Book excerpt: the religious right's "abortion myth" and racist provenance

That the fundamentalist anti-abortion movement didn't appear until nearly two decades after Roe v Wade was news to me. That it was a convenient vehicle for mobilizing evangelical voters to support institutional racism was news, too.

The author, a professors of religion at Columbia University (uh-oh, must be a radical propagandist) looks at the rise of the movement under Ralph Reed, Jerry Falwell, et al.

The abortion myth serves as a convenient fiction because it suggests noble and altruistic motives behind the formation of the Religious Right. But it is highly disingenuous and renders absurd the argument of the leaders of Religious Right that, in defending the rights of the unborn, they are the "new abolitionists." The Religious Right arose as a political movement for the purpose, effectively, of defending racial discrimination at Bob Jones University and at other segregated schools. Whereas evangelical abolitionists of the nineteenth century sought freedom for African Americans, the Religious Right of the late twentieth century organized to perpetuate racial discrimination. Sadly, the Religious Right has no legitimate claim to the mantle of the abolitionist crusaders of the nineteenth century. (. . .)

Falwell and others who eventually became leaders of the Religious Right, in fact, explicitly condemned the civil rights movement. "Believing the Bible as I do," Falwell proclaimed in 1965, "I would find it impossible to stop preaching the pure saving gospel of Jesus Christ, and begin doing anything else—including fighting Communism, or participating in civil-rights reforms."