The Origins of the Modern Republican Party

“It did not start with Donald Trump, he is the symptom not the cause.” Barack Obama  September 7, 2018

As a naval aviator, one of the first things that they teach you is that catastrophic mishaps do not occur in a vacuum. There is almost always a long chain of human failures leading up to the moment where everything goes horribly, catastrophically wrong. Before this instant though, there’s years of bad practices that if any one of them changed, the disaster would have been avoided. There’s poor maintenance practices, cutting corners on costs, shoddy spare parts, lack of training for pilots, or pilots using non-approved flight procedures for years.

This is an apt metaphor for where the American political system is today. We’re in what appears to be an unrecoverable, uncontrolled 500 knot vertical dive. The people up front (like me) know how screwed we are, everyone in back is terrified and helpless, and the stupidity and bad judgement that led up to this situation started long before we hit the point of no return.

But instead of cutting corners on maintenance, bad training, tired pilots, or task-saturated air traffic controllers, the root cause of where we are at today are the two original sins of our nation: racism and slavery.

Slavery and the Genesis of Modern American Politics

The election of 1860 was the breaking point for America before the Civil War, which killed between 620,000 and 750,000 people, and wounded another 419,000.[1] After the fractious 1856 elections, the political landscape was now drawn along fairly clear boundaries based on slavery. The war was unavoidable after the 1857 Dred Scott Supreme Court decision negated the Missouri Compromise, enshrined discrimination against blacks in the constitution, and allowed slavery to spread to every territory of the US.[2] Democratic President James Buchanan’s ineptitude drove the US further down the path to Civil War as well.[3]

One of the first great (near-permanent) splits over slavery was within the Baptist Church. In 1845, Southern Baptists split from the church over the issue of slavery. Specifically, it was over whether a slave owner could serve as a missionary. Southern Baptists saw the prohibition as a positional stance that “slaveholding brethren were less than followers of Jesus.”[4] Southern Baptist theologians devoted themselves to the task of proving the King James Bible not only justified slavery, but encouraged it because of apologetics such as the “Curse of Hamm.”[5] This led the Southern Baptist Convention and its Theological Seminary to become some of the dominant political and religious organizations defending first slavery, then segregation. It was not until 1995 that the SBC acknowledged their role in both, and even a 2018 report by the organization glossed over many of the details of their active role in these institutions.[6]

The debate over slavery produced division within the parties as well. The Democratic convention of 1860 caused the Democratic party to fracture over slavery. Northern Democrats put forward the more (relatively) moderate Stephen Douglass, who adopted the “popular sovereignty” position that each state should be allowed to decide. This was essentially an extension of the status quo, after the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 allowing those two states entering the Union to organically decide the issue of slavery. The resulting rush to “pack” the states, and allegations of fraud, resulted in several rounds of elections, competing legislatures, and bloodshed.

The hard-line Southern Democrats walked out of the convention when it failed to a adopt a resolution supporting extending slavery into territories whose voters did not want it. While this walk-out sounds extreme, there was a calculus behind the decision to make this position non-negotiable. Southern Democrats were well aware of how demographics and public opinion were shifting within the United States, and could clearly see that in the long run they were nearly certain to lose because a smaller and smaller percentage of Americans supported slavery. With much of the territory of the Western United States waiting to become states, it was only a matter of time before a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery was passed.

They knew that time, demographics, and the tide of history were going to end the institution upon which their entire political, religious, and economic system depended. (This should sound really familiar today).

Figure 1.1. Results of 1860 Presidential Election

Source: 270towin.com

The Constitutional Union Party was formed by remnants of the Know Nothing and the Whig parties who wanted to avoid secession, but punted on the issue of slavery by trying to avoid it altogether. They carried slave-states that separated the North from the South: Tennessee, Kentucky and Virginia. They almost carried Maryland as well: losing by 722 votes out of 92,000 cast.[7] There was perhaps a certain pragmatism to these states positions: almost all of the bloodiest battles fought in the civil war were fought in Tennessee, Maryland, and Virginia

Republicans were the party of the North and the far west states (California and Oregon). Going in to the 1860 convention positions on slavery within the party ranged from staunch abolitionist to a willingness to let demographics and time to take care of the issue. Abraham Lincoln was selected as the nominee because he was seen as the moderate choice, and he had alienated fewer constituencies than some of his rivals at the convention.

After the Civil War, there was a brief period where blacks were able to vote and actually held office. This was due to the 13^th, 14^th, and 15^th amendments which freed the slaves, guaranteed equal protection under the law, and guaranteed the right to vote. It also helped that Union troops occupied the south to help ensure the enforcement of US law.

But, this effectively ended after the Colfax massacre. After the disputed Louisiana election of 1872, the Klan and other local whites trapped approximately 100-150 black freedmen and state militia members at the Grant Parish courthouse in Colfax. They forced those inside to surrender, took them prisoner, and executed them all several hours later. President Grant was enraged by this slaughter and called it a “butchery” that “in bloodthirstiness and barbarity is hardly surpassed by any acts of savage warfare.”[8]

Seventy-two men were charged with these murders under the Enforcements Acts of 1870, which had been passed to allow the federal government to take legal action against the Klan. Many of those charged admitted freely to having participated. However, their convictions were overturned by the Supreme Court in the 1876 case of United States v. Kruikshank. The court found that the federal government only had authority to enforce the 14^th amendment (equal protection) against governments, not individuals. This effectively ended the authority of the Enforcement Acts, as well as Federal reconstruction efforts.

With reconstruction failed, the white, Baptist South gleefully fell back into its antebellum ways of corruption, racism, segregation, disenfranchisement, and single party rule by Democrats. Republicans attempted to address the ongoing racial discrimination in the South with the Civil Rights Act of 1875 which was intended to guarantee everyone in the United States was “entitled to the full and equal enjoyment” of public accommodations and facilities regardless of race or skin color.” The Supreme Court, however, found the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional in 1883. They ruled 8-1, based in park on Kruikshank, that the 14^th Amendment did not give Congress the right to prevent discrimination by businesses or individuals.

Similarly, in 1879 the Supreme Court ruled in Virginia v. Rives that all-white juries trying a black person were constitutional, since an all-white jury was not proof of discrimination. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 had been intended to prevent all-white juries, but after it was found unconstitutional Southern states easily found ways around it.

Plessy v. Ferguson, which in 1896 enshrined the legality of segregation under the concept that came to be known as separate but equal, was the final case law nail in the coffin of civil rights for another 58 years. It was not overturned until Brown v. Board of Education 1954. The combination of racism, religious justification, corruption, single party rule, and Supreme Court decisions came to be the septic tank that fermented almost 90 years of Jim Crow laws.

The blame for this tragedy in American history falls greatly on the Supreme Court, which thwarted efforts to prevent civil rights horrors at every turn, buying off on carefully selected arguments put forth by those committing atrocities. Adam Serwer of the Atlantic summarized this period in court history.

“The justices did not resurrect Dred Scott v. Sandford’s antebellum declaration that a black man had no rights that a white man was bound to respect. Rather, they carefully framed their arguments in terms of limited government and individual liberty, writing opinion after opinion that allowed the white South to create an oppressive society in which black Americans had almost no rights at all. Their commitment to freedom in the abstract, and only in the abstract, allowed a brutal despotism to take root in Southern soil.”

This should sound familiar: the Roberts Courts are accepting similarly bad arguments to undermine civil rights today not just for black people, but for LGBT people, women, the disabled, people over 40, immigrants, Muslims, and anyone else white, southern, evangelicals have deemed a threat to the existing moral order. We are already seeing results in cases today that will likely be remembered in the same breath as Kruikshank, Rives, and Plessy.

The Beginnings of a Demographic Shift

Broadly speaking, the political patterns of the states did not change much from the end of the Civil War until 1932. Republicans carried western and northern states, Democrats carried the south. It was not until 1884 that Democrats again took the White House and did it on the back of New York Governor Grover Cleveland running on an anti-corruption campaign against a Republican unpopular within his own party. Cleveland won by taking New York by only 1200 votes out of over a million cast.

The western states were more often in play than others. Democrats won the west in 1880, 1912 (when Theodore Roosevelt split the Republican vote) and 1916 as World War One raged on (without the United States). They managed a split it in 1896 and 1900. In 1928, Herbert Hoover ran on a platform of peace and prosperity under the Harding and Coolidge administrations. The Republican party had followed very business friendly policies over the previous decade, resulting in high levels of wealth inequality.[9]

Under President Coolidge, cash flush institutions loaned large amounts of money to Germany to help it meet the payments of war reparations. When the stock market collapsed in 1929 US lending institutions could no longer give money to Germany, which in turn could not repay the loans or the reparations. This led to a global economic cascade failure that saw world GDP fall by 15%. The Hoover administration’s response to the Great Depression was seen as completely insufficient and ineffective, both at the time and by modern historians. The actions they did take, such as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act were often counterproductive even if they did favor corporations.

At the same time, a demographic shift was occurring. Blacks in the American south had been migrating northwards since 1916 seeking work in Northern factories, and to escape the omnipresent racism and oppression of the south. Between 1916 and 1940 approximately 1.6 million rural blacks moved to northern cities. The military build up of World War I, the roaring twenties economy, and the increased availability of transport (rail and automobile) facilitated what became known as “The Great Migration”.

Politically, the blacks coming north were Republicans both out of habit and tradition, and because the Democratic party was still the Southern party of discrimination, Jim Crow, and racism. Indeed, the Democratic party did not allow black people to be delegates at its convention until 1924.[10]

As late as 1932, blacks in the United States were still primarily voting Republican. By one estimate, somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of blacks voted for Herbert Hoover in 1932 northern urban wards.[11] However, Hoover’s failed economic policies, and efforts to cozy up to segregationists in the south began to sour black voters on the Republican party. Black voters had also been hit harder than whites by the great depression, and Hoover had failed to address a staggering black unemployment rate of 38%.[12]

Roosevelt had done little to court black voters in 1932 either, being evasive about his positions on civil rights and choosing John Garner, a segregationist Texan, as his running mate.  But, by 1936 he had taken some limited steps to address the economic concerns of blacks via New Deal programs. Thus, in 1936 the black vote swung dramatically towards Democrats.[13]  By then blacks were split nearly evenly between the two major parties.

Their hopes in FDR were somewhat rewarded in 1937, when the Supreme Court partially overturned United States v. Kruikshank in the De Jonge v. Oregon, finding that the 14^th amendment applies to individuals under some circumstances (in this case, limitations on the freedom of assembly).

Post WWII and The Civil Rights Movement

During World War II and continuing through the 1970s, a second Great Migration of black American occurred. It was over three times larger than the first. At the same time, after s the tremendous contributions of black Americans during World War II, and ever-increasing support for Democratic candidates, President Truman made the (then) controversial decision to integrate the United States military starting in 1948. He was infuriated by reports of black veterans returning to their homes in the south, only to face further violence and persecution. Such tales motivated him to issue Executive Order 9981, desegregating the military. This antagonized much of the Democratic southern base, and Truman was forced to fire his Secretary of the Army (Kenneth Claiborne Royall) in 1949 for deliberately failing to implement his desegregation order.  President Truman also signed executive orders forbidding discrimination on the basis of race in civil service, and forming a committee to ensure defense contractors did not discriminate . Truman also supported the elimination of poll taxes and federal anti-lynching laws (which were not passed until 2019).

Figure 1.2: The Great Migrations

These civil rights actions by Truman caused the first major fracture of the Democratic party over civil rights. It led to South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond running as a third-party candidate in the 1948 Presidential Election on the States Rights Democratic Party (also known as the Dixiecrats). The majority of South Carolina was black, but due to disenfranchisement it was a one-party democratic state. Thurmond’s platform was primarily in defense of segregation. He deemed the civil rights movement a stepping stone to “communism,” and that electing Truman would lead to “totalitarianism.”[14]

When southern Democrats tried to sound more moderate, they made appeals to states rights, individual liberty, and limited government. They also made appeals to “secure and maintain Southern tradition, civilization, and ideals.” They denounced evidence that “negroes” weren’t inferior to white people as “pseudo-science”. They denounced the civil rights movement as unconstitutional, and civil rights laws as a violation of their own personal freedoms.[15]

In the end, Thurmond won four southern states (LA, MS, AL, and SC) along with 39 electoral college votes. It was not enough to deprive Truman of a win and did not change the ultimate outcome of the election.

Under the Eisenhower administration, the last segregated military unit was disbanded in 1954. More important, however, was the Brown vs. Board of Education decision which overturned Plessy v. Ferguson, and segregation with it. Prior to Brown, the states that mandated segregation were almost exactly the same states that supported slavery, or tried to ignore the issue, in 1860.[16]

Figure 1.3: States Requiring Segregation Before Brown

Eisenhower had won an overwhelming majority of electoral college votes in 1952 as a war hero, and carried every state except for nine southern states. He even managed to take Florida and Texas as a Republican, the first time that had happened since 1928. Still his support for the Brown decision was tepid at best. While the Eisenhower Department of Justice filed an amicus brief in support of Brown, Eisenhower himself pulled his own Chief Justice Earl Warren aside and admonished him, ““These are not bad people,” he said, referring to Southerners supporting segregation. “All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big black bucks.”[17] Warren wrote in his memoirs 20 years later that he was appalled by this encounter.

Eisenhower’s response to the decision itself was exactly what you would expect of a military man forced to follow an order he didn’t agree with. “The Supreme Court has spoken, and I am sworn to uphold the constitutional process in the country. And I will obey.” During the 1956 Presidential campaign, the Republican Party platform stated that it “accepted” the ruling, rather than the more affirmative “concurs”. As a result, Eisenhower neither hindered nor led on civil rights issues, and was symptomatic of the growing Republican indifference to civil rights laws when he stated, ““You cannot change people’s hearts merely by laws.”[18] Indeed, you get a similar response from Republicans today when you ask about civil rights laws for LGBT people.

The 1960 Presidential Election finally brought the cracks between northern Democrats and southern Democrats to the surface. While civil rights were not one of the top overall issues in the elections, they were extremely important to the two opposing groups: southern segregationists and black Americans.[19] The Democratic national platform affirmed the party’s dedication to, “create an affirmative new atmosphere in which to deal with racial divisions and inequalities which threaten both the integrity of our democratic faith and the proposition on which our nation was founded—that all men are created equal.”[20] The platform stated support for government efforts to desegregate schools and ensure voting rights. These positions did not sit well with southern Democrats, and would come to the forefront when the electoral college voted.

Despite the low priority of civil rights for most voters, Martin Luther King Jr. may have decided the election. King was arrested and imprisoned in Georgia on trumped up charges in October 1960 for an Atlanta sit-in he participated in. Nixon, who previously had warm relationship with King, quietly asked Eisenhower to pardon King. After this was rejected, Nixon let the matter drop, apparently in a political calculation that he needed white southern votes more than he needed black votes. This calculus was likely the genesis of his Southern Strategy.[21]

Senator John Kennedy, however, was convinced by campaign advisors and ardent civil rights proponents Harris Wofford and Sergeant Shriver to take a much more active role in supporting King. Kennedy ended up calling Coretta Scott King and King’s father. Kennedy also privately contacted Governor Vandiver of Georgia and secured King’s release with a mixture of thinly veiled carrots and sticks.[22] Prior to this, Kennedy had been seen as vacillating on civil rights issues as he courted Southern Democrats.

The election of 1960 ended up being one of the closest in modern American history by vote count. Kennedy won with 49.72% to Nixon’s 49.55% of the total vote. Nixon only got 32% of the black vote compared to Eisenhower’s 40% in 1956. Some Republicans credited Kennedy’s actions with King for swinging crucial states with large black populations into the Democratic column.[23]

There was a price to be paid for this, however.  All eight of Mississippi’s electoral college voters refused to follow the popular vote, and instead cast their ballots for Harry Byrd, a segregationist senator from Virginia. Six of Alabama’s 11 delegates did the same, and so did one of Oklahoma’s. This presaged the wider split that was coming, and would become permanent after 1976.

Origins of the “Southern Strategy”

“The Democratic party has abandoned the people. It has repudiated the Constitution of the United States; It is leading the evolution of our nation to a socialistic dictatorship.” Senator Strom Thurmond, on leaving the Democratic party and becoming a Republican because of the Civil Rights Act

If one event could be said to be the watershed event that guaranteed the exodus of southern evangelical segregationists from the Democratic Party, and blacks to become the Democrats’ most reliable demographic base, it was the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Civil Rights Act (CRA) finally codified into federal law (among a list of protected classes) bans on racial discrimination in employment and accommodations, segregation, and created the means to enforce this law. President Kennedy had proposed this legislation in 1963, and President Johnson pushed it forward after Kennedy’s assassination. With the precedent of Cruishank weakened, the federal government making the novel argument that the Act was constitutional under the commerce clause, and a more liberal Supreme Court that had upheld Brown v. Board of Education and mandated its implementation, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was far more likely to survive challenges than its predecessors passed during reconstruction.

Modern Republicans try to cast the Civil Rights Act as a fight between Democrats and Republicans, and like to claim credit for its passage. However, it is far more accurate to describe the debate as between former slave holding, segregationist states, and the rest of the US. While there were far more Democrats in Congress from the old South than Republicans, southern Republicans were just as likely (if not more so) to oppose the CRA as their democratic counterparts. Conversely, northern democrats were more likely to support the CRA than their republican counterparts. Indeed, not a single southern republican voted for the CRA.

Table 1.1. Vote by party, region, and Chamber of Congress on the Civil Rights Act of 1964Source: The Guardian[24]

After the CRA was passed, legend has it that President Johnson turned to his press secretary and remarked, “I fear we have lost the South for a generation.”[25] Whether or not this is true, events since then have essentially wiped out southern white democrats in Congress, and there is little reason to believe this will change anytime soon.[26] Strom Thurmond, who ran as a segregationist in 1948, switched parties to become a Republican in 1964 as a result of the CRA, calling democratic civil rights efforts a path to “socialist dictatorship.”[27]

The 1964 Presidential Election more or less completed the migration of blacks to the Democratic party. Barry Goldwater (Republican Senator from Arizona) was known as Mr. Conservative, and courted southern states with talk of limited government and states rights, which was music to segregationist ears. Additionally, Goldwater had voted against the CRA because he claimed it was government overreach. As a result, whereas Nixon received 32% of black votes in 1960, Goldwater carried less than 6% just four years later.[28] This sort of rapid, radical demographic shift is almost unheard of in modern politics.

However, Goldwater carried that states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. No Republican had carried them all before. No Republican had carried ANY of them since 1876. Thus, in this fracture, Republicans saw opportunity for 1968. There is considerable debate over whether the southern shift was a top down, Nixonian Southern Strategy, a bottom up grass roots effort led by Southern churches. Regardless, Nixon courted states on the border between the North and the South (e.g. Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri) by running on a “law and order” and “states rights” heavy platform, which was a barely concealed dog whistle for opposition to the civil rights movement. Eventual White House Chief of Staff Halderman stated that Nixon, “emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognized this while not appearing to”.[29]

By the 1970 mid-terms, there appears to have been a clearer focus on picking off Dixiecrats like Albert Gore Sr. of Tennessee. Nixon campaign advisor Kevin Phillips observed in 1969 that, “White Democrats will desert their party in droves the minute it becomes a black party.”[30] By the Presidential elections of 1972, Republicans swept the South. In 1976, Jimmy Carter, an evangelical Governor from Georgia, became the last Democratic presidential candidate to carry most of the south. Arkansas governor Bill Clinton carried  about half of southern states in 1992 and 1996. Since 1996, however, the south has remained solidly Republican, with the exception of Virginia and Florida as swing states.[31]

Rise of the Religious Right

“Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise. I know, I’ve tried to deal with them.” – Senator Barry Goldwater, November 1994

There was another potent cultural force driving the political shifts happening in the South during the 1950’s, 1960’s and 1970s; white southern evangelicals led the intellectual charge away from Democrats and into the arms of whomever was willing to entertain their racist ideals and goals. It was an open secret even in the 1950’s that the Klan drew its strength and worked hand in glove (or head in hood) with southern evangelical churches.

“The connection between the Klan and the Protestant churches has not proved much of a mystery to many scholars. Although the definitive history of this group has not yet been written, a number of students investigating the Klan noted a close tie-up between it and Protestantism. These writers generally agree that the Klan worked hand and glove with the more Fundamentalist denominations, that it received the open or tacit support of countless clergy-men, and that many of its officers were Protestant ministers. Moreover, both the secular and church press occasionally carried news items telling of the Klan visiting a church.”[32]

In 1956, shortly after the ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, there was perhaps no more influential Southern Baptist figure in the nation than W.A. Criswell, the pastor of the First Baptist Church in Dallas. In a speech to the Southern Baptist Convention in 1956 he outlined what would become the “religious freedom” argument for decades to come.

“Don’t force me by law, by statute, by Supreme Court decision…to cross over in those intimate things where I don’t want to go. Let me build my life. Let me have my church. Let me have my school. Let me have my friends. Let me have my home. Let me have my family. And what you give to me, give to every man in America and keep it like our glorious forefathers made – a land of the free and the home of the brave.”[33]

This 60-year-old rhetoric has been a prescient guide to understanding the longstanding efforts to establish a libertarian sounding religious right to discriminate and segregate based on the first amendment. Indeed, Criswell’s arguments that discrimination is natural and good is still used today in right wing online media outlets.

At the same time, dyed-in-the wool segregationists like Bob Jones Jr. (for whom the infamous university is named) generated the religious based arguments for segregation and racism. In 1960 he gave a sermon, which was later turned into a 32 page pamphlet, titled “Is Segregation Scriptural?” Of course the answer was yes, based on a single Bible verse (Acts 17:26, ESV)

“And he [God] made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place… Now, what does that say? That says God Almighty fixed the bounds of their habitation… God Almighty did not make of the human race one race in the sense that He did not fix the bounds of their habitation. That is perfectly clear. It is no accident that most Chinese are in China.”[34]

The implication being that God put different people in different places because he didn’t want them together, which make desegregation against God’s will, and therefore a sin. Another common justification for segregation and discrimination black people was that the color of their skin was a result of a curse from God for sinning, and that Ham’s descendants should be subordinate to people without the mark. This was known as the “Curse of Ham.” The Southern Baptist Convention did not formally renounce this teaching until 2018.[35] Indeed, throughout the Civil Rights movement, Southern Baptist preachers and congregations were among the most reliable defenders of segregation. Historian (and former Baptist) Wayne Flynt described the SBC as “the last bastion of segregation.”[36]

Almost without saying, Southern Baptist churches were segregated. When a liberal theologian invited Martin Luther King Jr. to speak in 1961, the backlash nearly cost him his job. In 1968, the First Baptist Church of Oxford Mississippi voted to ban blacks from services.[37] However, these were something of last (overt) gasps by the SBC and other white southern evangelicals to overtly work towards segregation.

In 1968 the Supreme Court issued a per curiam decision in Newman V. Piggie Park Enterprises that a religious objection to integration did not exempt a business owner from the CRA requirement to serve customers regardless of race.[38] This same year, the SBC convention voted to endorse desegregation, while at the same time electing Criswell president of the organization.

Fights over efforts to desegregate schools continued into the 1970s, including the use of forced busing. In the late 1960’s, evangelicals in the South thought they had found a way to keep schools segregated by creating private schools, and then having the state provide tuition grants to white students. The Supreme Court found these schools could not keep their tax-exempt status so long as they remained segregated in the 1971 Coit v. Green decision.

The IRS had begun sending letters to evangelical Christian schools in 1970 to verify that they were in compliance with the CRA. This included schools run by Jerry Falwell and Bob Jones Sr.  The schools themselves were a valuable source of revenue, recruiting, and indoctrination. Falwell was not happy. “In some states,” he complained, “It’s easier to open a massage parlor than a Christian school.”[39]

While Bob Jones Sr., decided to fight it out in court with the IRS (losing in the process), Falwell turned to an up-and coming young Catholic Conservative politico named Paul Weyrich. Weyrich had founded the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation at the age of 31. He also created the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) the same year, and found a way to tap into the indignation of aggrieved southern evangelical whites who were losing the battle to keep their schools segregated. While Weyrich had bigger designs, fighting back against integration was the entré he needed to leverage conservative religion into politics.

He worked with Falwell to quickly pivot away from Bob Jones’ arguments, and turned to the argument of “religious freedom” to rally around, while also staving off charges of racism. They pointed out that since Falwell’s schools didn’t take federal money, the government couldn’t tell them how to run their schools. They re-framed the issue as big, intrusive federal government agencies attacking good, honest Christians who just want to send their children to schools with the values they wanted. In the mid-70’s he described the messaging playbook that is still used today.

“The new political philosophy must be defined by us [conservatives] in moral terms, packaged in non-religious language, and propagated throughout the country by our new coalition… When political power is achieved, the moral majority will have the opportunity to re-create this great nation.”

Weyrich recognized that coded language appealing to racism had succeed where issues such as pornography, prayer in schools, the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, and even abortion had failed. This is why he latched onto using coded language intended to help keep evangelical religious schools segregated: because it was the issue that evangelicals really cared about.

It is important to note that abortion, and LGBT issues were hardly to be found in any of this rise of the religious right, and its affiliation with the Republican Party. Paul Weyrich noted that the issue had failed to act as a hook for Evangelicals in the early 1970s. As Chris Ladd[40] at Forbes Magazine noted: “The Southern Baptist Convention expressed support for laws liberalizing abortion access in 1971.”[41] Criswell himself expressed support for the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe, taking the traditional theological position that life began at birth, not conception.[42] The denomination did not adopt a firm pro-life stance until 1980.[43]

When Jimmy Carter ran for president in 1976, there were high hopes among some white southern evangelicals. He carried about half, which was a significant increase from recent past elections. However, evangelicals quickly turned against him as he failed to halt the IRS removal of tax-exempt status from segregationist religious schools.[44] They also were angered by the perception that he did not actively fight against gay rights and the Equal Rights Amendment hard enough.[45] By the 1980 election, Carter was roundly denounced as an enemy of Christian family values by the evangelical community.[46] Paul Weyrich and Jerry Falwell were recognized even then as key figures in the shift.[47]

Weyrich and Falwell wanted to move away from the traditional Baptist principle of avoiding directly participating in political debates. Falwell was furious with Carter, and denounced “godless, spineless leaders have brought our nation floundering to the brink of death.”[48] Thus, in June 1979 Weyrich and Falwell founded the Moral Majority, a Southern Baptist dominated umbrella organization for political action committee dedicated to spreading right wing Christian political positions and power. It became the model for other such organizations. During its heyday in the 80’s the Moral Majority was one of largest political lobbying groups in the United States. It helped re-build the moribund Republican party in the South’s ground game in elections, and worked to get Ronald Reagan elected in 1980.

It wasn’t until 1979 that a shift took place on the issue of abortion, and was primarily the brain child of Paul Weyrich (a conservative Catholic).[49] He successfully convinced evangelical leaders that this issue was more palatable to the rest of America as their primary goal than keeping black children out of white Christian schools.

Still, the “hook” issue for evangelical voters as late as 1980 was fighting back against integration. When (then) presidential candidate Ronald Reagan spoke to the SBC in August of 1980, he never mentioned abortion. His did, however explicitly support the SBC’s position on private religious schools and vigorously denounced the “unconstitutional regulatory agenda” directed by the IRS “against independent schools.”[50]

Thus, in the 1980 election evangelicals swung to Ronald Reagan and away from Jimmy Carter. This was despite Carter trying to put policies in place reducing the number of abortions performed in the US, and Reagan in 1967 as governor of California, having signed the most liberal abortion law in the country.[51] While somewhat revisionist history credits conservative religious social issues for the Moral Majority and the rise of the modern Republican party, those inside the Reagan campaign knew differently.

Lee Atwater was a Republican strategist for Reagan, and later became the chairman of the Republican National Committee. After the 1981 election, he spoke candidly about what really swung the voters.

“You start out in 1954 by saying, “N…., n…., n…..” By 1968 you can’t say “n….”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N…., n….. So, any way you look at it, race is coming on the backbone.”[52]

In other words, he acknowledged that using carefully coded racist language that appealed to erstwhile segregationists was the key to winning them over. Not abortion. Not gays. Not the ERA. From the top down there were efforts to swing the south with racism.  At the same time, evangelical leaders like Falwell helped create the grassroots movement that could effectively and willingly respond to these dog whistles.

The Moral Majority faded out by the late 1980’s. However, it mapped out the path to political power for a host of other organizations that followed. Focus on the Family transformed from a radio show in the 1970’s to a lobbying powerhouse. The Family Research Council, Heritage Foundation, and the Alliance Defending Freedom all work closely with the White House and Department of Justice to implement and legally defend social and tax policies favorable to the evangelical right and conservative Catholics. The Trump administration is packing the courts with lawyers representing, or employed, by religious right organizations.

It should come as no surprise that keeping LGBT youth, or youth with LGBT parents, out of religious schools is a top priority. Or the fact that they are fighting hard to ensure that schools receiving state and federal money do not have to comply with laws banning discrimination on the basis of sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity. The Alliance Defending Freedom spends much of its efforts on keeping transgender students out of schools, and enshrining a first amendment right by religious conservatives individually and collectively ignore civil rights laws in general. They argue that adoption agencies (conservative, religious of course) should not only be able to exclude gays and lesbians, but Jews as well. The Trump Department of Labor has gone so far as to argue that religiously motivated employers are exempt from the CRA as well, opening racial discrimination back up, and challenging the 50 year old ruling in Neuman v. Piggie Park.

The fight for segregation and a religious right to ignore civil rights laws lives on, whether we recognize it or not.

[1] To put this in context, if the US sustained a similar per capita death toll today, it would mean approximately 7 million people killed and another 5 million wounded.

[2] Dred Scott v.  Sanford is now considered one of the worst, if not the worst, Supreme Court decisions in US history. Given the composition of the Supreme Court, and it how it has been stacked to favor the south, corporations, and religions, and dark money, and is willing to make decisions completely out of step with US opinion, it seems likely that the Roberts Court will challenge this record. Citizens United is already widely reviled.

[3] Buchanan is widely regarded as one of the worst Presidents in US history. Presidential historians generally put Trump near the bottom as well.

[4] Kolchin, Peter (1993). American Slavery, 1619–1877. New York: Hill & Wang. ISBN 978-0-8090-2568-8.

[5] Rae, Noel. The Great Stain: Witnessing American Slavery. The Overlook Press, 2018.

[6] Report on Slavery and Racism in the History of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary http://www.sbts.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Racism-and-the-Legacy-of-Slavery-Report-v3.pdf

[7] https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/state.php?year=1860&fips=24&f=1&off=0&elect=0

[8] Serwer, Adam. “The Supreme Court Is Headed Back to the 19th Century.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 4 Sept. 2018, www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/09/redemption-court/566963/.

[9] Saez, Emmanuel, and Gabriel Zucman. “Wealth Inequality in the United States since 1913: Evidence from Capitalized Income Tax Data.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 131, no. 2, May 2016, pp. 519–578., doi:10.3386/w20625.

[10] Jackson, Brooks. “Blacks and the Democratic Party.” FactCheck.org, 16 May 2011, www.factcheck.org/2008/04/blacks-and-the-democratic-party/.

[11] Ample literature exists on the movement of black voters from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party: Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln; Donald J. Lisio, Hoover, Blacks & Lily-Whites: A Study of Southern Strategies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985); Richard Sherman, The Republican Party and Black America from McKinley to Hoover, 1896–1933 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1973): 134–144.

[12] John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss, Jr., From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, 8th ed. (New York: Knopf, 2000): 421.

[13] Bump, Philip. “When Did Black Americans Start Voting so Heavily Democratic?” The Washington Post, WP Company, 7 July 2015, www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/07/07/when-did-black-americans-start-voting-so-heavily-democratic/?utm_term=.2183767615eb.

[14] If this sounds familiar, it should. Modern republicans accuse virtually any efforts to protect LGBT people a form of fascism or totalitarianism.

[15] Lemmon, Sarah M. “The Ideology of the ‘Dixiecrat’ Movement.” Social Forces, vol. 30, no. 2, Dec. 1951, pp. 162–171., doi: 10.2307/2571628.

[16] Oklahoma wasn’t a state in the 1860 election. New Jersey and Missouri supported the northern democratic candidate.

[17] O’Donnell, Michael. “When Eisenhower and Warren Squared Off Over Civil Rights.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 17 Apr. 2018, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/04/commander-v-chief/554045/.

[18] Serwer, Adam. “Why Don’t We Remember Ike as a Civil Rights Hero?” MSNBC, NBCUniversal News Group, 18 May 2014, www.msnbc.com/msnbc/why-dont-we-ike-civil-rights.

[19] The dominant issues for voters outside the south in 1960 was the cold war, Sputnik, fear of Soviet technological superiority.

[20] “1960 Democratic Party Platform.” The American Presidency Project, University of California Santa Barbara, 11 July 1960, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/1960-democratic-party-platform.

[21] Frank, Jeffrey. “When Martin Luther King Jr. and Richard Nixon Were Friends.” The Daily Beast, The Daily Beast Company, 21 Jan. 2013, www.thedailybeast.com/when-martin-luther-king-jr-and-richard-nixon-were-friends.

[22] Levingston, Steven. “John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Call Changed History.” Time, Time Warner Communications, 20 June 2017, time.com/4817240/martin-luther-king-john-kennedy-phone-call/.

[23] Middleton, Russell (March 1962). “The Civil Rights Issue And Presidential Voting Among Southern Negroes And Whites”. Social Forces. 40 (3): 209–215. doi:10.2307/2573630. JSTOR 2573630

[24] Enten, H. J. (2013, August 28). Were Republicans really the party of civil rights in the 1960s? | Harry J Enten. Retrieved March 7, 2019, from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/28/republicans-party-of-civil-rights

[25] “The Long Goodbye.” The Economist, The Economist Newspaper, 11 Nov. 2010, www.economist.com/united-states/2010/11/11/the-long-goodbye.

[26] Senator Doug Jones (D-AL) is an outlier, having narrowly beaten Republican Roy Moore in a special election after Roy Moore was credibly accused during the campaign by multiple women of trolling high schools for underage girls to date when he was a 30-something year old district attorney. Not every Republican is committing statutory rape.

[27] THURMOND BREAK IS MADE OFFICIAL; He Will Work as Republican for Goldwater Election.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 17 Sept. 1964, www.nytimes.com/1964/09/17/archives/thurmond-break-is-made-official-he-will-work-as-republican-for.html.

[28] Jackson, Brooks. “Blacks and the Democratic Party.” FactCheck.org, 16 May 2011, www.factcheck.org/2008/04/blacks-and-the-democratic-party/.

[29] Robin, Corey (2011). The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 50. ISBN 978-0-19-979393-8.

[30] Phillips, K. (2015). The emerging Republican majority. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

[31] Virginia is becoming more solidly Democratic in state level elections as the DC suburbs spill into Northern Virginia. However, Republican gerrymandering

[32] Miller, R. M. (1956). A Note on the Relationship between the Protestant Churches and the Revived Ku Klux Klan. The Journal of Southern History, 22(3), 355. doi:10.2307/2954550

[33] Freeman, C. W. (2007). “Never Had I Been So Blind”: W. A. Criswell’s “Change” on Racial Segregation. The Journal of Southern Religion, X, 1-12. Retrieved March 7, 2019, from http://jsr.fsu.edu/Volume10/Freeman.pdf

[34] Jones, R. (April 17, 1960). Is Segregation Scriptural? Bob Jones University. Retrieved March 7, 2019 from https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B6A7PtfmRgT7Q1kzZEVXUThMLWc/edit

[35] On Renouncing The Doctrine Of The “Curse Of Ham” As A Justification For Racism. (n.d.). Retrieved March 7, 2019, from http://www.sbc.net/resolutions/2287/on-renouncing-the-doctrine-of-the-curse-of-ham-as-a-justification-for-racism

[36] Edwards, S. (2016, June 15). Southern Baptist Convention Votes to Discourage Display of Confederate Flag at Member Churches . Retrieved March 7, 2019, from https://jezebel.com/southern-baptist-convention-votes-to-discourage-display-1782025002

[37] Love the sinner. (2015, October 22). Retrieved March 7, 2019, from https://www.economist.com/united-states/2015/10/22/love-the-sinner

[38] Today, the religious right isn’t directly challenging this precedent, but they are arguing that the case only applies to protections on the basis of race, not sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity, and thus religious freedom and the first amendment gives them a unique right to ignore civil rights laws.

[39] Balmer, R., Lowry, R., Shafer, J., & Greenfield, J. (2014, May 27). The Real Origins of the Religious Right. Retrieved March 7, 2019, from https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133?o=1

[40] Ladd, C. (2017, May 22). Pastors, Not Politicians, Turned Dixie Republican. Retrieved March 8, 2019, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrisladd/2017/03/27/pastors-not-politicians-turned-dixie-republican/#73f1e65f695f

[41] SBC Resolution on Abortion, 1971. http://www.sbc.net/resolutions/13/resolution-on-abortion

[42] Allen, B. (2012, November 06). Evangelicals and abortion: Chicken or egg? – Baptist News Global. Retrieved March 8, 2019, from https://baptistnews.com/article/evangelicals-and-abortion-chicken-or-egg/#.XIJxVChKiUk

[43] SBC Resolution on Abortion, 1980. http://www.sbc.net/resolutions/19/resolution-on-abortion

[44] Balmer, R. (2014, May 23). Jimmy Carter’s evangelical downfall: Reagan, religion and the 1980 presidential election. Retrieved March 8, 2019, from https://www.salon.com/2014/05/25/jimmy_carters_evangelical_downfall_reagan_religion_and_the_1980_presidential_election/

[45] Harley, R. M. (1980, June 25). THE EVANGELICAL VOTE AND THE PRESIDENCY. Retrieved March 8, 2019, from https://www.csmonitor.com/1980/0625/062555.html

[46] Carter’s life post presidency has been dedicated to charity and building peace processes. The irony is not lost on the author. It can be observed that if one wants to know what the moral and ethical thing to do in any given situation is, look at the position of the Southern Baptist Convention on the issue, and then do the exact opposite.

[47] Johnson, S. D., & Tamney, J. B. (1982). The Christian Right and the 1980 Presidential Election. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 21(2), 123. doi:10.2307/1385498

[48]  Reinhard, David (1983). The Republican Right since 1945. Lexington, KY: Univ Press of Kentucky. p. 245. ISBN 978-0813114842.

[49] Eagan, M. (2018, February 05). Race, not abortion, was the founding issue of the religious right – The Boston Globe. Retrieved March 8, 2019, from https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2018/02/05/race-not-abortion-was-founding-issue-religious-right/A5rnmClvuAU7EaThaNLAnK/story.html

[50] Balmer, R., Lowry, R., Shafer, J., & Greenfield, J. (2014, May 27). The Real Origins of the Religious Right. Retrieved March 7, 2019, from https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133?o=1

[51] Ibid.

[52] Ladd, C. (2017, May 22). Pastors, Not Politicians, Turned Dixie Republican. Retrieved March 8, 2019, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrisladd/2017/03/27/pastors-not-politicians-turned-dixie-republican/#73f1e65f695f