Reflections on Randall Baumer’s book - Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right

Guest Message by Scotty Patton

In his book, Randall Baumer first establishes his credentials as a member of the evangelical faith, with a story of his invitation to a closed-door meeting with conservatives in 1990 in Washington DC, on the tenth anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s election. Paul Weyrich, who Baumer describes as the architect of the religious right, declared to Baumer that abortion had nothing to do with the emergence of the religious right. Since Goldwater in 1964, Weyrich had been trying to mobilize evangelical voters on several issues, but nothing galvanized them until the U.S. government’s challenge of tax-exempt status of racially segregated schools. Abortion was considered to be a “Catholic issue.”

Historically, evangelicalism was a social reform movement about the shaping the nation. The Bible was seen by evangelicals as God’s revelation, and was taken seriously and/or literally. The movement focused on personal conversion (from the story in John where Jesus tells Nicodemus he must be born again), and on bringing others to the faith (from the command in Mark to go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation).

In the 19th and well into the 20th century, evangelicals engaged in a broad spectrum of social reform efforts, many towards helping the marginalized in society. It was considered to be the “Second Awakening,” to bring the kingdom of God on earth. Evangelicals of the time focused on issues such as education, prison reform, advocating for the poor and for the rights of women, opposing violence in war, supporting gun control, supporting temperance in response to problems with alcohol (including spousal and child abuse), and ending of slavery (by evangelicals in the north). It was an effort to reframe society to pave Jesus’ way for the second coming (postmillennialism). This is in marked contrast to today’s religious right.

Evangelicals started to take ideas from John Nelson Darby and became convinced they had been interpreting the Bible incorrectly. Jesus would return not after the millennium but before the millennium (premillennialism). The second coming could come at any moment, so it was either be “raptured up” to heaven or be “left behind.” This eventually was taken to mean that there was no responsibility for addressing society’s ills, a “theology of despair.” Evangelicals stayed out of the political fray well into the 20th century, what was the point of working on society if the rapture was coming soon?

Baumer refers then to the John Scopes trial in 1925, where Scopes was convicted of teaching evolution. Prosecutors won the case, but evangelicals lost in the court of public opinion. This led American evangelicals to double-down on their rejection of the larger culture. Combined with premillennialism, evangelicals sought to protect their children from corruption from the outside world, and this included a Christian education rather than a public education.

Skipping ahead, Nixon was endorsed by Billy Graham and won the 1972 presidential election for republicans, but George McGovern as an evangelical appealed to evangelical voters. This led to the Chicago Declaration in 1973 that reaffirmed evangelicals’ historical commitment to social issues such as feeding the poor and women’s equality. Later, Jimmy Carter as a born-again evangelical sounded the themes of the Chicago declaration. As president he was a champion for human rights and environmental policies, and appointed more women and minorities than any previous president. But he was beset by problems including a sluggish economy, high interest rates, and the Iran hostage crisis, and there was a group of evangelicals conspiring against him. 

Next the author discusses the “abortion myth.” Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson claimed that evangelical leaders were shaken out of complacency by the Roe versus Wade decision in 1973 that legalized abortion at a national level. But the myth does not bear of scrutiny. Evangelicals considered abortion to be a Catholic issue until the late 1990s. Christianity Today convened a conference in 1968 that included 26 evangelical organizations. They issued a statement: “whether abortion is a sin we are not agreed,” and that in some cases there’s “necessity and permissibility.” The abortion issue still had no traction. Some groups with historic ties to evangelicalism pushed for legalization of abortion. The United Methodist Church General Conference called on state legislatures to repeal laws restricting abortion. In 1971, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution to work for legislation to allow the possibility of abortion. W.A. Criswell, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, said “I have always felt it was only after a child was born that it had a life separate from its mother and became an individual person.” That is not what the religious right is saying today.

Baumer argues that the Greene versus Connelly decision in 1971 was the real catalyst for the formation of the religious right. The decision meant that any organization that engaged in racial segregation or discrimination was not a charitable organization, and could not maintain tax exempt status. Nixon ordered the IRS to enact policy denying tax-exempt status to all segregated schools in the United States. Paul Weyrich reasoned that this issue could make evangelicals into a formidable voting bloc – a “moral majority.” He had failed to energize the evangelical voters with issues such as pornography, school prayer, the proposed equal rights amendment, and even abortion.

In their response to IRS inquiry, Bob Jones University officially stated that they did not admit African-Americans. Bob Jones himself argued that racial segregation was mandated in the Bible. But Jerry Falwell and Paul Weyrich reframed this as an argument about religious freedom. Baumer points out that Christian schools would say they didn’t accept federal dollars so were immune from government structures, but argues that tax-exempt status is a form of public subsidy. In 1976, the IRS rescinded Bob Jones University’s tax-exempt status. This is what galvanized early leaders of the religious right, not abortion; opposition to abortion came later. 

Baumer argues that while Carter tried to reduce the number of abortions in America, he did not seek a constitutional amendment banning it which cost him support from evangelicals, who instead supported Ronald Reagan, even though Reagan had just signed the most liberal abortion law in the United States. Reagan courted the evangelical vote, saying things like “Jesus is more real to me than my own mother.” In Dallas at a campaign speech attended by 20,000 evangelicals Reagan said he endorsed evangelicals and “what you are doing.” In his speech, he stated his support for creationism and railed against the unconstitutional regulatory agenda of the IRS versus independent schools, but he made no mention of abortion, the proposed equal rights amendment, gay rights, or school prayer. Evangelicals voted to put Ronald Reagan in office, turning on Carter who was one of their own.

Baumer says the abortion myth is important because it distracts from the issue of festering racism in America that is not being addressed, and cites problems such as African-American ghettos, red lining in real estate, and police brutality. The author had always defended evangelicals against charges of racism until 2016 when Donald Trump was elected; then he looked at the history of the emergence of the religious right since Ronald Reagan.

Ronald Reagan sought the repeal of the Rumsford fair housing act which sought to eliminate racial discrimination in housing. He opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He ran a California gubernatorial campaign based on “law and order” and “state’s rights,” which are thinly veiled racist code-words about keeping blacks “in their place.” Reagan supported apartheid in Rhodesia in South Africa. As president he gutted the civil rights commission by dismissing the commissioners and replacing them with anti-women’s rights and anti-civil rights members.

The author discusses other figures in the rise of the religious right: Jerry Falwell, who formed the segregated Lynchburg Christian Academy that would not admit blacks, and who denounced Martin Luther King as a communist subversive; Tim LaHaye of the “moral majority”; Terry Perkins who ran a senatorial telemarketing campaign using David Duke’s company (Duke was closely associated with the Ku Klux Klan); Ray S. Moore who formed the Foundation for Moral Law which supported Alabama secession and the repeal of the 14th amendment (equal protection); and Donald Trump and his birther conspiracy, and who called Mexicans “rapists and criminals.” Stuart Stevens, a republican consultant, said Trump openly ran on racial grievance. Baumer asks, where did family values go? Trump is three times married, a former casino operator, self-confessed sexual predator, who said “some good people” were marching in the white nationalist march in Charlottesville.

Baumer argues that the religious right is not about advancement of biblical values but is rooted in perpetuating racial segregation. He says the religious right hides behind high-minded issues such as abortion and religious freedom, but is really organized to allow evangelicals to continue policies of racial exclusion, and that single-issue white evangelicals are complicit on a whole range of policies that would be an anathema to 19th century evangelicals.

I ask myself, where is God’s kin-dom in this? How can we keep hope and faith amid a hostile and “alternative facts” reality? I believe our hope and faith reside in our moment and our joy, in the here and now, and in doing the work of Jesus even when things seem hopeless. We are offered an invitation to our own ‘theology of despair.’ But I would reject that. I still believe in the gifts of faith: it may get worse before it gets better, but you can’t keep a good God down. I believe it is in following in the way of Jesus that we will find our hope and our faith. To quote Brian Sirchio: “Do something beautiful for God - do something small, but do it with great joy!”

Guest Message From Ryan Stollar - The Bible, Like Homeschooling, Can Radicalize or Liberate

The text from Ryan Stollar's message to Veradale UCC on March 20, 2022

The Bible, Like Homeschooling, Can Radicalize or Liberate.pdf

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Guest Message by Naomi: "How Christian Education Creates Extremists"

This cartoon and others like it are featured in the works of Ken Ham, founder of Answers in Genesis.

Introduction

Before I start, I want to make a bunch of disclaimers, because I deliberately chose an inflammatory title for this message. First, I’m not going to argue here that all Christians, or all Christian school kids or teachers or parents, are extremists. I don’t have data on how many Christian school kids grow up to be fascists or anything like that. Rather, I am going to argue that Christian education makes children more vulnerable to radicalization. I also don’t want to paint my own upbringing as some kind of malevolent, militant indoctrination by self-consciously evil people. For the most part, I enjoyed my time in Christian schools, and most of the adults in my life were, I think, people who genuinely love Jesus and believe that Christian education is good. But people with good motives can still do bad things, and under the surface of my own experience, the waters get a lot murkier. I don’t want to excuse or diminish any of the harms that I’m going to be talking about today, so I’m threading a needle with a very small eye here. This is also a content warning for homophobia, transphobia, violence, and racism.

I also have to confess that, while some of my peers rebelled against the system in which we were brought up, I did not. I was entirely committed to some very toxic ideas well into my 20s. If that colors your impression of me, and all I can say in response is that I deeply regret my past beliefs and actions, and while I can’t ever undo or make up for the hurt I inflicted, I hope I can at least counter those ideas and actions with love and grace.

Finally, I’m going to breeze through a lot of information here and I really encourage everyone to look into it. I’ll post a suggested reading list on the website with links to news articles, opinion pieces, and other resources.

The history of Christian education

The modern American Christian school movement has always been a reactionary one, all the way back to the 1800s when Catholic parochial schools were founded as an alternative to Protestant public schools. It wasn’t until over a century later that Protestants themselves began establishing private schools for their children, in response to a number of social changes that occurred during the 20th century. Many parents objected to the teaching of evolution that became more common in the first half of the century. In the 1960s, the Supreme Court banned mandatory school prayer. Other issues like sex education also played a role in turning parents away from public schools, but probably the biggest factor was the Supreme Court’s ruling on Brown v. Board of Education in 1955, which deemed racial segregation unconstitutional. Many white families, especially in the South where integration efforts were concentrated, just left public schools for all-white private schools. However, this prompted a long court battle with the IRS over whether those schools could continue to operate as nonprofits. Most famously, Bob Jones University sued the US government in the 1970s for taking away their tax-exempt status because of their racial segregation policies..

BJU, and by extension, all private schools, eventually lost the fight over segregation, and most Christian schools today do not have any explicit racial discrimination, although the underrepresenation of minorities continues to be an issue to this day. And the other perceived social ills – evolution, sex ed, and secularism – continue to play a role in how Christian schools recruit and in what they will and won’t teach. Today, additional factors include trans-inclusive policies, mask mandates, and “critical race theory.”

My experience in Christian schools

I went to a Christian school from second grade until I graduated from high school, and after that I went to a Christian university. Before I moved to Spokane, I was a part-time teacher at a Christian school – the same school where I had been a student. I think this gives me a unique perspective on Christian schools, as I got to see the system from multiple angles over a period of two decades.

As a student, most of my education from grade school through college was filtered through the lens of evangelical Christianity, and in general I have no problem with that. Like, at my college, everyone who took a gen ed math course had to write a paper on what role mathematics played in their Christian worldview. But also, when I was in grade school, one of our math books mentioned Buddha in a story problem and my teacher made us cross the name out.

Bible was part of the curriculum throughout my education. For most of grade school and, sadly, all of college, these classes were supremely boring, as they didn’t encourage anything but the most surface-level understanding and analysis of Scripture. Fortunately, in high school I had a series of Bible teachers who really challenged us to engage with the Bible and with theology in a way that actually provoked critical thinking and basically set me on a path to where I am now by getting me to question what I’d been taught, for which I’m eternally grateful. On the other hand, one of these teachers also suggested that homosexuality was caused by demon-possession – and at the time, I thought this was a compassionate narrative because it painted gay people as victims instead of willfully evil.

In general, though, what sticks out to me about my time in Christian school is the imperative that was placed on imparting a set of values into us. We were very explicitly taught to reject such liberal ideas as abortion rights, welfare, affirmative action, and LGBTQ inclusion. One of my best friends was an outspoken Democrat, and students had no qualms about making fun of her in front of teachers. Our school was nondenominational, but students who came from non-evangelical backgrounds often had their beliefs belittled. A lot of our curricula came from Abeka Books which has a strong anti-Catholic bias. One time one of my own teachers mocked a friend of mine who was vegan about not eating meat until she became physically ill. I’m ashamed to admit that I participated in this abuse.

We went to chapel every week where guest speakers, often local pastors, spoke to the student body. Often it was more or less the same kind of message you’d hear in Sunday school about loving Jesus and being kind to others. Sometimes the speakers were missionaries who talked about the persecuted church and what an amazing testimony it was that people were being martyred for their faith. Once it was a pastor who said Christians shouldn’t get tattoos or multiple piercings – my own Bible teacher disagreed strongly with this idea in class afterward, but I don’t know how the rest of the teachers responded.

As a teacher, my experience was . . . mixed. On the one hand, getting paid to talk about my favorite books and about history – one of my favorite subjects – with a handful of intelligent teenagers was absolutely one of my dream jobs. On the other hand, I received a lot of pushback from parents – not directly, but through complaints they filed with the administrators. Oddly, these parents never criticized my skill as a teacher (and they really should have), but rather, I was told that I was “teaching feminism” and that I was indoctrinating the students with liberalism, even though I was just teaching from the same history book I’d had as a student. One time the principal questioned me about a picture I’d liked and shared on Facebook because the page that had originally posted it was called “Life After Faith.” Another time I got complaints about things Justin had posted online. For a while, I was really afraid that my job was in jeopardy, and so the opportunity to come to Spokane and work for myself came at just the right time.

The ideology of Christian schools

If my experience and the experience of people I’ve talked to is the norm, the culture war is at the forefront of Christian education. Whether it’s opposition to secularism, LGBT people, or mask mandates, these issues have always served and continue to serve as prime recruiting points for conservative parents. The message to them is that public schools are dangerous to children and that Christian schools are safe. To children, the message is slightly different: Christianity itself is in danger, it’s up to you to defend it, and a Christian education is going to equip you with the tools to do that.

This “us versus them” narrative was a major theme of my own education. We were repeatedly told as students that “the world” hated Christians and wanted to destroy us. I can recall multiple conversations in school in which I, as a young teenager, was asked to consider the possibility of my future martyrdom for my faith. The facts that a super-majority of Americans are Christians, that most politicians are Christians, and that every US president has been Christian, were immaterial to this point – these were never brought up.

Christian schools push this narrative by controlling the information students are exposed to. Sometimes that means presenting accurate, but incomplete, information. For example, we were taught that China persecuted Christians, but we weren’t taught about their persecution of any other religion or ethnic group. Sometimes it means omitting information entirely, like how we were never told about the fact that America is, and has always been, predominantly Christian. And sometimes it means teaching false information instead of facts. I learned that homosexuality was a dangerous lifestyle that led to loneliness and drug abuse, but I never learned about the AIDS crisis or the Reagan administration’s inhumane and disastrous response to it.

Another way some Christian schools control access to information is just by giving students an inferior education overall. Two of the biggest publishers of Christian school curricula are Abeka Books from Pensacola Christian College, and Accelerated Christian Education, or ACE, which is largely used by homeschool groups. Both programs focus on rote memorization over analytical thinking, and ACE is just a series of workbooks with fill-in-the blank questions whose answers can be found a few pages away.

The third major publisher in the industry is BJU Press, from Bob Jones University. Its history books, along with those of Abeka and ACE, are notorious for downplaying the horrors of the Native American genocide and slavery, for painting slaveowners and even the KKK in a sympathetic light, and for making heavy-handed and unnecessary moral judgments on contemporary civil rights movements like Black Lives Matter.

Even more than history, science classes in Christian schools differ greatly from public education. To this day, I couldn’t tell you squat about the fossil record, carbon dating, or any other evidence for the theory of evolution, but I could tell you all about what Answers in Genesis or the Discovery Institute have to say. I was taught that evolution is an ideological position invented to destroy Christianity, as evidenced by this actual cartoon that I saw in school, taken from a book by Ken Ham, the founder of Answers in Genesis. And my school was not an outlier; Abeka, BJU Press, and ACE all present creationism as the only correct understanding of our origins. I’ve found a few schools that say they teach both creation and evolution, but on closer inspection, this is disingenuous. They teach young-earth creationism as truth, then present evolution as an alternate theory that is scientifically suspect. I actually don’t know what I think about evolution because I was never given the opportunity to make a truly informed opinion.

The impact of Christian education

You may be thinking now, this is all fascinating, but how does it connect to the idea that Christian schools radicalize students? In his essay, Ur-Fascism, Umberto Eco created a list of 14 features common to fascist movements. Another disclaimer here, in using this list as a comparison I’m not saying that Christian education is inherently fascist, but that Christian schools that operate in the way I’ve described, create an environment that makes people more susceptible to radicalization. I’ve identified 8 of the 14 points are relating to Christian education.

1. A cult of tradition – fascism is inherently a conservative movement, based on the idea that the in-group (whoever that is) was once a glorious people and that everything used to be great, but that some external degenerative force caused a social decay that has led to the group’s decline. This ties directly in with point 2, the rejection of modernism, and point 5, fear of difference. We have seen how for decades, the Christian school movement has been fueled by opposition to social progress – whether they be Black people, trans people, or even people at high risk for complications from a pandemic. Christian schools, like the Christian conservatives behind them, are notoriously resistant to change, and this worldview rubs off on students by encouraging them to resist change as well.

4.Disagreement is treason – in my own experience, I came to understand that when parents complained about me, it wasn’t for the quality of my teaching or even my teaching methods (which actually deserved a lot of scrutiny), but for the content of what I was saying. Putting up a quote by Betty Friedan while we were discussing second-wave feminism meant I was “pushing feminism.” Discussing how the Great Depression, World War II, and Vietnam affected Black people differently from white people meant that I was “indoctrinating” the students. Sharing a meme on Facebook that originally came from a page called “Life after faith” meant that I wasn’t really a Christian. Christian schools want students to be taught a “biblical worldview,” and that can mean just not teaching material deemed to threaten that worldview. ACE and Abeka curricula focus on memorization and simplistic activities because actually analyzing and critiquing the material they present might lead to a rejection of their values and assumptions.

7. Obsession with a plot, 9. life is permanent warfare, and 11. everybody is educated to become a hero – the culture war is central to Christian education. “The world” hates you for being a Christian and will try to destroy you. One of the most frequently-cited Bible passages in Christian education is the one we read earlier: “always be ready to give an answer for the reason of the hope that is in you.” To us this meant training to be able to defend our beliefs, to debate evolutionists or atheists or abortionists in order to conquer their ideas in the court of public opinion – and ideally in the actual courts as well. It was actually kind of surprising to me when I entered the real world and discovered that it was pretty chill. Most people didn’t actually spend every minute of their day plotting how to overthrow Christianity.So when flat earthers or anti-vax conspiracists come along and say, “Yes, there is a plot, and scientists are in on it” – or when Qanon says “yes, there is a plot, and the government is in on it” – or when Neo-Nazis say “yes, there is a plot, and the Jews are behind it” – half the work of recruiting someone with this education background, has already been done.

13. Selective populism – this one speaks to the cognitive dissonance I’ve noticed within conservative Christianity. Through the rejection of evolution, mainstream history education, and the scientific consensus on public health, Christian schools teach students to be suspicious of authority. We’re taught that “the world” wants us all to be mindless robots that just accept whatever the government and the media say uncritically. And yet, at the same time, we were taught to accept without question the authority of the Bible as interpreted by the school. To disagree with an interpretation of Scripture given by your Bible teacher was potentially heretical. A lot of conservatives harbor authoritarian beliefs, and these are the people most likely to support Donald Trump, to praise the January 6 insurrection, even to support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Conclusion: What can we do?

Once again, I’m hesitant to make a blanket statement about Christian education as a whole. Apart from science and history classes, my education was in many ways excellent. A few of my teachers in particular encouraged their students to be critical thinkers and to seek truth – even if they had no intention of that pursuit leading us away from the worldview they wanted to instill in us. But I do think it’s clear that at best, Christian schools fail to protect kids against extremist recruitment, and at worst, actively create generations of young people ripe for radicalization.

So what can we do about this? As private religious institutions, the extent to which the government can regulate Christian schools is very limited, and I’d argue that any attempt to do so would be seen by them as yet another proof of the us versus them narrative they’re so keen to advance. Instead, I think it’s important for Christians who want to prevent the radicalization of our youth to present counter-narrative to the Christian nationalism that seems to dominate society.

One of the biggest ways we can do this is simply by supporting public education. It’s no secret that many conservatives are trying to undermine public education, whether through a voucher system that gives public funding to private schools or though creating the CRT hysteria to turn parents against public schools, or by passing legislation requiring schools to teach skewed versions of history and science. Every time we vote for school levies, speak up at school board meetings, and give community support to teachers, we help to mitigate the damage of these actions.

Another thing we should do is to be visible, and this is an area in which I think our church does a really good job. When we show up at Pride events with a sign saying “Jesus didn’t reject people; neither do we,” we are taking away from the narrative that Christians have to oppose LGBT rights. When we put “End systemic racism” on our message board, we declared our community that we stand with Black and Indigenous people of color. Whenever we publish statements in solidarity with the victims of religiously-motivated terror attacks, when we joined Faith Action Network, we showed that we don’t fear or demonize people who think differently from ourselves. I am proud to be a member of this church and I hope we always do things like this.

The last thing we should do, and unfortunately the most difficult, is to talk to other people. Given that I was raised in this insular environment and that for many years I wholly bought into it, you might be wondering how I ended up with a completely different set of beliefs, and the answer is that I encountered Christians who believed different things from me and I talked to them. Debating with other Christians felt less threatening to me than debating with non-Christians because I knew we had at least some ideas in common, and I was a lot more open to listening to those Christians and taking their ideas into consideration because I respected them as brothers and sisters in Christ. If you know someone who is in danger of being radicalized, or who is sympathetic to radical viewpoints, and if it’s safe for you to do so, talk to them. I know that’s not an option for everybody. Some of you are going to get nothing but hate from conservative religious types on the basis of your race, gender or sexuality, and I don’t think you should have to put yourself in harm’s way to try to win people over when just living your life as an out and proud Christian is itself an argument against their beliefs.

I’d like to leave you with two thoughts. First, if there’s anything my experience proves, it’s that people can change. The adults in my life did everything in their power to shield me from encountering ideas they saw as unbiblical or immoral, and I still ended up as a far-left “social justice warrior” who thinks trans children are made in the image of God. Secondly, radicalization can go one of two ways. To quote Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr:

“So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? [. . .] Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment.”