University of Virginia Library

RESULTS

Who Reported? The Moral Majority claims chapters in all fifty states. Ten states (20%) submitted no report at all during the two year time period of 1984-1985 which we studied. Eleven state chapters (22%) submitted one report, fourteen (28%) reported twice, and fifteen (30%) reported more than twice. Overall, there were a total of 104 reports published, including the District of Columbia. That amounts to an average of one report per year per state for the two year period examined.

Falwell has claimed strong support for the Moral Majority in all states and regions of the country, but the presence and absence of reports by state suggests a strong regional character. More than half (54%) of all the reports came from the South, states considered to constitute the Bible Belt. Of the ten states that failed to report, all were outside the Bible Belt region. The Northeast industrial complex (New England and Middle Atlantic) accounted for only 11% of all reports.

The distinctively regional character of Moral Majority activity is further evidenced by the proportion of states within each region that reported. All but one Southern state reported (94%) while approximately one third of the states in the East and West never reported. Furthermore, 81% of the Southern regional states reported more than once while only 44% and 39% respectively of the Eastern and Western region states did so.

We also observed that states were much more likely to report in 1984 (78%) than in 1985 (38%). The higher rate of activity in 1984 can partially be accounted for by the fact that it was an election year. This fact, however, cannot account for a dramatic drop in all kinds of activities between 1984 and 1985. (We'll return to interpreting this statistic in our conclusions. )

Activities Reported. The forty states plus the District of Columbia reported a total of 244 activities. Leading the list of activities is "lobbying," 17% of all activities. This is followed closely by "voter registration" which comprises 16% of all activities. "Monitoring" constituted 11% of all activities, but seldom did we find evidence indicating how a situation was being monitored. This led us to suspect that "monitoring" might constitute a certain "fudge factor," i.e., something to report when nothing was otherwise happening. "Meetings" comprised 9% of all activities, "demonstrations" 8% and "rallies" made up 4%. We identified a total.

Who are the actors? Thirty-eight percent of all activities reported are claimed solely as Moral Majority activities. Forty-two percent of the time, the writer explicitly indicates that the activity is being carried out by Moral Majority in cooperation with some other group. Rather frequently, 12% of the time, the person writing the report uses the first person singular to describe the activity, e.g., "I spoke," "I appeared on a TV program," etc. Eight percent of the time the actors are another group, or actors who are unspecified.

We think it significant that more than half of all activities reported are things that would usually be done by a single individual. In this context, we also find the large proportion of joint activities (42%) suggestive of a broad class of MM activities. If Jerry Falwell appears as a speaker at a rally or meeting, we suspect that activity would likely be considered a joint Moral Majority activity even though the MM may not have been involved in organization and management of the meeting.

Time frame for activity. The time frame for which activities were reported also proved to be quite revealing. Of the 244 activities recorded, 105, or 43%, were identified in the future tense. That is to say, nearly half of the time the authors of the state reports are writing about things they plan to do, rather than things they have done or are doing. For the future tense activities reported in 1984, we attempted to follow up and see if the author later reported that the activity had happened. This involved a total of 76 projected activities. Of this group, we could not positively confirm that any of these projected activities actually happened.

Activity Content. What were the substantive issues which the Moral Majority activities addressed? In our coding we had some difficulty differentiating between type of activity and activity content. This was particularly apparent with two general categories of activities -- election related tasks and "organizational maintenance." And these two issues topped our list of recorded activity content. More than a quarter of all activities (28%) dealt with election related matters. Matters pertaining to the organization of Moral Majority were the second most frequently recorded activity content, accounting for 14% of all activities. Together, they account for 42% of all activity content.

Part of our difficulty results from certain conceptual ambiguities that arise in differentiating between "type" and "content" of activity. But it is also evident that many of the reports simply do not report a substantive content. We clearly had a coding bias that was evident only after we completed the task. In the absence of content, we were prone to record type of activity as a substitute for content.

If we eliminate the election and organizational maintenance activities from consideration, we have a total of 147 coded substantive issues. Topping the list of concerns are issues relating to education with a total of 26% of all the contents recorded. The substance of the education mentions breaks down almost equally between matters relating to private and public schools. This is followed by abortion which constitutes 22% of all mentions and pornography with 18% of the mentions. Other issues include homosexuality (9%), drinking (5%), and church and state issues (5%). Other issues receiving less than 5% mention included patriotism, defense, ERA and family.