Falwell, a Baptist minister, founded the Moral Majority in 1979, the year after Keith and I married, in order to mobilize Christian conservatives to take political action on issues they deemed of chief concern. Though the organization would remain intact for only a decade, it normalized a way of talking, thinking, and politicizing in my part of the evangelical world that became almost synonymous with godliness. The message could not have been clearer in the white evangelical church world: if you’re a good Christian, you think this way. If you’re a bad Christian—or more likely no Christian at
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