Schlafly and Falwell Joint Rally Demonstrates Religious Right Coalition Unity

Phyllis Schlafly and Jerry Falwell headline an ‘I Love America—Stop ERA Rally’ in front of the Illinois state capitol, publicly demonstrating the emerging unity of the Religious Right coalition that Schlafly had been building since 1972. The rally symbolizes a historic breakthrough: the public embrace of the Catholic Schlafly by evangelicals and Mormons proves monumental, representing the growing rapprochement among faiths that enables the rise of the Religious Right as a unified political force. Falwell, a fundamentalist Baptist pastor who hosts the ‘Old Time Gospel Hour’ on television and radio, leads a Virginia megachurch, and founded what became Liberty University, had co-founded the Moral Majority in 1979. By 1980, Falwell is actively echoing and amplifying Schlafly’s case against the ERA. Significantly, when Schlafly addresses Jerry Falwell’s Thomas Road Baptist Church about the dangers of the ERA, it marks the first time a Catholic had ever spoken from the pulpit there—a powerful symbol of the ecumenical conservative coalition overcoming historical Protestant-Catholic antagonisms. While Falwell later receives credit for being the mastermind of this ecumenical conservative movement through his self-promotion and the Moral Majority’s organizing myth, Schlafly had actually imagined and begun building this unthinkable coalition in the 1950s and translated it into reality through her STOP ERA organization in the 1970s—almost a decade before Falwell and other Religious Right leaders mobilized politically uninvolved conservative churchgoers. The rally demonstrates how Schlafly serves as a founding architect of the Religious Right, with her biography revealing the much longer history of the movement than typically acknowledged.