The Moral Majority and the Rise of the Christian Right

In June 1979, Jerry Falwell and conservative political organizers founded the Moral Majority. Within little more than a year, the organization was helping mobilize white evangelical voters for Ronald Reagan. A religious constituency that many political strategists had considered politically fragmented or dormant became a central force in Republican politics.

The Moral Majority demonstrated what becomes possible when congregations, religious broadcasting, direct mail, donor networks, schools, trusted leaders, and a defined political agenda are organized together. It was not merely a collection of conservative opinions. It was an exercise in institution-building.

The organization did not arise from nothing. Conservative Protestant political activity had a long history. Fundamentalists and evangelicals had organized around anticommunism, public education, obscenity, family life, taxation, foreign policy, and opposition to theological liberalism. Religious broadcasters had already learned how to build national audiences and donor lists. Christian schools and colleges had created institutional networks beyond local congregations.

What changed in the 1970s was the concentration of several concerns into a durable political coalition.

The movement’s own narratives often identify the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision as the decisive catalyst. Concern for unborn life was sincere and eventually became one of the Christian Right’s most powerful organizing commitments. But historians have also documented the importance of federal efforts to deny tax-exempt status to racially discriminatory private schools, including institutions serving white families resisting public-school desegregation.

These explanations should not be reduced to a contest in which only one can be true. Conflicts over segregated Christian academies helped mobilize some institutional leaders and political strategists. Abortion, anticommunism, feminism, the Equal Rights Amendment, school prayer, pornography, gay rights, public education, and fears of secularization helped expand and sustain the movement. Ordinary voters did not necessarily join for the same reasons that initially motivated political entrepreneurs. himself embodied the transition. In 1965, he criticized civil-rights clergy for entering politics. By the late 1970s, he was holding “I Love America” rallies and working with strategists including Paul Weyrich, Richard Viguerie, Ed McAteer, and Howard Phillips.

The church had not suddenly discovered that politics mattered. It had changed which politics it considered legitimate.

The Moral Majority was one organization within a larger formation. The New Christian Right included political strategists, advocacy groups, broadcasters, publishers, legal organizations, pastors, donors, and voters. The wider Religious Right also involved conservative Catholics,........

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