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10 things conservative Christians got horribly wrong
Evangelicals and their ilk have used God to justify everything from
Prohibition and segregation to slavery

When Christians get political, they often do so because they believe
that they have God on their side. This is true whether they are
progressive or conservative, and throughout most of American history
there have been both. (You’d think that the conflicting claims about
what God wants would lead to more doubting, but here we are.) Looking
over the long history of people claiming to be speaking for God’s
wishes, it quickly becomes evident that Christians are frequently on the
wrong side of history. Here are 10 things that American Christians of
the conservative stripe got completely wrong when they were so sure they
were speaking on God’s behalf.

1) Slavery. Both sides of the American slavery debate claimed to be
speaking from profound Christian conviction. The Bible clearly has a
positive view of slavery, something pro-slavery Christians routinely
pointed out. Abolitionists took a broader, less literal view of the
Bible. Unsurprising that this divide led to the South being, to this
day, home of the most people who take a literalist, fundamentalist view
of Christianity.

Of course, nowadays you can’t find even the most literalist fan of the
Bible who is willing to agree with their predecessors in the 19th
century who believed the Bible endorsed slavery. Of the many things
conservative Christians have gotten wrong over the years, the
pro-slavery argument is probably the one that is least likely to be
revived by modern fundamentalists.

2) Women’s suffrage. Unsurprisingly, conservative Christianity was
hostile to women’s suffrage, just as it’s been hostile to women’s
progress every step of the way. Women’s “God-given” roles were routinely
referenced in arguments against giving women the right to vote, such as
when Susan Fenimore Cooper—daughter of James Fenimore Cooper–wrote in
Harper’s that “Christianity confirms the subordinate position of woman,
by allotting to man the headship in plain language and by positive precept.”

While the argument is clearly wrong in retrospect and disavowed by most
modern conservatives, there are still some Christian conservatives who
continue to believe that the issue isn’t resolved and should still be up
for debate.

3) Evolution. From the second it became evident that the Biblical story
of creation was wrong and life on earth evolved over millions of years
of random mutation, many Christians were aghast and resisted the truth
getting out as hard as they could. Because of this, there have been
multiple times throughout history where Christians embarrassed
themselves by being wrong in a dramatic courtroom setting. The Scopes
monkey trial is the most famous, but the Dover trial of 2005 over the
teaching of intelligent design in schools is up there in terms of sheer
humor. The Republican-appointed judge even went so far as to describe
the Christian conservative defenders of creationism as liars pushing a
theory of “breathtaking inanity.”

4) Pain relief for childbirth. The Bible explicitly lays out pain in
childbirth as Eve’s punishment for sin, so unsurprisingly, that’s what
many Christians in the 19th century believed had to be so. Once reliable
pain relief in childbirth began to be developed, therefore, there was a
lot of resistance to it from Christians who feared it defied God to let
women have some relief. The truth is that pain in childbirth is not a
punishment from God, but the product of evolution, which is a far from
perfect process. Eventually, the argument that women owed it to God to
suffer through childbirth faded to the fringes of right-wing
Christianity. “Natural” childbirth has seen a resurgence in popularity
in the secular world since the 1960s, but that was more of a reaction to
some medical overreach than a belief that women are sinful and deserve
to suffer.

5) Catholics. Modern American conservative Protestants embrace Catholics
and have even started to borrow some Catholic arguments against things
like abortion and contraception. But in the early 19th and 20th
centuries, there was widespread anti-Catholic sentiment, much of it tied
up in hostility to Catholic immigrants. There was even an anti-Catholic
political party in the early 19th century. Catholics were viewed as
idolaters and drunkards by many Protestants, but by far the most bizarre
relic of anti-Catholic paranoia is the fear that evil shenanigans were
going on in nunneries. A woman writing under the pseudonym “Maria Monk”
penned a best-selling book where she claimed to have escaped a convent
where she was forced to be a sex slave and pressed into the act of
killing babies and hiding their corpses. Needless to say, none of her
accusations should be taken as anything approaching true. Anti-Catholic
paranoia also led to another Christian-led folly…

6) Prohibition. Hostility to Catholic immigrants was a large part of the
reason temperance mania took over many Protestant communities in the
19th and early 20th centuries. Despite the fact that Jesus was a wine
drinker, abstinence from alcohol—and forcing abstinence on others by
force of law—became a major Christian cause during this period, leading
up to Prohibition. This was true, even though many in the temperance
movement were also aligned with the suffragist cause, making Prohibition
one of the few Christian follies that weighs as heavily on the
progressive Christian tradition as it does the conservative one.
Luckily, it took little more than a decade for the bigtime error that
was banning alcohol to be fixed.

7) Segregation. Religious leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. led the
desegregation movement, but it’s also important to note that the
pro-segregation movement was also conceived as a Christian one.
Arguments against “race mixing” were largely framed in religious terms.
The judge who initially ruled against the interracial couple in Loving
v. Virginia argued that the “Almighty God” put people on separate
continents and “did not intend for the races to mix.” Christian right
leader Jerry Falwell got his start fighting to uphold segregation,
giving sermons about how integration was offensive to God. As Max
Blumenthalnoted in the Nation, the modern religious right as we know it
started off as a movement to defend segregation.

8) Contraception. From the beginning of the “birth control movement,”
Christian conservatives fought to keep women from being able to have sex
without getting pregnant. Devout Christian Anthony Comstock successfully
convinced Congress in 1872 that contraception was ungodly, leading to a
federal ban on sharing birth control information across state lines.
This was finally repealed in 1936. In 1963, the Supreme Court ended
anti-contraception laws for married women. Finally, in 1971, the Supreme
Court also eliminated the last of the god-bothering anti-contraception
laws banning birth control for single people. Nowadays, 99 percent of
sexually active women have used contraception at some point in their lives.

9) School prayer. Along with supporting segregation and opposing
feminism, the third issue that created the modern religious right is the
issue of prayer in public schools. In 1961, the Supreme Court ruled
against school-led prayers, even if they were supposedly voluntary.
Instead of giving up a chance to use schools as a way to foist their
beliefs on the unwilling, the religious right spent and continues to
spend the next 50-plus years trying to find some way to sneak religious
indoctrination/bullying of non-believers into public schools. They’ve
attempted to sneak it in by having students lead it, as if that makes it
less coercive. Recently, in Rhode Island, they tried to sneak it in by
having it written on a wall instead of recited. Most attempts fail in
court. Even though there’s no evidence that these bullying tactics have
ever converted anyone to their faith, they keep trying.

10) Marriage equality. The religious right is still fighting like it’s
not obvious that they’re wrong on this one. The tide is shifting so fast
it’s quickly becoming apparent that this issue, like segregation, is
going to be one where they’ll be pretending they didn’t fight so hard
for the side of wrong in a few decades. The majority of Americans now
support same-sex marriage. Illinois is becoming the 15th state to
authorize it. The momentum is in the direction of justice, and as gay
rights proponents said from the beginning, Christian conservatives are,
as with most things, on the wrong side of history.

Amanda Marcotte

Amanda Marcotte is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer and
journalist. She's published two books and blogs regularly at Pandagon,
RH Reality Check and Slate's Double X.

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