One month before Election Day in 1980, Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan traveled to Lynchburg, Virginia, to speak at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty Baptist College, where he advocated the restoration of classroom prayer in public schools. While it was not the first time that Reagan had spoken at a fundamentalist Christian college, many analysts were still skeptical about the genuineness of Reagan’s commitment to the newly formed Christian Right. Some predicted that Reagan’s newfound alliance with Falwell and his Moral Majority would likely dissipate as soon as evangelicals discovered how little they had in common with the Republican Party. “Evangelicals as a whole are likely to find their relationship with the secular Right to be rather frustrating,” political scientist Corwin Smidt wrote at the beginning of the 1980s. “Evangelicals are primarily concerned with certain social issues. As secular conservatives focus on economic issues and ignore social issues, Evangelicals are likely to become somewhat impatient with such conservatives, and new alignments and political strategies may become evident.”Footnote ¹

But a quarter century later, white evangelicals remained firmly committed to the Republican Party, despite Smidt’s prediction to the contrary. After voting Republican in every presidential election from 1980 through 2004, they continued the trend in 2008 by supporting John McCain over Barack Obama by a 3–1 margin, providing nearly 40 percent of McCain’s total popular vote.Footnote ² Far from balking at the Republican Party’s focus on economic issues, as Smidt had predicted, the Christian Right became an ardent defender of the GOP’s proposals for tax cuts and increased defense spending. Political analysts who had predicted the collapse of the evangelical alliance with the GOP were puzzled. They understood why evangelicals embraced the GOP’s stance on abortion, but why had the Christian Right become a reliable proponent of the Republican Party’s entire platform? What did tax cuts and defense spending have to do with evangelical theology?

Jerry Falwell’s career as a Baptist pastor and founder of the Moral Majority, the leading national Religious Right organization of the early 1980s, offers a case study of the amalgamation of social and economic conservatism, and helps to explain why white evangelicals became full-fledged converts to the GOP not only on “moral” issues but also on matters of economics and national defense.Footnote ³ As an entrepreneurially minded megachurch pastor and nationally syndicated televangelist, Falwell fused an advocacy of moral regulation with a pro-business, antiregulatory approach to economics. Having come of age at a time when private industry and Cold War military spending were the principal sources of economic uplift for his previously impoverished community, he developed a strong faith in the private sector and became an enthusiastic advocate of a strong defense policy. Envisioning a society in which business-oriented pastors and their large evangelical congregations would offer the social and educational services that had, since the New Deal, primarily been the purview of local, state, and federal governments, he entered politics in order to protect the nation’s churches and families from the perceived intrusion of the federal bureaucracy. His ideology was forged in the political climate of the rapidly growing suburban Sunbelt, a region whose corporate leaders and megachurch pastors shared a deep suspicion of federal regulation, believing that the national government was a threat to the sanctity of the home and the health of the economy.

Interpreting the Christian Right as a religious version of Sunbelt conservatism allows one to make sense of the lasting alliance between economic and social conservatives, a phenomenon that has puzzled many political scientists, journalists, and historians. Corwin Smidt was hardly alone in noting the apparent incongruities in the alliance between evangelicals and secular, pro-business conservatives. Several political analysts, including Thomas Frank, Stanley Greenberg, and E. J. Dionne Jr., have argued that business conservatives hoodwinked religious traditionalists into supporting economic programs that were against their own self-interest.Footnote ⁴ Other scholars, noting that the alliance between free-market advocates and social conservatives has proved to be more enduring than Smidt and Dionne predicted, have portrayed the Christian Right as part of a larger white backlash against the civil rights movement, an interpretation that emphasized conservative evangelicals’ fight against the IRS’s threat to deny tax exemptions to racially discriminatory Christian schools as a primary impetus for the formation of the Christian Right. Such an interpretation accords well with the generally accepted narrative of the rise of the Republican South as a backlash against racial liberalism in the Democratic Party, but it glosses over most of the distinctive features of the Christian Right, such as its opposition to feminism and homosexuality or its view of the United States as a “Christian nation.”Footnote ⁵ By contrast, most histories of the Christian Right have not even attempted to explain the relationship between white evangelicals’ social conservatism and the antiregulatory, libertarian conservatism of the right wing of the Republican Party in the late 1970s and 1980s. In several analyses of the Religious Right, such as those of Clyde Wilcox and William Martin, the political mobilization of southern white evangelicals appears as an anomaly, with seemingly no connection to the Republican Party’s position on other issues.Footnote ⁶

What is needed is an analysis of the Christian Right that explains both its distinctive religious features while also situating it within the larger context of southern politics and the rise of conservatism in postwar America. A view of the Christian Right as a Sunbelt phenomenon has the potential to do this. The growth of the Sunbelt in the second half of the twentieth century transformed parts of the South into a suburban region whose rapid economic growth depended on Cold War defense industries, and whose middle-class white inhabitants therefore adopted conservative positions on taxes, military spending, and other political issues that benefited the Republican Party. At the same time, the Sunbelt produced most of the nation’s largest evangelical churches, along with nationally known televangelists and dynamic pastors who transformed their once-small congregations into multi-thousand-member megachurches with sprawling campuses that often dwarfed nearby shopping malls. The Christian Right represented a fusion of these phenomena. The leaders of the Christian Right in the early 1980s were Sunbelt religious entrepreneurs who combined a faith in business and a suspicion of federal regulation with a commitment to the evangelical religion that they had made a business of preaching.

Several recently published works have explored the connection between the Sunbelt’s political culture and contemporary evangelicalism, but none has directly examined the Sunbelt origins of the earliest Christian Right organizations. Steven Miller’s Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South examines the way in which the moderate racial conservatism and Cold War politics of the Sunbelt’s most well known twentieth-century evangelist enabled Republican politicians to form a new political coalition based in the suburban South and Midwest. Bethany Moreton’s To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise explores the connection between Sunbelt evangelicalism and the promotion of corporate capitalism, with a particular focus on Sam Walton’s business empire. Shayne Lee and Luke Sinitiere’s Holy Mavericks: Evangelical Innovators and the Spiritual Marketplace depicts the Sunbelt’s most successful megachurch pastors as business-savvy entrepreneurs.Footnote ⁷ But no historian has yet produced a study of Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority that connects the nation’s first prominent Religious Right organization with the political culture of the Sunbelt and the region’s opposition to federal regulation of business, or that explains the fusion of economic and social conservatism in the earliest manifestations of the New Christian Right.

Falwell acquired his faith in business partly from his personal observations of the economic benefits that private corporations brought to his region during the postwar era. In 1933, the year Falwell was born, economic conditions in his hometown of Lynchburg, Virginia, reflected those of the rest of the impoverished South, which a federal report characterized as a region of “sickness, misery, and unnecessary death.” While two-thirds of Americans outside the South lived in urban areas during the 1930s, only 34 percent of southerners did. Per capita income in the South reached only 52 percent of the national average. By the time Falwell was born, Lynchburg’s tobacco-processing industry had been declining for eighty years, and its economy had become dependent on small-scale manufacturing and agriculture, neither of which was a lucrative industry. Falwell’s home life reflected the hardscrabble existence of many of the people in the area. His father, who operated a moonshine business, turned to the bottle for solace and died of cirrhosis of the liver when Falwell was in his teens, while his more pious mother found comfort in the religion of her fundamentalist Baptist church.Footnote ⁸

As Falwell reached young adulthood, the national defense industry began to revive Lynchburg’s economy and transform its political culture. The first signs of economic betterment for southerners came during World War II, when the South received nearly 40 percent of the federal money spent on military bases, and increased its industrial workforce by 50 percent. But for Lynchburg and for many parts of the South, the Cold War provided an even greater economic bonanza. During the 1940s and 1950s, defense industries constructed new plants and research facilities in southern cities such as Atlanta, Huntsville, and Houston. The percentage of southerners who lived in urban areas increased from 44 percent to 58 percent during the 1950s, and much of this growth was due to the presence of new defense-related plants in the region. While large portions of the rural South remained impoverished, several southern cities that became high-tech or industrial centers experienced rapid economic growth.Footnote ⁹

Lynchburg’s economy grew rapidly with the arrival in 1955 of two industrial giants, Babcock & Wilcox and General Electric. B&W’s and GE’s decision to make Lynchburg a manufacturing center for nuclear reactors and radios brought thousands of new jobs to the region and created an instantaneous real estate boom. By the end of the 1950s, Lynchburg received its first Sears department store, along with several new shopping centers. Because the management for the new industrial plants came primarily from the Republican-dominated North, the arrival of the firms’ white-collar workers rejuvenated the local GOP and helped to ensure that the region’s politicians would support the defense spending that kept companies such as Babcock & Wilcox and GE, the nation’s third largest military contractor, in business. But at the same time, an even larger number of southern blue-collar workers moved to Lynchburg from the surrounding counties in order to take jobs in the town’s new factories; most of the workers on Babcock & Wilcox’s shop floor, for instance, came from rural areas. The rapid influx of these migrants transformed Lynchburg from a tightly organized community centered around a courthouse square into a sprawling network of suburban neighborhoods, mirroring the growth pattern of America’s leading industrial cities of the era. The whites who moved to these cities to take manufacturing jobs developed a faith in industry, a belief in the possibility of economic betterment through hard work, and a commitment to the nation’s Cold War defense spending, which were values that eventually led them to become supporters of the Republican Party in the 1980s.Footnote ¹⁰

The beginning of Falwell’s preaching career coincided with the Cold War industrialization of his community. In June 1956, only a few months after the city’s new defense-industry plants opened, the twenty-three-year-old Falwell founded a new congregation, the Thomas Road Baptist Church. Lynchburg already had more than fifty churches, a number that would expand to 110 by the 1970s and 140 by the end of the century, but Falwell’s TRBC had a dynamism and youthful vibrancy that many other congregations lacked, while also offering one of the most orthodox fundamentalist traditions that one could find. The young pastor preached the traditional doctrine of fundamentalist Baptist churches, replete with altar calls, premillennial dispensationalist theology, and all of the standard fundamentalist taboos against drinking, gambling, and movies, while at the same time embracing modernity through a sophisticated use of media and evangelistic strategy. The combination appealed to many of Lynchburg’s new arrivals from Appalachia, who had come to the city for blue-collar industrial jobs. At a time when Rex Humbard was building a megachurch in Akron, Ohio, by reaching out to the city’s southern transplants who had come north to work in the rubber factories, and Robert Schuller was doing the same thing in Los Angeles, Falwell relied on a similar strategy for church growth in Lynchburg. Falwell initially targeted lower-class whites for evangelism, not because of a conscious decision to limit his preaching to blue-collar workers but because those were the people he knew best. He drew a three-mile radius around the church’s meeting place, which originally was an abandoned soda bottling plant, and began an aggressive door-to-door evangelism campaign in which he visited six hundred homes a week to ask people to visit his church.Footnote ¹¹

Falwell’s greatest publicity came from his successful weekly radio and television programs, which he launched only a few months after starting his new church. In the late 1950s, Falwell was the only preacher in Lynchburg who had a television program, a medium that nationally known evangelists such as Oral Roberts and Billy Graham had only recently adopted. Many residents of the city were intrigued by the young, athletic pastor who did not shout at his audience in the manner of a country preacher, but who instead told stories in a conversational tone ideally suited for his new medium. Within a few months, Falwell’s church had a “youth department” to provide Bible classes and other programs for its burgeoning adolescent membership, a program that developed into an entertainment-filled “junior church,” complete with a “Tree House Club.” In only one year, TRBC’s attendance increased from 35 adults to 864 people.Footnote ¹²

Almost all of TRBC’s earliest members were working class, and many were undereducated. Falwell’s father-in-law, one of the charter members, had only been able to acquire a third-grade education in rural West Virginia. A few of Falwell’s early converts were deeply impoverished. The Falwells later loved to recount the story of how they provided one man his only pair of shoes so that he would not be ashamed to come to church barefoot. Another man received his only coat from Falwell. But most of the members were factory workers, who were the economic beneficiaries of the city’s Cold War industrial expansion. TRBC’s early membership included women who worked at the Craddock and Terry Shoe Factory, the Wilko Uniform Company, General Electric, and Courtland Manufacturing, and men who were employed as truck drivers and in print shops and local factories. Some had been born in Lynchburg, but many had moved to the city from rural counties in western Virginia or from more distant Appalachian towns in northeastern Tennessee. To them, a job in one of Lynchburg’s manufacturing plants was a ticket out of economic distress.Footnote ¹³

Falwell envisioned his church as an instrument of societal uplift for rural whites, who were only one generation removed from poverty. By providing social services to meet the material needs of his congregants and free them from addiction and economic degradation, he helped transform them into productive contributors to his town’s industrialized economy and move them from the social margins into the working or middle class. In 1959, he opened a home for recovering alcoholics, a cause that was particularly close to his heart because of his father’s losing battle with alcoholism. Four years later, he launched “Treasure Island,” a summer camp for two thousand children that he designed as an evangelistic outreach effort to the region’s youth. In 1965, his church started a prison and rehabilitation ministry directed by a former prisoner who introduced himself at speaking events as “ex-Virginia convict number 46362.” In 1967, Falwell opened a Christian school, and in 1971, a college. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the congregation pioneered a bus ministry to bring rural, lower-class children—most of whom were white—to Sunday school and church services, and at the same time brought in drug addiction experts to wean young people off illegal narcotics. A team of pastors visited poor congregants to give them lessons in childrearing and provide for their financial needs. Falwell promised his congregants not only spiritual teaching but also “a quality ministry to the total man for the glory of God.”Footnote ¹⁴

By the 1970s, Falwell’s vision of church-run social services as an alternative to the federal government’s welfare programs would attract him to the conservative wing of the Republican Party, but in the late 1950s his championship of the perceived interests of his blue-collar, southern congregants set him at odds with his city’s Republican business leaders. School integration became the initial point of conflict. In 1958, four years after the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling, some white Virginians attempted to stave off court-ordered racial integration of their public schools with a strategy of “massive resistance,” which proposed closing the public schools rather than integrating them. This strategy had the support of Senator Harry Byrd’s conservative Democratic Party machine, and it was popular with some whites in rural areas, such as Prince Edward County. It also had the support of many fundamentalists, including Falwell. When the Lynchburg chapter of the Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberty, a state organization that supported segregation and massive resistance, held its first mass meeting and invited as its inaugural speaker a Byrd Democrat, who would later head the ticket for the state’s pro-segregationist Conservative Party, Falwell was on hand to lead a closing prayer. He served as the Lynchburg Defenders’ official chaplain and defended racial segregation from his pulpit. Like other southern fundamentalists of the time, he proclaimed that interracial marriage was a sin, and predicted that the integration of public schools would lead to illicit interracial relationships and further the cause of communism. “If Chief Justice Warren and his associates had known God’s Word and had desired to do the Lord’s will, I am quite confident that the 1954 decision would never have been made,” Falwell said. “The true negro does not want integration,” he argued, because it was the product of the “Devil himself.”Footnote ¹⁵

While Falwell and his fellow fundamentalist Baptists sided with Byrd, Lynchburg’s business interests did not. The northern-born managers of the city’s new GE and Babcock & Wilcox plants were embarrassed by the strident racism of some of the region’s more vocal segregationists, and they resisted any attempt to close the city’s schools. The old-money residents of Lynchburg were likewise opposed to any expressions of outright racism that might tarnish their city’s reputation and jeopardize its recent economic success, and they were proud of the fact that their town had managed to avoid the race riots that Danville experienced or the controversial public school closings that occurred in Prince Edward County. A few of the city’s blue bloods, such as Lynchburg Foundry president Henry McWane, who co-chaired the Lynchburg Interracial Committee, viewed themselves as progressives on race relations, even if they were cautious about supporting immediate racial integration. As a result, Lynchburg’s moderate, pro-school organization quickly surpassed the local chapter of the Defenders in size and influence.Footnote ¹⁶

The ministers of the city’s most prestigious churches, where northern-born plant managers and southern-bred local elites gathered to worship, condemned the segregationist preaching that came from some of the city’s fundamentalist pulpits, and a few spoke out in favor of civil rights. As early as the late 1950s, downtown Lynchburg had one integrated Episcopal church, with a racially liberal white pastor and a mostly black congregation. Likewise, the pastor of the city’s United Church of Christ congregation publicly supported the racial integration of the city’s swimming pool in the early 1960s and hosted a visit from Martin Luther King Jr. at his church’s interracial coffee shop in 1962. The mainline Protestant ministers viewed Falwell as a reactionary whose time had passed. As the rector of the Good Shepherd Episcopal Church later recalled, he viewed Falwell during the 1960s as “just another segregationist preacher.”Footnote ¹⁷

Falwell looked for support not from his city’s liberal Protestant ministers or socially prominent business leaders, with whom he had little interaction during the early years of his ministry, but rather from a regional network of pro-segregationist southern fundamentalists. Bob Jones Jr., whose college later became notorious for its championship of racial separation, spoke at TRBC in 1959. Throughout the 1960s, Falwell maintained his defense of segregation. In 1964, members of the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) held a sit-in at TRBC to protest its refusal to admit African Americans. In 1965, Falwell preached a sermon condemning ministers who joined civil rights demonstrations. In 1967, he opened a private school that initially had an all-white student body.Footnote ¹⁸

Having committed himself to both racial segregation and fundamentalism, Falwell developed an antipathy toward the federal government, which he viewed as a threat to southern white Christians. When the Supreme Court ruled against classroom prayer and devotional Bible reading in public schools in the early 1960s, Falwell denounced the nation’s highest judicial body. The Court had “power unlimited,” Falwell said in 1967, and was “exercising that power against God Almighty.” He added, “When a group of nine ‘idiots’ can pass a ruling down that it is illegal to read the Bible in our public schools, they need to be called idiots.” In a search for political allies who shared his views, Falwell began reaching out in the early 1970s to southern segregationist politicians who shared his suspicions of federal power. In 1970, Senator Harry F. Byrd Jr. spoke at his church. George Wallace delivered an address there in 1974. Georgia governor Lester Maddox appeared on Falwell’s Old Time Gospel Hour.Footnote ¹⁹

But in the mid-1970s, as Falwell’s rapidly growing congregation began inching its way toward middle-class respectability, the pastor began distancing himself from segregationist politics and moving closer toward a Sunbelt conservatism that was more closely aligned with the interests of his city’s Republican business leaders. During the 1970s, Falwell began using direct-mail solicitations to expand his fund-raising base. For the first twenty years of his ministry, he had depended mainly on church tithes, on-air appeals, and locally produced written solicitations to generate revenue, but in 1976 he hired a Massachusetts-based direct-mail company to begin sending out fund-raising appeals en masse. The firm’s marketing expertise paid off. Within three years, Falwell increased his ministry’s annual revenue from $5 million to $50 million. At the same time, he began marketing himself to a larger audience and became increasingly cognizant of his role as an evangelical entrepreneur rather than merely a small-town pastor. By the end of the 1970s, his television program had expanded beyond a regional market to appear on 373 stations—more stations, Falwell boasted, than carried Johnny Carson’s Tonight show. His church membership increased from fewer than ten thousand to seventeen thousand over the course of the decade, making his congregation one of the largest in the nation, and his staff grew from seventy to one thousand.Footnote ²⁰

As a national evangelical leader, Falwell distanced himself from the provincial political ideology that he had once held, and abandoned his support for segregation. TRBC accepted its first African American members in 1968, and shortly thereafter his elementary school also did so. By the early 1980s, as Falwell’s national reputation grew, he became embarrassed over his past racism and expressed regret for obstructing civil rights. In 1980, he took the Lynchburg African American civil rights leader M. W. Thornhill Jr. to lunch to apologize for his past actions, and in 1981 he began working closely with Los Angeles African American pastor E. V. Hill to recruit black pastors for the Moral Majority. Martin Luther King Jr., he decided, had been a “true saint.” Although Falwell continued throughout the 1980s to make statements that many people considered racist, such as championing the interests of South Africa’s white apartheid government and condemning South African Bishop Desmond Tutu as a “phony,” he frequently expressed a desire to make amends for his earlier opposition to the civil rights movement, and he seemed genuinely embarrassed about his earlier racist statements that did not accord with the “color-blind” ideology that he tried to project after the 1970s.Footnote ²¹

Falwell’s moderation on race began at the same time that he started moving away from separatist fundamentalism by opening his church to nonfundamentalist speakers from the Sunbelt. Instead of preaching only a narrowly defined fundamentalist theology that condemned nonfundamentalists to hell, Falwell began inviting entrepreneurs and self-help gurus from the Sunbelt to speak at his church. In 1972, for instance, Harland “Colonel” Sanders, founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken, spoke to the congregation, as did evangelist Bob Harrington, the “Chaplain of Bourbon Street,” who was an inspiration to young evangelicals, but who was hardly a fundamentalist. Falwell began leading trips to Israel, and started to develop close relations with conservative Israeli politicians, including Prime Minister Menachem Begin. His relationship with the staunchly fundamentalist Bob Jones Jr. became strained, and he began forging alliances with less stridently fundamentalist Baptists, such as Greg Dixon, pastor of a megachurch in Indianapolis.Footnote ²²

Falwell also began to adopt the persona of a business-minded religious entrepreneur whose market-driven model of evangelism was not far removed from the business strategies of the Sunbelt corporate leaders that he brought to his church. “The church would be wise to look at business for a prediction of future innovation,” Falwell and his associate, Elmer Towns, wrote in 1971. Citing the “large shopping center” as the “greatest innovation of business in the last twenty years,” Falwell and Towns declared that they envisioned a similar structure for their church’s organization. “The combined ministries of several agencies in one church can not only attract the masses to the gospel, but can better minister to each individual who comes,” they wrote. When Falwell organized a Pastors and Workers’ Conference at his church in the early 1970s, the seminars on how to run a church seemed to have hardly anything to do with conventional notions of spirituality; instead, there was a class on television ministries, a training session on IBM computer skills, a class on church mailings, and another on how to be an effective church business manager. “The large churches are led by intense ministers who, like entrepreneur employers, climb over any obstacles to expand the business,” his church newsletter noted in October 1971, in a reprinted quotation from Christian Life magazine. “Sunday School buses are utilized to bring the crowd to study the Scriptures, multimillion dollar buildings are erected to house students, volunteer workers are trained to teach age-graded classes, and thousands of dollars are collected to finance the massive enterprise of Sunday School.”Footnote ²³

Like a good entrepreneur, Falwell was engaged in a relentless quest for the growth of his enterprise. He routinely logged nineteen-hour workdays, and he expected his associate ministers to be just as dedicated to evangelism as he was. He held frequent fund-raising drives at his church to induce people to tithe more, and he created a competition for outreach among his Sunday school teachers by ranking the classes based on the number of visitors they attracted. “Nothing is ever too challenging for him,” one of Falwell’s friends, who described the pastor as a “fierce competitor,” told a reporter. “Nothing is ever too grand or too expansive.”Footnote ²⁴

Like other entrepreneurs, Falwell also dreamed of expanding his franchise to other parts of the world. He envisioned the college that he founded in 1971—an institution initially named Lynchburg Baptist College, but that soon changed its name to Liberty Baptist, and finally to Liberty University—as a way to train a new generation of pastors in the evangelistic and entrepreneurial skills necessary to start urban churches modeled after TRBC. “Become a part of the team that can reach into a metropolitan area and change it for God, thereby affecting a nation and a world,” Falwell told Liberty’s students in 1980. His “Preacher Boys,” he said, would play a key role in creating “growing, aggressive churches running in the thousands in attendance,” but in an era of business marketing, they could not do it without talented entrepreneurial assistance, which is why Liberty had a business program. “Some of you business majors are going to be the key personnel in our churches,” he told his students.Footnote ²⁵

As Falwell became enthralled with the corporate model, he began to envision the megachurch, a term used to describe a congregation with more than two thousand members, as the new model for congregational organization in the United States. Megachurches were a new phenomenon in the early 1970s; at the beginning of the decade, Falwell’s congregation was one of only sixteen in the nation. But by 1984, there were seventy megachurches in the United States, and by 2007 there were 1,250. Nearly all of the megachurches were evangelical in their theology, and most were led by dynamic pastors who, like Falwell, relied on large ministerial staffs to offer a comprehensive array of programs and social services.Footnote ²⁶

Most megachurches experienced their success in the suburbs. Bill Hybels’s Willow Creek Community Church, one of the largest and best known of the new megachurches that emerged in the 1970s, was located in the Chicago suburb of South Barrington, Illinois, thirty miles away from the downtown financial district. Tim LaHaye’s Scott Memorial Baptist Church was located in suburban El Cajon, California, rather than in central San Diego. As Adrian Rogers’s Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis grew in size to become the largest megachurch in the Southern Baptist Convention, it relocated from its downtown location, where it had met for decades, and moved to a sprawling campus in the suburb of Cordova, eight miles from the city. Although Falwell’s church continued to meet in the city of Lynchburg during the 1970s, it was located in a residential area rather than downtown, and much of its membership lived in suburban-style subdivisions. As a city that sprawled across fifty miles, Lynchburg was “really a collection of suburbs,” Frances FitzGerald wrote in 1981. The city included “tracts of comfortable post–World War II developer-built Capes and Colonials,” while “at the edges of town, the developers are still at work, and streets with such names as Crestview and Forest Park run through sections of half-acre lots before dead-ending in the woods.”Footnote ²⁷

The political values of Falwell’s congregants paralleled those of many other Sunbelt suburbanites, who were becoming increasingly concerned about rising crime rates, drug use, and the cost of welfare, and who embraced a political ideology of private property rights, tax cuts, and a moderate racial conservatism that many Republican politicians championed. Like several other Sunbelt metropolitan areas whose economies depended on defense industries, Lynchburg was a Republican stronghold by the 1970s. The city helped elect a Republican congressional representative from Virginia’s sixth district, and it regularly voted Republican in presidential, gubernatorial, and senatorial elections. Richard Nixon carried the city in 1968 and 1972, and Gerald Ford did so in 1976. Several counties in rural southwestern Virginia, which maintained a tradition of economic populism, supported George Wallace in 1968 and Jimmy Carter in 1976, but Falwell, along with a majority of Lynchburg voters, cast his lot with the suburbanites and the GOP.Footnote ²⁸

In keeping with his new suburban values, Falwell replaced his earlier overt racism with a criticism of federal welfare programs, which he phrased in pro-business rhetoric that appealed to other Sunbelt suburbanites. Federal welfare checks, he complained, went to “bums” who “wouldn’t work in a pie shop eating the holes out of donuts.” Like several other conservatives of the time, he unfairly blamed welfare spending for the nation’s high taxes and economic woes. “Because of the heavy taxation demanded for the support of a sick and unbalanced welfare program, the very heart is being cut out of the business community,” Falwell wrote in 1977. “The government seems to be at war with big business. The government seems to be committed to taxing the successful businessman right out of business.” In contrast, he argued, a large church could provide a private alternative to the welfare system by offering aid to every demographic “segment” in a community, including the divorced, the disabled, and senior citizens. Private solutions, he believed, were inherently more efficient than government programs. “Let us train pastors to meet the needs of the segments in the same way the government is attempting to do it,” Falwell said. “I think we’re better equipped to do it than they.”Footnote ²⁹

Falwell also became antipathetic to federal regulation of businesses, believing that such legislation impeded the healthy functioning of the private sector. When the Security and Exchange Commission charged his church with “fraud and deceit” in issuing bonds in 1973, a charge of which he was eventually cleared but that forced him to turn over his finances to a board of Lynchburg businessmen in order to avoid further troubles with the SEC, the experience deepened his suspicion of the federal government. In 1978, he experienced further conflict with federal regulation when the Internal Revenue Service threatened to rescind tax exemptions for private schools that were racially discriminatory or that failed to meet a minimum quota of minority enrollment. Falwell’s academy, which had only five African Americans in its 1,147-student body in a town that was 25 percent black, would undoubtedly have been affected by the IRS policy. Fearing that the IRS’s action would severely hamper his enterprise, Falwell joined a broadly based conservative coalition that successfully fought the proposed policy change and forced the IRS to back down. Yet rather than phrase his opposition to the IRS as a defense of segregation, he argued against federal regulation in the name of entrepreneurial freedom. “The free-enterprise system is clearly outlined in the Book of Proverbs,” he claimed, so the federal government was wrong to try to interfere with it. “I think that we should take the shackles off business and get rid of outfits like OSHA,” he declared on another occasion.Footnote ³⁰

Falwell likewise found common ground with Republicans on defense spending, a key issue for Sunbelt conservatives who were well aware of the role that military contracts had played in their region’s economic growth. As a fundamentalist who had been a lifelong opponent of “atheistic” communism, Falwell combined his theology with the politics of Sunbelt conservatism to produce a justification for the strong defense system that conservative Republicans such as Ronald Reagan advocated. A strong defense system was a divine mandate, he argued, because God wanted the United States to protect itself against the officially atheistic Soviet Union, which he believed would launch a direct invasion if given the opportunity. In 1979, he embarked on a campaign against SALT II, an arms limitation treaty that President Jimmy Carter had negotiated with the Soviet Union. If the Senate ratified the treaty, Falwell warned, it would amount to the capitulation of the United States to communism, and would allow the Soviets to “pick up the telephone and call Washington, D.C., and dictate the terms of our surrender to them.” During the 1980s, Falwell continued his cooperation with conservative Republicans on defense issues by lobbying against proposals for a nuclear freeze and supporting federal aid to Nicaraguan contras, whom he viewed as “freedom fighters” against communism.Footnote ³¹

In an effort to promote his blend of faith, patriotism, and conservative politics, Falwell took his Christian college’s singers on a tour of state capitals in 1976 to hold a series of “I Love America” rallies, attracting an audience that included conservative Republican senators such as Jesse Helms (N.C.), Paul Laxalt (Nev.), and Gordon Humphrey (N.H.). For people who were still upset by the antiwar protests they had seen during the Vietnam War, these musical bicentennial celebrations offered a message that held appeal both for Christian conservatives and for promoters of a hawkish defense policy who might have been less religiously inclined. Employing arguments that harkened back to the seventeenth-century image of the nation as a “city upon a hill,” Falwell claimed that America had a divine mission to bring freedom and salvation to the rest of the world, but that task would never be accomplished if the nation forgot its covenant with the Lord. “If God lifts His hand from America, it’s all over, and if America loses her freedom, the free world is gone,” Falwell said. God’s ultimate purpose for the nation, he said, was that “America should bless the world,” a phrase that could be reconciled with neoconservative foreign policy views, even if the secular neoconservatives interpreted these words differently than Falwell did.Footnote ³²

In a reflection of his newfound political conservatism, Falwell shifted his support from the southern Democratic economic populists who had once been his allies to pro-business Republican politicians. In 1976, at a time when many Southern Baptists supported Democratic presidential candidate Jimmy Carter, Falwell endorsed President Gerald Ford and secured a taped broadcast from the president for his church’s Fourth of July celebration. In 1977, he supported Republican gubernatorial candidate John Dalton, whose father had opposed the Byrd Democratic machine that Falwell had once favored, and who enjoyed strong support from Virginia’s business community. In 1978, John Warner, a Republican who won election to the Senate later that year, made an appearance at TRBC and received an endorsement from Falwell. Some fundamentalists were shocked when Falwell extended a warm public welcome at his church to Warner’s wife, Hollywood actress Elizabeth Taylor, whose multiple divorces provided plenty of fodder for tabloid gossip, but the pastor did not let his fellow fundamentalists’ disapproval of Taylor’s morals deter him from publicly supporting her husband for the Senate.Footnote ³³

When Falwell launched the Moral Majority in 1979, he defended his organization’s stances with the antigovernment rhetoric that had become his stock-in-trade. Although some of his opponents, such as People for the American Way and the American Civil Liberties Union, accused him of trying to impose his religious and moral views on others through the use of state power, Falwell claimed that, on the contrary, he was defending middle-class American families from the encroachment of a liberal federal bureaucracy that had assailed their values. At a time when many socially conservative Americans were alarmed at the rapidly rising divorce rate and revolutions in sexual mores and gender roles, Falwell told his supporters that liberal government policies were at fault for these unwelcome changes in American family life, and that his political lobbying against such policies would enable families to thrive again. His fight against the Equal Rights Amendment, he said, was a battle against “a piece of anti-family legislation that feminists, unisexualists, secular humanists and others” had tried to foist on the American people in a “satanic attempt to destroy the biblical concept of the Christian home.” Falwell’s list of the ERA’s supporters seemed calculated to strike a nerve with people who distrusted media “elites” and federal bureaucrats. “Every daily newspaper in America except three” supported the ERA, he said. The amendment also enjoyed the “support of Liberal politicians, three presidents, most of the members of Congress, most of the governors, with most of the media, with the support of everybody on the left, with most of the labor unions,” while only the “Church of the Living God” was left to wage a fight against it.Footnote ³⁴

Similarly, Falwell pictured his fight against abortion as another David and Goliath struggle against an icon of liberal bureaucracy, the Supreme Court. In his denunciations of abortion, Falwell never mentioned the many women who had terminated their pregnancies before 1973; instead, he blamed the incidence of abortion solely on the Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe, implying that if that decision had not occurred, there would have been few abortions in the United States, and that the state was thus to blame for the nation’s abortions. “The decision by the Supreme Court legalizing ‘abortion-on-demand’ did more to destroy our nation than any other decision it has made,” Falwell said in 1978.Footnote ³⁵

Falwell likewise viewed his fight against gay rights as another battle for the protection of American families from liberal government policies. In his earliest anti-gay-rights campaigns in 1977 and 1978, Falwell attempted to rescind gay rights ordinances that liberal municipal and state governments had passed earlier in the decade. Homosexuals, according to Falwell, had used the claim that they were a “minority” to gain privileges through rights-based, antidiscrimination ordinances that allowed them to gain unrestricted access to public school classrooms, where they would allegedly endanger America’s middle-class children. By campaigning for state referenda that would prevent homosexuals from teaching in public schools, Falwell believed that he was protecting American schoolchildren from sexual predators, who currently enjoyed the protections of an overly tolerant, liberal government. “Though they claim to be another poorly treated minority, homosexuals are involved in open immorality as they practice perversion,” Falwell said. “They are not a minority any more than murderers, rapists or other sinners are a ‘minority.’ Homosexuals often prey on the young. Since they cannot reproduce, they proselyte [sic].”Footnote ³⁶

Even in the midst of his campaigns for more federal regulation of individual behavior, Falwell described his political battles as a defense of the interests of a pro-family majority against the impositions of liberal bureaucrats. “We’ve also had the enemy to stand up against us, bureaucrats, politicians, amoralists, humanists, all kinds of people from all strata of society.” Falwell told his supporters in 1980. “They see a country standing up that may very well outlaw abortion one day because enough people may demand it, and they may see newsstands cleaned up and television programs cleaned up. We’re not out to hurt anybody. We’re just trying to bring the country back to moral sanity.”Footnote ³⁷ For many conservative suburbanites who worried about the recent increase in profanity and sexual behavior on television programs, the prevalence of pornographic magazines in their community’s convenience stores, and the news stories that they were hearing about crime, abortion, and the campaign for gay rights, Falwell’s claim that an overbearing state was responsible for unwelcome social changes seemed persuasive, and they were encouraged by his assurance that conservative churches could use the political system to stem the tide of immorality.

The Moral Majority’s support was strongest in suburban Sunbelt areas, where conservative evangelical pastors shared Falwell’s support for free enterprise and suspicion of the federal government. Falwell’s largest television market in 1980 was not in the South but in Los Angeles, which had been a center of grassroots conservative organization for the previous two decades. The Moral Majority’s board of directors, which consisted entirely of young evangelical pastors of metropolitan megachurches, read like a “who’s who” of Sunbelt preachers, including such pastors as Charles Stanley of Atlanta’s First Baptist Church, Tim LaHaye of San Diego’s Shadow Mountain Community Church, and James Kennedy, leader of a multi-thousand-member Presbyterian church in Coral Gables, Florida. Like Falwell, these pastors had built Christian media empires through their syndicated television programs, Christian schools, and nationally known inspirational books, and they were therefore proponents of free enterprise. They shared Falwell’s fear that the state was encroaching on the rights of the church. Greg Dixon, pastor of the eight-thousand-member Indianapolis Baptist Temple, had campaigned for the rights of Christian schools and had lobbied the Indiana legislature for the Church Freedom Legislative Package before joining Moral Majority’s board. The Moral Majority’s first executive director, Robert Billings, had been a leader in the campaign to prevent the IRS from denying tax exemptions to Christian schools charged with racial discrimination. LaHaye, Moral Majority’s most prominent representative on the West Coast, had been involved in single-issue political campaigns since the mid-1960s, and was also a strong proponent of the idea that secular humanists wanted to use the power of the state to persecute Christians, an idea that he began preaching long before he popularized it through fiction in his best-selling Left Behind series. “Humanists,” LaHaye wrote in 1980, “have a running romance with big government. … The less government, the more freedom—and vice versa.”Footnote ³⁸

During his presidential campaign of 1980, Reagan won the support of the Moral Majority with his antigovernment rhetoric. When he visited Falwell’s Liberty Baptist College, he framed his support for prayer in public schools as a way to counteract the tactics of liberal government bureaucrats who had engineered the “expulsion of God from the classroom.” When he addressed the Religious Roundtable’s National Affairs Briefing in Dallas, a meeting at which Falwell also spoke, Reagan presented evangelicals with a litany of complaints about anti-Christian policies that federal agencies had passed. “Federally-funded textbooks” Reagan said, “taught grade school children [moral] relativism,” while the Federal Communications Commission tried to restrict the “independence of religious broadcasting.” The Department of Labor “tried to exert regulatory control over church employees” at the same time that the IRS launched an “unconstitutional regulatory vendetta” against Christian schools. Reagan’s administration, in contrast, would restore “parental rights” to their proper primacy and would limit the intrusions of “big government” into church and family life. “Despite some intolerable court decisions, we do not have to forever tolerate the pornography that defaces our neighborhoods or the permissiveness that assails our schools,” Reagan declared, using phrases that were indistinguishable from Falwell’s.Footnote ³⁹

During Reagan’s presidency, the Moral Majority consistently supported the president’s initiatives on a wide range of policies, including defense spending, tax cuts, and foreign policy. Falwell spent part of his time during Reagan’s presidency lobbying for restrictions on abortion and campaigning for a constitutional amendment to restore classroom prayer in public schools, but he also devoted many of his resources to supporting Reagan’s other policies. In 1983, he made opposition to a “freeze” on nuclear weapons buildup, a Democratic proposal that Reagan also strongly opposed, his top priority. In late 1986, as details of the Iran-Contra scandal began to emerge, Falwell urged “all good conservatives to come to the aid of their President.” In 1988, he used his organization to raise funds for a petition drive to secure Lt. Col. Oliver North’s pardon. Falwell rallied to support the president, his staff, and his initiatives at every opportunity, because he saw hardly any difference between his own views and Reagan’s. “We have a president who agrees with every position Moral Majority represents,” Falwell said in 1982.Footnote ⁴⁰

When Falwell declared that Reagan was the nation’s “finest President since Lincoln,” his statement confirmed the extent to which the Baptist pastor from Lynchburg had become a convert to the version of political conservatism that Reagan espoused.Footnote ⁴¹ Religious Right activists such as Falwell may have once been the small-town, undereducated, southern pastors that some pundits imagined them to be, but by the 1980s their devotion to the politics of corporate interests equaled that of any conservative Republican. The alliance between Christian conservatives and the GOP that Falwell helped to create was thus not merely an exercise in political opportunism, but was instead the result of a shared political ideology that reflected the experiences of a particular region. Falwell’s politics, like Reagan’s, were a product of the postwar Sunbelt.