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May 1 - May 10, 2025
Public schools, too, posed a direct threat to the authority of the family by usurping parents’ role in inculcating values. For this reason, Rushdoony and his followers promoted Christian schools and, even more preferable, homeschooling.1
In 1980, news broke that Gothard’s brother and vice president of the institute had been involved in affairs with seven of the institute’s secretaries. The scandal eventually grew to include fifteen people, and it became clear that Gothard had known of the improprieties for years but had silenced witnesses and covered up the abuse.
As homeschooling increased in popularity in the 1980s, many families who would not have identified as Christian Reconstructionists nevertheless came to embrace the tradition’s core precepts. In this way, authoritarian teachings infused Christian homes, churches, and the wider evangelical subculture.5
Spanking was a good way to accomplish this, and Dobson offered detailed instructions. He advised using a belt or a switch and keeping the implement in plain sight to remind children that insubordination brought consequences. He made clear that it wasn’t necessary “to beat the child into submission.” A little pain went a long way.
Dobson founded Focus on the Family in 1977, a parachurch organization dedicated to defending the institution of the family, and by the mid-1980s his half-hour daily show was playing on nearly 800 stations across the nation.
In 1972, the same year Congress overwhelmingly approved the ERA, they also passed Title IX as part of the Education Amendments Act, prohibiting sex discrimination in federally funded schools. In 1973, the Supreme Court established women’s constitutional right to an abortion in Roe v. Wade. Together with the growing power of the feminist movement, this series of events appeared to evangelicals to be a coordinated assault on traditional, God-ordained gender roles.15
He portrayed the distinction in stark terms: Men liked to “hunt and fish and hike in the wilderness” while women preferred to “stay at home and wait for them.” Men played sports as women watched, “yawning on the sidelines.”
But perhaps the most profound difference between men and women, according to Dobson, was their source of self-esteem: “Men derive self-esteem by being respected; women feel worthy when they are loved.”
Fine doctrinal differences that may have separated Nazarene from Southern Baptist, evangelical from fundamentalist, made little difference when it came to Dobson’s growing empire. The organization avoided divisive theological issues, and tuning in required no conversion experience, statement of faith, or claims of exclusivity.
Through books, newsletters, and especially radio, Dobson became a fixture in the homes and lives of tens of millions of Americans.
By 1987, Focus on the Family had developed into “a full-blown evangelical media empire” with a budget of around $34 million; by 1995 the budget surpassed $100 million.
That a child psychologist, not a pastor or evangelist, would in Land’s opinion surpass Graham’s influence testifies to changes within evangelicalism itself. As gender and “family values” moved to the center of evangelical identity, a man who dispensed advice on kids’ chores, potty training, and teenage sex ed could achieve celebrity status formerly reserved for pastors and evangelists.22
Within both separatist and “respectable” wings of modern evangelicalism, then, a shared defense of patriarchy contributed to an emerging cultural identity, and to a growing commitment to political activism. Over time, this alliance would begin to dictate the boundaries of evangelicalism itself.
AS EVANGELICALS BEGAN TO MOBILIZE AS A partisan political force, they did so by rallying to defend “family values.” But family values politics was never about protecting the well-being of families generally. Fundamentally, evangelical “family values” entailed the reassertion of patriarchal authority. At its most basic level, family values politics was about sex and power.
Beyond the home, the power of the patriarch ensured the security of the nation. In the aftermath of Vietnam, this required a renewed commitment to militarism. Family values politics, then, involved the enforcement of women’s sexual and social subordination in the domestic realm and the promotion of American militarism on the national stage.
The conquering Christ brings peace through the sword, slaying tens of thousands of opposition soldiers who fall dead, “splayed and filleted,” blood bursting “from skin and veins,” entrails gushing to the ground. In acts of unprecedented violence, Christ’s enemies get what they had coming.
feminist classic Our Bodies, Ourselves,
This was not a question to take lightly, and Billy James Hargis—the fundamentalist pastor who helped spearhead Christian anticommunism in the 1950s and 1960s—took it upon himself to safeguard the sexual purity of America’s children.
Many of the citizens who waged this battle were the same ones who were fighting against gun control and unsettled by the prospects of interracial dating at desegregated schools. Organizations like the John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan teamed up with Hargis.
Hargis’s career would be cut short in 1976, when Time magazine published an exposé of the crusader’s sexual improprieties. The allegations came to light after a student at Hargis’s college revealed to his bride on their honeymoon that he’d had sex with Hargis, only to discover that she had, too.
What happens when you believe that men have voracious sexual appetites, that their very ability to lead their families and their nation is linked to the satisfaction of those appetites, but wives have been taught from childhood that their sexuality must be restrained, controlled, suppressed? What happens when good Christian wives have little sexual knowledge and little apparent desire? When they are filled with guilt and an overbearing sense of modesty?
Charting a course between an unhealthy repression of sexuality on the one hand, and the excesses of the sexual revolution on the other, the LaHayes offered a vision of sexuality securely confined within the structures of patriarchal authority.
Men could have unrestrained libidos—they simply needed to satisfy themselves within marriage. Women needed to restrain themselves until marriage, at which point it was their duty to satisfy their husbands’ demands.
Within only a few years, CWA surpassed Schlafly’s Eagle Forum in terms of membership and influence within American evangelicalism. Even more than Dobson, Beverly LaHaye motivated her followers to engage with politics; 98 percent of CWA members voted in the 1988 presidential election, 93 percent had signed or circulated a petition, 77 percent had boycotted a company or product, 74 percent had contacted a public official, and nearly half had written a letter to the editor.9
In these writings LaHaye denounced “abortion-on-demand, legalization of homosexual rights . . . the size and power of big government, elimination of capital punishment, national disarmament, increased taxes, women in combat, passage of ERA, unnecessary busing.” For LaHaye, these were all facets of the same project.10
Premillennialists tended to see America, like any other nation, as doomed to destruction. Reconstructionists, on the other hand, were postmillennialists who believed Christians needed to establish the Kingdom of God on earth by bringing all things under the authority or dominion of Christ before Christ returned.
LaHaye’s embrace of Reconstructionism demonstrates how theological contradictions could be smoothed over in practice. In adopting Reconstructionist teachings piecemeal, premillennialists patched over a long-standing division within conservative Protestantism.
By generating ideas and networks, LaHaye established himself as one of the most influential evangelicals of the late twentieth century, a status he shared with another key player in the rise of the Christian Right, the Reverend Jerry Falwell.13
These leaders had connected Christian manhood to a strong national defense and championed a return to “macho” masculinity, but it was Falwell who most clearly represented the shift toward a more brazen militancy—and militarism.
In 1979, at the nudging of Goldwater campaign veterans Howard Phillips, Paul Weyrich, and Richard Viguerie, Falwell launched the Moral Majority, a political organization with the purpose of training, mobilizing, and “electrifying” the Religious Right, but he had been championing Christian nationalism throughout the 1970s.
With numbers on their side, the time had come to reclaim the country from “a vocal minority of ungodly men and women” who had brought America to “the brink of death.”
Such slaughter would soon be upon America, he warned, if they didn’t hold communism at bay and fight the “moral decay” destroying American freedoms. Signs of this decay abounded: “welfarism,” “income-transfer programs,” divorce, abortion, homosexuality, “secular humanism” in public schools, federally funded day care, and the Domestic Violence Prevention and Treatment Act.
Falwell offered solutions to the grim situation the country found itself in: free enterprise (as “clearly outlined in the Book of Proverbs”), patriotism, turning to God instead of government, and taking a firm stand against the ERA, feminism, and “the homosexual revolution.”
The US government, then, had every right “to use its armaments to bring wrath upon those who would do evil by hurting other people.” Good citizens submit to their governments and honor those in authority over them; in turn, government officials—“ministers of God”—ensure the safety of their citizens by “being a terror to evildoers within and without the nation.” Ultimately, American security depended on its men: “We need in America today powerful, dynamic, and godly leadership.”
A child of the South, Falwell was a segregationist. Rather than fearing that American racism would discredit the country globally, Falwell insisted that civil rights agitation was inspired by communist sympathizers. He saw Marxism at the root of the movement, not a Christian social justice tradition.
Falwell couldn’t stomach “effeminate” depictions of Christ as a delicate man with “long hair and flowing robes.” Jesus “was a man with muscles. . . . Christ was a he-man!”
This was achieved through the continual fabrication of new enemies. Danger, discrimination, and disparagement lurked around every corner. Malevolent forces aligned against true believers. Outsiders were likely to be enemies. Threats of a spiritual and cultural nature required a militant Christianity; threats to the nation required unrestrained militarism.23
Frustrated, conservatives denounced what they saw as a liberal scheme to hijack the conversation. Fuming that conference organizers had excluded conservatives’ issues—including banning abortion, defending school prayer, and opposing gay rights—from their final recommendations, conservative delegates walked out of the official conference in protest.
Meanwhile, the president was mired in a “crisis of confidence,” and seemed unable to lead America out of the mess he’d made. On top of all this, he wore cardigans and he smiled too much. Even the national media proclaimed Carter a “wimp,” and the label stuck.26 For American evangelicals who had placed patriarchal power at the heart of their cultural and political identity, Carter’s wimp factor was particularly infuriating, and their sense of betrayal acute.
“I know that you can’t endorse me,” the Republican nominee for president quipped. “But I want you to know that I endorse you, and your program.” In Ronald Reagan, the Religious Right had found their leader.2
He ran as a tough-on-crime candidate, and for conservatives, “tough on crime” generally connoted only certain types of crime: “street crime,” or the threat of black men.
It wasn’t lost on conservative Christians that Carter’s own masculinity seemed lacking, even as “the homosexual movement reached its maximum level of influence” under his watch.
The Christian Right may not have swung the election to Reagan, but it did succeed in securing the loyalty of evangelicals to the Republican Party. From Reagan on, no Democrat would again win the majority of white evangelical support, or threaten the same.
By the 1980s, then, the Democratic Party had become the party of liberals, African Americans, and feminists, and the Republican Party the party of conservatives, traditionalists, and segregationists.10 White evangelicals didn’t just participate in this realignment, they helped instigate it.
The Southern Baptist shift to the Republican Party coincided with a “conservative resurgence” within the denomination. Traditionally, Baptists had supported a separation of church and state and advocated a civil libertarianism when it came to social issues.
“Evangelical feminism” had been making inroads in Southern Baptist circles, and growing numbers of Baptist women had begun challenging male headship and claiming leadership positions; between 1975 and 1985, the number of women ordained in the SBC increased significantly. These women insisted on interpreting biblical texts contextually, attentive to the settings in which they were produced. Conservatives, however, insisted on a “populist hermeneutic,” a method privileging “the simplest, most direct interpretations of scripture.”
The same went for “homosexual marriage.” Inerrancy mattered because of its connection to cultural and political issues. It was in their efforts to bolster patriarchal authority that Southern Baptists united with evangelicals across the nation, and the alliances drew them into the larger evangelical world. Within a generation, Southern Baptists began to place their “evangelical” identity over their identity as Southern Baptists. Patriarchy was at the heart of this new sense of themselves.16
Once in office, however, Reagan’s loyalty to the Religious Right wasn’t what its members had hoped for. They’d expected Reagan to do away with abortion, bring back prayer in schools, and usher in a spiritual and moral renewal. They also expected some plum assignments in the new administration. On all these counts they were disappointed. Reagan did not prioritize the domestic family values agenda he had championed during the campaign, abortion rights remained the law of the land, and there was little evidence of moral revival.
Falwell promised Reagan he would help get his message out, “in laymen’s language,” and he did so by taking out full-page ads in major newspapers deriding “freezeniks,” “ultralibs,” and “unilateral disarmers” who were undermining Reagan’s efforts to rebuild the nation’s military strength. “We cannot afford to be number two in defense!” he warned.
PERHAPS NO EPISODE better reveals the connections between the Reagan administration and the leadership of the Christian Right than the Nicaraguan Contra War.
