Neither Moral Nor a Majority

There are few bigger political players in the last 33 years than the religious right. Time and again, we’ve seen republicans shuffle over to Liberty “University” to pay fealty to the christianists. The primary vehicle for fundamentalist political activity was the Moral Majority, founded in June of 1979. The above reference to Liberty ties directly to Jerry Falwell, the Baptist preacher who is generally credited with the creation of the MM. As it turns out, Falwell needed a push to get into the fight over abortion and other “values” issues.

In fact, in the aftermath of Roe v. Wade, the protestants in the anti-abortion movement were vastly outnumbered by catholics, led by long-time republican operative Paul Weyrich. (Weyrich, in 1984, said: “We are different from previous generations of conservatives... We are no longer working to preserve the status quo. We are radicals, working to overturn the present power structure of this country.”)

Falwell was more concerned about something closer to home: the revocation of tax-exempt status of racially segregated christian schools. It took Weyrich, who named the group, to get Falwell, Pat Robertson and the rest to form the Moral majority:

"I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed," Weyrich recalled in an interview in the early 1990s. "What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter's intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation."

In 1979, at Weyrich's behest, Falwell founded a group that he called the Moral Majority. Along with a vanguard of evangelical icons including D. James Kennedy, Pat Robertson and Tim LaHaye, Falwell's organization hoisted the banner of the "pro-family" movement, declaring war on abortion and homosexuality. But were it not for the federal government's attempts to enable little black boys and black girls to go to school with little white boys and white girls, the Christian right's culture war would likely never have come into being. "The Religious New Right did not start because of a concern about abortion," former Falwell ally Ed Dobson told author Randall Balmer in 1990. "I sat in the non-smoke-filled back room with the Moral Majority, and I frankly do not remember abortion ever being mentioned as a reason why we ought to do something."

The “Majority” would become a key ally in Reagan’s election and would grow in influence throughout the 80s, although their specific influence would wane toward the end of the Reagan years, and the group would disband in 1989. But the influence of the religious right has continued to this day-- look at the nonsense being spewed by the likes of Rick Santorum and Michele Bachman. As with so much of the right’s agenda since 1979, it’s always back to the future…

Coincidentally, 1979 was also the year that George Soros started his own social policy endevours, giving the right their favorite foreign bete noir:

In 1979 Soros began his philanthropic activities by providing funding for black students to attend the University of Cape Town in South Africa. To date he is chairman of the Open Society Institute and has founded many charity organizations that are active in more than 50 countries including Central and Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the United States.