Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (22 page)

In June of that year, many of these people joined with Tim LaHaye and with the Reverend Jerry Falwell, a deeply conservative forty-five-year-old Baptist preacher from Lynchburg, Virginia, to establish the Moral Majority. Falwell was a business-oriented promoter who normally wore a three-piece suit. He had already established a small empire around him in the Lynchburg area: a school, a home for alcoholics, a summer camp for kids, a college (Liberty Baptist College, later named Liberty University), and a church that claimed a congregation of 17,000 people. For years, his church had held multiple Sunday services in order to accommodate all the people who wished to attend. Falwell insisted on the literal truth of the Bible and opposed smoking, drinking, dancing, and rock ’n’ roll. Women were expected to wear dresses with hemlines at least two inches below the knee. The Bible, he maintained, commanded women to submit to their husbands. Falwell was already well known for his daily radio broadcasts, which were carried on 280 stations, and for his Sunday television program, the
Old Time Gospel Hour,
which ran on more than 300 stations and was available to 1.5 million people.
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Among the program’s many attractions was a male/female singing group, the Sounds of Liberty. The group featured good-looking women with Charlie’s Angels hairstyles whose presence was presumed to advance the show’s popular appeal.
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Though Falwell had opposed civil rights activity in the 1960s, until the mid-1970s he had had been a fundamentalist who refused to engage in politics. In 1977–78, however, he had joined Tim LaHaye in fighting to repeal a pro-gay-rights ordinance in Miami. The battle for repeal, which had been launched by Anita Bryant, a well-known Christian singer and mother, attracted national attention and inspired rising political activism among people on the Religious Right. In the end, the conservatives won the fight. In 1978, he began to preach against
Roe v. Wade
. “Abortion,” he said, “is a weapon that has annihilated more children than Pharaoh murdered in Egypt, than Herod murdered when seeking the Christ child, than the Nazis slaughtered of the Jews in World War II.”
⁷⁵

In forming the Moral Majority in 1979, Falwell and like-minded religious conservatives moved boldly into the partisan wars. This was a historic breakthrough that carried him beyond the single-issue battles in which he had previously participated. Falwell made it clear that the Moral Majority was a political, not a religious, organization, and that it was a broad conservative coalition open to people of all faiths. By saying that he welcomed all comers, he offended a number of fellow preachers, who could not imagine coalescing with other Protestant denominations, let alone with Catholics. For these and other reasons, most of the Moral Majority’s members were Baptists.

The rise of the Moral Majority nonetheless attracted widespread public attention. Falwell, who was by far the most prominent spokesman for the organization, proved to be a popular speaker and a master at garnering publicity. The Moral Majority, he exclaimed, was “pro-life, pro-family, pro-morality, and pro-American.” The ERA, he charged, would lead to “unisexual bathrooms” and to women being sent into combat.
⁷⁶
The Moral Majority, though relatively quiet concerning economic issues, was cool to labor unions, environmental causes, and social welfare programs, except for those that helped people who were sick, aged, or unemployed as the result of a depression.

Falwell, opposing SALT II, called on political leaders to fight against Communism: “A political leader, as a Minister of God, is a revenger to execute war upon those who do evil. Our government has the right to use its armaments to bring wrath upon those who would do evil.”
⁷⁷
Though he (like many others on the Religious Right) was hardly “conservative” when he called for government to increase its role in the lives of people—as, for example, by opposing abortion—he was proud to be known as a foe of liberals. “If you would like to know where I am politically,” he said, “I am to the right of wherever you are. I thought Goldwater was too liberal.”
⁷⁸

The Moral Majority elicited widespread hostility and ridicule from liberals, who distributed bumper stickers reading: T
HE
M
ORAL
M
AJORITY
I
S
N
EITHER
. Still, it encouraged a surge of grass-roots religious activity that boosted socially conservative Christian ideas after 1979 and that ultimately propelled cultural issues into the center of public debate in the United States. Highly visible advocates of these goals included charismatic “televangelists,” as critics called them, some of whom (not including Falwell) believed in faith-healing and tongues-talking. Among these believers was the Reverend Marion “Pat” Robertson of Virginia, a former marine who had served in the Korean War and who had earned a law degree at Yale. Founder and owner since 1960 of the immensely successful Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), Robertson resented the term “televangelist” and insisted on being referred to as a “religious broadcaster.” Another such believer and television performer was the Reverend Jim Bakker, an Assemblies of God preacher who created a Praise The Lord (PTL) ministry in South Carolina in 1974. Bakker organized an empire that ultimately included a 500-room luxury hotel, an amusement park, and an amphitheater. In 1979, conservatives gained control of the Southern Baptist Convention, which had added some 2 million members to its ranks in the 1970s. With some 13 million members in 1980, it was the largest Protestant group in America and had the potential to become more powerful than the Moral Majority.

Though some popular televangelists—Oral Roberts of Oklahoma, for example—continued to shun political activity, many of them embraced the causes of the Religious Right. They managed to garner substantial sums of money (some of which, it was later learned, ended up in their pockets). One historian has estimated that the top eight televangelists in 1980 grossed $310 million from their programs. Another has concluded that radio shows featuring socially conservative and religious messages, carried on hundreds of stations, regularly attracted 840,000 listeners, that the television programs were available to 20 million viewers, and that the Moral Majority and other groups succeeded in registering at least 2 million voters in 1980.
⁷⁹
(Later, in 1997, Robertson sold his Family Channel, a satellite-delivered cable television network, to Fox Broadcasting for $1.9 billion.)
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Many of these new voters, contemporary observers concluded, were relatively poor southern whites, including a considerable number of elderly women who were attracted above all by the pro-family messages.
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Whether these people were prepared to vote for Reagan in 1980 was difficult to predict as the election approached. Carter, after all, was widely known as a Southern Baptist who extolled the virtues of family life and taught Sunday school. Having openly and proudly announced that he had been born again, he was expected to command some support among Protestant evangelicals. Reagan, who had signed California’s liberal abortion law in 1967, and who had opposed an anti-gay-rights referendum in California in 1978, could hardly be sure in 1979 of great backing from socially conservative Christians.
⁸²

It was obvious, however, that evangelical, socially conservative religious groups were gaining considerable visibility in American culture and politics during the late 1970s. Some 50 million people, more than a fourth of all American adults, claimed to be born-again Christians. One-fifth of these, or 10 million people, appeared to have theological and social views that situated them solidly on the right. And the number of all Protestant churchgoers who identified themselves as members of socially conservative, evangelical churches grew considerably during this time—probably by a third between 1960 and 1985. A good deal of this growth occurred in the late 1970s.
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Developments such as these have led some writers to maintain that yet another “great awakening” of spirituality had surged through American life in the 1960s, leading to wider popular religiosity (some of it countering culturally liberal trends of the 60s) by the 1970s.
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By some definitions of “great awakening” this is a plausible claim, for millions of people in the 1960s had appeared to be looking earnestly for some form of spiritual guidance. As Tom Wolfe and Christopher Lasch had pointed out in the 1970s, many young people of the boomer generation—in their twenties and thirties in the late 1970s—seemed especially eager to arrive at a therapeutically consoling “new consciousness” that would help them attain “personal enlightenment” or find “peace of mind.” Still other Americans, searching for spiritual sustenance in a fast-paced, materialistic culture of “seekers,” had been swelling church membership in the United States since World War II.
⁸⁵

But these searchers hardly comprised a homogeneous group. Some conservative Protestant leaders—notably members of the Southern Baptist Convention—were believers in the separation of church and state. Fearing that the government would support Catholic schools, they were wary of virtually any public intrusion into the realm of religion, and they supported the Supreme Court’s ruling against state-sponsored school prayers. Other devout Americans were by no means conservative—socially, politically, or theologically. Some were liberals who backed the civil rights movement, which derived a good deal of its power from religiously rooted ideals. Many low-income people who regularly attended church remained independent or left of center in their politics. African Americans, generally liberal on economic and racial issues and supporters of Democratic causes and candidates, were numerous among evangelical Christians (though not among the followers of leaders like Falwell) in these and later years.

It is not so clear, moreover, that the United States was experiencing the sort of religious revival in the 1970s that would swell overall membership in churches. On the contrary, though the United States—always a highly religious country—continued to be one of the most churchgoing nations in the developed world, the trend toward secularization that had advanced in the Western world since the nineteenth century still operated as a powerful countervailing force. A decline in the membership of “mainstream” Protestant congregations, whose believers were aging, offset the rise in the number of evangelical Christians during the 1970s and 1980s.
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Thanks in part to declines in these mainline churches, membership in American religious bodies dropped from an estimated 77 percent of the adult population in 1960 to 69 percent in 1980, remaining at approximately that level into the early 2000s. Other estimates indicated that weekly attendance at church services fell from 47 percent of adults in 1960 to 40 in 1980, and then rose, but only slightly, to around 44 percent by 2000. Though Roman Catholicism held its own—according to government estimates, roughly 28 percent of American adults (including millions of Latino immigrants) were believed to be holding to the faith throughout the years between 1975 and 2000—enrollments in Catholic schools, many of which were city-based institutions that were hard hit by suburbanization, fell dramatically during these years.
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The Catholic Church also struggled desperately to attract young people as nuns, priests, or brothers, and to resolve internal disputes that broke out over the liberal reforms that had emanated from the Second Vatican Council between 1962 and 1965. Most American Catholics, moreover, made it clear that they did not subscribe to church teachings concerning birth control, abortion, and divorce.

As the private behavior of Catholics (among others) indicated, Americans were not always practicing what their priests, ministers, and rabbis had told them. Many people who said they had been born again did not seem to behave very differently thereafter. Nor did most people isolate themselves in theologically pure, sectarian enclaves. On the contrary, though doctrinal issues continued to divide religious leaders, most people who regularly attended services, like those who did not, were becoming more tolerant of faiths other than their own. Pope John Paul II, while unyielding in his defense of conservative Catholic doctrines concerning sexuality and family life, also advocated interfaith cooperation and worked to heal sharp rifts with Jews. Internal divisions within denominations—mostly along class and liberal/conservative lines—were becoming more significant in the United States than the primary identifications (Protestant, Catholic, or Jew) or than the denominational loyalties that had normally characterized American religious life in the past.
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Still, there was no doubting that by many standards of measurement the United States remained the most religious nation in the Western world in the 1970s and thereafter. Some 50 percent of Americans in the late 1970s told pollsters that they prayed every day, and 80 percent said that they believed in an afterlife. As membership figures indicated, devout people of socially conservative bent seemed to be growing in numbers and as a proportion of religiously inclined people in the United States. More politically engaged than at any time since battles over Darwinism had flourished in the 1920s, they had ambitions to register voters, to influence partisan debates, to select candidates, to defeat liberals, and to advance “moral values.”
⁸⁹
In most northern areas, they were weak. Even in the South, they were only beginning in 1980 to amass considerable political power. This was greater in 1984, by which time the Southern Baptist Convention had become more politically active.
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Even during the 1980 campaign, however, it seemed that members of the Religious Right might be able to deliver significant support to conservative candidates.
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Not for the first time in American history, a politics of the pulpit was reemerging in the United States.