A recent comment suggested framing the Christian Right’s racial legacy as a question rather than an assertion. I think that is a fair point. These are issues I am grappling with as a Black follower of the Way in the United States. So here’s the question: What do we make of the documented evidence that today’s Christian Right legal infrastructure was built by leaders who explicitly defended racial segregation?
It sounds provocative, but the record is there. In this piece, I look at four prominent leaders of the Christian right and their roles in perpetuating racial hierarchy: Jerry Falwell Sr, Dr. James Dobson, Pat Robertson, and Tim LaHaye.
Jerry Falwell Sr.: In His Own Words
In 1958, Jerry Falwell, future founder of the Moral Majority, preached that “when God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line.” He was opposing school desegregation. Historians note that Falwell and others organized politically not over abortion, but to defend segregated Christian academies when the IRS threatened their tax-exempt status in the 1970s. The Moral Majority itself formed primarily to protect Bob Jones University, which banned interracial dating.
One historical analysis puts it bluntly: the Christian Right’s founding “was not about abortion or gay rights but fundamentally about the assertion of religious freedom claims in the service of white supremacy.”
The Infrastructure
These weren’t just preachers with opinions. They built institutions. Moral Majority also helped mobilize evangelical voters for Reagan’s 1980 win.
Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), co-founded in 1994 by Dobson and other leaders: now has dozens of staff lawyers and thousands of allied attorneys. It coordinates with Focus on the Family to draft model legislation and defend it in court. ADF has made “DEI’s demise” an explicit priority, pressuring corporations to abandon diversity programs.
The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) (founded in 1990 by Pat Robertson): Founded in 1990, ACLJ filed an amicus brief in the Supreme Court case that banned race-conscious college admissions. The ruling’s impact? Black enrollment fell at nearly all selective colleges examined; for example, Harvard dropped from 18% to 11.5% Black freshmen, and Princeton from 9% to 5%.
LaHaye’s Council for National Policy (CNP): This secretive network coordinates strategy across legal groups, donors, and political operatives. Investigators call it “the most powerful conservative organization you’ve never heard of.”
The Modern Outputs
Here’s where the question gets uncomfortable: What do we call it when infrastructure built by segregation defenders produces these outcomes?
EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas, echoing a ‘DEI = discrimination’ frame publicly urged white men to file discrimination claims against DEI programs, calling such programs “primarily harmful to white men.” In this legal climate, major corporations have scaled back or dropped DEI initiatives.
Federal enforcement shifted: The Trump administration ordered colleges to provide detailed race data to hunt for “racial proxies” in admissions, creating compliance pressure that campus leaders say is reducing Black applicants.
Medical school diversity declined: Black and Hispanic first-year medical students dropped notably after the affirmative action ruling, affecting representation in healthcare professions.
The Linguistic Move
The genius here is linguistic. What these leaders called “defending our way of life” in the 1950s became “religious liberty” in the 1990s and “reverse discrimination” today. The framing evolved, but the impacts remain consistent: Black and brown Americans losing access to education, employment programs, and institutional support.
Survey data adds context: 72% of white evangelical Protestants believe they face discrimination, a higher rate than any actual minority group reports for itself. One researcher calls this a “funhouse mirror” worldview where the historically dominant group sees itself as most victimized.
The Question
So what do you think? When leaders who defended segregation build legal organizations that help drive campaigns that dismantle college diversity programs, corporate DEI initiatives, and civil rights enforcement priorities, resulting in measurable declines in Black access to elite institutions, what are we observing?
Is this coincidence? Unintended consequences? Or is it infrastructure working as designed, just with better PR?
The evidence is documented. The question is how we interpret it, and whether we’re willing to follow the through-line from explicit segregation defense to today’s “colorblind” legal campaigns that produce strikingly similar outcomes.
What do you think?
Note: All claims sourced from historical records, court documents, news reporting from Reuters/AP/Washington Post, and academic analyses cited in the research documents.