In May 1979, Jerry Falwell invited a select group of Christian conservative leaders to a strategic planning retreat at his Lynchburg, VA, estate.

Falwell ran a private Christian academy and hosted a popular televangelist program, “The Old-Time Gospel Hour”, but gained national prominence in 1977 with his support for Anita Bryant’s anti-gay campaign in Dade County, Florida. In ’78, he generated controversy by encouraging churches to register voters and evangelicals to vote for conservative candidates. Falwell offered a new direction for conservative Christians.

Those who attended the Lynchburg conclave included Richard Viguerie, the direct mail fund-raising guru; Paul Weyrich, who helped found the Heritage Society, the Christian Voice and the Free Congress Foundation; Robert Billings, founder of the National Christian Action Coalition; Howard Phillips, chairman of the Conservative Caucus; and Ed McAteer, an influential Christian organiser. According to Deanna Spingola, “their objective was to set up multiple New Right organisations to shape issues, raise money and acquire political power in an effort to restructure America’s domestic and foreign policies”.

Perhaps more apocryphal than actual, Falwell once  recalled that at the 1979 gathering, Weyrich said to him: “Jerry, there is in America a moral majority that agrees about the basic issues. But they aren’t organised.” Thus, was born the Moral Majority.

Looking back decades later, these religious warriors could legitimately claim that they were instrumental in forging a political movement that led directly to George Bush’s elections in 2000 and 2004 and Donald Trump’s in 2016 and 2024. Adopting a secretive Leninist program, these hardcore counter revolutionaries sought to seize state power and (re)impose a traditionalist moral order on the nation. They succeeded through the last half-century’s culture wars.

The 2008 electoral victory of Barack Obama and the Democrats signalled not only a — temporary — repudiation of the Bush presidency, imperialist misadventure and free-market or “unregulated” capitalism, but the Christian right’s culture values. After decades of growing influence and power, the fierce rightwing assault on popular values, especially sexuality, was — temporarily — contained.

The historian Lillian Faderman confirms the Christian right’s worst fears about America’s “degenerating” sexual culture, writing: “The decade of the ‘60s had ushered in unprecedented sexual permissiveness, characterised by mini skirts, the pill, group sex, mate swapping, a skyrocketing divorce rate, and acceptance of premarital sex. The rigidities of the ‘50s was turned on its head. Heterosexuality began to look somewhat like homosexuality, as nonproductive sex and cohabitation without marriage came to be commonplace.”

It was a permissiveness that encouraged not only social egalitarianism, but also sensual hedonism. It was an eros that supported the civil rights movement, opposed the war in Vietnam, empowered the new feminism, infused the spirit of the counterculture and spawned the gay liberation movement. It was an eros that terrified the Christian right.

The upstanding citizens who gathered with Falwell were shocked by what they perceived as the mounting evidence of America’s moral degeneration – rock & roll, the pill, short skirts, petting & premarital sex, pot and porn. If this was not sufficient confirmation, they needed only recall the Supreme Court’s momentous 1973 decision, Roe v. Wade. It confirmed an assumption that cut to the heart of the Christian right’s belief system: Women had the right to privacy and to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. Only the previous year, California voters had voted down the Briggs Amendment, an effort by Christian conservatives to ban homosexuals from teaching in public schools. For some, these actions signified America’s moral degeneration. In the face of such degeneration, these social worthies were determined to do something about it.

Christian moralists believed the ‘60s sexual revolution brought with it a “lowering” of moral standards. What they considered degeneration affected all social classes, including the political class. Between 1975 and 1998, there were approximately 40 highly publicised sex scandals involving members of the US Congress alone, not including the impeachment of a president.

A true accounting of the illicit sexual lives of members of Congress and other political leaders is impossible to determine as the political elite, like most people, can still effectively conceal much of their private lives. Nevertheless, such scandals slowly and steadily built, culminating in president Bill Clinton’s impeachment. Those who gathered at Falwell’s estate perceived a profound sexual crisis then underway and that it would reverberate through all domains of social life, whether adolescents or Hollywood celebrities, politicians or members of the clergy. To suppress the threat posed by what they identified as sexual degeneration, they had to secure state power.

The men who gathered with Falwell — and from all reports they seem to have been only men — appeared especially troubled by an emboldened women’s movement. The start of “2nd wave” feminism is dated with the 1963 publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminist Mystique. She gave voice to a profound disillusionment with post-WW-II consumerism that had begun in the ‘50s to percolate through society, particularly among women, but also African Americans, homosexuals and disillusioned beatnik-types.

Federal approval of the contraceptive pill in 1961 helped create a new sexual climate; the 1965 Supreme Court ruling, Griswold v. Connecticut, ended legal restrictions on married couples purchasing and using contraceptives that had been established in 1873 under the Comstock Act. In 1966, the National Organisation of Women was formed and, two years later, protests against the Miss America contest on the Atlantic City boardwalk gave rise to the apocryphal tale of bra burning that defined a movement. This tendency culminated in the crises of ’73 – the year of the Roe v. Wade decision and Phyllis Schlafly’s campaign to defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment. These countervailing tendencies — one progressive, the other regressive — would drive sexual contestation over the following quarter century.

Against the changing landscape of sexual politics, an equally important change in America’s sexual culture took place. A radical sexual culture became more visible after the ’69 Stonewall riot. It was especially evident in graphic depiction, the provocative — some would call it “obscene” or “pornographic” — images that appeared in newspapers and magazines, let alone in under-the-counter men’s magazines.

Changes in sexual culture visibility found its more “realistic” expression in the emerging medium of video. The old 8mm porn world, a world of the sleazy geezer in a dirty trench coat sneaking out of a decrepit porn theatre, got a facelift. Porn became a high-tech industry, offering well-produced programs that could fulfil a person’s — i.e., man’s — most personal and wildest fantasies. The home video revolution owes its success to legalised pornography – and to the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision, Miller v. California, that redefined obscenity in terms of the concept of community standards.

Falwell and his Moral Majority associates were deeply disappointed by the presidency of Jimmy Carter. While a “born again” Christian, Carter represented the liberal wing of the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest evangelical denomination. (Carter admitted, in a 1976 Playboy  interview, “I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times.”) In 1979, the year of the Falwell conclave, the SBC was wracked by a profound theological and ideological split – and the conservative forces won. The split led to organisational changes that remade evangelism into both a more orthodox, formal religious practice, and a more political, combative religious movement.

In 1980, Carter’s Democrats introduced a gay rights plank in the party’s electoral platform. While a brave gesture, it provided the religious right with proof that Carter, as a Christian, could not be trusted. It was a gesture that led the way to Ronald Reagan’s 1980 electoral victory. The Republicans received enormous support from the Christian right, helping an invigorated fundamentalism move closer to securing state power. Reagan, and the Christian right, received unexpected moralistic confirmation as the AIDS crisis deepened during the ‘80s.

Under the stewardship of Falwell and other Christian conservative leaders, the meaning of religious ecumenicalism changed. Where once it meant one denomination partnering with another religious groups like Protestants or Catholics, Baptists or Pentecostals, ecumenicalism now sought to join different — and historically often competing — faiths in common cause, whether they be Christian, Jewish or Muslim. The new religious right refocused its effort to unite those who were self-defined conservatives, traditionalists or fundamentalists. The new enemy was identified as not only secular humanists, but also liberal or moderate believers and non-believers.

During the ‘80s, the Moral Majority claimed a constituency of 50 million people and effectively drew upon the energies of what the sociologist Robert Davison Hunter calls “parachurch” groups. He claims, based on the scholarship of Robert Wuthnow, that in 1900 only about 150 such groups operated in the US. However, by 1975, they had grown to 400 and, by 1987, they totalled nearly 1000. And Falwell was at the heart of this movement. As reported in Time magazine, “By 1985, his operations had budgets of more than US$100 million a year, and he was winging round the world in private jets.”

The Moral Majority put together a strategic plan, “Top-Secret Battle Plan for 1982”, that laid out its political campaign to remake America. Its goals were clear: pass the Human Life Amendment to the Constitution; repress the growing homosexual influence; mount a co-ordinated fight against pornography; and counter the American Civil Liberties Union. Joining with groups like the Christian Voice and the National Conservative Political Action Committee, it mobilised an electorate that defeated the reelection efforts of Senators George McGovern (D-SD), Frank Church (D-ID), John Culver (D-IA) and Birch Bayh (D-IN). While the organisation formally dissolved in 1989, the Moral Majority, hatched by those who attended Falwell’s gathering a decade earlier, ultimately seized state power a decade-plus later.

In January 1992, just weeks before the all-important New Hampshire primary,  Star, the gossip tabloid, published an exposé claiming that Gennifer Flowers, an Arkansas state employee and cabaret singer, had had a 12-year affair with the governor, Bill Clinton. Moving quickly to counter the scandalous claim, Clinton, joined by his wife, Hillary, appeared later that week on CBS’s 60 Minutes immediately following the Super Bowl, thus ensuring a huge national audience. The couple’s denial, offered with a sincerity not seen since Nixon’s famous Checkers speech of a half-century earlier, was so convincing that it helped him defeat an incumbent president, George H.W. Bush, in a three-way race with Ross Perot.

The ’92 presidential conventions were noteworthy for two reasons. First, the Democrats nominated Clinton; second, the Republicans formally launched the culture wars. Pat Buchanan, Nixon’s loyal foot soldier, drew upon the sociologist Robert Davison Hunter’s recently published study of religious politics in American, Culture Wars, to  lament before a national TV audience: “There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a culture war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as the Cold War itself.”

He concluded, “[It is a] struggle for the soul of America ….”

Nurtured for decades, the culture wars were a conservative counter-revolutionary rebellion against the tumultuous ‘60s. A Christian-Republican alliance turned a host of important sex-related personal and social issues into a moralistic nightmare. Drawing inspiration from a fundamentalist religious fervour rooted in the Puritans, the current movement sought to police the sexual life of its fellow citizens. The arc of the conservative religious-political ascendancy is clear. It emerged with Nixon’s 1972 presidential run, gained momentum with Reagan’s victory in 1980, reached its zenith with the 1998 revelations about Clinton’s illicit liaison with Lewinsky, achieved state power with Bush’s 2000 victory and first started to sputter with the Congressional elections of 2006. Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 but especially 2024 secured victory for the Christian right in this round of the culture wars.

America suffers from sexual schizophrenia. On one side, innumerable politicians, clerics and much of the media decry what they see as the threat of illicit pleasures. On the other side, consenting adults, young people and the popular culture push for increased sexual explicitness. And in the middle, a growing and diverse assortment of ordinary Americans challenge restrictions on acceptable pleasure. Since the Puritans settled New Jerusalem nearly four centuries ago, American sexual life has embodied this tension. The nation has never dealt comfortably with human sexuality, or the wilder impulses long decried as immoral or illicit. This unresolved tension haunts American sex culture today.

The religious right’s effort to restrict sexual experience was motivated by a number of factors. Many Christians, like many other Americans, were deeply troubled by the highly commercialised sexualisation of society. Fashion, advertising, TV and movies were promoting an ever-increasing display of sexually suggestive (and often prurient) messages of word, image and sound targeted to the young, especially girls. And no one, least of all limousine liberals, challenged the intensifying media tyranny of erotic titillation.

The media is but one area that Christian conservatives felt challenged their deeply held traditions, their “family values”. These values had three critical components: (i) a hallowed beliefs in the family, (one grounded in the father’s hierarchical relations to “his” wife and children): (ii) religion, a person’s adherence to selective passages from the Bible; and (iii) sexuality, the man’s monogamous heterosexuality for procreation and, secondarily, pleasure. Together, these values were the core of a traditional notion of moral authority that post-modern, secular society challenged.

At the heart of this belief system is a commitment to — wish for? — an unchanging and predetermined moral order. It is a moral order grounded upon biblical myth, Adam and Eve. The sociologist Hunter calls this belief “natural and divinely mandated sexual relations among humans”. This is the sexual relationship “between male and female and this relationship is legitimate only under one social arrangement, marriage between one male and one female.” Sin was understood as a violation of this order, especially involving unacceptable sex practices like premarital relations, extra-marital adultery and homosexual encounters.

The religious right’s efforts were an attempt by sizeable segments of white America to preserve privilege (i.e., particularly racial) and to maintain patriarchy (i.e., masculine authority in family life and sexual relations). The religious right’s growth and eventual political triumph bears witness to the challenge posed by the earliest phase of globalisation. Nixon’s abandonment of the gold standard, the military failure in Southeast Asia and the institutionalisation of the permanent war economy set the stage for the social destabilisation that marked the last quarter of the 20th century.

The new Christian right — led by Jerry Falwell, James Dobson and others — forged a powerful moral and political movement that sought to stem the ever-increasing commercial secularisation — sexualization — of American society. This secularisation was fostered by the “American Dream” of the 1950s and the globalisation of capitalism as well as the containment efforts of the Cold War and McCarthyism. These forces helped fuel the civil dights, anti-Vietnam War and counterculture movements of the 1960s. But now, a half-century later, the “American Dream” is over and what lies ahead is yet to be determined.

Americans have been fighting culture wars since the nation was founded four centuries ago. The current round targeted at abortion rights, trans kids and library/school censorship, among numerous other issues, began a half-century ago and signs of the Christian right’s victory are evident. The 2024 re-election of Donald Trump as president, Republican control of both the House and Senate, and the dominant influence of the Christian conservatives in the Supreme Court are key indicators of this victory.

Republished from Counterpunch, 27 May 2025

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.