'Clear and Present Dangers' : The GOP and the "Christian" Right - Alan Brinkley, Kevin Phillips, et al.

Taking Over the Republican Party:"The Grand Old Party is more religious cult than political organization." -- President of the Alamo City Republican Women's club, 1993.1980 -- A Watershed Year:Paul Weyrich, speaking in Dallas in 1980, captured the spirit of this new movement. He said, "We are talking about Christianizing America. We are talking about simply spreading the gospel in a political context."Jerry Falwell, who became the leader of the Moral Majority said: "get them saved, get them Baptized, and get them registered." (These two quotes can be heard on the video produced by People for the American Way called Life And Liberty for All Who Believe.)Thousands of fundamentalist preachers participated in political training seminars that year, and by June, more than two million voters had been registered Republican. Their goal was to register 5 million by November. In the 1980 elections, the newly politicized Religious Right succeeded in unseating five of the most liberal Democrat incumbents in the U.S. Senate, and provided the margin that helped Ronald Reagan defeat Jimmy Carter. The year 1980 was the year that a sleeping giant was awakened, and the political landscape of the United States was dramatically altered.Many other organizations formed in the eighties. The Reverend Timothy LaHaye founded the American Coalition for Traditional Values -- a network of 110,000 churches committed to getting Christian candidates elected to office. In 1980 LaHaye was present at the birth of the Moral Majority and agreed to serve on the organization's first board of directors under the tutelage of the Rev. Jerry Falwell, with whom he remains close today. A year later, LaHaye was co-founder and first president of the Council for National Policy (CNP), a secretive umbrella group of far right leaders who meet regularly to plot strategy designed to advance a theocratic agenda."No one individual has played a more central organizing role in the religious right than Tim LaHaye," says Larry Eskridge of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals, calling him "the most influential American evangelical of the last twenty-five years." (Rolling Stone, January 28, 2004.)In 1979 Beverly and Tim LaHaye founded Concerned Women for American (CWA) claiming a membership of 600,000. With prayer and action meetings, the women were, and still are a formidable lobbying force. CWA was successful in defeating the Equal Rights Amendment, and their lawyers won an important textbook case in 1987 to combat Secular Humanism in the schools. That case was later overturned by the higher courts.James Dobson, host of the radio show Focus on the Family, founded the Family Research Council in 1983 to act as the political lobbying arm of his radio show. Because an estimated four million listeners tune into his radio show daily, the Family Research Council has remained a formidable lobbying organization.And the highly secretive Council for National Policy was founded in 1981 to conduct three-times-a-year strategy sessions. The CNP was and still is an umbrella organization of right-wing leaders who gather regularly to plot strategy, share ideas and fund causes and candidates to advance the theocratic agenda.http://www.theocracywatch.org/taking_over.htm