During his 1976 presidential campaign, Jimmy Carter promised social conservatives that, if elected, he would convene a conference examining 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 American evangelicals. They provided him with a crucial bloc of support in the 1976 election. Four years later, Carter finally made good on his campaign pledge when he convened the White House Conference on Families. Carter declared that the conference would “examine the strengths of American families, the difficulties they face, and the ways in which family life is affected by public policies.”Footnote ¹ He recruited a panel of organizers and asked them to focus on how government policy might better support family life.

If Carter was hoping to placate evangelicals who had soured on him since the 1976 election, he failed. The diverse group of conference organizers Carter assembled insisted that a conference on families must examine the pressures facing homosexual and single-parent families, and they refused to define a family as a heterosexual, two-parent household. These decisions led conservative Christian political leaders to repudiate the meeting. Jerry Falwell's political action group, the Moral Majority, dubbed it “the Anti-Family Conference,” and Alabama governor Fob James announced that his state would not send any delegates “because the conference appears to oppose Judeo-Christian values.” Conference speakers, declared the Moral Majority Report, were “activists who hold the traditional family and its morals in contempt.” As a result, according to religious conservatives, the White House Council on Families would “heap scorn and ridicule on the American family.”Footnote ²

For three decades, leaders of the Christian right have deployed rhetoric such as this in order to promote “family values.” They contended that abortion, feminism, and homosexuality represented a multifaceted “attack” on the family, which they defined as “the fundamental institution of society, an immutable structure established by our Creator.”Footnote ³ Christian right leaders envisioned the family as the central unit of American society, and they framed their political activities throughout the 1980s and 1990s as a defense of the “traditional” family. The centrality of the family to the Christian right's sense of its mission extended even to the names of its institutions: two of the most important institutions in the contemporary Christian right are Focus 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 that came to constitute the core of “family values”—opposition to abortion, feminism, and gay rights—did not command much attention from evangelicals before 1975.Footnote ⁴ In fact, most evangelicals who spoke publicly about these issues in the early 1970s supported the Equal Rights Amendment and equivocated on abortion. Gay rights, to be sure, never found favor among conservative Christians, yet it seemed a marginal issue until the end of the decade. In short, on these three issues, evangelicals in the 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 “traditional family” with opposition to abortion, feminism, and gay rights. Christian right leaders 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 was never typical among Americans,Footnote ⁵ the image of a working father, a stay-at-home mother, and well-scrubbed children carried significant appeal among conservatives in the wake of the 1960s. And Christian right leaders developed a political rhetoric that connected the demise of these “traditional” families with feminism and gay rights. For instance, Jerry Falwell said that ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (a key initiative among 1970s feminists) “could sanction homosexual marriage, send mothers and young girls into combat, and generally injure the dignity of the traditional family.”Footnote 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 was going to argue against families? By the end of the 1970s, the Christian right had devised rhetoric that made liberal reformers enemies of the family and positioned “family values” as mainstream fare. Opposing abortion, feminism, and gay rights, in the view of the Christian right, would benefit all Americans. Some traditional political conservatives dissented, wondering why they ought to care about these issues. For instance, a letter writer to the politically conservative periodical Human Events declared, “Whether or not we agree with the lifestyle of the homosexual, we, as conservatives, cannot deny his right to live according to his own conscience without the interference of the government.”Footnote ⁷ This statement confirmed sociologist Ted Jelen's observation that the Christian right faced a formidable barrier in legislating morality in a society that considered the primary role of government to be the defense of individual rights.Footnote ⁸ Americans viewed with suspicion any political movement that encroached on individual liberties. Yet the Christian right worked around this problem by establishing the family as an institution instrumental to America's success. “If America is to return to original greatness,” wrote Falwell, “we must … support the traditional monogamous family as the only acceptable form.”Footnote ⁹ Falwell and others suggested that America became great because it nurtured “traditional” families. Thus, according to the rhetoric of the Christian right, opposition to abortion, 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 with pro-life Catholics, an alliance that horrified some fundamentalists. Likewise, the Christian right's conflation of church and state offended some Baptists who considered that principle sacrosanct. Grassroots activists, many of them stay-at-home mothers, joined with lawmakers to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment and to protest Roe v. Wade. The rhetoric of family values facilitated these unusual alliances. It was capacious enough to accommodate Americans of differing theological orientations and political commitments yet specific enough to provide a common vision for leaders, activists, and fellow 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 encourages both shrill and triumphalist narratives about the movement. Critics have published a raft of titles recently that accuse the Christian right of wanting to establish a theocracy, of kowtowing to the most craven corporate interests, and of fomenting bigotry throughout the heartland.Footnote ¹⁰ These studies, written mainly by journalists, vary in the quality of their research, but they share a fixation on the more extreme claims of Christian right leaders. Conversely, evangelical leaders have written narratives of the Christian right that emphasize the guiding hand of providence and the sinister machinations of liberals—narratives that fail to treat the movement with careful historical scrutiny.Footnote ¹¹ Neither of these approaches satisfactorily explains how the Christian right won significant influence. This article aspires to join the growing body of studies that treat the Christian right with sympathy, probe its leaders' claims with scrutiny, and explain how the movement's political agenda captured widespread support. To date, sociologists have provided some of the best studies of the movement.Footnote ¹² This article adds a historical dimension to the story of the Christian right, showing that Christian right leaders developed the family values agenda through a series of contingencies that 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 protect women's right to an abortion during the first six months of pregnancy. Overturning that decision became (and remains) the preeminent political task of social conservatives. Many of these social conservatives hailed from evangelical churches, and they identified the Roe decision as the critical issue that awakened them from long political slumber. “The abortion issue,” recalled Southern Baptist leader Al Mohler, “is the stick of dynamite that exploded the issue.”Footnote ¹³ Likewise, Jerry Falwell said that on “the morning of January 23, 1973”—the day after the Roe decision—“I felt a growing conviction that I would have to take my stand.”Footnote ¹⁴ Though it took several years for Falwell to follow through on his conviction, abortion clearly occupied a central role among the constellation of issues Christian right leaders spotlighted in their mobilization of conservative Christians.

Yet evangelicals' initial response to Roe v. Wade hardly matched their recollections of immediate indignation. Falwell issued no statements on the decision until 1975, a silence he attributed to preoccupation with a government investigation of his organization's finances in 1973.Footnote ¹⁵ Polls of Southern Baptists in the half-decade before Roe showed an overwhelming majority in favor of “therapeutic abortion,” albeit not abortion on demand. Though some conservatives in the SBC agitated for a stronger stand against abortion after Roe, moderates blocked the discussion of an anti-abortion resolution at the 1974 convention.Footnote ¹⁶Christianity Today, the flagship evangelical journal launched by Billy Graham in the 1950s, took a strong stand against abortion under the direction of editor (and Southern Baptist minister) Harold Lindsell, but few magazines followed its lead. While grassroots pro-life activists expressed indignation about the Roe decision, most evangelical Protestant leaders and institutions responded tepidly at first.Footnote ¹⁷

Why did evangelicals remain a minority faction in the pro-life coalition through most of the 1970s? In 1973 two factors mitigated against conservative Christians' opposition of Roe. First, the language the Court used to legitimate abortion drew on conservative rhetoric. The Fourteenth Amendment, said the Court, “protects against state action the right to privacy.” In other words, the Supreme Court employed an individual rights rationale that favored women's prerogative in reproductive choices against the state's interference. Early abortion foes knew the consequences of Roe could be dire. By defining abortion as an issue “belonging to the private sphere, more like a religious preference than a deeply held social belief,” the Court's decision appealed to those who rejected governmental interference into private decisions.Footnote ¹⁸ Evangelicals, who had developed sensitivity to governmental intrusion on their beliefs in the decades after the 1925 Scopes trial, increasingly guarded against any attempts to infringe on their religious liberty. By framing abortion as an individual right, the Court predisposed some political conservatives to support Roe.Footnote ¹⁹

Second, and more important, Catholics spearheaded the earliest campaigns against abortion.Footnote ²⁰ In the early 1970s, about 70 percent of the members of the National Right to Life Commission claimed membership in the Catholic Church.Footnote ²¹ Catholics' leadership of the pro-life movement made it less likely that conservative Protestants would join it. A 1984 study of the pro-life movement found that few activists had expressed any public opposition to abortion before 1967 (when California legalized abortion), and almost all of the earliest activists were Catholic. Catholics' overwhelming majority in the nascent anti-abortion coalition persisted at least through 1978.Footnote ²² Given the historic enmity between Catholics and conservative Protestants, it is hardly surprising that evangelicals felt some discomfort about joining the pro-life movement in the early 1970s. As the evangelical theologian Harold O. J. Brown put it, “At that point, a lot of Protestants reacted almost automatically—‘If the Catholics are for it, we should be against it.’”Footnote ²³ Right-to-life groups did receive a surge in Protestant membership after the Roe decision—especially from younger women with small children—but on the whole, evangelicals seemed hesitant to enter the pro-life coalition until the mid-1970s.Footnote ²⁴

Evangelical theologian Francis Schaeffer sought to change that. Born and reared among conservative Presbyterians in Pennsylvania, Schaeffer established a Christian community called L'Abri (“the shelter”) in Switzerland during the 1950s. From L'Abri, Schaeffer published his views on a variety of subjects. Schaeffer rejected fundamentalism's notion of “purity” as misguided and even heretical. Christians, he contended, needed to 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 life equally.” He presented conservative Christian views on a host of subjects, from the environment to the arts. Schaeffer contended that “secular humanists” had embedded an anti-Christian philosophy in American laws and government. Now, Schaeffer argued, Christians had to fight back. “Our loyalty to the God who gave the law,” wrote Schaeffer, “requires that we make the appropriate response … to such a tyrannical usurping of power.”Footnote ²⁵

By the end of the 1970s, Schaeffer had emerged as the foremost evangelical opponent of abortion, which he portrayed as the primary issue demanding Christian response. In Whatever Happened to the Human Race, which Schaeffer co-wrote with the future surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, he argued, “Of all the subjects relating to the erosion of the sanctity of human life, abortion is the keystone.” Schaeffer contended that the permissibility of abortion meant America had abandoned respect for human life. The book connected abortion to a host of dehumanizing practices, including euthanasia, torture, and suicide. The final pages of Whatever Happened to the Human Race featured various figures pictured in cages: African-American slaves, Jewish immigrants, a handicapped girl, and a premature infant. Schaeffer concluded that “we must stand against the loss of humanness in all its forms.” He saw abortion as murder of innocents, and his book popularized that interpretation among conservative Protestants.Footnote ²⁶

Perhaps more important, Schaeffer disseminated a view of political involvement that encouraged—even demanded—that evangelicals cooperate with non-evangelicals in order to achieve political success. Schaeffer advanced the notion of a culture war, and he suggested that political quiescence was untenable in the face of practices like abortion. He argued that evangelicals needed to adopt “co-belligerence,” or cooperation with non-evangelicals, as a political tactic. In A Christian Manifesto, he wrote, “It is time for Christians and others who do not accept the narrow and bigoted humanist views rightfully to use the appropriate forms of protest.”Footnote ²⁷ Schaeffer believed that the dire straits in which Christians found themselves in the late 1970s demanded cooperation with all who would join the fight against abortion. Evangelicals responded. A comment by Jimmy Draper, president of the Southern Baptist Convention from 1982–1984, typified Christian right leaders' view of Schaeffer's influence. Draper said, “Francis Schaeffer was the first one to say, hey, listen, there's a war going on with our culture, and our worldview's in danger, and we need to stand for the things that God has revealed to us.”Footnote ²⁸ Evangelicals' embrace of Schaeffer's culture war ideal represented the critical first step in mobilizing conservative Christians.

Among evangelicals, Jerry Falwell emerged as the foremost proponent of Schaeffer's doctrine of “co-belligerency.” Falwell's leadership of the movement was surprising. In the 1960s he had advocated political quiescence and fundamentalist “separation” from doctrinal rivals. But he changed in the late 1970s. In his political newsletter Moral Majority Report, Falwell wrote, “In itself, the political process is not ‘dirty.’ It has been corrupted by wicked, sinful men and by the neglect of God's people to be the moral conscience of our leaders.” Christians, said Falwell, must fight “the spiritual war where Satan is active—in the political arena.”Footnote ²⁹ And in order for conservative Protestants to fight successfully in the political arena, they would have to cooperate with those whose theology differed from theirs. Falwell contended that “those of us in the leadership of Moral Majority are aware of the vast theological issues that separate Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Mormons, etc. We are not fighting to unite any of these factions. We are fighting to maintain [the] religious freedom of this nation so that we can maintain our religious practices regardless of how different they may be.”Footnote ³⁰ These words reflected Schaeffer's influence on Falwell. In fact, Schaeffer called Falwell in 1978 to encourage Falwell in his efforts against moral decay in America.Footnote ³¹ Falwell subsequently popularized many 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 (Paul Weyrich) and a Jew (Howard Phillips), met with Falwell at the Holiday Inn in Lynchburg to discuss forming a political action committee. Weyrich reportedly coined the new group's name, Moral Majority, and Falwell emerged as the leader.Footnote ³² In an early promotional brochure, the Moral Majority described its philosophy as “pro-life, pro-family, pro-moral, and pro-America.” The brochure also suggested that a coalition of at least 170 million “moral” Americans existed: 50 million to 60 million “idealistic moralists,” more than 60 million “religious moralists,” and 60 million born-again Christians.Footnote ³³ The organization clearly intended to reach each of these groups, crossing once unbridgeable divides.

Most notably, the Moral Majority targeted Catholics for cooperation. Falwell claimed that thirty percent of Moral Majority's budget came from Catholic contributions, and Moral Majority Report regularly published letters and articles from Catholic supporters.Footnote ³⁴ “I do hope others will join me in giving you our prayerful support (which I have already given you),” wrote one Catholic nun. “I think Dr. Jerry Falwell is brave, devoted to Christian living and unafraid to speak out.”Footnote ³⁵ Falwell's advertisement of Catholics' support displayed his commitment to political alliances with non-fundamentalists. Moreover, Catholics' strong and consistent stance against abortion endeared them to evangelicals who had grown increasingly strident in their pro-life position by the end of the 1970s. In his 1987 autobiography, Falwell celebrated Catholics' early opposition to Roe and lamented that “the voices of my Protestant Christian brothers and sisters, especially the voices of evangelical and fundamentalist leaders, remained silent” in the first few years after the decision.Footnote ³⁶ Aligning himself with abortion's earliest opponents reflected Falwell's wholesale adoption of Schaeffer's doctrine of co-belligerency.Footnote 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. Fundamentalist stalwart Bob Jones, Jr., issued a denunciation of Falwell and the Moral Majority. In a letter to alumni of Bob Jones University dated June 10, 1980, Jones censured Falwell's alliance with anti-feminist activist Phyllis Schlafly (“a devout Roman Catholic”) and called Falwell “the most dangerous man in America as far as Biblical Christianity is concerned.” Jones viewed cooperation with Catholics as an unpardonable breach of fundamentalist “separation.” As a leader of southern fundamentalists, Jones's condemnation of the Moral Majority effectively excommunicated Falwell from the right-most flank of conservative Christianity. Stung by the criticism, Falwell replied, “I am indeed considered to be ‘dangerous’ to liberals, feminists, abortionists, and homosexuals, but certainly not to Bible-believing Christians… . God has called me to do what I am doing today.”Footnote ³⁸ Falwell rejected the proposition that his political activities compromised his faith, yet he understood that building alliances 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 would not be enough.” He decided that “it was my duty as a Christian to apply the truths of Scripture to every act of government.”Footnote ³⁹ This decision marked a break with both previous generations of fundamentalists and Falwell's own statements. In a 1964 sermon called “Advancing through Prayer,” Falwell had chided ministers who used their pulpits to call for civil rights legislation. “God never called the church to be a social reformer,” Falwell said. “The church has not been called to a political ministry of lobbying in Washington for any kind of legislation.”Footnote ⁴⁰ This stance emanated from southern fundamentalists' belief that the separation of church and state meant that Christians were to abstain from political activity.Footnote ⁴¹ He also might have added that, for the first half of the twentieth century, southern society's racial and gender hierarchies, which most white Christians endorsed, faced few real threats. The civil rights movement changed that. By the early 1970s, white conservative Christians understood that standing on the political sidelines would not ensure the perpetuation of “traditional” values. Some of these Christians had mobilized in the fight against civil rights, though countless more resisted the movement through declarations like Falwell's, decrying the defilement of the church with secular politics. But abortion, said Falwell, caused him and others to turn the corner. Political action was no longer taboo—it was essential.

Even so, many conservative Protestants in the late 1970s still conceived of abortion as a “Catholic issue,” which necessitated a new approach to the issue. Catholic leaders defined abortion as a “life issue,” and Falwell gradually adopted that rhetoric. But he also connected opposition to abortion with defense of the family. The Family Manifesto, a lengthy policy statement released 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.’”Footnote ⁴² The document's authors used the language of pro-choice advocates to show how Roe threatened the family structure authorized by the Bible. By relegating the family's primary function—reproduction and rearing of children—to “private” decisions that women could undertake apart from their husbands, Roe posed a threat. Conservative Christians perceived the language of Roe, which described abortion as a “woman's choice,” as a direct assault on the gendered 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 primary occupations of women and their position in the abortion debate. Women who worked outside the home were more likely to support abortion rights. Homemakers, Luker reported, felt that abortion devalued motherhood, which had once represented women's social and biological destiny. After Roe, motherhood became simply one of several choices available to women.Footnote ⁴³ This choice, in the eyes of abortion foes, demeaned the mothering roles that most of them cherished. They believed abortion fostered “a world view that deemphasizes (and therefore downgrades) the traditional roles of men and women.” Female abortion foes' experience as mothers and homemakers predisposed them to reject Roe's disregard for their “family values.”Footnote ⁴⁴

Of course, the rhetoric Christian right leaders deployed in opposition to abortion did not portray Roe solely as an assault on motherhood. Moral Majority flyers talked about a “holocaust” and compared abortion advocates to defenders of slavery. “In 1857 the U.S. Supreme Court voted 7 to 2 that a slave was not a person but the property of his owners,” read one such flyer, invoking the Dred Scott decision. Likewise, said the Moral Majority, “In 1973 the U.S. Supreme Court voted 7 to 2 that an unborn human being was not a person but the private property of his mother. … Again, the self evident truth of the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness was denied.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Spurred on by Schaeffer's vision, evangelical leaders in the early 1980s had characterized abortion as an unmitigated evil. Their ability to do so depended on a host of factors, including the far-reaching nature of the Roe decision and the subsequent spike in abortions performed in the United States.Footnote ⁴⁶

Yet the escalation in the Christian right's anti-abortion rhetoric in the early 1980s obscured both an early hesitancy to engage the issue and the connection of pro-life positions to a program of “family values” that coincided with conservative Christians' worldview. “Pro-life activists believe that men and women are intrinsically different,” Luker wrote. “They subscribe quite strongly to the traditional belief that women should be wives and mothers first.”Footnote ⁴⁷ The correlation of “traditional” understandings of gender roles and opposition to abortion reflected the efforts of Schaeffer, Falwell, and other Christian right leaders to connect Roe with a widespread assault on “family values.” It also helps explain why the Christian right demonized the women's movement in the years after Roe, just as feminism appeared poised to win wide acceptance among evangelicals.

II. Fighting Feminism

Many abortion rights advocates hailed from the ranks of the women's movement, which won notable gains during the 1970s. The United Nations designated 1975 as the International Women's Year, sanctioning the movement's goal of making women full and equal participants in civil societies. During that year, the UN convened a summer conference in Mexico, which produced a report emphasizing women's contributions to peacemaking and tying their full participation in governments to the promotion of disarmament.Footnote ⁴⁸ Some U.S. feminists derided the IWY as a token gesture, but mainstream media endorsed the achievements and mission of feminism. For instance, Time said that “feminism has transcended the feminist movement. In 1975 the women's drive penetrated every layer of society, matured beyond ideology to a new status of general—and sometimes unconscious—acceptance.”Footnote ⁴⁹ The women's movement, like the civil rights movement before it, had won popular support, albeit conditional and fleeting. Feminists seemed poised to accelerate their drive for full equality.

Evangelicals initially appeared excited about the advances of feminism. A 1974 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-1 margin.Footnote ⁵⁰ Evangelicals in 1974 also witnessed the publication of Letha Scanzoni and Nancy Hardesty's All We're Meant to Be: A Biblical Approach to Women's Liberation, which became the most important text in the nascent evangelical feminist movement. Scanzoni and Hardesty's book deployed some familiar feminist arguments, such as the contention that cultural conditioning, not biology, played the largest role in creating notions of “masculine” and “feminine.” But unlike most feminists, Scanzoni and Hardesty enlisted the support of the Bible. They wrote that “from the beginning” of the church, “women participated fully and equally with men.” The church must therefore “face up to the concrete implications of a gospel which liberates women as well as men.”Footnote ⁵¹ Although many of Scanzoni and Hardesty's conclusions parroted the claims feminists had been making for years, their use of biblical arguments in support of “women's lib” awakened Christians to the possibility that scripture might support feminism. Feminist Alice Mathews called All We're Meant to Be “a shot heard round the evangelical world.” She recalled that “once books and journal articles appeared by reputable evangelical feminist scholars writing and speaking within the limits of accepted evangelical interpretive guidelines, shock waves coursed through the evangelical scholarly community.”Footnote ⁵² Scanzoni and Hardesty enabled conservative Christians to claim biblical support for feminist positions.

While not all evangelicals agreed with Scanzoni and Hardesty, some of the most prominent ones conceded the fundamental worthiness of the women's movement. Christianity Today editor Harold Lindsell, whose 1976 book The Battle for the Bible condemned evangelicals who did not subscribe to biblical inerrancy, admitted that “women, evangelical or not, have legitimate grievances.” He believed that women “should have the same rights as men; equal pay for the same jobs; [and] the right and freedom to pursue any career.”Footnote ⁵³ Likewise, former Christianity Today editor Carl F. H. Henry declared that “this is a moment in history … when able evangelical women are needed in all the professions and vocations now opening to both sexes—medicine, law, the mass media, politics, and much else.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Neither of these conservative stalwarts agreed with Scanzoni and Hardesty's contention that the Bible sanctioned the ordination of women. Indeed, the debate over women's ordination divided—and continues to separate—evangelical churches. Yet Lindsell and Henry's measured outlook on the broader women's movement reflected little of the Christian right's subsequent hostility toward feminism.

Conservative Christians' openness to feminist advances in the early 1970s depended in part on the seemingly benign wording of the Equal Rights Amendment, feminism's most notable policy goal. The ERA, which passed Congress in 1972, read like a simple guarantee of women's full and equal participation in modern society:

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

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

• Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

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

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

How did Schlafly arrive at such a drastic interpretation of the ERA? Schlafly contended that the ERA's benign appearance masked its sinister potential. She claimed to support “any necessary legislation” needed to redress inequalities between women and men in employment opportunities or income, but Schlafly thought all the necessary legislation had already passed Congress.Footnote ⁵⁷ “There is no way,” she wrote in the politically conservative magazine Human Events, that the ERA “can extend the effect of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972 … the Education Amendment of 1972 … [or] the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974.” Rather, “the Equal Rights Amendment is a big takeaway of the rights that women now have. It will take 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 support his wife financially … [and] wipe out the right [for a wife] to receive Social Security benefits based on her husband's earnings.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Writing for the Moral Majority Report a few years later, Schlafly described the ERA to evangelicals in more dire terms. The ERA, she wrote, would eliminate “the traditional family concept of husband as breadwinner and wife as homemaker,” restrict motherhood to “the very few months in which a woman is pregnant and nursing her baby,” and embed “the first anti-family amendment in the Constitution.” She also argued that the amendment would protect bigamists, legalize prostitution, and defang rape laws. In short, “the social and political goals of the ERAers are radical, irrational, and unacceptable to Americans.”Footnote ⁵⁹

Most of Schlafly's charges depended on tenuous and unlikely legal developments. She arrived at her conclusions based on a reading of the law that emphasized the most extreme possible eventualities of ERA ratification. In the article for Moral Majority Report, Schlafly used the book Sex Bias in the U.S. Code, authored by future Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Brenda Feigen-Fasteau, as “a good index to what the ERA would do.” While Schlafly rightly highlighted that the federal government funded Sex Bias, concluding that Ginsburg and Feigen-Fasteau's book would provide 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 federal government funded their study, but Sex Bias was an advocacy document. In fact, the preface of Sex Bias admitted that an ongoing Department of Justice study of gender discrimination in U.S. laws would ultimately decide which of the book's recommendations to follow. Schlafly's usage of Ginsburg and Feigen-Fasteau's study allowed her to exaggerate the potential effects of the ERA.Footnote ⁶⁰

This sleight of hand helped Schlafly to convince a large subset of evangelicals that feminists misrepresented their hopes and desires. Women, argued Schlafly, wanted to tend their homes and care for their families. The acronym of her antifeminist coalition, STOP ERA (Stop Taking Our Privileges), revealed the organization's philosophy. Convinced that the ERA would make it impossible for women to assume the roles of wife and homemaker—the privileges most STOP ERA members desired to protect—activists mounted a massive campaign aimed at state legislators. A typical anti-ERA letter sent to Ohio legislators read, “Those women lawyers, women legislators, and women executives promoting ERA have plenty of education and talent to get whatever they want in the business, political, and academic world. We, the wives and working women, need you, dear Senators and Representatives [sic] to protect us.” And then, tellingly: “We think this is the man's responsibility.”Footnote ⁶¹ STOP ERA materials reflected a gender essentialism that placed men in the role of providers and protectors while women appeared as domestically inclined nurturers. Some STOP ERA campaigns featured well-coiffed conservative women bringing freshly baked sweets to legislators' offices. The contrast between conservative women's femininity and feminists' aggressiveness was not lost on lawmakers. According to historians Donald Mathews and Jane Sherron DeHart, “the perceived lack of civility of ‘women's libbers’ seemed to offend” U.S. Senator Sam Ervin, “possibly because it indicated disrespect for themselves as well as other women.” Ervin, the Senate's chief opponent of the ERA, felt that the “‘physiological and functional differences’ between the sexes [were] so natural and sacred as to have had a moral economy based upon them.”Footnote ⁶² STOP ERA members agreed with Ervin's assessment and, taking their cue from 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. It is instructive that the most famous picture from her 1952 campaign for Congress featured Schlafly in an apron cooking breakfast. Yet she ran this picture in a bid for legislative office—not exactly a “domestic” responsibility. Schlafly deftly constructed a public persona that emphasized the primacy she gave her family, even as she undertook larger and larger political initiatives. Indeed, Schlafly's contention that women wanted most to tend their homes and care for their families demanded that she give primacy to her role as wife and mother. It was jarring for feminists to encounter a woman who held degrees from Washington University and Harvard (as Schlafly did) positing that men are inclined to pursue “higher intellectual activities,” whereas women “tend more toward conformity than men—which is why they often excel in such disciplines as spelling and punctuation.”Footnote ⁶³ Declarations such as this caused an exasperated Betty Friedan to tell Schlafly, “I'd like to burn you at the stake!”Footnote ⁶⁴ But the conservative Christian women who flocked to Schlafly's banner understood her point. Women could engage in public affairs and intellectual activities, but their primary desire was to care for home and family. They perceived feminism as a denigration of women's noblest calling. Schlafly's political activities seemed legitimate to antifeminist women because she framed them as a defense of her 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 the amendment. Specifically, conservative Christians rejected feminists' claim that physiological traits represented the only meaningful differences between the sexes, because they believed the Bible delineated clear distinctions between men and women. “We proclaim that male and female were established in their diversity by the Creator,” said the authors of the “Family Manifesto.” This created diversity, the authors contended, “extends to psychological traits which set natural constraints on gender roles… . The role of the male is most effectively that of provider, and the role of the female one of nurturer.”Footnote ⁶⁵ In conservatives' minds, feminists' rejection of gender essentialism challenged the created order. God had ordained certain roles for men and women, and the ERA threatened them. For instance, conservatives worried that the ERA would mandate government-funded daycare and paternity leave, measures they believed would denigrate women's primary responsibility for rearing children. (One Moral Majority radio commentator referred to the possibility as “Big Mother” government.Footnote ⁶⁶) Convinced that “women's lib … flies in the face of the Scriptures,”Footnote ⁶⁷ conservative Christians increasingly viewed the ERA as a frontal 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. Only one state (Indiana) ratified the ERA after 1975, and four state legislatures (Nebraska, Tennessee, Idaho, and Kentucky) voted to rescind their initial ratification of the amendment. Fifteen states never ratified the ERA. A 1978 effort by feminists to extend the deadline for ratification won them extra time but alienated some state legislators who felt the deadline extension unfair. Subsequent widely publicized campaigns in Illinois, North Carolina, and Florida resulted in defeat for ERA supporters, and the deadline for ratification finally arrived on June 30, 1982. Schlafly marked the occasion with a celebratory dinner.Footnote ⁶⁸

III. Gay Rights

At the 1977 National Women's Conference in Houston, feminists ratified an alliance with homosexual rights groups. Feminist organizers thought that the prominence of lesbians within the women's movement, along with the intolerance that homosexuals faced in American society, demanded that they support gay rights. As such, delegates to the 1977 National Women's Conference approved a National Plan of Action that called for the end of discrimination according to sexual preference. Betty Friedan, who had long argued that associating feminism with gay rights would hurt the women's movement, said, “As someone who has grown up in Middle America and has loved men—perhaps too well—I've had trouble with this issue. But we must help women who are lesbians in their own civil rights.” The delegates agreed, overwhelmingly passing a plank supporting gay rights. When the vote tally was announced, lesbians roared their approval, releasing yellow and green balloons throughout the convention hall that said, “WE ARE EVERYWHERE.”Footnote ⁶⁹

Conservatives hoping to rally evangelicals against feminism could hardly have scripted a better scenario. Feminism had linked itself with gay rights, creating a bond between the two movements that persisted for years. In the early 1990s, Concerned Women for America founder Beverly LaHaye remembered, “The lesbians flooded into that conference and attached themselves to the feminist movement, and never again were the feminists able to shake the lesbians from their agenda.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Perhaps more tellingly, in 1988 a Moral Majority radio broadcaster described the ERA as “essentially a gay rights bill.”Footnote ⁷¹ In the early 1970s, conservative Christians displayed tolerance and even support for feminism. Yet by making gay rights an integral part of the feminist agenda, women's rights advocates associated their movement with one that conservative Christians unequivocally repudiated.

The gay rights movement emerged as an important player in national politics during the late 1970s. Previous generations had considered homosexuality an aberration. Major medical associations listed homosexuality as an abnormality, and mainstream media rarely acknowledged gays. While many Americans viewed homosexuals as relatively harmless “queers,” that attitude depended on the vast majority of homosexuals remaining in the closet, concealed from public view. “We make a distinction,” wrote one conservative, “between the gay who is quiet and keeps his lifestyle to himself, and the exhibitionist.”Footnote ⁷² Sentiments like that persisted long after the early 1970s, but as gays began to demand rights and recognition, society began to display more openness toward homosexuals. In 1973 the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses, and sixteen states repealed sodomy statutes between 1971 and 1976. A 1975 Time magazine cover featured an Air Force officer declaring, “I am a homosexual.”Footnote ⁷³

These developments frightened Christian right leaders, who talked about homosexuals as a sort of fifth column that had infiltrated the highest reaches of American government. In 1980, for instance, Falwell recounted a conversation with President Carter. “I asked the president,” Falwell said, “‘why do you have known practicing homosexuals on your staff in the White House?’ Carter replied, ‘Well, I'm president of all the American people; I believe I should represent everyone.’” To that Falwell answered, “Why don't you have some murderers and bank robbers and so forth?” The Carter campaign subsequently released tapes that proved this exchange never occurred. When reporters challenged him, Falwell described his fabrication of the exchange with Carter as an “anecdote which we use not to specifically refer to what was actually said,” a comment that created a firestorm about Falwell's credibility.Footnote ⁷⁴ Yet Falwell's supporters questioned the media's “attack” on their leader rather than Falwell's flimsy justification. The willingness of some evangelicals to grant Falwell latitude in this incident depended in part on their views of homosexuality. They saw gays as a threat to America.

In fact, Falwell cited the prevalence and permissibility of homosexuality as a sign of America's downfall. “History proves that homosexuality reaches a pandemic level in societies in crisis or in a state of collapse,” Falwell wrote. “If homosexuality is deemed normal, how long will it be before rape, adultery, alcoholism, drug addiction, and incest are labeled as normal?”Footnote ⁷⁵ One of Falwell's colleagues agreed. “There are absolutes in this world,” said Moral Majority radio commentator Charlie Judd. “Just as jumping off a building will kill a person, so will the spread of homosexuality bring about the demise of American culture as we know it.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Conservative Christians thought American culture's increasing openness toward “alternative lifestyles” was a major problem. That homosexuals could win positions of power in American society signaled impending doom to evangelicals.

Christian right leaders foretold this doom by portraying homosexuals as threats to the family. “Most of us, while feeling sorry for the homos,” said one, “believe they should not be given posts of importance, lest our children come to regard the gay life as ‘normal.’”Footnote ⁷⁷ Conservative Christians opposed assigning homosexuals any positions of authority over children because many of them believed that homosexuality fostered child abuse. In 1977, Dade County, Florida, passed a measure prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual preference. Anita Bryant, a Southern Baptist and former singer, led a campaign against the measure. She described the county ordinance as an “attempt to legitimize homosexuals and their recruitment plan for children.” Bryant called her campaign “Save Our Children,” and she distributed leaflets that tied homosexuals to several recent child abuse cases. The media aided Bryant's campaign by disseminating statistics exaggerating homosexuals' propensity for pedophilia. For example, reports in 1977 suggested that more than one million boy prostitutes were working in the United States. Bryant leveraged these reports to argue that the non-discrimination law would abet homosexuals' activities rather than protect their human rights. “THERE IS NO HUMAN RIGHT TO CORRUPT OUR CHILDREN,” 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-1 margin.Footnote ⁷⁸

Tellingly, the Bryant campaign chose to focus on how the gay rights movement was anti-children rather than on biblical injunctions against homosexuality. To be sure, scriptural passages prohibiting homosexuality had provided Bryant initial motivation. Yet she framed her activities in terms designed to appeal to a broad cross-section of potential voters. Human Events noted that blacks and Latinos overwhelmingly supported the Bryant campaign, suggesting that a campaign to “save” the children held wide appeal.Footnote ⁷⁹ The success of the Save Our Children campaign displayed conservative Christian activists' growing political dexterity. They had learned how to transform “biblical” issues into “pro-moral” or “pro-family” issues that attracted people from a variety of theological perspectives. Social conservatives—many religious, some not—flooded the precincts in Florida to reject the Dade County ordinance. The political success of this “silent majority” depended on Christian right leaders lessening the emphasis they gave to an explicitly Christian rationale for fighting gay rights and spotlighting reasons that right-thinking citizens ought to fight against homosexuals' political advances.Footnote ⁸⁰

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