Much of their disdain for Carter and his Democratic Party owed to essential partisan disagreements: taxation, spending, regulation, foreign policy, labor disputes, and the like. Yet these matters were of no obvious moral urgency. And Falwell’s crew couldn’t build a viable public-facing effort—in the twilight of the 1970s—around some of their pet causes, such as fighting the Equal Rights Amendment and supporting religious schools that discriminated against Blacks.
