IRS Tightens Private School Tax Exemption Rules Catalyzing Religious Right Political Mobilization

In August 1978, the IRS proposes new rules tightening tax-exempt status requirements for private elementary and secondary schools under IRC 501(c)(3) and begins holding hearings to determine whether segregated Christian academies should be eligible for tax exemption. The announcement triggers the mass political mobilization that creates the modern Religious Right movement.

Paul Weyrich, conservative activist and founding father of the Religious Right, later states explicitly: “What got us going as a political movement was the attempt on the part of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to rescind the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University because of its racially discriminatory policies.” Weyrich explains: “It shattered the Christian community’s notion that Christians could isolate themselves inside their own institutions and teach what they pleased.”

For nearly two decades, Weyrich has been trying different issues to engage evangelical political interest: pornography, prayer in schools, the proposed Equal Rights Amendment, even abortion. “I was trying to get these people interested in those issues and I utterly failed,” Weyrich recalls at a 1990 conference. But the IRS rules spark immediate mass mobilization. Weyrich recalls: “What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter’s intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax exemption on the basis of so-called de facto segregation.”

Weyrich and other leaders of the nascent religious right blame President Jimmy Carter for the IRS actions against segregated schools—even though the policy was mandated by Nixon, and Bob Jones University lost its tax exemption a year and a day before Carter was inaugurated as president. The ability to frame the issue as government overreach against religious freedom rather than civil rights enforcement proves crucial to building a broad political coalition.

Working with Richard Viguerie (the conservative direct mail mogul), Howard Phillips, and John “Terry” Dolan, Weyrich recognizes that “organizing a grassroots political movement around the defense of racial segregation, essentially the defense of racism, was not going to be effective, and so they began looking for other issues.” Only in 1979, a full six years after Roe v. Wade, does Weyrich urge evangelical leaders to also crusade against abortion as a more politically viable mobilizing issue.

In 1979, Weyrich meets with televangelist Jerry Falwell and launches the Moral Majority, which raises nearly $100 million in its first two years and claims to have registered nearly ten million conservative voters. The organization becomes the political vehicle for mobilizing evangelical Christians into the conservative movement, helping elect Ronald Reagan in 1980.

The 1978 IRS action demonstrates how the segregationist resistance infrastructure from the 1950s-1960s is successfully repurposed for the broader conservative movement. The organizational networks established through White Citizens’ Councils, segregation academies, and state-level massive resistance provide the foundation for Religious Right mobilization. The strategy of reframing racial issues as matters of religious freedom, parental rights, and resistance to government overreach—pioneered during massive resistance—becomes the template for conservative movement messaging on abortion, LGBTQ rights, and religious liberty.