Religion in America Since 1945 by Patrick Allitt

Author:Patrick Allitt
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: REL033000, Religion/History, HIS036000, History/United States/General
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2003-12-16T16:00:00+00:00

Visitors to Falwell’s Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg noted the paradox that, in person, Falwell was affable and well-to-do, living comfortably in a gentle, small-town setting, largely immune from daily trauma, yet he kept up in his preaching and writing this rhetoric of war, setting himself and his congregation sharply at odds with what he depicted as a sinister outside world.

The New Christian Right, with Moral Majority as one of its central elements, believed that President Carter had not lived up to his promises. As a Baptist, for example, Carter was personally opposed to abortion but had not worked against the Democratic Party’s pro-choice position. Similarly, the Carter government had done nothing to dismantle the court-sanctioned wall of separation between church and state, which cut off public school children from their nation’s religious heritage. Should religion and politics be mixed? Falwell, eschewing his earlier belief in keeping the two separate, now answered with a confident yes. “What else would you expect? One’s religious convictions impact on every area of one’s life. If a man is religious, it’s him. It’s part of him. It’s all of him.”7 He campaigned vigorously against Carter, claiming in one speech (falsely) that he had met Carter in the Oval Office and that Carter had told him he had to hire homosexual advisers because of the homosexual constituency in the Democratic Party.

Democratic Party policy seemed to the New Christian Right to threaten the integrity of the traditional family. Paul Weyrich, another leader, emphasized the importance of family to their concerns in a 1980 interview:

What is behind the thrust against the traditional family values? Well, first of all, from our point of view, this is really the most significant battle of the age-old conflict between good and evil, between the forces of God and forces against God, that we have seen in our country. We see the anti-family movement as an attempt to prevent souls from reaching eternal salvation, and as such we feel not just a political commitment to change this situation, but a moral and, if you will, a religious commitment to battle these forces.8

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