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Intel - History
Moral Majority

"In God we trust.
All others we monitor."

• That year, 1978, Begin invited The Reverend Jerry Falwell for his first official visit to Israel...
• He and Begin got along famously. (The Fall of the House of Bush, p. 109)

• One of the first people Begin sought out was Jerry Falwell, who had just begun to achieve national recognition and who saw the birth of Israel as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy. "It was obvious to me, beginning with the birth of the Israeli state, in 1948, and the Six-Day War, in 1967, that God was bringing his people home," Falwell said in a 2005 interview. "So I came to believe that it was in America's best interest to be a friend of Israel....If America blessed the Jew, Israel in particular, God would bless America." (The Fall of the House of Bush, p. 109)

• The creation of Moral Majority and the "new religious right" resulted partly from the 1978 IRS decision to stop giving automatic tax exemptions to religious day schools and to set racial quotas as the general standard for qualifying.

• In the United States, Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority in 1979, urging Protestant fundamentalists to get involved in politics and to challenge state and federal legislation that pushed a "secular humanist" agenda. (The Battle for God, p. 278)

• Before Falwell, most evangelical Christian groups were reluctant to get involved in politics, concentrating primarily on saving souls.
• When he founded Moral Majority in 1978, fellow fundamentalist Bob Jones called the organisation "the work of Satan", because it was making common cause with Catholics, Mormons and Jews in an ecumenical-political alliance.

• An older, more extreme version of Fundamentalism is still around, symbolized most visibly by South Carolina's Bob Jones University (enrollment: 5,500), which did not admit blacks until 1971 and still forbids interracial dating. Chancellor Bob Jones Jr. of the superstrict institution (supervised dating, no pop music, rigid dress code) almost seems to take pride in what he jokingly calls the school's "lunatic-fringe" reputation.

• He gave Falwell's ministry a private jet. (The Fall of the House of Bush, p. 109)

• In 1980, Begin presented Falwell with the prestigious Jabotinsky Award, making him the first gentile to receive it. (The Fall of the House of Bush, p. 109)

Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority helped sky-rocket the success of the Reagan campaign in 1980

• In the 1980s, Falwell's group claimed 6.5 million members, raising $69 million for conservative politicians and helping to elect Ronald Reagan president in 1980.
• One index of the remarkable political change: between 1980 and 1984 the proportion of Southern Baptist pastors who identified with the Republican Party went from 29% to 66%. Falwell's Moral Majority claims that it registered 8 million voters during the past two national elections. Even if the actual number was 2 million, as some outsiders estimate, the feat remains impressive.
• Moral Majority's 200,000 registrations in North Carolina last year were crucial in saving the U.S. Senate seat of Pro-Life Leader Jesse Helms.

• President Reagan supports school prayer, and antiabortion legislation and several of his appointments have gratified the religious right.
• Among them: William Bennett, a Roman Catholic who backs religious day schools, as Secretary of Education; former Moral Majority Lobbyist Robert Billings as Assistant Secretary of Education; Pro-Life Presbyterian C. Everett Koop as Surgeon General.

• One of the shrillest of the Fundamentalist ideologues in Washington is the Rev. Tim LaHaye, 59, who moved to the capital from San Diego last year.
• A Baptist, LaHaye is lobbying in the capital and also building a network of clergy activists in more than 300 cities.
• He speaks of Reagan's presidency as , nothing less than God-ordained ("the Heavenly Father looked down and saw our plight") and says a second Carter Administration "might have plunged us into another French Revolution, only this time on American soil."

• LaHaye advocates a quota of 25% of federal jobs for Christian conservatives and, at the same time, insists that "no humanist is qualified to hold any governmental office."

• The "packaging of the Gospel with politics" is unfortunate for the faith, says Chattanooga's Ben Haden, a conservative Presbyterian pastor and TV preacher.
• He compares the Fundamentalists who are venturing into politics to the church liberals who stressed social action over the Gospel in the 1960s.

• ABORTION. The Supreme Court's 1973 legalization of this procedure is perhaps the single most important cause now energizing conservative churches. In some areas antiabortionists have taken their fight to the streets.
• Women arriving at clinics in many cities face a formidable line of protesters, or "sidewalk counselors," who try to talk them out of getting abortions.
• Threatened with a boycott of their lucrative annual cookie sale by right-to- lifers, Detroit's Girl Scouts in 1984 deleted mention of abortion and birth control from a proposed training program for adults.

• In 1982, the group boycotted, with mixed success, television advertisers who sponsored offensive shows. Wildmon also organizes believers in many cities to get the Playboy channel off local cable. Sex on television, says Wildmon, "threatens the very continued existence of a society based on the Judeo-Christian perspective of man."
• Wildmon has backed picketing in many towns to get Playboy and Penthouse magazines off the counters of neighborhood stores. Says Topeka Pastor Carl Bush about the local 7-Eleven outlets: "All we're asking is that they put them behind the counter so kids can't get them. But they won't even do that."

• "Is homosexuality a disease? No! It is a sin," insists Preacher Joe Chambers of Paw Creek, N.C.
• His judgment is based on such Bible references as Leviticus 18: 22 ("You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination") and Romans 1: 27 ("men committing shameless acts with men").
• In communities across the nation, Fundamentalists and other religionists are lobbying against homosexual-rights bills. They are alarmed by a federal court ruling applying the District of Columbia gay-rights law. The judges rejected Georgetown University's constitutional claim of freedom to practice Catholic teaching and said the Jesuit school should be forced to recognize and fund a gay student group. A rehearing is pending.

• This school, which takes its name from analysis of the various eras ("dispensations") in sacred history, is distinct for its highly literal interpretation of certain prophetic and apocalyptic passages in the Bible. To dispensationalists, specific events cited in the Bible presage the Second Coming of Christ. Since 1948, Fundamentalists have backed Israeli government policy virtually without question. Fundamentalists also fervently support Israel's sovereignty over the West Bank, because they consider God's granting of the Holy Land to the biblical patriarchs (Genesis 15: 18-20) to be irrevocable.

• The religious right leads in agitating to restore prayer to the classroom (a cause favored by 69% of Americans, according to Gallup)

• To Fundamentalists, statements by St. Paul like "the husband is the head of the wife" (Ephesians 5: 23) are eternal truths, not timebound opinions, and a woman's central task is child rearing. Says Bill Palmer, director of a small Christian academy outside Charlottesville, Va., who moved his family into a mobile home so that his wife could quit outside work: "I am not against equality or equal pay, but God did mean for the woman to be mother and keeper of the home. That doesn't mean she can't be the head of a corporation, but that does make it very difficult."

• The large majority of these estimated 10,000 schools are run by Fundamentalists. One school founder, Baptist Pastor Everett Sileven, became a Fundamentalist folk hero for spending 155 days in jail rather than allowing the state of Nebraska to license teachers in his religious day school. The dispute was ended last year when the state permitted church schools to hire teachers without state certification.

• In the public view, opposition to the theory of evolution has characterized Fundamentalism since its birth. Today's activists do not ask for a ban on the teaching of evolution, as they did at the Scopes trial, but for "balance." That means equal school time for creationism, which follows a particularly literal reading of Genesis. Not only were Adam and Eve the first two humans, creationists contend, but Bible chronology means the earth was created by God a mere 10,000 to 20,000 years ago.
• (Most scientists, Evangelicals included, estimate that the earth came into being 4.5 billion years ago.) Balancing laws to require inclusion of these ideas in Arkansas and Louisiana schoolrooms have been thrown out by the courts.

• Discussion of abortion in a high school text is the cause of protest in towns like Oak Hills, Ohio. Under attack in Madison, W. Va., and Peoria, Ill., are books of sexual counsel, including Changing Bodies, Changing Lives and A Way of Love, A Way of Life, as well as such popular Judy Blume novels for teenagers as Forever and Deenie.

• In 1983, he was named one of the 25 most influential people in the US.

• The same is true of television. A 1984 survey estimated that regular viewers of religious TV shows number more than 13 million.

• Largely because of the Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart scandals, donations to Falwell’s ministry dropped from $135 million in 1986 to less than $100 million the following year.
• Hundreds of workers were laid off, and viewers of his television show dwindled.

• In 1987, Falwell took over the PTL (Praise the Lord) ministry in South Carolina after Jim Bakker’s troubles.
• He gave it up seven months later after learning the depth of PTL’s financial problems.
• In 1987, Falwell took over the scandal-plagued PTL ministry of its disgraced founder, Jim Bakker, but he was overwhelmed by its deficit of about $US70 million and resigned a few months later.

• Falwell dissolved the Moral Majority in 1989, insisting the organisation had accomplished what he had set out to accomplish.

• And in 1999, he told an evangelical conference that male Jews were the Antichrist. He later apologised for his remarks — but not for holding the belief.

• That year he also warned parents that Tinky Winky, a character on the children's TV show Teletubbies, was a gay role model.

• Perhaps his most inciting came two days after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the US when he blamed pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays, and civil libertarians for the attacks.
• "I point the finger in their face and say 'you helped this happen'," he said. He later apologised.