‘God’s Right Hand’ traces Falwell’s influence

In the fall of 1981, Yale president A. Bartlett Giamatti welcomed the university’s new freshman class with a blast at the Moral Majority, a pressure group of religious conservatives founded two years earlier whose most visible spokesman was the Rev. Jerry Falwell. Giamatti told students that Falwell and his ilk were moralistic authoritarians whose injection of religion into politics was responsible for a “new meanness of spirit in our land” and “resurgent bigotry.” Giamatti’s attack on Falwell and the religious right landed on the front page of the New York Times and made headlines around the country. Conservative journalist William F. Buckley, Jr., had the best riposte, as usual, scoffing that “to be lectured against the perils of the Moral Majority on entering Yale is on the order of being lectured on the dangers of bedbugs on entering a brothel.”

Jerry Falwell was one of the most consistently unpopular public figures of his time. He was also, according to Michael Sean Winters’ new biography, God’s Right Hand: How Jerry Falwell Made God a Republican and Baptized the American Right, one of the most consequential. Indeed, Winters maintains that Falwell reshaped American religion, American politics and the Republican Party – not necessarily in that order – and that his influence has persisted to the present day, even though Falwell died in 2007.

In Winters’ view, Falwell was the figure principally responsible for galvanizing fundamentalist and evangelical Christians to political engagement after their long self-imposed exile from the cultural mainstream following the Scopes trial – though, ironically, Falwell had delivered a famous 1965 sermon criticizing Martin Luther King, Jr., and other pro-civil rights ministers for participating in politics. Falwell and the Moral Majority mobilized social conservatives around support for laissez-faire capitalism, low taxes, American exceptionalism, anti-communism and pro-Israel foreign policy, and opposition to abortion, secularism, liberalism and homosexuality.
Read the rest here