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Speaker 1: We got three people down on the ground. I can't tell you about shooting.

Mayor Byron Brown: This is the worst nightmare that any community can face, and we are hurting and we are seething right now as a community.

Melissa Harris-Perry: This is The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. Thanks for being with us. By now you've probably seen the news. 10 people are dead and at least 3 more are injured after what appears to be a white supremacist mass killing in Upstate New York. Payton Gendron of Conklin, New York, is in custody after live streaming video of himself brutally killing Black people in a Buffalo, New York, grocery store on Saturday. The President spoke about it yesterday.

President: We're still gathering the facts, but already the Justice Department has stated publicly that it is investigating the matter as a hate crime, a racially motivated act of white supremacy and violent extremism. As they do, we must all work together to address the hate that remains a stain on the soul of America.

Melissa Harris-Perry: We will be bringing you much more about that story and its context on tomorrow's show. We know that you're thinking about this, so we want to hear from you. Give us a call at 1-877-8-MY-TAKE. We begin today with a very different conversation. One that nonetheless addresses some of the deep fissures that divide our nation. In the wake of changes to abortion laws across the country, we've been thinking a lot about the so-called culture wars and how religion and politics are part of the debate and the divide.

Now, on the one hand, religiosity in America is declining. Recent data from the Public Religion Research Institute show a significant increase in secular identity over the past two decades. Nearly 1 in 4 Americans and more than a third of Americans who are under 30 are religiously unaffiliated and overall fewer than 40% say religion is very important to their daily lives. One identity with the steepest decline is white evangelical Protestants. In 2006, the Pew Religion and Public Life survey found that 23% of Americans self-identified as white and evangelical.

By 2020, the proportion had declined to just over 14% and that's even after experiencing a little uptick in affiliation following 2016, but don't mistake shrinking numbers with declining influence. Indeed white evangelicals seem to be on the precipice of a triumphant win.

White Evangelicals: [crowd chants "Why are we matching? Changing legislation."]

Melissa Harris-Perry: Before we get to that, let's back up just a little bit and ask who are white evangelicals?

Anthea Butler: I like to put it down to what American religious historian said, George Morrison, which is anybody who liked Billy Graham.

Melissa Harris-Perry: This is Anthea Butler. She's the Geraldine R. Segal Professor in American Social Thought and Chair of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She's also the author of White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America. Butler reminds us that American evangelicalism first rose to public prominence with the charismatic North Carolinian, Billy Graham.

Billy Graham: I do not believe that any man can solve the problems of life without Jesus Christ. There are tremendous marital problems. There are physical problems. There are financial problems. There are problems of sin and habit that cannot be solved outside the person of our Lord Jesus Christ. Have you trusted Christ Jesus is savior?

Melissa Harris-Perry: Throughout the 1950s, Graham, a Southern Baptist minister held dynamic mass rallies dubbed crusades. He also harnessed the emerging power of television to reach millions across the world. Graham served as confidant, friend, and advisor to political leaders of both parties, and was particularly close with President Lyndon Johnson and President Richard Nixon, relationships made possible by Graham's insistence that spiritual matters transcended political ones.

Billy Graham: Everybody's talking about election now and the political conventions that are coming along. I'm absolutely convinced that no matter who's elected, America is not going to be saved unless we have a moral and spiritual revival.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Anthea Butler writes that Graham "fused Christianity and Americanism together" to create a potent cocktail of Evangelical Christian Nationalism.

Anthea Butler: What has happened with talking about evangelicals since probably the late 1970s forward is that evangelical has been synonymous with white, but now evangelicalism has become a candle for white Christians and white conservative Christians because of their relationship to the Republican Party.

Melissa Harris-Perry: According to 2021 data from the Pew Research Center, more than three-quarters of evangelical Christians are white and white evangelicals tend to be older, more Southern, and less college-educated than other white Americans and they form a core constituency of the Republican Party.

Anthea Butler: We have a particular group in this country that is at one hand, really religiously conservative, but at the same time, very politically motivated based on moral issues. What we have come to discover is that those moral issues are being used as a shield to wield power in certain kinds of ways in the political spectrum.

Melissa Harris-Perry: That white evangelicals would become firmly ensconced in the Republican Party was not a foregone conclusion. Newsweek magazine declared 1976 "The Year of the Evangelical" in response to the presidential victory of Democrat Jimmy Carter.

Jimmy Carter: To build a better life for us all that we can have it and we're going to have it.

Randall Balmer: Jimmy Carter represents what I call the tradition of progressive evangelicalism going back into the 19th century.

Melissa Harris-Perry: This is Randall Balmer. He's Professor of Religion at Dartmouth College, and author of several books, including Evangelicalism in America.

Randall Balmer: If you look at evangelical activism in politics and in social reform, they were very much interested in the plight of those that Jesus called the least of leaps. That is to advocate for prison reform, to be advocates for public education because that was a way to bolster those in the lower ranks of society into the middle class. They were very much in favor of women's equality, including voting rights, which in the 19th century was a rather radical idea. Jimmy Carter represents this strand of evangelicalism.

Melissa Harris-Perry: A Southern Baptist peanut farmer who made time to teach Sunday school while serving as George's governor, Carter described himself as born again and regularly invoked his evangelical identity during the campaign.

Jimmy Carter: I formed a very close, intimate, personal relationship with God through Christ that has given me a great deal of peace, equanimity, the ability to accept difficulties without unnecessarily being disturbed.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Carter was the last Democratic presidential candidate to secure the solid Southern block from Texas to North Carolina. 25 years later, the white evangelical vote backed a very different Southern governor for the White House.

George W. Bush: Thank you very much. God bless America.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Here again is Randall Balmer.

Randall Balmer: George W. Bush represents another strand of evangelicalism, which really doesn't take hold until the emergence of the religious right in the late 1970s. What happens with the religious right, particularly after the 1980 presidential election, is that it merges almost completely with the far-right precincts of the Republican Party.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Like Carter before him, George W. Bush spoke undeservedly about his religious faith and his born-again identity.

George W. Bush: My relationship with God through Christ gives me meaning and direction. I'll talk about it. I've got a personal faith. Billy Graham came into my life.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Once in office, President Bush established the White House office of faith-based and community initiatives and created centers for faith-based initiatives in 11 federal agencies. By the end of his second term, white evangelicals were just as likely to disapprove of President Bush's job performance as they were to approve of it. Democrats eyed that slim space of possibility with hopes that a new kind of candidate could appeal to voters whose religious values guided their policy choices.

President Barack Obama: The pundits, the pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states; red states for Republicans, blue states for Democrats. I've got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the red states.

Melissa Harris-Perry: In his first national campaign, President Barack Obama leaned into the cadences and tropes of a related, but distinct evangelical tradition, the social gospel of Southern Black evangelicalism.

President Barack Obama: I was raised by a single mother. I needed some hope to get here. I got in trouble when I was a teenager. Did some things folks don't like to talk about. I needed some hope to get here.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: Matched against the avowedly secular John McCain, the Obama '08 campaign implored religious strategy in addition to rhetoric by visiting Christian college campuses in swing states. In 2008, Obama's support among young white evangelical voters was twice what John Kerry had earned four years prior. Black evangelicals, like their white counterparts, acknowledge the literal authority of the Bible, regard Jesus as the savior of humanity, and believe in God's active and continuing involvement in human lives, but historically, these claims have led the Black faithful to distinctly different political conclusions and policy prescriptions.

Perhaps, if the evangelical question in American politics were primarily about Biblical interpretation and theological commitments, 2008 might have unlinked the firm connection between white evangelicals and the Republican Party, but instead of an Obama-era cross-racial coalition of progressive evangelical action, white evangelicals coalesced behind an unlikely candidate.

President Trump: The Bible means a lot to me, but I don't want to get into specifics.

Speaker 2: Donald Trump is a man who can't even fake religious literacy, I think. In many ways, he is a rather odd champion for this political movement.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: Could evangelical voters align with President Trump as a moral good, believing that despite his personal ethical failings, he was committed to achieving the religiously motivated policy goals that they most desired, especially securing an anti-abortion federal judiciary?

Speaker 3: No, I think it's an illusion. It's a way to elide what is really going on. First, people were a little bit wary of Trump, they started getting behind him when people like Jerry Falwell Jr. said he was okay, and then their pastor said it was okay, and then it became okay because it came through authority. I think authority is a really important word to remember here because, a lot of times, what happens with evangelicals is that they respect authority.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: In 2016 to 2020, white evangelicals didn't vote like evangelicals of other races, they voted in a cross-religious coalition of whiteness. According to the Pew Research Center, 77% of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in 2016, and he earned 84% of white evangelicals 4 years later in 2020. Indeed, not only were evangelicals good for Trump but Trump was good for evangelical ism. Pew Research Center also found that during the Trump presidency, more white Americans adopted than shed the evangelical label.

Speaker 4: Certainly by the time of the emergence of Donald Trump as a political entity, the religious right represents, in my judgment, an utter betrayal of what I consider the noble legacy of 19th and early 20th-century evangelicalism as embodied by Jimmy Carter when he ran for president in 1976 and for re-election in 1980.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: When we come back, we continue our exploration of white evangelical politics and the battleground of abortion.

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Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: We're continuing our exploration of the political history and political power of white evangelicals in America. I'm speaking with Randall Balmer, author of Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right. Balmer is a professor of history and an ordained Episcopal priest. Born in Chicago, his upbringing was firmly evangelical.

Randall Balmer: When I was growing up as an evangelical in the middle decades of the 20th century, we had a very strong sense of ourselves not only as a subculture but as a counterculture. That is to say, we had our own mores, we had our own language, we had our own celebrities, but we also saw ourselves as opposing the larger dominant culture. In the middle decades of the 20th century, evangelicals were calling out the larger culture, they were afraid of the corrosive effects of a larger culture. Now evangelicals want to command the culture, want to drive the culture, and that's a very, very big difference.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: No effort more fully captures this transition from counterculture to culture warrior than the Moral Majority, founded in 1979 by conservative televangelist Jerry Falwell. The late Reverend Falwell was explicit that evangelicals must engage the political arena not only as voters but as an organized, vocal, and powerful force.

Jerry Falwell: More than 40 years ago, in my college training for the ministry, I was instructed repeatedly, "Religion and politics do not mix." The premise, I suppose, theologically, was that, ideally, if we meet the spiritual needs of society, we automatically, as a side benefit, cure the political and social ills. Idealistically, that's a correct premise, but in reality, it doesn't work out that way.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: Today, many remember the rise of conservative evangelical influence as a response to the legalization of abortion. Randall Balmer tells the story differently.

Randall Balmer: What got them organized as a political movement was not, as is frequently said, the Roe v. Wade issue or opposition to abortion, what got them interested was opposition to the Internal Revenue Service and its attempts to enforce anti-discrimination policies at evangelical institutions, including Bob Jones University. I had a conversation with Paul Weyrich, who's really the architect of the religious right, in November of 1990, and he was emphatic on this point.

He told me that he had been trying since the Goldwater campaign in 1964 to enlist evangelical voters into conservative causes. He said he tried a number of issues, he tried the abortion issue, he tried the school prayer issue, which, of course, in the early 1960s was a fairly live issue, he tried the pornography issue, he tried the women's rights issue. Nothing, he said, got the attention of evangelical leaders until the Internal Revenue Service began coming after the tax-exempt status of places like Bob Jones University, and also, not incidentally, Jerry Falwell's segregation academy in Lynchburg, Virginia.

That, he said-- He was emphatic on this point. That, he said, was the catalyst for evangelical organized political action in the 1970s. He was just as emphatic that abortion had nothing whatsoever to do with the genesis of the religious right.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: Let me fill in a few details. The late Paul Weyrich was a conservative political activist who co-founded The Heritage Foundation. Back in 1990, he told Professor Balmer that the key issue which drew white evangelicals into organized political action was not the protection of embryonic life but protection of racial segregation in education.

In 1971, the Supreme Court had ruled in Green v. Connally that the IRS could withhold tax-exempt status from racially discriminatory private schools. Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina, and Jerry Falwell's Lynchburg Christian school in Virginia were directly impacted by the ruling. Rather than openly defend racial segregation, they reframed the issue as a matter of religious freedom, a framework that might sound kind of familiar.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito: It pains me to say this, but in certain quarters, religious liberty is fast becoming a disfavored right.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: That was Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito in a speech to the Federalist Society in November of 2020. Justice Alito, who's Roman Catholic, used his speech in the Federalist Society to highlight what he defined as unfair restrictions on religious practice caused by pandemic regulations. The tone reverberated with the culture war rhetoric of Falwell's Moral Majority.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito: If you go to Nevada, you can gamble, drink, and attend all sorts of shows, but here's what you can't do. If you want to worship, and you're the 51st person in line, sorry, you are out of luck. Houses of worship are limited to 50 attendees. The size of the building doesn't matter, nor does it matter if you wear a mask and keep more than six feet away from everybody else, and it doesn't matter if the building is carefully sanitized before and after a service. The state's message is this, forget about worship and head for the slot machines or maybe a Cirque du Soleil show.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: Justice Alito is, of course, the author of the leaked draft opinion published by Politico earlier this month, which suggests the court is prepared to reverse Roe v. Wade. While segregation may have been white evangelicals' initial battleground, five decades later, the war's primary front has shifted to abortion.

Randall Balmer: Abortion became a very important issue for the religious right. I sometimes call it a godsend because it allowed them to divert attention from the real origins of this movement. It was really a two-step process to get there. That is to say, Paul Weyrich, he was a very savvy tactician. He recognized early on that it would be difficult to mobilize grassroots evangelical voters in defense simply of racial segregation or, to put it plainly, racism. He tried initially to flip the script to say, "Oh, no this is not a defense of racial segregation, this is a defense of religious freedom." Thereby writing a page from the contemporary Republican playbook that you see in the Hobby Lobby case, for example, or the Colorado Cakemaker case.

Even that didn't quite take. After the midterm elections of 1978, really by accident, Weyrich stumbled on the abortion issue. In that election cycle, the midterm elections of 1978, he concentrated on four Senate races. One in New Hampshire, one in Iowa, and two of them in Minnesota, one of them for the unexpired term of Walter Mondale. On the final weekend of that campaign, pro-lifers, Roman Catholics because abortion was a Catholic issue throughout the 1970s, leafleted church parking lots.

Two days later in an election with a very low turnout, all four favored Democratic nominees lost to anti-abortion Republicans. I recall reading through Paul Weyrich's papers, which are out at the University of Wyoming, Laramie, and coming across his correspondence surrounding that 1978 midterm election campaign. It was clear he was excited because he finally found an issue that he thought would take hold among evangelical voters.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Help me understand the reasons abortion could take hold this way? I suppose that a veiled attempt to maintain racial segregation actually makes more sense to me because it aligns to certain understandings of narrow self-interest, but why abortion? The evangelical churches I've attended taught that without choice there is no morality. That ethics and morality can only exist because God grants humanity the freedom to choose. Without choice, we would simply be predestined widgets in a divine game of chess. Is it possible that even those who articulate a moral opposition to abortion would want to retain a legal choice by the same logic?

Randall Balmer: I think the notion of volition is very important as a religious concept, the ability to choose right over wrong, good over evil. When it comes to the abortion issue, I have no interest in making abortion illegal. I would like to make it unthinkable. That is to say, "To change the moral climate surrounding that issue from a legal issue to a moral concern." That I think is a very, very different argument and one that allows individuals to exercise their moral agency without encumbering the legal system in a situation that is legally fraught.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Randall Balmer is Professor of Religion at Dartmouth College. Thank you so much for taking the time.

Randall Balmer: My pleasure, Melissa.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: Last week a settlement was reached in a lawsuit filed against Liberty University. In July 2021 a dozen women filed a federal Title IX lawsuit against the private evangelical university first founded by Jerry Falwell back in 1971. The suit alleged mishandling of cases of rape and sexual assault. No details of the settlement were made public, and Liberty faces additional lawsuits based on similar claims.

All this comes after the scandal-laced resignation of Jerry Falwell Jr. in 2020. This seeming precarity of Liberty University's moral authority in this moment raises questions about the future of conservative by evangelical political influence. Professor Butler, data shows the white evangelicals are an aging population. Do younger white evangelicals share the same political commitments of older generations or are they feeling constrained by the conservative social policies of their predecessors?

Anthea Butler: I think it depends. I think what we see with younger white evangelicals is that some of them feel very constrained because this is not the world that they would like to see or the world that they've been told. I think for older white evangelicals, which is a shrinking population, which is also the problem. I think for them that they don't feel constrained at all, they feel like it's a moral imperative. I say moral here because it is a moral imperative for them that they continue to keep the status quo. That means that you might have this [unintelligible 00:24:54].

We can see where younger evangelicals if you look at Pew or PRRI polls, they are walking out and leaving and calling themselves something else, but older evangelicals are holding steady. I think that this is a generational divide about who feels uncomfortable versus who feels comfortable in this space. Then also I think you have to look at the ways in which some of the larger evangelical denominations behave. Let's talk about the Southern Baptist Convention, which last summer had real big problems about how they wanted to talk about things like CRT and others.

A moderate won out, but then that moderate also resigned because basically, it's like, "Well, I had all these things. Yes, I took a few other sermons and put them together, and so I probably shouldn't be in office." I think this problem for the Southern Baptist is going to continue because you have a generational divide first of all, but you have some strong sentiments about what people think about CRT, about book banning, about all kinds of issues that are coded as moral issues, but also are racial issues.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Can we talk about Liberty University a bit?

Anthea Butler: Sure, we can.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Jerry Falwell Jr. is out, is this an institution that can survive without a Falwell at the leadership helm?

Anthea Butler: Yes, absolutely. It will survive without Jerry Falwell and it'll probably be better for it if Jerry Falwell is out of the way, which he is. I think that Liberty University is going through some real pain right now, the pain between the sexual abuse scandals and the way that they handle the Title IX situation, the way that Jerry Falwell Jr. basically took them in a very different direction than what they had previously been.

In terms of being politically active and his association with Trump. Then I also think that the times, as Dylan would say, they are changing, and they have to wonder how they're going to get students just the same way that everybody else is. They've had a real problem, and you know this, with African American students and they've tried to do these kinds of things that bring people in, but the racism that has been inherent in that place is pretty bad.

Melissa Harris-Perry: How are young evangelicals managing that?

Anthea Butler: I would say probably 50/50. Some of them are managing it well and finding new ways to express their faith. For others, I think this is a time of disillusionment. A lot of times what happens to evangelicals, I like to joke, is two different things. Either you just walk out and you never come back. There's a very hefty movement of exvangelicals who talk about this on Twitter, which I think is really important for people to pay attention to. Then the other half are the people who decide to go into other religious traditions that a lot of them go high church.

I think that's really interesting, to me, the people who end up either in the Episcopalian Church or the Catholic Church or someplace else, because they feel as though that gives them more of a firm grounding and to be maybe less political. I'm not sure if that's the case really as a scholar, but at least for them that gives them a sense of things. Then the other part is, as you go perhaps to another non-denominational church or an emergent church, that's a lot more hip and a lot more focused in on what you do in the community vis-à-vis political action.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I told Professor Butler about a concerned voice by several of my Wake Forest University students this semester in a course that explored issues of identity, faith, and politics. Their concern was that religious faith was incompatible with rigorous scholarly and scientific thought?

Anthea Butler: This is an interesting question. I don't have the perfect answer for it, but I will say this. I think part of the problem and what you see in your students right now is the response to the crazy. I want to put it just like that. I think that with all the vaccine kind of craziness, I don't want to wear a mask, I don't want to take the vaccine, QAnon, that's a whole another show you have to bring me back for. All these conspiracy theories and watching their parents and their grandparents say all this stuff, that they want some rationality and they want the rationality of saying that, "Science helps because I can see this and I've learned this, and I've been learning it in my classes and everything, and that makes a difference."

When you see them say that, it's that right now religious people, and especially certain kinds of religious people in this country, ie evangelicals, look like they don't have sense, and that is a problem. I would say that this response is not so much that they don't have faith, they may just want to keep it to themselves, but that faith right now is so poisonous. People may misunderstand me when I say that. What I mean by that is, faith expressions that are off the Richter scale in terms of conspiracy theories and outright lies are the kinds of faith claims that nobody wants to be seen making. Unless you really are a true believer in those kinds of fake faith claims.

There's a great book that I just read blurb the 25-year anniversary for, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind by Mark Noll. I'll give that book a shout-out because I think if you want to understand the problems with intellectualism and evangelicalism, that's the book you pick up. My book does a little bit of that, but his book really sets the stage for why we are where we are today and why evangelicals believe in things like QAnon and that the election was stolen.

Melissa Harris-Perry: If Roe v. Wade is reversed, will the evangelical moral majority voting bloc disperse with it having basically met their primary stated political goal?

Anthea Butler: No, no, no, no, no, they're not dispersing at all. They are feeling themselves as we would say out in the streets. They are feeling the headiness of a win and if they can push more things through, I mean, Mitch McConnell has already said it because he's taken his cues from these people that, let's get a federal mandate on abortion. There's all the ways in which that particular statement was written that you could see the fall Obergefell. It's not just abortion and that, it's maybe same-sex marriage and maybe other kinds of restrictions about religion in the public square. Who knows?

I think that there always be something else to aspire to for this particular group because that's the way the money's going to run. Maybe that sounds cynical, but it's really true when you have a group that is so willing to buy the books and do the conferences and the material on wokeness and CRT and everything else that they bandy about, then I think you can expect that this is not going to be the end by a longshot.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Anthea Butler is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor in American Social Thought and the Chair of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She's also author of White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America.

 

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