One Week
Jerry Falwell, who died last week at 73, did more to launch the modern Christian right than any other figure in the past 50 years, but his career also illustrated the limits of the movement as it tried to translate its political clout into law.
Until Falwell came to the helm of the Moral Majority in 1979, white evangelicals were largely disengaged from American political life. When the so-called New Right began organizing after Barry Goldwater's unsuccessful 1964 presidential campaign, conservative activists in Washington began eyeing evangelicals as potential allies who would be the foot soldiers of their political revolution. But New Right activists were unsuccessful in drawing evangelicals into their fold until they recruited Falwell, founder of what would later become Liberty University and host of the nationally broadcast television show Old Time Gospel Hour, to run the fledgling Moral Majority.
Falwell used the organization to focus his activism on evangelical pastors, telling them that issues like abortion rights and gay rights required them to stop viewing politics as a dirty business unfit for churchgoers. His activism paid off early. While white evangelicals had backed Jimmy Carter-a Southern Baptist who'd taught Sunday school in Georgia-in 1976, they broke 2 to 1 for Ronald Reagan in 1980, establishing themselves as a lasting base of Republican support. Falwell was a frequent guest in the Reagan White House.
But such treatment yielded few real policy results for the Christian right. Reagan's first Supreme Court nominee, Sandra Day O'Connor, was a social moderate. Though Reagan brought Falwell to the White House to announce support for a constitutional amendment enshrining a right to prayer in public schools, his administration did little to support it, and the measure died. The Moral Majority closed in 1989. That same year, Pat Robertson would launch the Christian Coalition, which built a grass-roots network populated by political professionals. Today, still more sophisticated Christian conservative groups such as James Dobson's Focus on the Family are the vanguard. But it's unlikely that either organization would have become a force without applying the lessons of Falwell's failures.
This story appears in the May 28, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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