Reagan Election (1980)

Ronald Reagan's 1980 victory over Jimmy Carter — himself a born-again Southern Baptist — was the Christian right's debut as a decisive political force. Reagan was an infrequent churchgoer and had signed liberal abortion legislation as California governor. But he spoke the language. At the National Affairs Briefing in Dallas (1980), Reagan told a crowd of 15,000 evangelical leaders: 'I know you can't endorse me, but I want you to know that I endorse you.' The Moral Majority claimed to have registered millions of voters and ran get-out-the-vote operations that delivered white evangelical turnout crucial to Reagan's margin. The alliance was transactional from both sides: Reagan got votes; evangelical leaders got access, appointments, and the language of Christian America as official policy.

Themes this entry appears in

• Christian Nationalism
• Political Strategy
• Anti-Democratic

Connections from Reagan Election (1980)

• influenced → James Dobson (1980) — Reagan's 1980 election transformed James Dobson's relationship to political power. Before 1980, Dobson had maintained some distance from direct partisan politics, framing Focus on the Family as a family-advice ministry rather than a political organization. Reagan's election — and the White House access it provided to Religious Right leaders — pulled Dobson into the political sphere. He served on Reagan-era federal panels, including the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography (1985). The election demonstrated that evangelical mobilization could win the presidency, which gave Dobson both the institutional confidence and the political incentive to make FOTF an increasingly explicit political actor through the 1980s and 1990s. By the time Dobson founded the Family Research Council as FOTF's Washington policy arm, the political transformation Reagan's election had enabled was complete.
• influenced → Reagan Restores Bob Jones Tax Exemption (1982) — After Reagan's 1980 election, which evangelical voters helped deliver, his administration moved to reverse the Bob Jones University tax exemption revocation. In January 1982, the Reagan administration announced it would restore the tax exemption of Bob Jones University and Goldsboro Christian Schools, overriding the IRS policy. Balmer reads the move as repayment to Religious Right leaders who had organized against the IRS rules, and as an early demonstration of what the evangelical-Republican alliance could deliver.

Connections to Reagan Election (1980)

• Heritage Foundation influenced (1980) — Heritage's Mandate for Leadership, delivered to the Reagan transition after the 1980 election, provided a policy framework for the incoming administration.
• Moral Majority influenced (1980) — The Moral Majority claimed to have registered millions of evangelical voters and ran get-out-the-vote operations critical to Reagan's 1980 margin.
• The Southern Strategy influenced (1980) — In August 1980, Ronald Reagan spoke at the Neshoba County Fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi — near where civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were murdered by Klan members with local law enforcement complicity in 1964. He told the crowd, 'I believe in states' rights.' 'States' rights' was the language of segregationist resistance to federal civil rights enforcement. Historians such as Rick Perlstein read the choice of location and language as a deliberate signal to the white Southern constituency the Southern Strategy had been cultivating since 1968: the Republican Party understood their grievances and would not actively oppose them. The Moral Majority, built from the same white Southern evangelical constituency, had been working to register those voters. Reagan's campaign fused the Southern Strategy's racial appeal with the Religious Right's moral-cultural framing — the two streams of white Southern backlash politics completing their merger in a single candidacy. He carried every former Confederate state except Carter's Georgia.

Sources

• Jesus and John Wayne — Kristin Kobes Du Mez (2020), pp. 105-115
• Thy Kingdom Come — Randall Balmer (2006), pp. 30-42