Randall Balmer - Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right

I have been waiting for this book. Randall Balmers Bad Faith is the essential reader for all who want to know how America was pushed to the brink and how the evangelical church was led off a cliff. Balmers Bad Faith tells the story of how white supremacy was, and continues to be, the central motivating factor of the Religious Rightnot abortion. This quick and easy read packs a mighty punch. Every American must read this book before they cast their next vote.

Lisa Sharon Harper
author of The Very Good Gospel

This brilliant, readable detective story demonstrates that the Religious Right, far from speaking for all evangelicals, has masked its recentand deviantorigin among groups advocating white supremacy. Here Randall Balmer, our most influential historian of American evangelical Christianity, sets forth the evidence and calls for evangelical Christians to return to their actual sourcesthe teachings of Jesus.

Elaine Pagels
Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton University

Bad Faith is a fantastic primer on one of the most potent and controversial political forces of the past half centurythe Religious Right. Bad Faith upends the tidy narrative that protesting abortion was the issue that rallied evangelicals in the political realm. Randall Balmers historical research helps restore the true and infuriating story, that racism, once again, played a central role in shaping the political and religious landscape of the nation. Before you read another headline or write another social media post about religion, race, or politics, read this book.

Jemar Tisby
New York Times bestselling author of The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Churchs Complicity in Racism

This compelling, timely, tremendously important book is nothing less than the definitive origin story of the Religious Right. Balmer performs an essential service in definitively debunking the myth that the Religious Right was originally organized around opposition to abortion. The revealing and damning truth is that the Religious Right was initially organized in opposition to desegregating private Christian schools, which confirms that the Religious Right has always been racialized in its tactics and political aims. Their most recent embrace of Trumpism and all it represents is therefore the fruit of a poisonous tree of white supremacy and the Religious Rights racial grievance politics nearly half a century in the making. You simply must read this book.

Jim Wallis
New York Times bestselling author of Christ in Crisis? Reclaiming Jesus in a Time of Fear, Hate, and Violence

In spare and elegant prose, Balmer demolishes the myth that abortion was the issue that launched the Religious Right and replaces it with uncomfortable fact: it was always about race. More than that, Balmer asks us to consider the consequences of the later suppression of that fact, and points to a profound connection between that willful forgetting and the alliance of the Religious Right with white supremacy and racist demagoguery today. Bad Faith invites us all to rethink our assumptions about the nexus of race, religion, and politics and the origins of our present crisis.

Katherine Stewart
author of The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism

It is time evangelicals are better understood. They matter. Trump. Need I say more? As someone who helped contribute to fomenting the lie-based Republican strategy of a pro-life platform back in the 1970s and 80s, and who has heartily repented of my and my father Francis Schaeffers part in making abortion the divisive litmus test it became, it is a relief to read the hard unvarnished and unlovely truth Balmer exposes in Bad Faith. America has paid dearly for the incursion of far-right evangelicals into her politics. The word timely hardly covers it in describing Balmers book. Anyone who wants to find the way back from the evangelical/Republican suicide pact of the Trump years needs to read this book.

Frank Schaeffer
author of Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back

Also by Randall Balmer

Solemn Reverence: The Separation of Church and State in American Life

Evangelicalism in America

Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter

First Freedom: The Fight for Religious Liberty

The Making of Evangelicalism: From Revivalism to Politics and Beyond

God in the White House: How Faith Shaped the Presidency from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush

Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America

Religion in American Life: A Short History [with Jon Butler and Grant Wacker]

Protestantism in America [with Lauren F. Winner]

Encyclopedia of Evangelicalism

Growing Pains: Learning to Love My Fathers Faith

Religion in Twentieth Century America

Blessed Assurance: A History of Evangelicalism in America

Grant Us Courage: Travels along the Mainline of American Protestantism

The Presbyterians [with John R. Fitzmier]

Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America

A Perfect Babel of Confusion: Dutch Religion and English Culture in the Middle Colonies

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

4035 Park East Court SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546

www.eerdmans.com

2021 Randall Balmer

All rights reserved

Published 2021

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN 978-0-8028-7934-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Balmer, Randall Herbert, author.

Title: Bad faith : race and the rise of the religious right / Randall Balmer.

Description: Grand Rapids, Michigan : William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Summary: A history of the origins of the Religious Right that challenges the commonly held misconception that abortion was its original galvanizing issueProvided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020056557 | ISBN 9780802879349 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Religious rightUnited StatesHistory. | EvangelicalismPolitical aspectsUnited StatesHistory. | AbortionPolitical aspectsUnited StatesHistory. | RacismUnited StatesReligious aspects.

Classification: LCC BR1642.U5 B338 2021 | DDC 277.3/0825dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020056557

For my contemporaries in Sunday school at Highland Park Evangelical Free Church, Des Moines, Iowa

I dont want to see religious bigotry in any form. It would disturb me if there was a wedding between the religious fundamentalists and the political right. The hard right has no interest in religion except to manipulate it.

Billy Graham,
Parade Magazine, 1981

Part One:
Evangelicalism before the Religious Right

Part Two:
The Abortion Myth and the Rise of the Religious Right

In 1990, I was invited to a closed-door conference in Washington, DC, marking the tenth anniversary of Ronald Reagans election to the presidency. I wasnt sure then why I was included, although I now suspect it was because the previous year I had published a book about American evangelicalism, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America