Growth of the Christian Right
The growing Christian right emerged just as North Carolina took up the Equal Rights Amendment.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Mary Turner Lane, September 9 and 16, 1986; May 21, 1987; October 1 and 28, 1987. Interview L-0039. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
There was also—I'm trying to think
when this sort of growing conservative Christian movement came along. I
think that began here at the end of the seventies and the beginning of
the eighties, where you had an enormous swell of students involved in
Christian Athletes. What is that group called on Campus?
- PAMELA DEAN:
-
I can't remember.
- MARY TURNER LANE:
-
It's an undergraduate group, and I'm astounded at
the number who are involved in that. There's an Inter-Varsity
group. There's the Campus Crusade group, and those groups
adhere very closely to traditional norms. In fact, I was invited to give
one of the last lectures, you know, the program that the senior class
has in the spring, and they ask about five different professors to make
last remarks. I spoke very much in the sense of awareness of gender,
awareness of male and female, whether you're going on into
marriage or going on into work or whatever. And a young woman, who I
learned later on was very active in one of these religious groups,
chastised me for what I had said—that what I had said was
appropriate in my own class but not for a group like that. And I said my
concern was that you hear it at least once
before you graduate since you are a senior. But that strong religious
campus movement was beginning then. The Bible Church began then.
Although that was an off-campus organization, many students were caught
up in it. So while the women's movement was there, this other
conservative movement really was beginning. Phyllis Schlafly was
very—oh, the other thing, you see, was we were debating ERA
in North Carolina.
- PAMELA DEAN:
-
Right, repeatedly. [laughter]
- MARY TURNER LANE:
-
Yes, we were. That was on the agenda of the state legislature. That
polarized people dramatically. The students brought in Phyllis Schlafly
and Betty Freidan for a debate. I begged them not to because that meant
that Phyllis Schlafly would then be in the state at the time that the
state legislature was in session. And I think some very conservative
students did that deliberately. She was already invited by the time I
got to them. So that was the, that resistance, I think, was the
resistance to change, I believe in retrospect, was greater than
opposition on the part of faculty or departments or anything else.