Christian Coalition Founded - Grassroots Religious Right Electoral Infrastructure

On September 25, 1989, at an organizational meeting in Atlanta, Pat Robertson founded the Christian Coalition following his unsuccessful 1988 Republican presidential bid. Robertson recruited Ralph Reed, a twenty-eight-year-old doctoral student in history at Emory University, as the organization’s first staff member and executive director.

The Christian Coalition represented a new phase in religious right organizing, shifting from the Moral Majority’s top-down approach to systematic grassroots electoral infiltration. Reed developed “leadership schools” in states with strong evangelical presence, showing video presentations where Robertson discussed the need for Christians to stop America’s “moral slide,” then instructing audiences on how to participate in local politics and form local, state, and regional organizations.

Reed’s organizing strategy was notably deceptive: he encouraged coalition members to run for school boards, city councils, and legislatures without revealing their Christian Coalition affiliation. This “stealth candidate” approach allowed religious conservatives to win local offices by obscuring their ideological agenda until after election.

The organization’s growth was explosive. Under Reed’s leadership from 1989 to 1997, the budget grew from $200,000 to $27 million, and membership expanded from 2,000 to over 2 million members and supporters. This infrastructure enabled systematic conservative takeover of local Republican party organizations, school boards, and municipal governments across the country.

The Christian Coalition integrated religious conservative activism with corporate Republican priorities, mobilizing evangelical voters around cultural issues (abortion, gay rights, school prayer) while these voters simultaneously supported policies benefiting corporate donors (tax cuts, deregulation, anti-labor legislation). This alignment replicated the Moral Majority’s strategy of using cultural warfare to advance economic elite interests.

The 1989 founding of Christian Coalition demonstrated the continued evolution and sophistication of religious right organizing. Building on infrastructure established by the Moral Majority, Council for National Policy, and other 1980s organizations, the Christian Coalition created a permanent grassroots electoral apparatus that could identify, train, and deploy conservative Christian activists to capture governing institutions from the bottom up while maintaining coordination with national conservative networks.