The Moral Majority

The Moral Majority was founded in 1979 by the conservative Southern Baptist pastor Jerry Falwell (1933–2007) as a political and civic organization focused on influencing voters to support conservative candidates. It arose in response to many of the cultural changes that had affected America in the 1960s and 1970s. In a 1999 op-ed in Christianity Today, Falwell expressed his motivations for beginning the group. Some were religious: he opposed what he saw as a rising number of abortions and illegitimate births and believed that conservative Christians had been denied “equal access to public-school facilities for religious gatherings” and had little voice in national debates on social issues. Many more were political: in his perception, the U.S. economy was in trouble, taxes were too high, the military was weak and unable to combat Soviet expansion, Communists were winning the Cold War, crime and the welfare state were growing, and “overt patriotism had almost vanished.”