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Holy War:

Secular Humanism and Evangelical Women’s Legal Activism, 1975-1990

Sarah Barringer Gordon

In the mid 1970s, Beverly LaHaye experienced a painful awakening.[1] As she put it a decade later in her autobiography, it was as if “the churchwomen had been asleep.”[2] The quiet lives of conservative Christian women were threatened from outside by a world run amok, a new society in which women had lost their bearings. “Lesbianism, Marxism, and extreme social change” were on the horizon, LaHaye said, espoused by feminists and their fellow travelers.[3] Secularism was the vector for these threats; it spread like gangrene.[4] But LaHaye’s churchwomen were oblivious, as she tells it, until she understood that unless she and those like her did something, her opponents -- and thus the opponents of believing women across America -- would undermine morals and the traditional family entirely and forever.

LaHaye’s was a battle that had both familiar and unprecedented elements. She drew, for example, on long-standing traditions in anti-communist thought to explain the threat she saw building in modern America. She connected these traditional fears to newer political and social movements, especially feminism and “humanist” texts used in public education. LaHaye also used new tools and strategies: in 1979 she established Concerned Women for America (CWA), a formidable organization dedicated to defending conservative Christian women’s values. She mobilized a new constituency that could “lobby from their kitchen tables,” as she put it.[5] Most important, and perhaps least expected for an organization of evangelical women dedicated to preserving biblical and family values, LaHaye hired lawyers, and understood law and legal action as central to CWA’s mission.

Unlike her predecessors and the few other women leaders of what was known as the Religious Right by the late 1970s, LaHaye and CWA were widely known for their commitment to challenge the legal structures of secularism in an effort to bring America back to a religiously defined social order. Only then, they maintained, would the country return to the path that God and the Founding Fathers had designed for America; women would once again be secure in their homes. As one of LaHaye’s local CWA leaders put it, there were the vanguard of a spiritual army of women, whose “warfare [took] many forms.”[6] They carried their martial commitment into battle, knowing well that they were involved in a holy war. In response, LaHaye and CWA were demonized by their enemies, in part because they were so effective, and in part because they exposed weaknesses in American law, education, and respect for the rights of believers.

This article explores the beliefs and work of LaHaye and CWA, as well as the legal strategies that were the hallmark of CWA’s early years. CWA was a phenomenally successful organization, growing quickly across the late 1970s and through the 1980s, garnering the admiration of President Ronald Reagan and catapulting LaHaye into the national limelight. LaHaye and CWA were not alone on the evangelical Right, of course, but CWA and its president became uniquely powerful. LaHaye mobilized her constituency of “concerned women.”[7] By the mid-1980s, CWA claimed more than 500,000 members, more than eight times the size, just to give one example, of conservative Catholic Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum.[8] LaHaye was also richer; she commanded an impressive six million dollar annual budget.[9] LaHaye was so respected that feminist author Susan Faludi claimed that other New Right leaders were envious of her power to command hundreds of thousands of followers. Paul Weyrich reflected on her remarkable control: “[LaHaye] has the kind of loyalty from her people where literally she can call them up and say, ‘Don’t do that,’ and they’ll drop it.”[10] CWA and LaHaye also brought a new legal consciousness to conservative women; their litigation strategy linked religious conviction to innovative legal claims that had the potential to re-integrate conservative Christians into public schools. For all these reasons, CWA and its long-time president deserve a place in legal and religious histories, especially those that hope to understand the vibrant, intensely conflicted world of religion and law in the late twentieth century.

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Even before she founded CWA, LaHaye had long been active in religious circles. She and her husband Tim LaHaye (best known currently as the co-author of the apocalyptic Left Behind novels) met as students at BobJonesUniversity in 1946. They were part of the wave of southerners who by the late 1950s migrated to California, where Tim became the pastor of an early megachurch. LaHaye described herself as shy and retiring throughout the 1960s, although she was a frequent public speaker. She was also the co-star of a television show called “The LaHayes on Family Life” that ran for four years.[11]

By the mid-1970s, the LaHayes were well known in conservative Christian circles as the authors of a how-to book about sex titled The Act of Marriage.[12] The LaHayes described sex in unapologetic, even graphic terms, including recommendations for lovemaking positions, foreplay, and more – joyful and also blessed sex within marriage. They were frequent guests on talk shows and church programs; Beverly as well as Tim started to play a leading role. Clearly, the LaHayes were beneficiaries and participants (of a sort) in the revolutions of the 1960s. Like the wildly successfulThe Joy of Sex, published only four years before the LaHayes’ sex manual, The Act of Marriage built on a new openness that allowed even respectable Christian husbands and wives to experience the pleasures of the flesh.[13] The Sixties, in the LaHayes’ view, did not provide critical justifications for abandoning traditional social structures. Instead, they demonstrated how timeless biblical truths could be expressed in new ways. One might well believe, for example, that new knowledge about sex was valuable, but that truly joyful sex could only occur within marriage. “The other side of the Sixties” was, we have learned, deeply grounded in innovative religious thought as well as conservative activism.[14]

The LaHayes’ broad comfort zone in matters sexual was matched by a profound commitment to preservation of other older evangelical values. Beverly LaHaye’s first sole-authored book, The Spirit-Controlled Woman, advised Christian women to take themselves seriously as individuals, and at the same time to remember that in the marital hierarchy, God comes first, husbands second, and wives owe a duty to “die to oneself” and submit to their husbands.[15] The book sold more than half a million copies.[16]Scholars might once have dismissed such mixed messages as irreconcilable; now it is clear that many modern American conservatives have built on just such combinations of innovation and preservation.[17] We live in a world, as LaHaye herself might have put it, in which we know well that it is possible to believe that God commands a married woman has an inherent right to practice birth control, but not to obtain an abortion.[18] Feminism is not the only logical consequence of the changes LaHaye and other activist women of her generation witnessed and helped unleash. LaHaye’s commitments led her in a very different direction indeed. And the fact that her activism fit so seamlessly into her husband’s life and work just proved to LaHaye how vital it was to have engaged Christian women defending marriage and the traditional family.[19]

LaHaye only emerged from the safety of family life, she said, because her world was in grave danger. Like other conservative Christians in the 1970s, she felt both empowered and victimized. The growth of evangelical churches and the complementary sense that more liberal Protestants and their churches were anemic and unwilling to meet the challenges of a deeply threatening world drew conservatives into the fray. Most painful for LaHaye, however, was the sense that the country had been led astray by those who should have known better. Political leaders, judges and especially women in liberal groups such as the National Organization for Women and Planned Parenthood had deceived American women and perverted the innate morality of the American people. [20]

It was up to faithful women, LaHaye believed, to engage these forces of evil, protect the sanctity of marriage and freedom of religion, and preserve the family as the center of American society. “Never underestimate the power of a woman,” LaHaye said.[21] Women in America “have found themselves threatened by a permissive society, by humanistic thinking, and by a legal system that often protects the guilty and punishes the innocent.”[22] In response, they -- like their mothers and grandmothers before them -- organized powerful movements to strengthen family stability. LaHaye understood CWA and her own leadership as a counterweight to recent decay and corruption, and part of a tradition of women’s activism and religious organizing that had saved America in the past, and could do so again if only given free rein.[23] LaHaye claimed an impeccable lineage among women for her activism, especially the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.[24] She also explained how it could be that so much of what she worried about came from women in the opposing camp: ‘twas ever thus, women across American history divided into corrupt and incorruptible, radical and reliable. Out of this confidence in the strength of good Christian women and a compelling sense of danger from the likes of “Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan,” as LaHaye tells it, she founded CWA in early 1979.[25]

LaHaye’s followers embraced the message of inherent power and imminent threat. “[A woman] has the power within her hands to either make or break a nation…. As we submit to God and become all we can be under God’s authority, we find fulfillment. There’s no limit to what women can do today.”[26] It was time, said CWA leaders, to assert the spiritual authority of women as mothers: “I’m a grandmother and I’m a mother and I’m a woman, and I’ve have enough. It’s time now to pick up my skillet and my rolling pin and charge. It’s time to say, ‘I’m a homemaker, and I’m proud of it, and I carry that title with dignity.’”[27]

Spiritual combat was a mode evangelicals knew well. Yoking together nostalgia, recrimination and hope for the future in a single message had been a favorite preacher’s tactic for many generations. Sermons known to the cognoscenti as “Jeremiads” excoriated but also uplifted – strong medicine for a wayward people.[28] LaHaye brought this time-tested formula to a new venue and audience. The women she motivated to concern themselves with the legal and political life of the country responded with lawsuits against secularism in the schools and protests against communist influences in government. To LaHaye and her followers, both corruptions were cut from the same cloth; both were incarnations of the atheistic central core of liberalism.

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Historians of conservatism and religion have explored how deeply suburbanization and technological innovation affected growth of religious commitment.[29] Perhaps most noticeable in the prosperous insta-communities of the Sunbelt, but also across the South and lower North, religious life generated connective tissues that tied a transient people to eternal verities and meta-geographical morality.[30] As debate over racial integration and the active defense of segregation cooled somewhat after the 1960s, transplanted Southerners gained credibility as religious critics of what they saw as coordinated assaults on sexual and familial morality.[31] The emergence of conservative Protestants as powerful critics by the late 1970s was wedded to their defense of what had once seemed like unchallengeable social structures, especially those tied to gender and sexual difference.[32] Marriage and family life, at once intensely private and publicly a battleground, provided the backdrop for the growth of vigorous new conservative organizations in the late twentieth century.[33]

This much we have known, but a vital piece has been missing -- law. The union of deep religious commitment with legal consciousness allowed newly motivated believers to deploy legal tools as deftly as they did television appearances and mass mailings. The development of this legal consciousness drew conservative activists into new arenas, and gave them fresh strategies for the defense of core beliefs. Beverly LaHaye may seem at first to be the least likely of the Christian Right to enter the once all-male world of conservative lawyering. Yet her story illustrates how in the late twentieth century, traditional women belied easy stereotypes. Their legal mobilization was tethered firmly to arguments that law (especially government oversight) must not invade the precincts of marital or parental prerogative. The new legalism was also tied to claims (in some tension with the privacy argument) that religious life and expression had been unfairly – and unconstitutionally – severed from the public domain. LaHaye was at the forefront of an energized union of religious and legal activism; she drew strength from law in her very modern crusade to salvage the traditional world of Christian women.[34]

LaHaye did not identify herself publicly as a Southern Baptist. Instead, she projected a deeply personal faith, impatience with those who sought to invade this private space and a call for volunteers of like mind. Her organization was avowedly “Christian” and Protestant, but also non-denominational. This capacious identity became a hallmark of evangelical organizing in the 1970s: it reflected a commitment to offering authentic religious experience and accompanying political drive to all who felt the call.[35] Yet it would be a mistake to assume that all conservative or evangelical Christian women would be attracted to CWA. LaHaye’s audience (and CWA’s membership) was overwhelmingly Protestant and white.[36] In contrast to the Catholic activist Phyllis Schlafly, for example, LaHaye claimed that she reached a bigger audience. “Phyllis has a wonderful ability to attract those who are already activists,” LaHaye said. “I develop women into activists, who have never done it before.”[37]

CWA’s mission was based on prayer to combat “the spiritual forces of darkness,” and political, eventually legal, advocacy to fight back against secularism and its handmaiden, women’s rights activism. LaHaye called her nation-wide system of two thousand prayer chapters the “quiet strength of CWA,” and kept them updated with monthly “Prayer/Action Alerts.” Legal action, of course, is less quiet, and needed more explaining to the membership. Here, too, LaHaye tied CWA firmly to the deployment of new tools in the interest of family preservation. CWA was compelled to take up the sword because the “humanists” had taken over public schools, propagating their corrupt “religion” to innocent children.[38]

LaHaye’s success came from believing Protestant women, who felt that LaHaye captured their frustration with feminism as well as their commitment to their faith. As CWA member Laura Krocka of Pomona, California put it: “Like Mrs. LaHaye says, the difference between us and NOW is, we’re the group that likes men.”[39] Marriage, family, religious liberty, education, sanctity of life and national sovereignty – all keyed to “biblical principles” – formed the core concerns of the organization. One study reported that religion was so important in CWA members’ lives, that they would not have joined but for the biblical mission of the organization.[40] Early battles centered on members’ prayers in opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment.[41] As LaHaye put it, after she urged all CWA members to pray for the defeat of the ERA every Wednesday, “[w]e began to see miracle after miracle occur on Wednesdays!”[42] In Idaho, Oklahoma, Illinois, Georgia, and Missouri, ERA defeats proved that “feminists may have access to the media, tax dollars, and the influence of notable personalities, but we have access to the Creator through fervent prayer!”[43]

Lawsuitsbecame central to CWA’s mission after Michael Farris, a graduate of GonzagaLawSchool, contacted LaHaye in 1980, urging her to “wag[e] legal battles against humanism.” LaHaye recognized that constitutional litigation in defense of believers – especially mothers and their children – would inject the fight against secularism into a new arena. The association with Farris was “providential,” according to LaHaye. Farris brought a lawyer’s vocabulary to CWA and the means to connect long-festering complaints with targeted claims for redress. Within months, Farris became a full-time CWA employee; he began to file high profile lawsuits on behalf of aggrieved CWA members and sympathizers.[44]

CWA became active in multiple cases, defending Larry Witters, a seminary student whose application for vocational rehabilitation services was denied by the Washington Commission for the Blind, even though his degenerative eye disease qualified him for funding. The case produced a significant victory for Witters and CWA. The Washington Supreme Court held that the federal establishment clause would bar supporting Witters’ education at the Inland EmpireSchool of the Bible, because that would be state supportfor “religious instruction.”[45] The United States Supreme Court reversed, however, stressing that the aid would go to Witters personally, and would then be directed by him to purposes that suited his goals and educational needs. The State of Washington, emphasized Justice Thurgood Marshall for the Court, had construed the establishment clause too broadly, turning it into a means of interfering with private choices of students like Witters.[46]