Many commentators voiced alarm when President Reagan, in a press conference on his ninth day in office, denounced détente with the Soviet Union. In fact, he was using words that could have been lifted from any of a number of Falwell’s sermons or from the preacher’s 1980 book Listen, America, which included a chapter on fighting communism. Here was Reagan: “I know of no leaders of the Soviet Union since the revolution, and including the present leadership, that has not more than once repeated in the various Communist congresses they hold their determination that their goal must be the promotion of world revolution and a one-world Socialist or Communist state, whichever word you want to use.” And here was Falwell on the same subject: “The Soviets have always had one goal, and that is to destroy capitalistic society. They are a nation committed to communism and to destroying the American way of life.” What’s more, the fear of a one-world state—which Reagan alluded to—had important implications in the universe of fundamentalist thought. A 1980 mailing from Falwell’s “Old-Time Gospel Hour” warned that the time of Tribulation foretold in the Bible would witness a “Russian invasion of Israel” (although Russia is not mentioned in the Bible), and warned that “A powerful ruler, led by Satan and referred to as the Anti-christ, will rise to power. After leading the nations to form an alliance to help preserve the world system, he will break the treaty and be responsible for persecuting the nation of Israel and leading the last great battle against the forces of God in the battle of Armageddon.”

In the spring of 1981, the newly installed Reaganites made the decision to lead with their economic agenda, not with the divisive social issues like abortion and gay rights that were understood to be the principal concern of Christian conservatives. Some interviewers were surprised when Falwell told them he endorsed this decision. “I don’t think the president is sidestepping the moral and the social issues,” he explained on “Face the Nation.” “I think he wants to give [his economic agenda] the full shot.” But Falwell did more than support Reagan’s decision to emphasize economic issues. He also lent him cover for his proposed cutbacks in social programs. “We must be sensitive to the fact that we cannot ignore the presence and the needs of the poor among us,” Falwell said in that same interview, “and I think that is where the churches must quickly move in, particularly conservative churches of which I am a part, and fill the vacuum that no doubt the country can no longer fill.”

For Falwell, then, being a social conservative was not simply a matter of denouncing abortion and gay rights. It also meant fealty to laissez-faire economics and to an aggressive foreign policy. But even as he was helping to make evangelicals into hard-right fiscal conservatives and foreign policy hawks, Falwell was also doing something else: giving them permission to form alliances with other religious groups. Before Falwell, fundamentalists were warned against being “yoked” with non-believers, and a “non-believer” was anyone who did not share the core beliefs of evangelical Protestantism. Mormons, Catholics, and most liberal Protestants did not make the cut. But, after reading Francis Schaeffer’s teachings on “co-belligerency”—the idea that believers and non-believers could cooperate—Falwell came to see the necessity of working with non-fundamentalist but conservative believers of other creeds. This newfound awareness of ecumenical possibilities came to Falwell in the late 1970s, just as he was being encouraged to get politically involved by GOP operatives. If Simon the Cyrene could help Jesus carry his cross, Mormons and conservative Catholics and fundamentalist Baptists could join forces to defeat liberalism. In the early years of the Moral Majority, Falwell would brag that a third of the group’s members were Roman Catholic.

And so it is that the three remaining Republican candidates for president (excluding Ron Paul, who has one ideological foot outside the GOP) are a Mormon and two conservative Catholics. Without Falwell, it seems quite possible that none of their candidacies—let alone the entire coalition that presently forms the Republican base—would have been possible.