THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT, THE FEDERAL COURTS, AND THE CONSTITUTION IN THE UNITED STATES

Abstract

Twenty-five years have passed since the newly formed Moral Majority helped put Ronald Reagan in the White House and a Republican majority in the United States Senate. The Moral Majority was one organization (and its founder, the Reverend Jerry Falwell, one figure) at the centre of an emerging evangelical Protestant social movement. This movement was galvanized by two aims: defeating the Equal Rights Amendment,3 which Congress submitted to the states for consideration in 1972, and contesting the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade4 ruling, which recognized a constitutional right to abortion. In the early 1980s, “New Christian Right” was an accurate description of the first widespread public engagement of evangelicals in half a century.