Jerry Falwell and his Contribution to the Christian Right

In 1956, Jerry Falwell, an evangelical pastor, founded a new congregation in his Southern hometown of Lynchburg. He slowly grew very influential not only in American Christianity but also in politics, helping usher in the formation of the Christian Right. He was already fairly influential in his hometown, being the only pastor there with a television program (Williams 130). However, when he began treating his ministry more and more like a business, his influence expanded greatly. By the end of the 1970s, he had a megachurch with 17,000 members and his television program was broadcast across 373 different stations (Williams 133). By this time he also had become relatively aligned with the Republican Party and its pro-business ideals. In 1976, Falwell went on a tour with singers from his Christian college to hold “I Love America” rallies across the nation. These rallies combined evangelical theology with rhetoric that appealed to conservative Republicans. It was after this that he began a more overt support of the Republican Party, and in that same year, he endorsed Republican president Gerald Ford (Williams 139). His most notable contribution to the Christian Right came in the form of the Moral Majority, which he launched 1979. This political organization held a stance that the government was encroaching on the rights of the Christian family and fought against the Equal Rights Amendment (Williams 139).

However, Jerry Falwell was not always as aligned with the Republican Party. Early on, much of his ministry included social service programs that operated through his church, such as a home for recovering alcoholics, a prison rehabilitation program, and a team of pastors that helped impoverished congregants (Williams 131). These efforts would have placed him on the side of the conservative Republican Party for creating an alternative to government welfare. However, he also was a very vocal segregationist, claiming that interracial marriage was a sin and would promote communism (Williams 132). This position placed him against his city’s Republican business leaders, many of which were from the north and took great issue with his segregationist rhetoric. It was only until his congregation began moving away from supporting segregation that he began distancing himself from that ideology. Once he became a prominent national figure, he entirely left those views behind (Williams 134) and conservative Republicans had an easier time associating themselves with him. Eventually, he started preaching an evangelical theology that encompassed Republican values. For example, he preached that the book of Proverbs promoted the free-enterprise system and that it was against federal taxation, which infringed upon entrepreneurial freedom (Williams 137). He also combined defense spending into his theology. The Soviet Union was an officially atheistic state, and Falwell believed that it was a threat to Christian America, justifying more defense spending (Williams 138). He even went so far as to say that it was divinely mandated that America spend more on defense