" Family Values " and the Formation of a Christian Right Agenda

“Family Values” and the Formationof a Christian Right Agenda

SETH DOWLAND

DURING his 1976 presidential campaign, Jimmy Carter promised socialconservatives that, if elected, he would convene a conferenceexamining how the federal government could support American

families. That promise—alongside Carter’s description of being “born again”and his well-documented Christian devotion—thrilled Americanevangelicals. They provided him with a crucial bloc of support in the 1976election. Four years later, Carter finally made good on his campaign pledgewhen he convened the White House Conference on Families. Carter declaredthat the conference would “examine the strengths of American families, thedifficulties they face, and the ways in which family life is affected by publicpolicies.”1 He recruited a panel of organizers and asked them to focus onhow government policy might better support family life.

If Carter was hoping to placate evangelicals who had soured on him since the1976 election, he failed. The diverse group of conference organizers Carterassembled insisted that a conference on families must examine the pressuresfacing homosexual and single-parent families, and they refused to define afamily as a heterosexual, two-parent household. These decisions ledconservative Christian political leaders to repudiate the meeting. JerryFalwell’s political action group, the Moral Majority, dubbed it “the Anti-Family Conference,” and Alabama governor Fob James announced that hisstate would not send any delegates “because the conference appears tooppose Judeo-Christian values.” Conference speakers, declared the MoralMajority Report, were “activists who hold the traditional family and its

Seth Dowland is a lecturing fellow and associate director of the Thompson WritingProgram at Duke University.

1Jimmy Carter, “White House Conference on Families Appointment of Wilbur J. Cohen asChairman,” 14 April 1978, in John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American PresidencyProject (Santa Barbara: University of California), available at: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=30666; accessed 23 January 2009. I would like to thank Steve Berry, Elesha Coffman,Brantley Gasaway, Matt Harper, Sarah Johnson, Grant Wacker, Jackie Whitt, and twoanonymous readers for their helpful critiques of this article. I would also like to thank sessionparticipants and audience members from the 2007 American Academy of Religion meetingpanel “Religion and the Politics of the Common Good,” where I initially presented a version ofthis paper and received thought-provoking feedback.

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Church History 78:3 (September 2009), 606–631.# 2009, American Society of Church Historydoi:10.1017/S0009640709990448 Printed in the USA

morals in contempt.” As a result, according to religious conservatives, theWhite House Council on Families would “heap scorn and ridicule on theAmerican family.”2

For three decades, leaders of the Christian right have deployed rhetoric suchas this in order to promote “family values.” They contended that abortion,feminism, and homosexuality represented a multifaceted “attack” on thefamily, which they defined as “the fundamental institution of society, animmutable structure established by our Creator.”3 Christian right leadersenvisioned the family as the central unit of American society, and theyframed their political activities throughout the 1980s and 1990s as a defenseof the “traditional” family. The centrality of the family to the Christianright’s sense of its mission extended even to the names of its institutions:two of the most important institutions in the contemporary Christian right areFocus on the Family and the Family Research Council.Yet the rise of “family values” as the rallying cry of the Christian right was

neither inevitable nor predictable. The triumvirate of political positions thatcame to constitute the core of “family values”—opposition to abortion,feminism, and gay rights—did not command much attention fromevangelicals before 1975.4 In fact, most evangelicals who spoke publiclyabout these issues in the early 1970s supported the Equal RightsAmendment and equivocated on abortion. Gay rights, to be sure, neverfound favor among conservative Christians, yet it seemed a marginal issueuntil the end of the decade. In short, on these three issues, evangelicals inthe early 1970s seemed ambivalent.Over the course of the 1970s, however, a small cadre of evangelical ministers

developed a political philosophy that connected defense of the “traditionalfamily” with opposition to abortion, feminism, and gay rights. Christian rightleaders defined traditional families as those with two heterosexual parents,with the husband as the head and, preferably, the primary breadwinner.Though some scholars have argued that this type of nuclear family wasnever typical among Americans,5 the image of a working father, a stay-at-home mother, and well-scrubbed children carried significant appeal amongconservatives in the wake of the 1960s. And Christian right leadersdeveloped a political rhetoric that connected the demise of these “traditional”

2“The Anti-Family Conference,” Moral Majority Report, 14 March 1980, 2.3Moral Majority: Policy Documents, Family Manifesto folder, Archives, Pierre Guillermin

Library, Liberty University, Lynchburg, Va.4I focus here on abortion, feminism, and gay rights because opposition to these issues was

universal within the Christian right. Other issues, of course, factored into the family-valuesagenda, and I will discuss those issues at the end of the article.

5See, for instance, Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and theNostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 8–22 and passim.

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families with feminism and gay rights. For instance, Jerry Falwell said thatratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (a key initiative among 1970sfeminists) “could sanction homosexual marriage, send mothers and younggirls into combat, and generally injure the dignity of the traditional family.”6

Likewise, early campaigns against abortion connected that practice to pro-choice advocates’ devaluation of motherhood and, by extension, the family.

Critics of the Christian right called its agenda narrow-minded and divisive,but the genius of the movement was to frame opposition to abortion,feminism, and gay rights as “defense of the family.” After all, who wasgoing to argue against families? By the end of the 1970s, the Christian righthad devised rhetoric that made liberal reformers enemies of the family andpositioned “family values” as mainstream fare. Opposing abortion, feminism,and gay rights, in the view of the Christian right, would benefit allAmericans. Some traditional political conservatives dissented, wonderingwhy they ought to care about these issues. For instance, a letter writer to thepolitically conservative periodical Human Events declared, “Whether or notwe agree with the lifestyle of the homosexual, we, as conservatives, cannotdeny his right to live according to his own conscience without theinterference of the government.”7 This statement confirmed sociologist TedJelen’s observation that the Christian right faced a formidable barrier inlegislating morality in a society that considered the primary role ofgovernment to be the defense of individual rights.8 Americans viewed withsuspicion any political movement that encroached on individual liberties. Yetthe Christian right worked around this problem by establishing the family asan institution instrumental to America’s success. “If America is to return tooriginal greatness,” wrote Falwell, “we must . . . support the traditionalmonogamous family as the only acceptable form.”9 Falwell and otherssuggested that America became great because it nurtured “traditional”families. Thus, according to the rhetoric of the Christian right, opposition toabortion, feminism, and gay rights became markers of mainstream identity.

The family values agenda enabled the Christian right to bridge some long-standing boundaries, even as it reinforced or redefined others. For instance,evangelicals’ embrace of political activism encouraged them to unite withpro-life Catholics, an alliance that horrified some fundamentalists. Likewise,the Christian right’s conflation of church and state offended some Baptistswho considered that principle sacrosanct. Grassroots activists, many of them

6Jerry Falwell, “America Was Built on Seven Great Principles,”Moral Majority Report, 18 May1981, 3.

7“Conservative Forum,” Human Events, 9 July 1977, 14.8Ted G. Jelen, “Political Esperanto: Rhetorical Resources and Limitations of the Christian Right

in the United States,” Sociology of Religion 66:3 (Autumn 2005): 303–321.9Falwell, “America Was Built on Seven Great Principles,” 3.

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stay-at-home mothers, joined with lawmakers to defeat the Equal RightsAmendment and to protest Roe v. Wade. The rhetoric of family valuesfacilitated these unusual alliances. It was capacious enough to accommodateAmericans of differing theological orientations and political commitmentsyet specific enough to provide a common vision for leaders, activists, andfellow travelers.In fact, the triumph of the Christian right in defining “family values” as a

capacious yet specific policy agenda has created a situation that encouragesboth shrill and triumphalist narratives about the movement. Critics havepublished a raft of titles recently that accuse the Christian right of wanting toestablish a theocracy, of kowtowing to the most craven corporate interests,and of fomenting bigotry throughout the heartland.10 These studies, writtenmainly by journalists, vary in the quality of their research, but they share afixation on the more extreme claims of Christian right leaders. Conversely,evangelical leaders have written narratives of the Christian right thatemphasize the guiding hand of providence and the sinister machinations ofliberals—narratives that fail to treat the movement with careful historicalscrutiny.11 Neither of these approaches satisfactorily explains how theChristian right won significant influence. This article aspires to join thegrowing body of studies that treat the Christian right with sympathy, probeits leaders’ claims with scrutiny, and explain how the movement’s politicalagenda captured widespread support. To date, sociologists have providedsome of the best studies of the movement.12 This article adds a historical

10See, for instance, Joe Bageant,Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War(New York: Crown, 2007); Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas? How ConservativesWon the Heart of America (New York: Metropolitan, 2004); Michelle Goldberg, KingdomComing: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006); Chris Hedges,American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (New York: Free Press, 2006);Kevin Phillips, American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, andBorrowed Money in the 21st Century (New York: Viking, 2006); Jeff Sharlet, The Family: TheSecret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (New York: HarperCollins, 2008).

11See, for instance, Charles W. Colson, “The Lures and Limits of Political Power,” in Piety &Politics: Evangelicals and Fundamentalists Confront the World, ed. Richard John Neuhaus andMichael Cromartie (Washington: Ethics & Public Policy Center, 1987), 171–185; Jerry Falwell,Listen, America! (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1980), 21–70; Tim F. LaHaye, The Battle forthe Mind (Old Tappan, N.J.: Revell, 1980), 181–195; Richard A. Viguerie, The New Right:We’re Ready to Lead (Falls Church, Va.: Viguerie, 1981), 123–136.

12Sociologist William Martin’s 1996 volume on the Christian right, developed in conjunctionwith a PBS series and recently updated, is the most thorough treatment of the movement:William C. Martin, With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America(New York: Broadway, 2005). Martin’s colleague D. Michael Lindsay recently published a studyof evangelical powerbrokers that provides a helpful distinction between “cosmopolitan” and“populist” evangelicals. This distinction—alongside Lindsay’s chapter on evangelicals inpolitics—further clarifies the story Martin lays out. I should note, too, that most of the figures inthis article are populist evangelicals, whose efforts, according to Lindsay, are more visible butmay ultimately prove less permanent: D. Michael Lindsay, Faith in the Halls of Power: How


dimension to the story of the Christian right, showing that Christian rightleaders developed the family values agenda through a series of contingenciesthat was hardly predictable, much less inevitable.

I. THE IMPORTANCE OF ABORTION

In January 1973, the Supreme Court voted 7-2 in Roe v. Wade to protectwomen’s right to an abortion during the first six months of pregnancy.Overturning that decision became (and remains) the preeminent political taskof social conservatives. Many of these social conservatives hailed fromevangelical churches, and they identified the Roe decision as the criticalissue that awakened them from long political slumber. “The abortion issue,”recalled Southern Baptist leader Al Mohler, “is the stick of dynamite thatexploded the issue.”13 Likewise, Jerry Falwell said that on “the morning ofJanuary 23, 1973”—the day after the Roe decision—“I felt a growingconviction that I would have to take my stand.”14 Though it took severalyears for Falwell to follow through on his conviction, abortion clearlyoccupied a central role among the constellation of issues Christian rightleaders spotlighted in their mobilization of conservative Christians.

Yet evangelicals’ initial response to Roe v. Wade hardly matched theirrecollections of immediate indignation. Falwell issued no statements on thedecision until 1975, a silence he attributed to preoccupation with agovernment investigation of his organization’s finances in 1973.15 Polls ofSouthern Baptists in the half-decade before Roe showed an overwhelmingmajority in favor of “therapeutic abortion,” albeit not abortion on demand.Though some conservatives in the SBC agitated for a stronger stand against

Evangelicals Joined the American Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 15–37,218–223. One of the best historical studies of the Christian right is Daniel Kenneth Williams,“From the Pews to the Polls: The Formation of a Southern Christian Right” (Ph.D. diss., BrownUniversity, 2005). Other helpful studies include Sara Diamond, Spiritual Warfare: The Politicsof the Christian Right (Boston, Mass.: South End, 1989); Darren Dochuk, “From Bible Belt toSunbelt: Plain Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Southernization of SouthernCalifornia, 1939–1969” (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 2005); Robert C. Liebman,Robert Wuthnow, and James L. Guth, The New Christian Right: Mobilization and Legitimation(Hawthorne, N.Y.: Aldine, 1983); Michael Lienesch, Redeeming America: Piety and Politics inthe New Christian Right (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); ChristianSmith, Christian America?: What Evangelicals Really Want (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 2000); Clyde Wilcox, Onward Christian Soldiers?: The Religious Right in AmericanPolitics (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1996).

13Oral Memoirs of R. Albert Mohler, Jr., The Texas Collection, Baylor University, Waco, Texas.14Jerry Falwell, If I Should Die before I Wake (Nashville, Tenn.: T. Nelson, 1986), 31–32.15Jerry Falwell, Strength for the Journey: An Autobiography (New York: Simon and Schuster,

1987), 336.

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abortion after Roe, moderates blocked the discussion of an anti-abortionresolution at the 1974 convention.16 Christianity Today, the flagshipevangelical journal launched by Billy Graham in the 1950s, took a strongstand against abortion under the direction of editor (and Southern Baptistminister) Harold Lindsell, but few magazines followed its lead. Whilegrassroots pro-life activists expressed indignation about the Roe decision,most evangelical Protestant leaders and institutions responded tepidly at first.17

Why did evangelicals remain a minority faction in the pro-life coalition throughmost of the 1970s? In 1973 two factors mitigated against conservative Christians’opposition of Roe. First, the language the Court used to legitimate abortion drewon conservative rhetoric. The Fourteenth Amendment, said the Court, “protectsagainst state action the right to privacy.” In other words, the Supreme Courtemployed an individual rights rationale that favored women’s prerogative inreproductive choices against the state’s interference. Early abortion foes knewthe consequences of Roe could be dire. By defining abortion as an issue“belonging to the private sphere, more like a religious preference than a deeplyheld social belief,” the Court’s decision appealed to those who rejectedgovernmental interference into private decisions.18 Evangelicals, who haddeveloped sensitivity to governmental intrusion on their beliefs in the decadesafter the 1925 Scopes trial, increasingly guarded against any attempts toinfringe on their religious liberty. By framing abortion as an individual right,the Court predisposed some political conservatives to support Roe.19

Second, and more important, Catholics spearheaded the earliest campaignsagainst abortion.20 In the early 1970s, about 70 percent of the members of

16Edward E. Plowman, “Southern Baptists: Unity the Priority,” Christianity Today, 5 July 1974,41–42. Before Roe, some Protestant denominations even argued for the expansion of abortionrights. Southern Baptists, for instance, resolved in 1971 “to work for legislation that will allowthe possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetaldeformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional,mental, and physical health of the mother”: “Resolution on Abortion,” Southern BaptistConvention http://www.sbc.net/resolutions/amResolution.asp?ID=13 (accessed 23 January 2009).That said, the SBC was not nearly as conservative in 1971 as it would become in the 1980s, sothis resolution hardly represented a consensus view in the denomination.

17The clearest statement by Christianity Today on the Roe decision is “Abortion and the Court,”Christianity Today, 16 February 1973, 32–33. On the relative silence of other conservativeProtestants in the first years after Roe, see Williams, “From the Pew to the Polls,” 285–300.

18Kristin Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1984), 141.

19In fact, throughout the 1970s, it was unclear that Republicans would champion the pro-lifecause. Catholics, who constituted a majority of the pro-life coalition for most of the 1970s,tended to vote Democratic, and some prominent Democrats opposed Roe. The pro-life coalitionremained almost equally split between Senate Republicans and Democrats until 1979, and amajority of pro-life supporters voted for Jimmy Carter over Ronald Reagan in 1980. See GregD. Adams, “Abortion: Evidence of an Issue Evolution,” American Journal of Political Science41:3 (July 1997): 723–730.

20Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, 126–137.


the National Right to Life Commission claimed membership in the CatholicChurch.21 Catholics’ leadership of the pro-life movement made it less likelythat conservative Protestants would join it. A 1984 study of the pro-lifemovement found that few activists had expressed any public opposition toabortion before 1967 (when California legalized abortion), and almost all ofthe earliest activists were Catholic. Catholics’ overwhelming majority in thenascent anti-abortion coalition persisted at least through 1978.22 Given thehistoric enmity between Catholics and conservative Protestants, it is hardlysurprising that evangelicals felt some discomfort about joining the pro-lifemovement in the early 1970s. As the evangelical theologian Harold O. J.Brown put it, “At that point, a lot of Protestants reacted almostautomatically—‘If the Catholics are for it, we should be against it.’”23 Right-to-life groups did receive a surge in Protestant membership after the Roedecision—especially from younger women with small children—but on thewhole, evangelicals seemed hesitant to enter the pro-life coalition until themid-1970s.24

Evangelical theologian Francis Schaeffer sought to change that. Born andreared among conservative Presbyterians in Pennsylvania, Schaefferestablished a Christian community called L’Abri (“the shelter”) inSwitzerland during the 1950s. From L’Abri, Schaeffer published his viewson a variety of subjects. Schaeffer rejected fundamentalism’s notion of“purity” as misguided and even heretical. Christians, he contended, neededto engage secular culture as part of a holistic presentation of the gospel.“The Lordship of Christ,” argued Schaeffer, “covers all of life and all of lifeequally.” He presented conservative Christian views on a host of subjects,from the environment to the arts. Schaeffer contended that “secularhumanists” had embedded an anti-Christian philosophy in American lawsand government. Now, Schaeffer argued, Christians had to fight back. “Ourloyalty to the God who gave the law,” wrote Schaeffer, “requires that wemake the appropriate response . . . to such a tyrannical usurping of power.”25

By the end of the 1970s, Schaeffer had emerged as the foremost evangelicalopponent of abortion, which he portrayed as the primary issue demandingChristian response. In Whatever Happened to the Human Race, whichSchaeffer co-wrote with the future surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, he

21Donald T. Critchlow, The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made PoliticalHistory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 135.

22Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, 127–128.23Quoted in Martin,With God on Our Side, 193. Martin also discusses the discomfort with which

Protestants received Billy Graham’s affirmations of John Kennedy, and Brown claims that a“lingering anti-Catholic bias” led Protestants to take up the anti-abortion fight surprisingly late.

24Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, 144–157.25Francis A. Schaeffer, A Christian Manifesto (Westchester, Ill.: Crossway, 1981), 19, 17,

131–132.

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argued, “Of all the subjects relating to the erosion of the sanctity of human life,abortion is the keystone.” Schaeffer contended that the permissibility ofabortion meant America had abandoned respect for human life. The bookconnected abortion to a host of dehumanizing practices, includingeuthanasia, torture, and suicide. The final pages of Whatever Happened tothe Human Race featured various figures pictured in cages: African-American slaves, Jewish immigrants, a handicapped girl, and a prematureinfant. Schaeffer concluded that “we must stand against the loss ofhumanness in all its forms.” He saw abortion as murder of innocents, and hisbook popularized that interpretation among conservative Protestants.26

Perhaps more important, Schaeffer disseminated a view of politicalinvolvement that encouraged—even demanded—that evangelicals cooperatewith non-evangelicals in order to achieve political success. Schaefferadvanced the notion of a culture war, and he suggested that politicalquiescence was untenable in the face of practices like abortion. He arguedthat evangelicals needed to adopt “co-belligerence,” or cooperation with non-evangelicals, as a political tactic. In A Christian Manifesto, he wrote, “It istime for Christians and others who do not accept the narrow and bigotedhumanist views rightfully to use the appropriate forms of protest.”27

Schaeffer believed that the dire straits in which Christians found themselvesin the late 1970s demanded cooperation with all who would join the fightagainst abortion. Evangelicals responded. A comment by Jimmy Draper,president of the Southern Baptist Convention from 1982–1984, typifiedChristian right leaders’ view of Schaeffer’s influence. Draper said, “FrancisSchaeffer was the first one to say, hey, listen, there’s a war going on withour culture, and our worldview’s in danger, and we need to stand for thethings that God has revealed to us.”28 Evangelicals’ embrace of Schaeffer’sculture war ideal represented the critical first step in mobilizing conservativeChristians.Among evangelicals, Jerry Falwell emerged as the foremost proponent of

Schaeffer’s doctrine of “co-belligerency.” Falwell’s leadership of the movement

26Francis A. Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop, Whatever Happened to the Human Race? (OldTappan, N.J.: Fleming H. Revell, 1979), 31, 198, pictures following p. 198.

27Schaeffer, A Christian Manifesto, 110. Schaeffer’s comment revealed the ways thatconservative Christians drew on the rhetoric of the civil rights movement. On this point, seeDavid John Marley, “Riding in the Back of the Bus: The Christian Right’s Adoption of CivilRights Movement Rhetoric,” in The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory, ed. ReneeChristine Romano and Leigh Ford (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 346–362. JonShields’s recently published book offers an expanded treatment of the ways the Christian rightrevived the democratic impulses of 1960s liberal activism: Jon A. Shields, The DemocraticVirtues of the Christian Right (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009). Cf. RichardJohn Neuhaus, “The Pro-Life Movement as the Politics of the 1960s,” Wall Street Journal, 8January 2009; John G. Turner, “Civility and Boldness,” Books & Culture (May/June 2009): 18–19.

28Oral Memoirs of James T. Draper, Jr., The Texas Collection, Baylor University, Waco, Texas.


was surprising. In the 1960s he had advocated political quiescence andfundamentalist “separation” from doctrinal rivals. But he changed in the late1970s. In his political newsletter Moral Majority Report, Falwell wrote, “Initself, the political process is not ‘dirty.’ It has been corrupted by wicked, sinfulmen and by the neglect of God’s people to be the moral conscience of ourleaders.” Christians, said Falwell, must fight “the spiritual war where Satan isactive—in the political arena.”29 And in order for conservative Protestants tofight successfully in the political arena, they would have to cooperate withthose whose theology differed from theirs. Falwell contended that “those of usin the leadership of Moral Majority are aware of the vast theological issues thatseparate Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Mormons, etc. We are not fighting tounite any of these factions. We are fighting to maintain [the] religious freedomof this nation so that we can maintain our religious practices regardless of howdifferent they may be.”30 These words reflected Schaeffer’s influence onFalwell. In fact, Schaeffer called Falwell in 1978 to encourage Falwell in hisefforts against moral decay in America.31 Falwell subsequently popularizedmany of Schaeffer’s views through his books, periodicals, and public appearances.

In May 1979, Falwell inaugurated the political action group Moral Majority.That month, a handful of conservative Republicans, including a Catholic (PaulWeyrich) and a Jew (Howard Phillips), met with Falwell at the Holiday Inn inLynchburg to discuss forming a political action committee. Weyrich reportedlycoined the new group’s name, Moral Majority, and Falwell emerged as theleader.32 In an early promotional brochure, the Moral Majority described itsphilosophy as “pro-life, pro-family, pro-moral, and pro-America.” The brochurealso suggested that a coalition of at least 170 million “moral” Americansexisted: 50 million to 60 million “idealistic moralists,” more than 60 million“religious moralists,” and 60 million born-again Christians.33 The organizationclearly intended to reach each of these groups, crossing once unbridgeable divides.

Most notably, the Moral Majority targeted Catholics for cooperation. Falwellclaimed that thirty percent of Moral Majority’s budget came from Catholiccontributions, and Moral Majority Report regularly published letters andarticles from Catholic supporters.34 “I do hope others will join me in giving

29“6 Questions Asked Most of Christians in Politics,” Moral Majority Report, 15 May 1980.30Jerry Falwell, “Falwell Defends Assault by Bob Jones: Morally Concerned Must Unite Clout,”

Moral Majority Report, 14 July 1980, 4.31Falwell’s associate Norman Keener recounted this phone call in a letter to Edith Schaeffer dated

24 May 1984, shortly after Francis Schaeffer’s death. Francis Schaeffer: letters folder, Archives,Pierre Guillermin Library, Liberty University, Lynchburg, Va.

32For a description of the Holiday Inn meeting, see Martin, With God on Our Side, 199–200.33“Your Invitation to Join the Moral Majority,” Moral Majority: Informational Booklets folder,

Archives, Pierre Guillermin Library, Liberty University, Lynchburg, Va.34The claim that 30 percent of the Moral Majority’s budget came from Catholic contributions

appeared in Kenneth Baker, “Catholics andMoralMajority,”MoralMajority Report, 20April 1981, 14.

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you our prayerful support (which I have already given you),” wrote oneCatholic nun. “I think Dr. Jerry Falwell is brave, devoted to Christian livingand unafraid to speak out.”35 Falwell’s advertisement of Catholics’ supportdisplayed his commitment to political alliances with non-fundamentalists.Moreover, Catholics’ strong and consistent stance against abortion endearedthem to evangelicals who had grown increasingly strident in their pro-lifeposition by the end of the 1970s. In his 1987 autobiography, Falwellcelebrated Catholics’ early opposition to Roe and lamented that “the voicesof my Protestant Christian brothers and sisters, especially the voices ofevangelical and fundamentalist leaders, remained silent” in the first fewyears after the decision.36 Aligning himself with abortion’s earliestopponents reflected Falwell’s wholesale adoption of Schaeffer’s doctrine ofco-belligerency.37

Cooperating with Catholics was not a trivial step for Falwell to take. In fact,this new alliance triggered the breakup of some older ones. Fundamentaliststalwart Bob Jones, Jr., issued a denunciation of Falwell and the MoralMajority. In a letter to alumni of Bob Jones University dated June 10, 1980,Jones censured Falwell’s alliance with anti-feminist activist Phyllis Schlafly (“adevout Roman Catholic”) and called Falwell “the most dangerous man inAmerica as far as Biblical Christianity is concerned.” Jones viewedcooperation with Catholics as an unpardonable breach of fundamentalist“separation.” As a leader of southern fundamentalists, Jones’s condemnation ofthe Moral Majority effectively excommunicated Falwell from the right-mostflank of conservative Christianity. Stung by the criticism, Falwell replied, “Iam indeed considered to be ‘dangerous’ to liberals, feminists, abortionists, andhomosexuals, but certainly not to Bible-believing Christians. . . . God hascalled me to do what I am doing today.”38 Falwell rejected the proposition thathis political activities compromised his faith, yet he understood that buildingalliances with Catholics had occasioned turmoil among his spiritual compatriots.The legalization of abortion, in Falwell’s estimation, had made that turmoil

unavoidable. Roe, said Falwell, showed him “that this time preaching wouldnot be enough.” He decided that “it was my duty as a Christian to apply thetruths of Scripture to every act of government.”39 This decision marked a

35“Letters from America,” Moral Majority Report, 1 May 1980, 11.36Falwell, Strength for the Journey, 335.37Catholics’ firm opposition to abortion made some of them heroes among evangelicals. Most

notably, the late Richard John Neuhaus and his periodical First Things won widespread acclaimamong evangelicals, notably George W. Bush. Time even named Neuhaus one of the country’s25 most influential evangelicals in 2004.

38Falwell, “Falwell Defends Assault by Bob Jones,” 4–5. Jones’s June 10 letter to alumni“preacher boys” was reprinted in its entirety in the same issue of Moral Majority Report (14July 1980).

39Falwell, Strength for the Journey, 337.


break with both previous generations of fundamentalists and Falwell’s ownstatements. In a 1964 sermon called “Advancing through Prayer,” Falwellhad chided ministers who used their pulpits to call for civil rights legislation.“God never called the church to be a social reformer,” Falwell said. “Thechurch has not been called to a political ministry of lobbying in Washingtonfor any kind of legislation.”40 This stance emanated from southernfundamentalists’ belief that the separation of church and state meant thatChristians were to abstain from political activity.41 He also might have addedthat, for the first half of the twentieth century, southern society’s racial andgender hierarchies, which most white Christians endorsed, faced few realthreats. The civil rights movement changed that. By the early 1970s, whiteconservative Christians understood that standing on the political sidelineswould not ensure the perpetuation of “traditional” values. Some of theseChristians had mobilized in the fight against civil rights, though countlessmore resisted the movement through declarations like Falwell’s, decrying thedefilement of the church with secular politics. But abortion, said Falwell,caused him and others to turn the corner. Political action was no longertaboo—it was essential.

Even so, many conservative Protestants in the late 1970s still conceived ofabortion as a “Catholic issue,” which necessitated a new approach to theissue. Catholic leaders defined abortion as a “life issue,” and Falwellgradually adopted that rhetoric. But he also connected opposition to abortionwith defense of the family. The Family Manifesto, a lengthy policy statementreleased by several Christian right organizations in the mid-1980s, declared,“We proclaim that parental responsibility for reproductive decisions is joint.Hence we deny that reproduction is solely a ‘woman’s choice.’”42 Thedocument’s authors used the language of pro-choice advocates to show howRoe threatened the family structure authorized by the Bible. By relegatingthe family’s primary function—reproduction and rearing of children—to

40Jerry Falwell, “Advancing through Prayer [unpublished sermon],” 1964, Archives, PierreGuillermin Library, Liberty University, Lynchburg, Va. Falwell made a similar remark in hismore widely cited 1965 sermon, “Ministers and Marches.”

41The historian Leo P. Ribuffo, among others, has shown that fundamentalists did not hold thatstance throughout American history. An “old Christian Right” existed well before men and womenlike Falwell came on the scene. But political quiescence, at least on the national stage, had been therule among conservative Christians for at least a generation: Leo P. Ribuffo, The Old ChristianRight: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War (Philadelphia:Temple University Press, 1983). Also see Joel A. Carpenter, Revive Us Again: The Reawakeningof American Fundamentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); George M. Marsden,Fundamentalism and American Culture, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006);and James A. Morone, Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History (New Haven,Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003).

42“Family Manifesto,” Moral Majority: Policy Documents, Family Manifesto folder, Archives,Pierre Guillermin Library, Liberty University, Lynchburg, Va.

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“private” decisions that women could undertake apart from their husbands, Roeposed a threat. Conservative Christians perceived the language of Roe, whichdescribed abortion as a “woman’s choice,” as a direct assault on thegendered family order instituted by the Bible.Portraying abortion as an assault on motherhood was crucial. Sociologist

Kristin Luker discovered a high degree of correlation between the primaryoccupations of women and their position in the abortion debate. Women whoworked outside the home were more likely to support abortion rights.Homemakers, Luker reported, felt that abortion devalued motherhood, whichhad once represented women’s social and biological destiny. After Roe,motherhood became simply one of several choices available to women.43

This choice, in the eyes of abortion foes, demeaned the mothering roles thatmost of them cherished. They believed abortion fostered “a world view thatdeemphasizes (and therefore downgrades) the traditional roles of men andwomen.” Female abortion foes’ experience as mothers and homemakerspredisposed them to reject Roe’s disregard for their “family values.”44

Of course, the rhetoric Christian right leaders deployed in opposition toabortion did not portray Roe solely as an assault on motherhood. MoralMajority flyers talked about a “holocaust” and compared abortion advocatesto defenders of slavery. “In 1857 the U.S. Supreme Court voted 7 to 2 that aslave was not a person but the property of his owners,” read one such flyer,invoking the Dred Scott decision. Likewise, said the Moral Majority, “In1973 the U.S. Supreme Court voted 7 to 2 that an unborn human being wasnot a person but the private property of his mother. . . . Again, the selfevident truth of the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness wasdenied.”45 Spurred on by Schaeffer’s vision, evangelical leaders in theearly 1980s had characterized abortion as an unmitigated evil. Their abilityto do so depended on a host of factors, including the far-reaching natureof the Roe decision and the subsequent spike in abortions performed in theUnited States.46

Yet the escalation in the Christian right’s anti-abortion rhetoric in the early1980s obscured both an early hesitancy to engage the issue and the

43The advent of birth control presented this question to an earlier generation of mothers, andthose who entered the pro-life movement before the late 1970s largely rejected artificial methodsof contraception (including condoms, the pill, and intrauterine devices). As the anti-abortionmovement grew in the early 1980s, a greater diversity of opinion on the legitimacy of artificialcontraception emerged: Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, 165–168.

44Ibid., 159–175, quote on 162.45“Judgment Without Justice,” The Old-Time Gospel Hour News, n.d., Archives, Pierre

Guillermin Library, Liberty University, Lynchburg, Va.46Almost 1.3 million American women received abortions in 1977, up from 193,000 in 1970:

Susan B. Hansen, “State Implementation of Supreme Court Decisions: Abortion Rates since RoeV. Wade,” The Journal of Politics 42:2 (May 1980): 375.


connection of pro-life positions to a program of “family values” that coincidedwith conservative Christians’ worldview. “Pro-life activists believe that menand women are intrinsically different,” Luker wrote. “They subscribe quitestrongly to the traditional belief that women should be wives and mothersfirst.”47 The correlation of “traditional” understandings of gender roles andopposition to abortion reflected the efforts of Schaeffer, Falwell, and otherChristian right leaders to connect Roe with a widespread assault on “familyvalues.” It also helps explain why the Christian right demonized thewomen’s movement in the years after Roe, just as feminism appeared poisedto win wide acceptance among evangelicals.

II. FIGHTING FEMINISM

Many abortion rights advocates hailed from the ranks of the women’smovement, which won notable gains during the 1970s. The United Nationsdesignated 1975 as the International Women’s Year, sanctioning themovement’s goal of making women full and equal participants in civilsocieties. During that year, the UN convened a summer conference inMexico, which produced a report emphasizing women’s contributions topeacemaking and tying their full participation in governments to thepromotion of disarmament.48 Some U.S. feminists derided the IWY as atoken gesture, but mainstream media endorsed the achievements and missionof feminism. For instance, Time said that “feminism has transcended thefeminist movement. In 1975 the women’s drive penetrated every layer ofsociety, matured beyond ideology to a new status of general—and sometimesunconscious—acceptance.”49 The women’s movement, like the civil rightsmovement before it, had won popular support, albeit conditional andfleeting. Feminists seemed poised to accelerate their drive for full equality.

Evangelicals initially appeared excited about the advances of feminism. A1974 editorial in Christianity Today endorsed the Equal Rights Amendment,and a survey in the same issue reported that Christians favored it by a 3-to-1margin.50 Evangelicals in 1974 also witnessed the publication of Letha

47Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, 159, 161.48The text of the resolution can be found at “1st World Conference on Women, Mexico,” http://

www.choike.org/nuevo_eng/informes/1453.html (accessed 28 April 2009).49“Great Changes, New Chances, Tough Choices,” Time, 5 January 1976.50CT conducted a survey of 250 “conservative and liberal” Christians on issues related to

women’s rights, including ordination, submission, and the ERA. The 87 respondents included 23women. Though such a small sample is far from representative—and CT offered no descriptionof its survey methodology—these articles, in the flagship magazine of evangelicalism, indicatedthat in 1974, the “party line” of conservative Christianity did not necessarily include oppositionto ERA. “Editorial: Some Thoughts for the ERA Era,” Christianity Today, 27 September 1974,

618 CHURCH HISTORY

Scanzoni and Nancy Hardesty’s All We’re Meant to Be: A Biblical Approach toWomen’s Liberation, which became the most important text in the nascentevangelical feminist movement. Scanzoni and Hardesty’s book deployedsome familiar feminist arguments, such as the contention that culturalconditioning, not biology, played the largest role in creating notions of“masculine” and “feminine.” But unlike most feminists, Scanzoni andHardesty enlisted the support of the Bible. They wrote that “from thebeginning” of the church, “women participated fully and equally with men.”The church must therefore “face up to the concrete implications of a gospelwhich liberates women as well as men.”51 Although many of Scanzoni andHardesty’s conclusions parroted the claims feminists had been making foryears, their use of biblical arguments in support of “women’s lib” awakenedChristians to the possibility that scripture might support feminism. FeministAlice Mathews called All We’re Meant to Be “a shot heard round theevangelical world.” She recalled that “once books and journal articlesappeared by reputable evangelical feminist scholars writing and speakingwithin the limits of accepted evangelical interpretive guidelines, shock wavescoursed through the evangelical scholarly community.”52 Scanzoni andHardesty enabled conservative Christians to claim biblical support forfeminist positions.While not all evangelicals agreed with Scanzoni and Hardesty, some of the

most prominent ones conceded the fundamental worthiness of the women’smovement. Christianity Today editor Harold Lindsell, whose 1976 book TheBattle for the Bible condemned evangelicals who did not subscribe tobiblical inerrancy, admitted that “women, evangelical or not, have legitimategrievances.” He believed that women “should have the same rights as men;equal pay for the same jobs; [and] the right and freedom to pursue anycareer.”53 Likewise, former Christianity Today editor Carl F. H. Henrydeclared that “this is a moment in history . . . when able evangelical womenare needed in all the professions and vocations now opening to both sexes—medicine, law, the mass media, politics, and much else.”54 Neither of theseconservative stalwarts agreed with Scanzoni and Hardesty’s contention that

36–38; Cheryl Forbes, “Survey Results: Changing Church Roles for Women?” Christianity Today,27 September 1974, 42–44.

51Letha Scanzoni and Nancy Hardesty, All We’re Meant to Be: A Biblical Approach to Women’sLiberation (Waco, Texas: Word Books, 1974), 60, 205.

52Alice Mathews, “The Struggle for the Moral High Ground: Christians for Biblical Equality vs.The Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood,” Journal of Biblical Equality 4 (July 1992):98, 95.

53Harold Lindsell, “Egalitarianism and Scriptural Infallibility,” Christianity Today, 26 March1976, 45.

54Carl F. H. Henry, “Reflections on Women’s Lib,” Christianity Today, 3 January 1975, 26.


the Bible sanctioned the ordination of women. Indeed, the debate over women’sordination divided—and continues to separate—evangelical churches. YetLindsell and Henry’s measured outlook on the broader women’s movementreflected little of the Christian right’s subsequent hostility toward feminism.

Conservative Christians’ openness to feminist advances in the early 1970sdepended in part on the seemingly benign wording of the Equal RightsAmendment, feminism’s most notable policy goal. The ERA, which passedCongress in 1972, read like a simple guarantee of women’s full and equalparticipation in modern society:

Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged bythe United States or by any state on account of sex.

Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriatelegislation, the provisions of this article.

Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date ofratification.

Most evangelicals felt the ERA represented the fulfillment of women’s push forequal rights, and they raised hardly a peep when thirty states ratified theconstitutional amendment in the first year after it passed Congress. The ERAappeared destined to garner the thirty-eight states needed for ratification.

Yet conservative Christian activists led by Phyllis Schlafly blunted andeventually halted the ERA’s momentum. Schlafly, a Catholic from Alton,Illinois, won the hearts of conservative Republicans in the 1950s and 1960sby opposing communism and nuclear disarmament. A Choice Not An Echo,her 1964 book endorsing conservative senator Barry Goldwater for the GOPpresidential nomination, sold more than three million copies and solidifiedSchlafly’s place as the “sweetheart of the silent majority.”55 In 1972,Schlafly turned her attention to the ERA, organizing a network of grassrootsactivists—mostly women—opposed to the amendment. They agreed withSchlafly that the amendment was “anti-family, anti-children, and pro-abortion.”56

How did Schlafly arrive at such a drastic interpretation of the ERA? Schlaflycontended that the ERA’s benign appearance masked its sinister potential. Sheclaimed to support “any necessary legislation” needed to redress inequalitiesbetween women and men in employment opportunities or income, butSchlafly thought all the necessary legislation had already passed Congress.57

“There is no way,” she wrote in the politically conservative magazine

55I borrow this phrase from Carol Felsenthal, The Sweetheart of the Silent Majority: TheBiography of Phyllis Schlafly (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1981).

56Donald T. Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’s Crusade(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 218.

57Ibid.

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Human Events, that the ERA “can extend the effect of the Equal EmploymentOpportunity Act of 1972 . . . the Education Amendment of 1972 . . . [or] theEqual Credit Opportunity Act of 1974.” Rather, “the Equal RightsAmendment is a big takeaway of the rights that women now have. It willtake away the right of a young woman to be exempt from the draft . . .invalidate the state laws that make it the obligation of the husband to supporthis wife financially . . . [and] wipe out the right [for a wife] to receive SocialSecurity benefits based on her husband’s earnings.”58 Writing for the MoralMajority Report a few years later, Schlafly described the ERA toevangelicals in more dire terms. The ERA, she wrote, would eliminate “thetraditional family concept of husband as breadwinner and wife ashomemaker,” restrict motherhood to “the very few months in which awoman is pregnant and nursing her baby,” and embed “the first anti-familyamendment in the Constitution.” She also argued that the amendment wouldprotect bigamists, legalize prostitution, and defang rape laws. In short, “thesocial and political goals of the ERAers are radical, irrational, andunacceptable to Americans.”59

Most of Schlafly’s charges depended on tenuous and unlikely legaldevelopments. She arrived at her conclusions based on a reading of the lawthat emphasized the most extreme possible eventualities of ERA ratification.In the article for Moral Majority Report, Schlafly used the book Sex Bias inthe U.S. Code, authored by future Supreme Court justice Ruth BaderGinsburg and Brenda Feigen-Fasteau, as “a good index to what the ERAwould do.” While Schlafly rightly highlighted that the federal governmentfunded Sex Bias, concluding that Ginsburg and Feigen-Fasteau’s book wouldprovide the blueprint for post-ERA legislation required a leap of logic.Schlafly based her assertion on Ginsburg’s status as one of the nation’s“most widely-quoted pro-ERA lawyers” and Feigen-Fasteau’s role as“director of the Women’s Right’s Project for the ACLU.” The federalgovernment funded their study, but Sex Bias was an advocacy document. Infact, the preface of Sex Bias admitted that an ongoing Department of Justicestudy of gender discrimination in U.S. laws would ultimately decide whichof the book’s recommendations to follow. Schlafly’s usage of Ginsburg andFeigen-Fasteau’s study allowed her to exaggerate the potential effects ofthe ERA.60

This sleight of hand helped Schlafly to convince a large subset ofevangelicals that feminists misrepresented their hopes and desires. Women,

58Phyllis Schlafly, “Can Federal Bureaucrats Buy Passage of Equal Rights Amendment?”HumanEvents, 15 May 1976, 10.

59Phyllis Schlafly, “How ERAWould Change Federal Laws,” Moral Majority Report, January1982, 9; Sex Bias in the U.S. Code: A Report of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 1977, iii.

60Schlafly, “How ERAWould Change Federal Laws,” 9.


argued Schlafly, wanted to tend their homes and care for their families. Theacronym of her antifeminist coalition, STOP ERA (Stop Taking OurPrivileges), revealed the organization’s philosophy. Convinced that the ERAwould make it impossible for women to assume the roles of wife andhomemaker—the privileges most STOP ERA members desired to protect—activists mounted a massive campaign aimed at state legislators. A typicalanti-ERA letter sent to Ohio legislators read, “Those women lawyers,women legislators, and women executives promoting ERA have plenty ofeducation and talent to get whatever they want in the business, political, andacademic world. We, the wives and working women, need you, dearSenators and Representatives [sic] to protect us.” And then, tellingly: “Wethink this is the man’s responsibility.”61 STOP ERA materials reflected agender essentialism that placed men in the role of providers and protectorswhile women appeared as domestically inclined nurturers. Some STOP ERAcampaigns featured well-coiffed conservative women bringing freshly bakedsweets to legislators’ offices. The contrast between conservative women’sfemininity and feminists’ aggressiveness was not lost on lawmakers.According to historians Donald Mathews and Jane Sherron DeHart, “theperceived lack of civility of ‘women’s libbers’ seemed to offend” U.S.Senator Sam Ervin, “possibly because it indicated disrespect for themselvesas well as other women.” Ervin, the Senate’s chief opponent of the ERA, feltthat the “‘physiological and functional differences’ between the sexes [were]so natural and sacred as to have had a moral economy based upon them.”62

STOP ERA members agreed with Ervin’s assessment and, taking their cuefrom Schlafly, took pains in both word and deed to highlight their femininity.

Yet these domestic desires did not prevent them from entering public life—especially when feminists were threatening the sanctity of home and family. Itis instructive that the most famous picture from her 1952 campaign forCongress featured Schlafly in an apron cooking breakfast. Yet she ran thispicture in a bid for legislative office—not exactly a “domestic”responsibility. Schlafly deftly constructed a public persona that emphasizedthe primacy she gave her family, even as she undertook larger and largerpolitical initiatives. Indeed, Schlafly’s contention that women wanted most totend their homes and care for their families demanded that she give primacyto her role as wife and mother. It was jarring for feminists to encounter awoman who held degrees from Washington University and Harvard (asSchlafly did) positing that men are inclined to pursue “higher intellectualactivities,” whereas women “tend more toward conformity than men—which

61Quoted in Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism, 224.62Donald G. Mathews and Jane Sherron De Hart, Sex, Gender, and the Politics of ERA: A State

and the Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 43, 36.

622 CHURCH HISTORY

is why they often excel in such disciplines as spelling and punctuation.”63

Declarations such as this caused an exasperated Betty Friedan to tellSchlafly, “I’d like to burn you at the stake!”64 But the conservative Christianwomen who flocked to Schlafly’s banner understood her point. Womencould engage in public affairs and intellectual activities, but their primarydesire was to care for home and family. They perceived feminism as adenigration of women’s noblest calling. Schlafly’s political activities seemedlegitimate to antifeminist women because she framed them as a defense ofher right to be a wife and mother.As in the abortion debate, women who opposed the ERA possessed a

worldview fundamentally different from the feminists who supported theamendment. Specifically, conservative Christians rejected feminists’ claimthat physiological traits represented the only meaningful differences betweenthe sexes, because they believed the Bible delineated clear distinctionsbetween men and women. “We proclaim that male and female wereestablished in their diversity by the Creator,” said the authors of the “FamilyManifesto.” This created diversity, the authors contended, “extends topsychological traits which set natural constraints on gender roles. . . . Therole of the male is most effectively that of provider, and the role of thefemale one of nurturer.”65 In conservatives’ minds, feminists’ rejection ofgender essentialism challenged the created order. God had ordained certainroles for men and women, and the ERA threatened them. For instance,conservatives worried that the ERA would mandate government-fundeddaycare and paternity leave, measures they believed would denigratewomen’s primary responsibility for rearing children. (One Moral Majorityradio commentator referred to the possibility as “Big Mother”government.66) Convinced that “women’s lib . . . flies in the face of theScriptures,”67 conservative Christians increasingly viewed the ERA as afrontal assault on faith and family.Not all evangelicals endorsed the Christian right’s antifeminism, but the

STOP ERA forces mustered enough support to defeat the amendment. Onlyone state (Indiana) ratified the ERA after 1975, and four state legislatures(Nebraska, Tennessee, Idaho, and Kentucky) voted to rescind their initialratification of the amendment. Fifteen states never ratified the ERA. A 1978effort by feminists to extend the deadline for ratification won them extra

63Phyllis Schlafly, The Power of the Christian Woman (Cincinnati, Ohio: Standard, 1981), 27, 26.64Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism, 12.65“Family Manifesto,” Moral Majority: Policy Documents, Family Manifesto folder, Archives,

Pierre Guillermin Library, Liberty University, Lynchburg, Va.66Charlie Judd, “Listen America Radio Broadcast,” 12 April 1988. Transcript available in Listen

America Radio folder, Archives, Pierre Guillermin Library, Liberty University, Lynchburg, Va.67Rus Walton, “Will Baptists Ever See through Carter?” Human Events, 25 September 1976, 14.


time but alienated some state legislators who felt the deadline extension unfair.Subsequent widely publicized campaigns in Illinois, North Carolina, andFlorida resulted in defeat for ERA supporters, and the deadline forratification finally arrived on June 30, 1982. Schlafly marked the occasionwith a celebratory dinner.68

III. GAY RIGHTS

At the 1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston, feminists ratified analliance with homosexual rights groups. Feminist organizers thought that theprominence of lesbians within the women’s movement, along with theintolerance that homosexuals faced in American society, demanded that theysupport gay rights. As such, delegates to the 1977 National Women’sConference approved a National Plan of Action that called for the end ofdiscrimination according to sexual preference. Betty Friedan, who had longargued that associating feminism with gay rights would hurt the women’smovement, said, “As someone who has grown up in Middle America andhas loved men—perhaps too well—I’ve had trouble with this issue. But wemust help women who are lesbians in their own civil rights.” The delegatesagreed, overwhelmingly passing a plank supporting gay rights. When thevote tally was announced, lesbians roared their approval, releasing yellowand green balloons throughout the convention hall that said, “WE AREEVERYWHERE.”69

Conservatives hoping to rally evangelicals against feminism could hardlyhave scripted a better scenario. Feminism had linked itself with gay rights,creating a bond between the two movements that persisted for years. In theearly 1990s, Concerned Women for America founder Beverly LaHayeremembered, “The lesbians flooded into that conference and attachedthemselves to the feminist movement, and never again were the feministsable to shake the lesbians from their agenda.”70 Perhaps more tellingly, in1988 a Moral Majority radio broadcaster described the ERA as “essentially agay rights bill.”71 In the early 1970s, conservative Christians displayedtolerance and even support for feminism. Yet by making gay rights anintegral part of the feminist agenda, women’s rights advocates associatedtheir movement with one that conservative Christians unequivocallyrepudiated.

68Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism, 276–281.69“What Next for U.S. Women,” Time, 5 December 1977.70Quoted in Martin, With God on Our Side, 164.71Judd, “Listen America Radio Broadcast,” 12 April 1988.

624 CHURCH HISTORY

The gay rights movement emerged as an important player in national politicsduring the late 1970s. Previous generations had considered homosexuality anaberration. Major medical associations listed homosexuality as anabnormality, and mainstream media rarely acknowledged gays. While manyAmericans viewed homosexuals as relatively harmless “queers,” that attitudedepended on the vast majority of homosexuals remaining in the closet,concealed from public view. “We make a distinction,” wrote oneconservative, “between the gay who is quiet and keeps his lifestyle tohimself, and the exhibitionist.”72 Sentiments like that persisted long after theearly 1970s, but as gays began to demand rights and recognition, societybegan to display more openness toward homosexuals. In 1973 the AmericanPsychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mentalillnesses, and sixteen states repealed sodomy statutes between 1971 and1976. A 1975 Time magazine cover featured an Air Force officer declaring,“I am a homosexual.”73

These developments frightened Christian right leaders, who talked abouthomosexuals as a sort of fifth column that had infiltrated the highest reachesof American government. In 1980, for instance, Falwell recounted aconversation with President Carter. “I asked the president,” Falwell said,“‘why do you have known practicing homosexuals on your staff in theWhite House?’ Carter replied, ‘Well, I’m president of all the Americanpeople; I believe I should represent everyone.’” To that Falwell answered,“Why don’t you have some murderers and bank robbers and so forth?” TheCarter campaign subsequently released tapes that proved this exchange neveroccurred. When reporters challenged him, Falwell described his fabricationof the exchange with Carter as an “anecdote which we use not to specificallyrefer to what was actually said,” a comment that created a firestorm aboutFalwell’s credibility.74 Yet Falwell’s supporters questioned the media’s“attack” on their leader rather than Falwell’s flimsy justification. Thewillingness of some evangelicals to grant Falwell latitude in this incidentdepended in part on their views of homosexuality. They saw gays as a threatto America.In fact, Falwell cited the prevalence and permissibility of homosexuality as a

sign of America’s downfall. “History proves that homosexuality reaches apandemic level in societies in crisis or in a state of collapse,” Falwell wrote.

72Morrie Ryskind, “What in the World Are We Coming To?,” Human Events, 3 November1979, 11.

73See Philip Jenkins’s chapter, “Mainstreaming the Sixties,” for analysis of how elements of the1960s counterculture won official endorsements in the 1970s: Philip Jenkins, Decade ofNightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2006), 24–36.

74“Falwell Lied About Carter, White House Aide Says,” Lynchburg News, 7 August 1980, A2.


“If homosexuality is deemed normal, how long will it be before rape, adultery,alcoholism, drug addiction, and incest are labeled as normal?”75 One ofFalwell’s colleagues agreed. “There are absolutes in this world,” said MoralMajority radio commentator Charlie Judd. “Just as jumping off a buildingwill kill a person, so will the spread of homosexuality bring about thedemise of American culture as we know it.”76 Conservative Christiansthought American culture’s increasing openness toward “alternativelifestyles” was a major problem. That homosexuals could win positions ofpower in American society signaled impending doom to evangelicals.

Christian right leaders foretold this doom by portraying homosexuals asthreats to the family. “Most of us, while feeling sorry for the homos,” saidone, “believe they should not be given posts of importance, lest our childrencome to regard the gay life as ‘normal.’”77 Conservative Christians opposedassigning homosexuals any positions of authority over children becausemany of them believed that homosexuality fostered child abuse. In 1977,Dade County, Florida, passed a measure prohibiting discrimination on thebasis of sexual preference. Anita Bryant, a Southern Baptist and formersinger, led a campaign against the measure. She described the countyordinance as an “attempt to legitimize homosexuals and their recruitmentplan for children.” Bryant called her campaign “Save Our Children,” and shedistributed leaflets that tied homosexuals to several recent child abuse cases.The media aided Bryant’s campaign by disseminating statistics exaggeratinghomosexuals’ propensity for pedophilia. For example, reports in 1977suggested that more than one million boy prostitutes were working in theUnited States. Bryant leveraged these reports to argue that the non-discrimination law would abet homosexuals’ activities rather than protecttheir human rights. “THERE IS NO HUMAN RIGHT TO CORRUPT OURCHILDREN,” declared a Save Our Children campaign flyer. Voters agreed.In June 1977, just five months after Dade County had passed the non-discrimination law, voters rejected the measure in a referendum by a 2-to-1margin.78

Tellingly, the Bryant campaign chose to focus on how the gay rightsmovement was anti-children rather than on biblical injunctions againsthomosexuality. To be sure, scriptural passages prohibiting homosexualityhad provided Bryant initial motivation. Yet she framed her activities in termsdesigned to appeal to a broad cross-section of potential voters. Human

75Falwell, Listen, America!, 157, 159.76Charlie Judd, “Listen America Radio Broadcast,” 28 December 1987. Transcript available in

Listen America Radio folder, Archives, Pierre Guillermin Library, Liberty University,Lynchburg, Va.

77Ryskind, “What in the World Are We Coming To?,” 11.78Jenkins, Decade of Nightmares, 120–122.

626 CHURCH HISTORY

Events noted that blacks and Latinos overwhelmingly supported the Bryantcampaign, suggesting that a campaign to “save” the children held wideappeal.79 The success of the Save Our Children campaign displayedconservative Christian activists’ growing political dexterity. They hadlearned how to transform “biblical” issues into “pro-moral” or “pro-family”issues that attracted people from a variety of theological perspectives. Socialconservatives—many religious, some not—flooded the precincts in Floridato reject the Dade County ordinance. The political success of this “silentmajority” depended on Christian right leaders lessening the emphasis theygave to an explicitly Christian rationale for fighting gay rights andspotlighting reasons that right-thinking citizens ought to fight againsthomosexuals’ political advances.80

The portrayal of homosexuals as pedophiles allowed the Christian rightto link gay rights with abortion and feminism as yet another example ofthe government’s attack on the family. In his 1980 polemic Listen, America!,Falwell unpacked the logic of this characterization. “Homosexuals cannotreproduce themselves, so they must recruit,” he wrote. “Why must they preyupon our young?” Falwell drew on the words of Dr. Harold Voth, a leader ofthe National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality, in orderto answer his question. Homosexuals, explained Dr. Voth, were not fullymature. Being fully mature “include[s] the capacity to mate and live inharmony with a member of the opposite sex and to carry out theresponsibilities of parenthood. Mature people are competent and masterful . . .they can replace themselves with healthy children who become healthy menand women.” Falwell used this diagnosis to illustrate the threat homosexualsposed to American families. Because homosexuals “prey[ed] on” the nation’schildren, the gay rights movement represented a brazen attempt by thegovernment to justify child abuse.81 And the support of feminists for gayrights further discredited the women’s movement in the eyes of the Christianright. Falwell linked support for abortion, feminism, and gay rights in anunholy trinity that provided the Christian right with its foremost foils.“Family values” became the rallying cry of the movement.

79“Will White House Cool It on Counterculture?” Human Events, 18 June 1977, 3.80On the role of fear—specifically, fear of homosexuals—in late twentieth-century

evangelicalism and conservative politics, see Jason Bivins, Religion of Fear: The Politics ofHorror in Conservative Evangelicalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 76–78,216–220; Jenkins, Decade of Nightmares, 119–125.

81Quoted in Falwell, Listen, America!, 160.


IV. CONCLUSION: THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT

AND POLITICAL CONSERVATIVES

Falwell represented an extreme wing of evangelicalism; not all evangelicalsfollowed his lead. Almost as soon as the Moral Majority formed, evangelicaldetractors emerged to warn the faithful against identifying the “familyvalues” agenda with the gospel. Critics included not only leftist evangelicalslike Jim Wallis and Ronald Sider, but also moderate academics like MarkNoll, George Marsden, and Nathan Hatch. Evangelist Billy Graham,chastened by his overly close relationship with disgraced President RichardNixon, warned Christian right leaders “to be wary of exercising politicalinfluence.”82 And leaders to the right of Falwell, like Bob Jones, consideredhis political activities to be a breach of fundamentalist separation.

Yet pollsters and sociologists have demonstrated the influence of theChristian right.83 This influence stemmed from its ability to frame familyvalues as a matter crucial to the survival of the country. By the end of the1970s, Christian right leaders had connected governmental attempts toprotect abortion, advance feminism, and defend gay rights withconservatives’ sense of national decline. They saw opposition to thesemovements as essential to restoring America’s strength. Falwell wrote, “Thefamily is the fundamental building block and the basic unit of our society,and its continued health is a prerequisite for a healthy and prosperous nation.No nation has ever been stronger than the families within her.”84 Byportraying abortion, feminism, and gay rights as a tripartite assault on thefamily, the Christian right connected a pervasive sense of America’s decay toissues that resonated with evangelicals.85

I have argued that opposition to abortion, feminism, and gay rightsconstituted the heart of family values, but other issues certainly occupied

82Billy Graham, “An Agenda,” Christianity Today, 4 January 1980, 25.83On the political influence of the Christian right, see John C. Green, “The Christian Right and

the 1994 Elections: AView from the States,” PS: Political Science and Politics 28:1 (March 1995);John C. Green and James L. Guth, “The Christian Right in the Republican Party: The Case of PatRobertson’s Supporters,” The Journal of Politics 50:1 (February 1988); John C. Green and James L.Guth, “Religion, Representatives, and Roll Calls,” Legislative Studies Quarterly 16:4 (November1991); John C. Green, James L. Guth, and Kevin Hill, “Faith and Election: The Christian Rightin Congressional Campaigns 1978–1988,” The Journal of Politics 55:1 (February 1993); JohnC. Green, Mark J. Rozell, and Clyde Wilcox, “Social Movements and Party Politics: The Caseof the Christian Right,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 40:3 (September 2001);James L. Guth, The Bully Pulpit: The Politics of Protestant Clergy (Lawrence: University Pressof Kansas, 1997); James L. Guth and John C. Green, “Politics in a New Key: Religiosity andParticipation among Political Activists,” The Western Political Quarterly 43:1 (March 1990).

84Jerry Falwell, Listen, America! (New York: Bantam, 1980), 104.85Critchlow, The Conservative Ascendancy, 131–142; Jenkins,Decade of Nightmares, 109–111,

120–123.

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much of the Christian right’s attention. Jerry Falwell, for instance, spotlightedthe growing drug problem and the ubiquity of “smut” as further evidence ofAmerican decline. His book Listen, America! decried secularist advances intelevision, music, and education.86 Similarly, Tim LaHaye charted no fewerthan 25 entities contributing to the decline of family values in 1979,including the American Civil Liberties Union, the National EducationAssociation, the National Organization for Women, Hollywood movies,government bureaucrats, and public education.87 Other members of theChristian right created their own lists of grievances and bogeymen. Nobodyin the movement limited family values quite as sharply as I have here.And yet, I want to suggest that opposition to abortion, feminism, and gay

rights stood at the center of the family values agenda, for a couple of reasons.First, these three issues posed existential threats to the gendered orderevangelicals championed. The “gendered order” I refer to here indicates aworldview—often unspoken—that regarded differences between men andwomen as the fundamental markers of human identity. In 1988 several leadingChristian right organizations, including the Moral Majority, the Eagle Forum,the Family Research Council, Concerned Women for America, and theAmerican Family Association, issued the “Family Manifesto,” which spelledout this belief. “We deny that sexual difference is solely a matter ofreproductive biology,” declared the manifesto’s authors. “Sexual differentiationextends to psychological traits which set natural constraints on gender roles.”Situating a discussion of gender in a document on the family underlined theChristian right’s belief in the family as “the fundamental institution of society,an immutable structure established by our Creator.” By attempting to redefineAmericans’ conception of families, feminism and gay rights directlythreatened conservative Christians’ belief in a gendered order. Abortion,according to the Christian right, represented not only the murder of innocentsbut also an assault on motherhood. The Christian right’s political agendaresponded primarily to these threats. Conservatives labeled their opposition toabortion, feminism, and gay rights as the defense of “family values,” and theywere not shy about its importance: “government must support familyparenting as the first premise of its social, economic, and fiscal policy.”88 Theemphasis conservative Christians placed on “family values” grew out of theirunderstanding of gendered order.89

86Falwell, Listen, America!, 162–209.87LaHaye, The Battle for the Mind, 141.88“The Family Manifesto,” Moral Majority: Policy Documents, Family Manifesto folder,

Archives, Pierre Guillermin Library, Liberty University, Lynchburg, Va.89For a sustained analysis of conservative Christians’ understanding of “gendered order,” see

Sally K. Gallagher, Evangelical Identity and Gendered Family Life (New Brunswick, N.J.:Rutgers University Press, 2003).


Second, Francis Schaeffer’s cultural critique, which motivated manyChristian right leaders to action, asked evangelicals to abandon their fixationwith relatively inconsequential “bits” and focus on “totals,” or those keyissues that threatened the survival of humanity. In fact, Schaeffer thoughtChristians could disagree on a host of issues. He articulated progressiveviews on race and economics in the 1960s and embraced high art and culturethat American evangelicals had previously deemed too risque. To be sure,Schaeffer muted his progressive stances by the mid-1970s, as his politics fellmore and more in line with the Christian right. And he never publiclydenounced the movement. Quite the contrary: Schaeffer spent his last yearswriting books and filming movies that advanced the cause of the Christianright. Yet Schaeffer did caution Jerry Falwell in private about both hisapproach (too dogmatic) and his unwillingness to tolerate dissent on issuessuch as arms control and taxes.90 He urged leaders of the Christian right tofocus on issues related to life and family, and those issues stood at the centerof the movement’s agenda.91

Moreover, focusing on abortion, feminism, and gay rights—issues thatcommanded almost universal opposition among evangelicals and Christianright sympathizers—allowed the movement to portray a partisan agenda as acommonsensical program that most Americans agreed with implicitly. In sodoing they aligned themselves with the New Right, which latched ontoRichard Nixon’s declaration that a “silent majority” of Americans were fedup with noisy liberals and their assault on traditional values.92 Far fromthinking of themselves as trying to impose morality on an unwillingpopulace, Christian right leaders framed the movement as a long-overduereturn to widely held values. Hence the name of Falwell’s political actiongroup: Moral Majority.

Yet the Christian right’s usage of the silent majority trope differed somewhatfrom Nixon’s original formulation. Rather than promising to end government’sintrusion on the lives of hard-working Americans, the Christian right intendedto legislate standards that would prohibit amoral behavior. The family valuesagenda bore only a marginal relationship to traditional political conservatism.Defense of individual rights had gone too far. Abortion, the ERA, and gay

90Barry Hankins, Francis Schaeffer and the Shaping of Evangelical America (Grand Rapids,Mich.: Eerdmans, 2008), 109–135, 200–204.

91Francis’s son, Frank Schaeffer, has questioned his father’s initial motivation for opposingabortion in a recent memoir: Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God: How I Grew up as One of theElect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back(Cambridge, Mass.: Carroll & Graf, 2007), 265–267. Cf. Os Guinness, “Fathers and Sons: OnFrancis Schaeffer, Frank Schaeffer, and Crazy for God,” Books & Culture, March/April 2008,32–33.

92See Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 5.

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rights proved to Christian right leaders that they could not expect a laissez-faireapproach to government to guarantee the perpetuation of traditional values. Inpursuing the family rights agenda, then, Christian right leaders did not fit neatlyinto the realm of political conservatives. Yet they believed the turmoil of thetimes demanded a new approach to politics. By convincing themselves thatthey represented a majority of Americans—and by convincing enoughAmericans that a liberal minority had launched a covert war on the family—Christian right leaders made “family values” an essential element in theRepublican agenda. Many longtime party members chafed at the emergenceof the Christian right in the early 1980s, but the movement has demonstratedremarkable staying power. This staying power depended in part on theChristian right’s ability to frame defense of the family as essential toprotecting the common good. Where critics see them as intrusive moralists,Christian right leaders portrayed the defense of family values as thenecessary antidote to almost all of America’s ills.93

As Carter found out in his ill-fated White House Conference on Families, by1980 “the family” was no longer a neutral term. That reality representedperhaps the greatest triumph of the Christian right. By painting theiropponents as enemies of the family, movement leaders gave their sectarianagenda the potential for wide appeal. Longstanding divides—betweenCatholics and evangelicals, or between political activists and conservativeChristians—broke down as the Christian right rallied supporters of the“traditional family.” Believers who had once defined their vision accordingto biblical terms recognized the political power of recasting their agenda as amatter of family values. This transition took shape rapidly in the late 1970s,but it was hardly predictable. The emergence of family values as thecenterpiece of the Christian right agenda occurred as movement leadersdefined a particular vision of America in a capacious rhetoric of publicinterest and common good. In so doing, they set terms for political debatethat continue to resonate.

93The historian Grant Wacker has demonstrated the pervasiveness within evangelicalism of the“custodial ideal,” which frames Christianity as the custodian of American culture and situates thatideal in the South, where a majority of Christian right leaders lived and worked: Grant Wacker,“Uneasy in Zion: Evangelicals in Postmodern Society,” in Reckoning with the Past: HistoricalEssays on American Evangelicalism from the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals,ed. D. G. Hart (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1995), 376–393. Also see Grant Wacker,“Searching for Norman Rockwell: Popular Evangelicalism in Contemporary America,” in TheEvangelical Tradition in America, ed. Leonard I. Sweet (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press,1984), 289–315.
