Randall Balmer

That didn't come until six or seven years later.

There's a historian named Randall Balmer that does some really good work on this.

The first issue they chose was the forced desegregation of Christian colleges and schools because of the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, one of the crowning achievements of the civil rights movement.

That act, many years later, was starting to force schools, colleges like Bob Jones University and lots of Christian colleges and schools across the South to integrate.

Wade in '73 mobilized evangelicals into politics.

Um, the challenge associated most closely with Randall Balmer of Dartmouth is that the actual catalyst was federal action against tax exemptions of segregated Christian schools, and that abortion became an organizing issue later.

Um, Balmer's documentary spine is strong.

It, it...

This extends all the way to the culture war issues as well.

Historian Randall Balmer argues that the religious right first started to organize to defend racial segregation and only later began to rally around ending abortion in the 1970s and through 1980s and today because of this desegregation.

And so it wasn't a big issue in the church.

And then around the 1970s when they're like, oh yeah, you're going to have to start desegregating your private schools, that's when all of a sudden abortion became this really huge issue in the church and things started getting more right-coded.