[ARCHIVED THREAD] - The Jerry Falwell Effect (Page 1 of 2)
Posted: 5/16/2007 5:28:37 AM EDT
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1979 - Rev. Jerry Falwell forms the Moral Majority to mobilize christians to go out and vote for conservative values. That same year, Ronald Reagan is elected President on the key issues of national defense and abortion. 1984 - Ronald Reagan is re-elected president. 1988 - George HW Bush is elected president. 1989 - The Moral Majority organization founded by Jerry Falwell disbands. 1992 - Bill Clinton is elected President. Coincidence? |
+1. You went to Liberty? Interesting. I wonder what direction the school will go, now that Caner is in charge? |
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No it's not to TOUGH for me to swallow. And the fact that the MM disband was just one more nail in the coffin. But lets look at what happened, didn't Bush Sr. denounce his NRA membership or did something else that pissed off a lot of people in the gun culture? And of course there was the "Read my lips, No new taxes". Which he did raise the taxes not to long afterwards. Which I am sure did piss off a lot of people. I am not trying to take away from J.F. but I don't think that his MM is the sole reason. Then too I might be wrong. And motown_steve I would like to be counted among the Christians. |
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When I withdrew from Nichols, I still wanted to play NCAA football, so I applied to Liberty. Some friends of mine got me to apply to Bob Jones University, too. I made up my mind that whichever school accepted me first, I would go there. Bob Jones accepted me first. |
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I grew up in Christian churches, and I had never heard of Jerry Falwell or his Moral Majority until the Tele Tubbie fiasco. I'm having a hard time believing that he organized enough people to influence elections in an appreciable way. How do we explain the 94 Republican sweep? How about GW getting elected? Reagan? Pfft. Carter was EXTREMELY unpopular. Can anybody objectively look at the mood in this country circa 1980 and seriously tell me that Reagan would not have been elected, were it not for Falwell? I'm not buying it. |
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Oh yeah, back on topic, Falwell was a good man with a good heart who was frequently the victim of leftwingers who took nearly everything he said out of context just to try to paint him in a bad light. Why? Because he was so effective in getting Republicans and conservatives mobilized for elections. |
My family bounced us around alot of churches. I've been a member of Assembly of God, Baptist, Lutheran, Catholic and various non denominational churches. His name never came up. When it finally did (tele tubby thing), everybody thought he was a joke. It's extremely difficult for me to find Christians who don't think the guy is a joke. Regarding his ability to mobilize Christians in numbers sufficient to sway elections, I think we've got a serious causation/correlation problem, here. |
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The Moral Majority was an easy target of the left in this country; similar to how the left still brings up the bogeyman of the KKK. It got far more press than its actual political clout seemed to warrant. Similar to how certain people on the right used Norman Lear's People for the American Way organization in a similar fashion. On a side note, it is amusing to see all the closeted perverts out there on the gun boards who are rhetorically dancing on the man's grave. Just what exactly was their beef with him? Me thinks that they are giving themselves away.. As I've said before, there are a whole lot of people on the various gun boards who fancy themselves to be "conservatives", but they are demonstrably not so. Kind of reminds me of the Replublican debates last night... ETA> Just for anecdotal purposes: I grew up in a christian family, and have been "churched" all my life. My mother is currently a baptist missionary in China (just like John Birch, but I digress..). In all these years, I have never heard any reference to Jerry Falwell or his disbanded MM orgainization from anything other than left wing propaganda sources. Ever. |
Like your family, ours attended a few different types of churches (AG and unaffiliated Protestant, Baptist) and everybody in our circles knew who Jerry Falwell was. I think the Teletubby thing was a mistake on his part...but only because he chose to vocalize it. I think he may have been right on the actual accusation. AFA mobilizing voters, dude, even the left is admitting he was a force back in the '70s and '80s. The Moral Majority was a very big deal back then. I was just a kid but even I remember it. |
Agreed. 
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| Careful, if you were to say that Falwell was an old assbag that suffered from "foot-in-mouth" disease some of our members will assume that you are slamming all of Christianity. If this thread goes over three pages I'll need to run to Kinkos for another batch of victim cards. |
WG, was Sam Rutigliano the football coach at Liberty at that time? HH |
Jerry Falwell was not the SOLE cause for president's Reagan and Bush I getting elected, but he was a definite factor. President Reagan especially spent alot of time pandering to the "religious right" (and deservedly so), especially on the abortion issue. |
+1 |
That's because you are a kid. Those of us who have been around longer know that evangelical Christians largely stayed OUT of politics, even to the point of not voting because they didn't feel right about it...meanwhile they complained that the country seemed to be losing its mind. Fallwell's Moral Majority campaign came along and began organizing people by telling them that SOMEBODY was going to have authority in America, and that by sitting idly by Christians weren't doing themselves or their nation any favors. Fallwell's organization did not single handedly do this, but it DID spawn organization to vote and get involved that previously didn't exist. While not the sole cause of Reagan's election, there is a REASON why you hear the mainstream media talk about the political impact of Christians in elections these days. The Moral Majority is a big part of that reason..... Reagan's nomination as a Republican had a lot to do with the surging power of Evangelical Christians like those in the MM. Nominations preceed elections, which is why Rudy tried hard not to piss off Evangelicals by being too pro-choice. |
A lot of Christians, even good Christians, are essentially clueless idiots who believe what they hear in the media as opposed to the actual truth. There are members of my church who think that the towers on 9/11 didn't fall because of the plane impacts because of some silly documentary they saw. They think Bush is the devil....and then turn around and complain about the "liberals" who are screwing up the country. ....and they have never voted in their life. 
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Perhaps not. ....but I'll wager you HAVE heard sermons on the importance of voting and on the moral issues facing the nation today, right? Back in the 1960s and 1970s lots of Evangelical churches didn't mention that sort of stuff. For much of the 20th century Christian churches and Christian people in the United States didn't fight in the culture wars. Fallwell's Moral Majority was the result of a growing sentiment within Christian circles that the battle should be joined by those who actually believed that the Constitution and the Bible mean what they say. |
And the effect of getting Christians to wake up, organize, and participate in the political process has lasted longer than the organization itself. ....which is why Falwell was such a hated figure. He got Conservative Christians to start actually participating in the governance of the United States again, and there is nothing in the world that pisses off liberals and "progressives" more than that. Thus Jerry became Hitler incarnate, as the idiotic thread here yesterday so eloquently demonstrated. |
| All Fallwell accomplished was a mass polarization in which all conservative values are immediately related to fundamentalist christianity. In essence, he drove moderately conservative people away. Lots of gun owners and fiscal conservatives couldn't give a rats azz about abortion or what homos do in their own privacy. Lots of other conservative Catholics and Jews, don't like being linked with a movement that tells them they are going to hell because they don't worship the same G-d the same way he did. |
I don't expect the school's character to change much, nor the church to change much. I do expect to see Caner get a lot more attention and more controversy to be generated by his rather "plain-spoken" comments. I also expect Caner to have some very public dust-ups with hard line Calvinists.... |
You might be suprised about the school. With the amount of growth Liberty has experienced, it's a totally different school now than it was 15 years ago (socially, at least). TRB is moving over to the campus (the old Ericsson building, IIRC) as well, so things could change there too.
That's already started. The LU Alumni  I won't go into detail on the doctrinal swings that seem to be happening in the Protestant church in America, but suffice it to say that Liberty's dispensational stance will stay where it is no matter what happens. LU/TRB doesn't appear to be shying away from positions that alienate an awful lot of brothers and sisters. In fact, they seem to be reveling in it. As a former student, I think I can safely say that LU isn't an Evangelical Baptist college, it's a Dispensational Baptist college. Evengelicals of other denominations or doctrines were never welcome to do anything other than pay tuition to attend classes. The more things change, the more they stay the same. *shrugs* Before I forget, Rutigliano was coach when I was there, and to keep the thread on topic: Yes, Falwell and the MM had a huge influence countering the the political movement of the "liberal" Church in politics (think PCUSA's stance on homosexuality, gun control, abortion, etc.). He is the primary reason that Evangelical Christians are now a huge voting block that cannot be ignored by either party. |
How big of a "movement" are the attitudes attributable to "the Christian Right" in today's politics, specifically the Republican Party? That's your answer, or at least an answer to how big the influence of the MM became, though the organization itself disbanded almost 20 years ago. |
Fair enough. |
I've heard a few of Caner's sermons where he takes issue with "hardcore Calvinists" on a couple of occasions. I actually liked them.  Then again, I've never been much of a fan of Calvinism in general from a theological standpoint. |
He was also a big supporter of segregation and opposed the civil rights movement, calling it the "Civil Wrongs Movement". He changed his views later on when it became very unpopular to be a racist but he turned his focus to other things like gays. |
Lots of people supported segregation in the 1950s. No, it's not a shining moment. As to the civil rights movement, a fair number of folks who supported the goals of doing away with segregation at the same time didn't like the METHOD of achieving that goal, namely activist court decisions. |
1979 - Jimmy Carter single handedly secures the Reagan election. Seems we just need another Jimmy Carter. 1984 - Mondale/Ferraro secures the re election of Reagan. Seems we just need another Mondale/Ferraro. 1988 - Dukakis single handedly secures the Bush election. Seems we just need another Dukakis. 1992 - Bush Sr. single handedly secures the Clinton election. Good job George. |
And that right there seems more plausible than an unspecified number of voters influenced by the Moral Majority. I'm still leaning towards correlation/causation mixup. |
The MM was certainly a "factor" just as the NRA has been a factor in some elections. But the MM was also a very polarizing factor and probably rallied as many people against Reagan as they did behind him. |
Bears repeating. Love him or hate him, his influence has been a factor in the American political scheme. Edit: Highlighted for O_P |
| Jerry Falwell was just some fat media guy who happened to sell religion really well on TV (it is way too hard these days to pick up a bible or attend a real service). He supported apartheid in the '80s and did nothing for any true conservative causes other than raise some money for people he thought he could raise money for and make a big profit from it. He was morally corrupt and just another Hollywood dick who wore makeup to work everyday. He served himself and did it well. |
You don't know what you are talking about, but then your post #7 shows that you are only a troll.  |
Repeat it all you want, but it is still wrong. The MM was a huge factor in Ronald Rex winning the Presidency. Anyone that says that is not true, is simply mistaken. If it had "cost as many votes as it added" it would have been a wash. His victory was a true landslide. |
I'll admit to being very young at the time, but I have done alot of reading. Why doesn't it seem MORE reasonable to suggest that Reagan won because the Carter presidency was an utter failure? The MM hadn't even been around long, yet. I find it incredibly difficult to believe that an unquantified moral majority was responsible for a landslide victory. I won't discount an influence, but come on. I was young, but I can read. Nobody liked his handling of the Iran Hostage crisis. Low economic growth High inflation Sky high interest rates. An Energy Crisis Yet, I'm to believe that a preacher who formed an advocacy group in 1979 was a *huge* factor? This makes no sense to me whatsoever. It really sounds like people are giving an enormous amount of credit where little is due. |
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Huge +1 on that. Yesterday was not a banner day here at this site for all the reasons you posted. |
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O_P, forgive me for not being specific. I don't think Jerry Falwell was the reason Reagan got elected, rather I believe the MM was the beginning of a widespread movement to influence American Evangelicals to get off their ass and vote their concience on the issues that mattered to them. That movement "polarized" socially liberal and socially conservative Christians. That polarization still exsists. Now if we REALLY wanted to get technical, we'd have to go back to the work Francis Shaeffer published on Christian Governance and public morality in the early 70's. Despite having substantially different views on doctrine, it is my opinion that Fallwell's MM (and subsequently, the modern "Christian Right") would have had no traction without Schaeffer. |
[ARCHIVED THREAD] - The Jerry Falwell Effect (Page 1 of 2)
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