A generation back, in the late 1970s, the Carter administration began to crack down on "segregation academies" in the Deep South, formed to take white kids out of public schools when integration was finally law in ALL the land.
The white academies were often affiliated with evangelical and fundamentalist churches. In the view of Randall Balmer, an Episcopal priest and Columbia University scholar, "The religious right of the late 20th Century was organized to perpetuate racial discrimination."
Paul Weyrich, one of the religious right's organizers, once explained how he tried to rouse fundamentalists with the abortion issue, and later the Equal Rights Amendment. "What changed their minds," Weyrich explained, "was Jimmy Carter's intervention against the church schools, trying to deny them tax exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation."