it is also extremely significant that during 1970s conservatives were not in positions of power in the Southern Baptist Convention. Moderates and liberals dominated the leadership of the denomination.
Balmer ignores this, in favor of establishing the narrative that conservative Baptists were only concerned about segregation. He should know the basic history of the SBC because he is currently promoting his most recent book, which just happens to be on one of the most famous moderate Baptists – former President Jimmy Carter.
He is able to demonstrate that one organization, Bob Jones, was actively racist. Other leaders and groups said they were troubled by what they saw as religious liberty violations. Now, you can claim they really were motivated by racism, but then you would have to support that. Balmer merely relies on the tangental connections to Bob Jones to raise insinuations about the others.
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