Moral Majority

In my lifetime, it started in the early to mid-70s, and it's run through today.

It's also, I think, that this sort of apolitical church that we find ourselves in today, broadly speaking, in evangelicalism, is also... a reaction to some of the failures of the moral majority.

You know, our fathers in the faith formed the moral majority to fundamentally, I think it was about Roe v.

Wade.

I think fundamentally it organized around the horror that is abortion in the country.

Some of the sins of its loudest proponents came to light, which is always something that's going to happen in any Christian movement.

God only uses broken vessels because those are the only vessels available to him.

But if your organization is called the moral majority and you find immoral behavior in it, that's obviously going to give it a black eye.

... uh, across the country.

He creates something called the Moral Majority, which is, harnesses the power of Christian evangelicals, and he creates, among others, the Heritage Foundation, um, and really understands that people in elective office are often held hostage by politics, and what they really need is a conservative beacon to hold them accountable, and that beacon becomes the mandate for leadership but also all the activism he does on the outside to ensure that real conservatives pass a litmus test and that they march in a certain line towards the real end goal, which is, uh, rewinding civil rights progress-

Mm-hmm

... and social progress of the last 20 years.

This is Jerry Falwell out front, who was a Baptist minister, one of the organizers of religious right and Christian right that begins to emerge and backs Reagan very heavily in the late 1970s.

Falwell creates an organization called the Moral Majority and it is one of the vehicles for supporting Ronald Reagan.

This language of majority, the emerging Republican majority, Nixon's silent majority, the moral majority, all of these are full of ambitions for not only winning one election, but in fact, transforming American politics in a much more permanent way.

Reagan in 1980 comes up with a very powerful slogan that's intended to capture this historical story that's intended to tell a tale about a past that was better than the present, but also a future that might be made as good as the past.

That slogan was, Let's make America great again.

He thinks the Republican Party under Reagan needs to re-radicalize and purge the non-believers.

And he creates, found some of the most important right-wing institutions of the modern era, including the Moral Majority, ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, which writes legislation to this day for conservatives across the states.

and the Heritage Foundation, which is an idea he has in the late 70s, a think tank that will be the right-wing answer to what he sees as liberal think tanks like the Brookings Institution, and he wants there to be a direct pipeline from these kind of brain and nerve centers outside government to the people tasked with executing on the right-wing agenda inside government.

So he creates the Heritage Foundation.

We can bring Christians in because it's the federal government is trying to... define the parameters of what a Christian school can and can't do.

And that is an affront to God and freedom of religion and free speech.

And so it is through the Bob Jones case that's working its way through the courts that Weirich convenes Christian pastors on the Hill and helps bring evangelicals into the movement that he is building, that the new right is building, and creates the moral majority comes out of this, a highly influential Christian advocacy and activist organization.

But it's that's how the bedfellows first, you know, get in bed together is over the issue of desegregation and the Bob Jones University case, which ends up getting shut down at the Supreme Court, but is forevermore.

This shift influenced theologians like Stanley Hauerwas, who argued that the spiritual and political spheres should remain separate nonetheless.

But the influence of these theologians was eventually drowned out by evangelical political movements like the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition.

Conclusion.

The tapestry of modern theology is full of vibrant colors and fascinating images.

Everybody was wondering if they were saved or not.

And, um, and then I witnessed shortly after that, the rise of the, uh, the kind of the moral majority and that kind of thing, which is, you know, we had W.A. Criswell in the first Baptist of Dallas and, um, That was a giant congregation.

The whole world just seemed to be run by all of that for me.

So that was kind of my background.