Moral Majority Has Reached Goal, Will Dissolve--Falwell

Claiming that his goal of prodding religious conservatives into the political arena has been achieved, the Rev. Jerry Falwell announced Sunday that he will dissolve the Moral Majority in August.

“The Religious Right is solidly in place. . . . Moral Majority as an organization is no longer needed,” Falwell said during a news conference as part of the Religion Newswriters Assn. meeting here.

The independent Baptist pastor from Lynchburg, Va., founded the lobbying organization 10 years ago this month at a time when fundamentalists and the Religious Right had only begun to attract attention. He was here to speak Wednesday to an evangelists’ meeting as part of the three-day annual convention of Southern Baptists, which opens Tuesday.

“Moral Majority was credited or blamed, depending on your perspective, for the election of Ronald Reagan to the Presidency in 1980” and the voters’ rejection of some liberal U.S. senators, Falwell said.

That claim was disputed several years ago by some religious sociologists, who felt the political swing to the right was already occurring. Nevertheless, Falwell added that he thought it was likely that Reagan was reelected in 1984 and succeeded by George Bush because of the galvanizing influence of Moral Majority.

The organization--and Falwell--became symbols of the resurgent Religious Right. Newspapers and television shows increasingly sought out Falwell and others as spokesmen for conservative views--a forum Falwell said did not exist in the 1970s.

As an example, Falwell said that before 1979 it was rare “that anyone with our point of view” would appear on Phil Donahue’s talk show. “Now, I’ve been on the Donahue show 16 times and turned it down as many times because of scheduling problems,” he said.

Yet Falwell, 55, acknowledged that Moral Majority reached its peak in the mid-1980s.

Moral Majority, which Falwell said registered “millions” of conservative voters who had previously shunned politics, raised a high of $11 million in 1984, but dropped to its lowest amounts over the last three years.

“We only raised about $3.5 million last year,” he said.

Moral Majority never became a large membership organization, but developed a mailing list of 50,000 pastors, Falwell said. Yet some state chapters, such as the one in California, were only intermittently active and had very little impact.

The current “rising star” for the Religious Right, Falwell said, is radio broadcaster and author James Dobson of the Pomona-based Focus on the Family ministries. Dobson, an ardent foe of abortion, pornography and, last year, the controversial film “The Last Temptation of Christ,” has begun forming political lobbying groups in each state.

Dobson was recently criticized by U.S. Surgeon Gen. C. Everett Koop for allegedly giving out misinformation about AIDS. And Dobson was in the news early this year when his prison interview with mass murderer Theodore R. Bundy--the final one granted before his execution in Florida--quoted Bundy as pointing to a youthful fascination with hard-core pornography as a factor in his path to violent sex crimes.

Less Political Activity

By contrast, Falwell has reduced his political activity since 1986, when he said he would devote more time to his church, TV ministry and his Liberty University, which will have 7,000 students in the fall.

He resigned as president of Moral Majority in 1987, acknowledging that the name had often become a hindrance because critics attacked it as a symbol of political and religious intolerance. Falwell stayed as Moral Majority board chairman but subsumed it within a larger body he called the Liberty Federation.