“The religious right rose to fight abortion.”

VerdictMisleading

Roe v. Wade came in 1973, and the Southern Baptist Convention supported legal abortion in limited cases in 1971, 1974 and 1976. The Moral Majority formed in 1979, after IRS action against the tax exemptions of segregated Christian schools, which strategist Paul Weyrich later named as what mobilized evangelicals. Historians dispute how much weight race deserves, and pro-life conviction grew sincerely in the same years.Last checked October 2026

If you grew up in the evangelical church, you likely absorbed a very specific origin story about the modern Religious Right. The narrative goes like this: in 1973, the Supreme Court handed down Roe v. Wade, and conservative Christians, horrified by the legalization of abortion, spontaneously rose up in unified moral outrage to defend the unborn.

It is a powerful, noble origin story. For millions of deeply sincere, pro-life evangelicals today, defending the unborn is the absolute center of their political engagement.

But if we are going to be honest brokers of our own history, we have to look at the calendar. If the evangelical political machine was built in direct response to Roe, it would have organized in 1973. It didn’t. The Moral Majority wasn’t founded until 1979.

So, what happened during those missing years?

The Missing Five Years

When we trace the actual events of the 1970s, the timeline reveals a very different catalyst for the mobilization of conservative evangelicals.

SBC Resolutions

1971-1976 The Southern Baptist Convention (the largest evangelical denomination in the country) calls in 1971 for laws allowing abortion in cases of rape, incest, severe fetal deformity, and risk to the mother’s health, and reaffirms that position in 1974 and 1976.

Roe v. Wade

Jan 1973 The Supreme Court issues its landmark ruling. The Catholic Church immediately mobilizes in opposition. Conservative evangelicals, however, largely view abortion as a “Catholic issue” and remain on the political sidelines.

The IRS Action

1976 The IRS formally revokes the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University over its ban on interracial dating. The revocation is retroactive to 1970.

The Carter IRS proposal

1978 The IRS proposes stripping tax exemptions from private schools that can’t demonstrate they aren’t segregated in practice, a far broader move that threatens thousands of “segregation academies” at once. Protest mail floods Washington. This is the spark most participants later name.

The Moral Majority

1979 Pastor Jerry Falwell launches the Moral Majority with conservative strategists including Paul Weyrich. Abortion is eventually elevated as the unifying public platform.

The Movement’s Own Architect

Historian Randall Balmer has heavily documented what actually happened in the gap between 1973 and 1979. According to his research, the catalyst that finally unified the Religious Right wasn’t the Supreme Court decision on abortion; it was the federal government taking action against the tax exemptions of segregated Christian schools.

The clearest statement of this comes from the movement’s own architect.

At a closed-door conference in Washington, D.C. in November 1990 — a gathering that included figures like Richard Land, Ralph Reed, and Donald Wildmon — conservative strategist Paul Weyrich spoke candidly about how the movement had actually come together. Balmer, who was present, has written about what he said, and the remarks were later published. Weyrich explained that he had spent years since the 1960s trying to get evangelicals politically engaged on school prayer, pornography, the Equal Rights Amendment, and abortion, and had failed every time.

What finally worked was something else. In Weyrich’s own words, as Balmer reports them:

“I was trying to get these people interested in those issues and I utterly failed.”

“What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter’s intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation.”

He wasn’t confessing a scandal. He was talking strategy with allies, describing what had worked. That’s what makes the statement so useful: it’s the movement’s chief organizer, among friends, naming the thing that actually lit the fire.

And he isn’t the only witness. Ed Dobson, formerly Jerry Falwell’s assistant at the Moral Majority, said at the same 1990 conference: “The Religious New Right did not start because of a concern about abortion. I sat in the non-smoke-filled back room with the Moral Majority, and I frankly do not remember abortion being mentioned as a reason why we ought to do something.” The conservative activist Grover Norquist, speaking to U.S. News & World Report in 2009, put the origin in “’77 or ’78 with the Carter administration’s attack on Christian schools and radio stations.” Three people inside the movement, describing the same thing.

Engaging the Pushback: A Scholarly Dispute

If you dig into this history, you will find that Balmer’s account is contested. To be intellectually honest, we must engage this pushback rather than sweeping it under the rug.

Critics of Balmer, most notably voices from The Gospel Coalition and several conservative historians, argue that this narrative unfairly reduces a complex religious awakening to pure racism. They make two fair counterpoints:

  • The Fear of IRS Overreach: They argue the anger wasn’t strictly about defending segregation, but a broader fear of state overreach. When the IRS went after Christian schools, evangelicals saw the federal government threatening the autonomy of Christian institutions writ large. If the government could dictate admissions policies, what would it dictate next?
  • Organic Pro-Life Sentiment: Critics also point out that grassroots evangelical discomfort with abortion was genuinely growing in the late 1970s, heavily influenced by Catholic anti-abortion activists and by evangelical theologian Francis Schaeffer’s influential film series, Whatever Happened to the Human Race?

Both points have merit, and the honest version of this history holds room for them. Pro-life conviction did grow, and it was sincere. The fear of federal reach into Christian institutions was real and not reducible to a defense of racism in every heart that felt it.

Letting the Dates Arbitrate

We don’t need to flatten this nuance to understand what happened. We can readily acknowledge that the pro-life conviction of millions of everyday evangelicals today, and even in the late 1970s, is entirely sincere.

But when it comes to the origins of the political machine, we have to let the dates arbitrate the dispute.

Even if we fully accept the conservative defense that the trigger was a broader fear of “IRS overreach,” the historical fact remains undeniable: the specific object of that IRS action was a racially discriminatory policy. In Balmer’s reading, the political apparatus of the Religious Right was built to protect institutional tax exemptions from federal civil rights enforcement.

Balmer argues that abortion became the primary public focus because Weyrich, Falwell and other strategists recognized that rallying grassroots evangelicals to defend segregated schools would be a losing strategy. Defending the unborn, however, provided a powerful, unassailable moral crusade that could unify millions.

The Texas Parallel: The Engine of Segregation

This fusion of fundamentalist religion and racial conservatism wasn’t invented in Washington in the late 1970s. It was a political machine that had already been running for decades, particularly in the American South.

If you want to see how those religious and racial currents ran together, look at Texas.

In his book One State Under God, historian Joseph L. Locke devotes a chapter, “The Most Segregated Hour,” to exactly this dynamic. Long before Jerry Falwell became a household name, a bombastic Fort Worth pastor named J. Frank Norris built an early blueprint for the politically weaponized fundamentalist megachurch.

For decades, religious machinery in places like Texas was intertwined with the defense of Jim Crow. The transition the Religious Right made in the late 1970s, from defending segregation to fighting the “culture wars,” wasn’t an abrupt pivot. It was the evolution of a political architecture that had already been built, tested, and funded on Southern soil.

The Takeaway

Acknowledging this history does not require anyone to abandon their pro-life convictions. A cause can be genuine today even if it was chosen for strategic reasons yesterday.

But understanding this history matters. It means the political movement that claims to represent God’s will in America was not born from a spontaneous desire to protect the vulnerable. It was assembled by political operatives who needed a moral banner to defend their institutions from civil-rights enforcement, and who found one. When we know how the machine was built, we are less likely to let it do our thinking for us today.

Related claims

Sources

  • Weyrich’s statement: Randall Balmer, who attended the November 1990 conference, recounts it in Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right (Eerdmans, 2021) and in The Historian’s Pickaxe, which prints Weyrich’s remarks as quoted in William Martin, With God on Our Side (Broadway Books, 1996), p. 173. His 2014 Politico essay “The Real Origins of the Religious Right” quotes the “I utterly failed” remark from the same conference.
  • Corroborating witnesses: Ed Dobson’s remarks at the 1990 conference and Grover Norquist’s 2009 interview with Dan Gilgoff of U.S. News & World Report, both as quoted in Balmer, The Historian’s Pickaxe (citing Michael Cromartie, ed., No Longer Exiles, Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1993).
  • The legal timeline: Green v. Connally (1971); IRS Revenue Ruling 71-447; the 1976 revocation of Bob Jones University’s exemption (upheld in Bob Jones University v. United States, 461 U.S. 574 (1983)); the 1978 IRS proposal on private-school segregation.
  • The SBC’s position: Southern Baptist Convention resolutions of 1971, 1974 and 1976 supporting legal abortion in limited circumstances.
  • The Texas parallel: Joseph L. Locke, One State Under God (University of Texas Press, 2026), chapter “The Most Segregated Hour”; on J. Frank Norris.