b. Jerry Falwell
By the decade's end, evangelicals had emerged as an identifiable mass constituency. Falwell, who had changed his mind on the value of political action, founded an organization called the Moral Majority in 1979 to harness the power of that constituency. Evangelicals began taking over local school boards, running for state office, and getting elected to Congress. They created political action committees, lobbied legislators, and turned out voters. Ironically, the politicization of the evangelical counterculture in the late 1970s put it at loggerheads with the nation's born-again president, whose views on many issues, but especially foreign policy, evangelicals did not share. Embracing the Republicans, the Moral Majority harked back to the rhetoric of Nixon's silent majority a decade earlier.