Wikipedia Deep Dive

Christian right

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The modern American Christian right didn't begin with abortion. It began with taxes and segregation.

This might come as a surprise. For decades, opposition to abortion has been the defining feature of religious conservatism in American politics. But the movement's true origin story is far more complicated, and arguably more revealing, than its leaders have typically acknowledged.

What We Mean by the Christian Right

The Christian right—also called the New Christian Right or the Religious Right—is an informal coalition that wields enormous influence in American politics. At its core are conservative Evangelical Protestants and conservative Roman Catholics, but the coalition draws support from politically conservative mainline Protestants, Orthodox Jews, and Mormons as well.

This movement shouldn't be confused with conservative Christianity itself. A Christian can hold theologically conservative beliefs—accepting traditional doctrines about Scripture, salvation, and morality—without necessarily embracing the political positions of the Christian right. As evangelical theologian Tim Keller pointed out, conservative theology predates conservative politics by centuries. Someone might believe in biblical inerrancy while also supporting progressive economic policies, wealth redistribution, or racial justice initiatives. The conflation of theological and political conservatism is relatively recent, and it obscures important distinctions.

Consider the Amish, Mennonites, and Hutterites. These Anabaptist communities hold profoundly conservative theological and social views. Yet they have no political organizations. They remain largely uninvolved in electoral politics, viewing such engagement as inconsistent with their faith. Being a conservative Christian and being part of the Christian right are not the same thing.

Early Attempts at Christian Nationalism

The impulse to enshrine Christianity in American governance stretches back well before the modern Christian right emerged. In 1863, during the Civil War, representatives from eleven Christian denominations formed the National Reform Association with an ambitious goal: amending the United States Constitution to explicitly declare America a Christian nation.

They failed. But they established a template that would persist.

Other early organizations pursued more specific aims. The Christian Civic League of Maine, founded in 1897, supported the temperance movement—the campaign against alcohol that would eventually achieve the constitutional prohibition of liquor in 1920. Interestingly, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many Evangelical Protestants supported progressive causes. The movement was not uniformly conservative.

The Scopes Trial of 1925 changed everything. When a Tennessee teacher named John Scopes was prosecuted for teaching evolution, the resulting media circus portrayed religious conservatives as backward and anti-intellectual. The trial's aftermath reportedly drove most Evangelicals out of organized political engagement for decades. They retreated into a parallel subculture of their own institutions—schools, publishing houses, radio programs—largely isolated from mainstream American life.

The Cold War: When Godlessness Became Un-American

The mid-twentieth century brought a new enemy: communism. And communism came wrapped in state atheism.

The Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc allies didn't merely ignore religion—they actively suppressed it. Churches were shuttered. Clergy were persecuted. Religious practice was driven underground. For many Americans, this made the Cold War feel like something more than a geopolitical contest. It felt like a battle between godliness and godlessness itself.

This fear reshaped American civic life in the 1950s. Congress established the National Day of Prayer. The phrase "In God We Trust" was added to American currency—and later made the official national motto. The words "Under God" were inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance, which schoolchildren recited daily. These weren't simply expressions of national piety. They were deliberate markers of difference from the atheist enemy.

Secularization—the gradual separation of religious institutions and practices from public life—came to be seen by many conservatives as the leading edge of communist-style godlessness creeping into America itself. This framing would prove enormously influential in shaping the Christian right's later rhetoric about a "culture war."

The Real Catalyst: Segregation Academies

Now we arrive at the part of the story that's often omitted.

A conservative operative named Paul Weyrich had been trying to mobilize conservative Evangelicals and Catholics into a political force since the early 1960s. He tried various wedge issues—abortion, pornography, the Equal Rights Amendment, school prayer—but none of them generated sustained enthusiasm. White Evangelicals remained largely politically inactive, and they weren't a unified voting bloc.

What finally worked was taxes and race.

In 1970, the Internal Revenue Service adopted a policy of revoking the tax-exempt status of private schools that refused to admit Black students. The following year, the Supreme Court ruled in Coit v. Green that organizations practicing racial discrimination couldn't claim tax exemption. The case originated with a challenge to segregation academies—private schools in Holmes County, Mississippi that had been established specifically to allow white parents to avoid sending their children to newly integrated public schools.

Many of these segregation academies were sponsored by churches. When the IRS began targeting them, evangelical leaders took notice. Jerry Falwell, who would later become one of the most prominent figures of the Christian right, was among them.

The largest institution in the IRS's crosshairs was Bob Jones University, a fundamentalist Christian college in South Carolina. Bob Jones lost its tax exemption in 1976 because of its policy prohibiting interracial dating. This action infuriated evangelical leaders who viewed it as government overreach into religious institutions.

Weyrich, ever the strategist, worked to reframe the issue. Rather than defending segregation directly—which would have been politically toxic—he portrayed the IRS crackdown as government intrusion and an attack on religious freedom. The racial dimension was carefully obscured.

Jimmy Carter and the 150,000 Letters

Here's where the story gets ironic.

Jimmy Carter, the Democratic candidate in 1976, described himself as an Evangelical, born-again Christian. He spoke openly about his faith in ways that were unusual for presidential candidates at the time. A majority of American Evangelicals supported him, drawn by his religious sincerity.

But the segregation academy controversy carried into Carter's presidency. In 1978, the IRS proposed a new rule that would have revoked the tax exemption of private schools based on their racial demographic composition relative to their surrounding communities. The idea was to catch schools that claimed to be non-discriminatory but somehow had all-white student bodies in diverse neighborhoods.

The rule never went into effect. But the backlash was extraordinary.

The IRS received more than 150,000 letters opposing the proposal—most from Christians. Many correspondents believed the rule would threaten genuinely non-discriminatory religious schools. Whether this fear was reasonable or not, the political effect was undeniable: white Evangelicals who had never been politically active before became engaged, and they turned against Jimmy Carter.

Weyrich later said explicitly that "what got evangelicals involved in politics was Jimmy Carter's intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation." Another conservative activist, Richard Viguerie, put it more colorfully: the 1978 IRS action "kicked a sleeping dog."

Abortion Becomes the Issue

By the late 1970s, Weyrich recognized that defending segregation academies directly was not a sustainable political strategy. He needed a new issue—one that could keep Evangelicals politically mobilized without the toxic racial baggage.

He found it in abortion.

This required some work. At the time, the Catholic Church was the only major Christian denomination staunchly opposed to abortion. Many Protestant and Evangelical denominations, including the Southern Baptist Convention, either supported legal abortion in some circumstances or took no official position. The 1973 Roe v. Wade decision had not provoked immediate outrage from Evangelical leaders.

But abortion had advantages as a wedge issue. It could be framed in terms of "family values." It allowed its advocates to claim moral superiority. And it provided a vehicle for attacking second-wave feminism, which many religious conservatives viewed with alarm.

In 1979, filmmaker Frank Schaeffer produced a series of anti-abortion films called "Whatever Happened to the Human Race?" starring his father, the evangelical theologian Francis Schaeffer, and a pediatric surgeon named C. Everett Koop (who would later become Surgeon General under Ronald Reagan). The films toured churches across America, though initially to tepid reception.

Leaders like Jerry Falwell were hesitant at first. They worried that abortion's reputation as a "Catholic issue" would limit its appeal to Evangelicals. But gradually, through sustained organizing and messaging, abortion was transformed into the signature cause of the Christian right. By the early 1980s, conservative Evangelicals were joining the anti-abortion movement in large numbers.

The Moral Majority and the Reagan Revolution

In 1979, Falwell, Weyrich, and their associates founded the Moral Majority—widely considered the first true organization of the religious right. The group emphasized abortion, pornography, gay rights, and opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment. It warned of America's moral decline and called for religious believers to take back the country.

The timing was perfect for Ronald Reagan's 1980 presidential campaign.

Reagan courted religious conservatives with remarkable skill. He told audiences that if stranded on a desert island, he would want only the Bible. He promised religious leaders that he wouldn't let the IRS interfere with Christian schools. He questioned the legitimacy of evolution and suggested that creationism deserved equal treatment in public school curricula. He encouraged Evangelicals to become more politically active.

Crucially, Reagan's Justice Department signaled that it would drop the government's opposition to lawsuits brought by Bob Jones University and similar schools seeking to restore their tax-exempt status. When critics attacked this move, Reagan proposed legislation that would explicitly deny tax exemption to segregated schools—but Congress never passed it, believing the IRS already had this authority. The gesture satisfied Reagan's evangelical supporters while costing him little politically.

The 1980 Republican Party platform adopted numerous positions favored by the Christian right, including the resumption of public school prayer. On abortion, the platform opposed the practice and supported a constitutional amendment to establish fetal personhood—but it also acknowledged that many Americans, including many Republicans, remained divided on the issue. At this point, both major parties contained significant blocs on both sides of the abortion debate. It would take until the late 1980s for abortion to become the sharply partisan issue it is today.

The Infrastructure of Influence

The Moral Majority disbanded in the late 1980s, but by then it had demonstrated what was possible. The Christian right built a durable infrastructure of organizations that would shape American politics for decades.

The Christian Coalition of America, founded by televangelist Pat Robertson after his 1988 presidential campaign, developed sophisticated grassroots organizing techniques. Focus on the Family, founded by James Dobson in 1977, built a media empire around family and parenting issues while consistently promoting socially conservative positions. The Family Research Council, originally a division of Focus on the Family, became an influential lobbying organization. The Alliance Defending Freedom (originally the Alliance Defense Fund) provided legal representation for religious liberty cases. The American Center for Law and Justice, founded by Robertson and led by attorney Jay Sekulow, mirrored the litigation strategies of liberal civil rights organizations.

By 2016, scholars were describing the alliance between evangelical leaders and Catholic bishops as "a cornerstone of the Christian Right for nearly twenty years." The coalition that Weyrich had envisioned in the 1960s—conservative Protestants and Catholics working together—had become a political reality.

The Battles That Define the Movement

Since its emergence, the Christian right has engaged in sustained combat over a consistent set of issues.

On sexuality and reproduction, the movement opposes abortion, euthanasia, contraception access (particularly for minors), and comprehensive sexual education. It has fought against LGBTQ rights at every stage—from decriminalization of homosexuality to same-sex marriage to transgender recognition.

On education, the movement has sought to insert creationism (or its rebrand, "intelligent design") into public school curricula, or at minimum to undermine the teaching of evolution. It has pushed for school prayer and opposed what it characterizes as secularism in public education.

On public morality, the movement has campaigned against pornography, gambling, and obscenity. Some activists have advocated for Sunday blue laws—restrictions on commercial activity on Sundays, the Christian Sabbath—though these campaigns have largely faded.

Undergirding many of these specific positions is a broader commitment to what has come to be called Christian nationalism: the belief that America was founded as a Christian nation, is specially blessed by God, and should explicitly acknowledge its Christian identity in law and governance.

The Complexity of Labels

Labeling this movement is contested terrain.

Jerry Falwell used the term "religious right" to describe himself without apparent discomfort. But others in the movement bristle at the phrase. Gary Schneeberger of Focus on the Family argued that terms like "religious right" are used pejoratively to suggest extremism. He preferred "socially conservative evangelicals"—less exciting, perhaps, but more accurate in his view.

Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council has cautioned against equating the Christian right with Evangelical Christianity broadly. While Evangelicals form the movement's core constituency, not all Evangelicals fit the description, and significant numbers of Catholics participate as well.

The term "conservative Christian" creates its own confusion. As noted earlier, many Christian communities are theologically, socially, and culturally conservative without any involvement in the political movement called the Christian right. The labels overlap imperfectly.

What This History Reveals

The origin story of the Christian right matters because it reveals something important about how political movements actually work.

The issues that galvanize a movement at its founding may not be the issues that come to define it. Abortion is now so central to the Christian right's identity that it's hard to imagine the movement without it. But abortion wasn't what brought Evangelicals into politics. Taxes and segregation did that work. Abortion came later, selected and cultivated as a more palatable wedge issue once defending segregation academies directly became untenable.

This doesn't mean that Christian right activists are insincere about abortion. Many clearly hold deep moral convictions on the issue. But it does suggest that the relationship between religious beliefs and political positions is more complicated, more historically contingent, and more shaped by strategic calculation than the movement's own rhetoric typically acknowledges.

Understanding this history helps explain otherwise puzzling features of American politics. Why do so many Evangelicals consistently vote Republican even when Republican candidates seem to violate their stated values? Part of the answer is that the alliance between Evangelicals and the Republican Party was forged through decades of deliberate organizing around specific issues, creating bonds of identity and loyalty that transcend any individual candidate or policy position.

The Christian right remade American conservatism. Whether one views this transformation as a rescue or a corruption of both Christianity and conservatism depends on where one stands. But there's no denying its magnitude. A movement that began in backlash against the IRS's attempt to enforce civil rights laws became one of the most powerful forces in American political life. Its influence persists, its battles continue, and its contradictions remain unresolved.