Christian right
Early history and rise, 1970s–1980s

The movement that would become the Christian right had much of its origin in the work and activism of conservative operative Paul Weyrich, who had foreseen the potential to organize conservative Evangelicals and Roman Catholics into a political force in the early 1960s and had reportedly started trying to do so during the 1964 U.S. Presidential election. Weyrich tried a number of wedge issues throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, including abortion, pornography, the proposed Equal Rights Amendment, and school prayer, without success. Weyrich was not successful until the legality of segregation academies began to be challenged in the early 1970s. In 1970, the Internal Revenue Service adopted a policy of rescinding the tax-exempt status of private schools that did not admit African–American students, and the following year, the Supreme Court ruled in Coit v. Green that organizations that voluntarily practice racial discrimination are not eligible for tax exemption. The origin of this case was a legal challenge to the tax-exempt status of a group of segregation academies in Holmes County, Mississippi. Many of the schools targeted by these rulings were church-sponsored, and these actions reportedly caught the attention of a number of evangelical leaders, including Jerry Falwell. The largest educational institution targeted by the IRS was Bob Jones University, which lost its tax exemption in 1976 due to its policy prohibiting interracial dating. This action reportedly further caught the ire of evangelical leaders, many of whom believed that the IRS was overstepping its legal authority. Weyrich also sought to frame the IRS crackdown on segregation academics as an issue of government intrusion and attacks on religious freedom, effectively diverting attention from the racial aspect of the issue.
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