Jerry Falwell was a bulbous minister and televangelist who, during the late 1900s, played a focal role in forming the Christian Right. He used a unique strategy of combining social and economic conservatism to influence American politics in the sunbelt states of the USA. One of the several things he did towards the formation of the Christian Right was the formation of the Moral Majority in 1979. He intended to use it to organize or unite conservative Christians over problems like abortion and to attack Supreme Court rulings against the Classroom prayer and devotional Bible reading in public schools. He even went so far as to say the following about the Supreme Court’s ruling: “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” (Williams). Moreover, other than forming the Moral Majority, he also played a part in forging an alliance between religious groups like Roman Catholics and conservative Jews. Forming these unusual alliances helped him fight issues like the aforementioned issue of abortion and support the Equal Rights Amendment (Williams).
Other than fighting for the Equal Rights Amendment, unifying religious groups, and supporting Classroom prayers, he also ardently supported U.S. military spending during the Cold War. In Jerry Falwell’s Sunbelt Politics by Daniel K. Williams, he stated that Jerry Falwell argued that” 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…”. In addition, Falwell’s political commitments did indeed change as the time passed; for example, when the IRS warned private schools by threatening to withdraw tax exemptions for private schools that practiced discriminatory practices against people of color, he joined the coalition that fought this change as his academy which too arguably practiced discriminatory practices only had 5% African American students in a town where 25% of the population was made up by black people. Additionally, he also fought against gay rights, justifying his fight against gay rights by saying it was for the protection of American families against liberal government policies. He argued that Homosexuals used the term “minority” to gain access to public school classrooms, where they corrupted the minds of middle-class children. Lastly, in his fight against abortion, he blamed the Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe for the abortions that occurred in the United States, arguing that if it were for the Supreme Court’s ruling, there would have been fewer abortions in the United States (Williams).
In terms of tax cuts and defense spending fitting the Evangelical theology, I think that Falwell at least saw the tax cuts as being vital for sustaining individual freedoms. Furthermore, in terms of defense spending, it did indeed fit his evangelical theology; as aforementioned in the essay, he saw defense spending as a divine order to fight the godless Soviets.
Will Wright 