In the fall of 1981, Yale president A. Bartlett Giamatti welcomed the university\u2019s new freshman class with a blast at the Moral Majority, a pressure group of religious conservatives founded two years earlier whose most visible spokesman was the Rev. Jerry Falwell. Giamatti told students that Falwell and his ilk were moralistic authoritarians whose injection of religion into politics was responsible for a \u201cnew meanness of spirit in our land\u201d and \u201cresurgent bigotry.\u201d Giamatti\u2019s attack on Falwell and the religious right landed on the front page of the New York Times and made headlines around the country. Conservative journalist William F. Buckley, Jr., had the best riposte, as usual, scoffing that \u201cto be lectured against the perils of the Moral Majority on entering Yale is on the order of being lectured on the dangers of bedbugs on entering a brothel.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jerry Falwell was one of the most consistently unpopular public figures of his time. He was also, according to Michael Sean Winters\u2019 new biography, God\u2019s Right Hand: How Jerry Falwell Made God a Republican and Baptized the American Right, one of the most consequential. Indeed, Winters maintains that Falwell reshaped American religion, American politics and the Republican Party \u2013 not necessarily in that order \u2013 and that his influence has persisted to the present day, even though Falwell died in 2007.<\/p>\n