government are independent of each other, and have the power to act as checks
and balances over each other’s actions. This, which he held to be a basic
constitutional need if liberty was to be preserved from tyrannical governments,
has its most famous expression in the US Constitution, the writers of which
were acutely conscious of Montesquieu’s ideas on the subject.
Moral Majority
The Moral Majority entered into the political vocabulary as the name of an
American pressure group, founded in 1979, which formed an important part
of thenew right. Its purpose was to campaign for the election of morally
conservative politicians and to alter public policy in a number of areas where it
was thought that either the legislature or the Supreme Court had adopted
standards that were not consonant with the views of the majority of Americans.
Particular issues of concern to the Moral Majority included school prayer,
abortionand the tolerance ofhomosexuality. The Moral Majority became
identified in particular with two developments in the American political
system in the late 1970s, becoming even more powerful in the 1980s after
the presidential election victories of Ronald Reagan, which provoked con-
troversy and in some cases the organization of groups to resist the Moral
Majority’s ambitions. The first was the growing involvement of the religious
and the political right in the USA through the mobilization of Christian
fundamentalism—mostly independent Baptists in the Moral Majority—in
particular around a set of themes known as social issues or family issues. The
second was the growth in popularity of a number of television and radio
preachers who used their media spots to promote not merely a religious but
also a political message. The Moral Majority’s leader was Rev. Jerry Falwell—a
leading television evangelist—although it is clear that much of the initiative for
founding the group came from more political new right leaders such as Paul
Weyrich, Richard Viguerie and Howard Phillips. The financial and sex
scandals attached to many such television preachers in the late 1980s did not
stem the general political influence of the movement immediately, although a
decline in donations forced the organization to close in 1989. Similar groups
continued, the term moral majority often being applied to them generally,
although many observers sensed a decline in their influence during the Clinton
presidency in the 1990s—it was instructive that even the more outrageous
allegations against President Clinton for sexual impropriety damaged neither
his standing nor his party in the subsequent presidential election. Despite the
length of time passed since the dissolution of the organization bearing the
name, the term remains closely associated with groups on the religious right.
(See alsoneo-conservatism).
Moral Majority