Wikipedia Deep Dive

Moral Majority

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The Preacher Who Changed American Politics

In 1979, a Baptist minister from Lynchburg, Virginia did something that Baptist ministers weren't supposed to do. He got into politics.

Jerry Falwell Sr. had spent years building one of the largest independent Baptist churches in America. Thomas Road Baptist Church wasn't just a congregation—it was a media empire, complete with a television program called the Old Time Gospel Hour that reached millions of homes. Falwell had mailing lists, donors, and a network of fellow ministers who shared his views. What he didn't have, until that summer, was a political organization.

The Moral Majority would change that. Over the next decade, it would help elect presidents, reshape the Republican Party, and create a template for religious political activism that endures to this day. It would also demonstrate both the power and the limitations of mixing faith with electoral politics.

The Road to Political Engagement

Traditional Baptist theology held firm to the separation of church and state. Preachers were supposed to save souls, not swing elections. Falwell himself had once believed this. But by the mid-1970s, he was having second thoughts.

What changed his mind? Falwell described it as watching the nation's morality decay around him. The Supreme Court had legalized abortion in 1973. The feminist movement was pushing for the Equal Rights Amendment. Gay rights activists were making unprecedented gains. To Falwell, America was sliding toward something he couldn't accept.

In 1976, he began testing the waters with a series of rallies he called "I Love America." These weren't church services—they were political events wrapped in patriotic language. Falwell traveled the country, speaking at state capitols and civic centers, measuring the appetite for organized Christian political action. The response was overwhelming.

That same year, something else happened that would prove significant. Jimmy Carter, a self-professed born-again Christian from Georgia, won the presidency. For the first time in modern American history, an evangelical occupied the Oval Office. You might think this would have satisfied conservative Christians.

It didn't.

The Strange Birth of a Movement

The actual founding of the Moral Majority reads like a political thriller with an unexpected cast. The spark came from an ugly incident in 1978 involving a group called Christian Voice, one of the early attempts at organizing conservative Christians politically.

Robert Grant, the president of Christian Voice, held a news conference where he declared that the religious right was a "sham" controlled by "three Catholics and a Jew." The Catholics he meant were Paul Weyrich, Terry Dolan, and Richard Viguerie. The Jew was Howard Phillips. All four were conservative political operatives who had been working to build a coalition between religious voters and the Republican Party.

Grant's comments were both offensive and clarifying. The four men left Christian Voice and began looking for a different vehicle for their ambitions. They found Jerry Falwell.

In a 1979 meeting, Weyrich, Dolan, Viguerie, and Phillips urged Falwell to start a new organization. Weyrich even supplied the name. "Moral Majority," he suggested—a phrase designed to imply that conservative Christians represented most Americans, even if polling data on many issues suggested otherwise.

Falwell liked what he heard. In June 1979, he and Weyrich officially founded the Moral Majority.

Building the Machine

The Moral Majority had advantages that most new political organizations can only dream of. Falwell brought his television ministry's mailing lists—hundreds of thousands of names of people who had already demonstrated their willingness to send money in response to direct mail appeals. He also brought the Journal Champion, a publication that had been going out to Old Time Gospel Hour donors, which became a ready-made communication channel.

The organization grew with remarkable speed. Within a year, it had chapters in eighteen states. By 1982, it had surpassed Christian Voice to become the largest and most influential organization of the Christian right.

The structure was deliberately decentralized. Four distinct entities operated under the Moral Majority umbrella:

Moral Majority Inc. handled lobbying at the local, state, and national levels
The Moral Majority Foundation educated ministers and ordinary people about political issues and ran voter registration drives
The Moral Majority Legal Defense Fund filed lawsuits, often challenging the American Civil Liberties Union and what they called "secular humanist" positions in court
The Moral Majority Political Action Committee directly supported candidates who aligned with the organization's values

State chapters were financially independent from the national organization. This meant the Lynchburg headquarters couldn't always control what local chapters did, but it also meant the movement could spread without the national organization having to fund everything. Washington State developed the largest chapter in the country.

At its peak, the Moral Majority claimed more than four million members and over two million donors. Even if those numbers were inflated—and political organizations routinely inflate such figures—it represented a genuine mass movement.

The Issues That Mattered

The Moral Majority's genius lay in packaging. Previously, conservative Christians had cared about various issues in isolation. Some worried about abortion. Others opposed feminism. Still others were alarmed by the growing visibility of gay Americans. The Moral Majority bundled all of these concerns together under a single banner: "traditional family values."

This framing was brilliant politics. Rather than appearing to attack women or gay people, the organization positioned itself as defending something—the American family. Instead of saying what they opposed, they emphasized what they supported. At least publicly.

The actual policy positions were quite specific:

Complete prohibition of abortion, including in cases of rape or incest
Opposition to any state recognition or acceptance of homosexuality
Support for prayer in public schools
Opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have guaranteed equal legal rights regardless of sex
Opposition to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, the nuclear weapons negotiations with the Soviet Union
Support for tax incentives that favored married couples
Active efforts to convert Jews and other non-Christians to Christianity

The internal communications were often more explicit than the public messaging. Fundraising letters that focused on homosexuality consistently outperformed other topics. Scholars who have studied the organization's archives note that "shared anti-gay sentiment aided in solidifying a collective set of grievances and ideologies, in establishing a collective identity of constituents, and in constructing a hostile enemy against which the conservative Christian activists were to fight."

As the organization gained power through the 1980s, the rhetoric became less coded. Falwell himself argued that because gay people were rejected by society, they "had no choice but to prey on the young" and were therefore threats to children and families. A Moral Majority commentator named Charlie Judd declared that "just as jumping off a building will kill a person, so will the spread of homosexuality bring about the demise of American culture as we know it."

The Carter Disappointment

Jimmy Carter should have been exactly what evangelical Christians wanted. He taught Sunday school. He spoke openly about being born again. He brought evangelical Christianity into the national spotlight in a way no previous president had.

But Carter was also a Democrat, and he governed like one. He didn't actively oppose his party's position on abortion rights. He maintained the traditional separation between church and state that Falwell was working to erode. He supported the Equal Rights Amendment.

The Moral Majority concluded that religious identification wasn't enough. They wanted a president who would make their political priorities his own—even if that president wasn't particularly religious himself.

They found their man in Ronald Reagan.

The Reagan Revolution

Reagan was a divorced former Hollywood actor who rarely attended church. On paper, he was an unlikely champion for the Christian right. But he was willing to say what they wanted to hear, and more importantly, he was willing to let them help him win.

The Moral Majority endorsed Reagan before the Republican convention, making them among his earliest organized supporters. According to Carter himself, "that autumn a group headed by Jerry Falwell purchased $10 million in commercials on southern radio and TV to brand me as a traitor to the South and no longer a Christian."

The strategy worked. More than one-fifth of Moral Majority supporters who had voted for Carter in 1976 switched to Reagan in 1980. After the election, Falwell credited the Moral Majority and similar organizations with Reagan's victory, claiming they had registered and mobilized millions of church-goers who had never previously voted.

How much credit did they actually deserve? Scholars have debated this for decades. The evidence suggests Falwell's claim has "some truth, though difficult to determine definitively." Reagan would have won anyway—Carter was unpopular, inflation was high, and American hostages were still being held in Iran. But the margin might have been different, and the coalition that elected Reagan certainly looked different from previous Republican victories.

What's undeniable is that Reagan sought input from the Moral Majority leadership during his administration. The organization had access. It had influence. It had arrived.

The Conspiracy Connection

One of the more fascinating aspects of the Moral Majority's success was its connection to an earlier conservative organization: the John Birch Society.

The Birch Society, founded in 1958, was known for elaborate conspiracy theories about communist infiltration of American institutions. It saw hidden plots everywhere and believed that even mainstream Republican figures like Dwight Eisenhower were secret communist agents. By the 1970s, it had become something of a punchline in mainstream political discourse.

But its ideas lived on. Tim LaHaye, who helped organize the Moral Majority, was a John Birch Society member and speaker. Scholar Carmen Celestini argues that the Birch Society's "culture war issues, conspiratorialism, apocalypticism, and fear" were key elements in the Moral Majority's successful mobilization.

LaHaye would later become famous for co-authoring the Left Behind novels, a series of apocalyptic thrillers about the end times that sold more than 80 million copies. The line from John Birch Society conspiracy theories to Moral Majority organizing to Left Behind fiction to contemporary evangelical political engagement is straighter than many people realize.

The Decline

By the late 1980s, the Moral Majority was fading. The reasons were partly structural and partly a victim of its own success.

The structural problems were real. In 1985, the organization was folded into a larger entity called the Liberty Federation. By then, its finances were already eroding. Falwell stepped back as formal head in 1987, replaced by Jerry Nims, though he remained visibly involved.

That same year, Falwell attempted to rescue the scandal-plagued PTL ministries of televangelist Jim Bakker, who had been exposed for financial fraud and sexual misconduct. The effort failed, and the whole episode associated Falwell with the seedier side of televangelism.

But the deeper problem was success. After eight years of Reagan, conservative Christians no longer felt the same sense of crisis that had motivated them in 1980. The nation didn't seem to be in the same "state of supposed moral peril." Donations dropped. Enthusiasm waned.

In 1989, Falwell disbanded the Moral Majority at a ceremony in Las Vegas. His public statement was characteristically optimistic: "Our goal has been achieved. The religious right is solidly in place and religious conservatives in America are now in for the duration."

The Legacy

Falwell was right about one thing: the religious right wasn't going anywhere. The Moral Majority's dissolution didn't end Christian conservative political organizing—it just changed forms.

Pat Robertson founded the Christian Coalition in 1989, the same year the Moral Majority closed. It picked up where Falwell left off, with even more sophisticated grassroots organizing techniques. The coalition's first headquarters were in Virginia, the same state where the Moral Majority had been based, continuing the state's role as a center of Christian right politics.

More broadly, the Moral Majority had demonstrated that evangelical Christians could be mobilized as a reliable Republican voting bloc. The template it created—direct mail fundraising, voter registration in churches, framing social issues as threats to the family, mixing religious language with political organizing—remains the playbook for conservative Christian political groups today.

The organization also showed both the possibilities and the limits of religious political movements. At its best, it gave voice to millions of Americans who felt their values were under attack. At its worst, it used religious language to demonize minorities and advance policies that had little to do with any mainstream understanding of Christianity.

The Moral Majority operated for barely a decade. But the world it helped create—one where evangelical Christianity and Republican politics are nearly synonymous, where "family values" is a political slogan, where churches double as political organizing centers—that world is still with us.

Understanding the Name

One final thought about that name, "Moral Majority."

It was always aspirational rather than descriptive. The organization never represented a majority of Americans on most of its signature issues. Polls consistently showed that most Americans supported keeping abortion legal in at least some circumstances, that most Americans opposed mandatory school prayer, that most Americans didn't share the organization's apocalyptic view of gay rights.

But the name served its purpose. It implied that conservative Christians weren't a special interest group or a fringe movement—they were the real America, the silent majority that Richard Nixon had invoked a decade earlier, finally finding its voice.

Whether that was true or not, enough people believed it to change American politics. And that, in the end, is what political movements are for.