Land Responds to Balmer

A few days ago I wrote a blog about Randall Balmer's online debate with Richard Land. Balmer seemed to get the best of Land in that debate.

I recently discovered that Land carried on the debate offline by responding to Balmer on his personal weblog. In a blog entitled "Debunking Segregationist Academy Myth" Land said:

C'mon Randall. You're a better historian than that. You continue to perpetuate this inside-the-beltway urban myth that the religious right "organized a political movement effectively to defend racial segregation" as a result of Carter administration efforts to lift the tax-exempt status of private Christian academies. This one just doesn't pass the "smell test," Randall. Most people involved in the pro-life movement didn't and don't send their children to such academies. As I said earlier, I was a sergeant in the pro-life movement from the mid-70s onward and I attended no rallies to defend private schools. If such rallies had been held, few, if any, would have attended. Most Evangelicals I knew considered Bob Jones' segregationist policies to be abhorrent and embarrassing.

I think there is little doubt that Land and many other Evangelicals did consider Bob Jones' segregationist policies to be "abhorrent and embarrassing." Land, by his own admission, was only a "foot-soldier and non commissioned officer" or a "sergeant" in the Religious Right in the 1970's. He was not sitting inside Jerry Falwell's office when the Moral Majority was launched. Paul Weyrich co-founder of the Moral Majority, on the other hand, was sitting in Jerry Falwell's office encouraging him to lead a movement of evangelicals into secular politics. Here's what Weyrich said according to William Martin, author of With God and Our Side and the companion PBS documentary series by the same name:

Paul Weyrich emphatically asserted that, "what galvanized the Christian community was not abortion, school prayer, or the ERA. I am living witness to that because I was trying to get those 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." Weyrich explained that while Christians were troubled about abortion, school prayer, and the ERA, they felt able to deal with those on a private basis. They could avoid having abortions, put their children in Christian schools, and run their families the way they wanted to, all without having to be concerned about public policy. But the IRS threat, "enraged the Christian community and they looked upon it as interference from government, and suddenly it dawned on them that they were not going to be able to be left alone to teach their children as they pleased. It was at that moment that conservatives made the linkage between their opposition to government interference and the interests of the evangelical movement, which now saw itself on the defensive and under attack by the government. That was what brought those people into the political process. It was not the other things." (With God on Our Side, p. 173)

Martin also received corroborative statements from leaders of the Christian School Action movement, later the National Christian Action Coalition, which was founded to fight the IRS at that time.

Anyone who has read Martin's book and viewed the companion video series will comprehend the feebleness of Land's attempt to defend the myth that opposition to abortion prompted evangelical activism in politics.