How Church and State Made Their Match

By LOU CANNON
New York Times

Summerland, Calif.

JERRY FALWELL, who died on Tuesday, would no doubt be pleased that so many obituaries gave him credit for putting Ronald Reagan in the White House. Mr. Falwell encouraged this view of his influence, as well as the related notion that he and Mr. Reagan were cut from the same conservative cloth.

The record does not support either claim. Nor does it back up the more general idea that it was Mr. Falwell who first galvanized his fellow faithful into the political force they have become.

Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980 after an issues-oriented campaign against an unpopular incumbent. He did not push the social issues emphasized by Mr. Falwell and his Moral Majority but income-tax cuts, military-spending increases and what Mr. Reagan called the “failed leadership” of President Jimmy Carter.

The odd thing was that it was Mr. Carter himself who had brought fundamentalism into presidential politics: as the first born-again president and first major candidate to wear religion on his sleeve, he might have lost to President Gerald Ford in 1976 without the evangelical vote. This new voting bloc abandoned Mr. Carter four years later not so much because it was enamored of Mr. Reagan’s social policies but because they, too, saw Mr. Carter as an ineffective president.

In the end, Mr. Reagan’s victory owed far less to Mr. Falwell than to the independent candidate John Anderson, who siphoned off enough normally Democratic votes in New York and Massachusetts to enable Mr. Reagan to carry those usually liberal bastions.

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