by Kitty Testa

My father once told me, “The pendulum swings.” We were talking about history, and I was very young at the time. He explained how the licentious 1920s were a response to the prudish Victorian Era, how the conservative post-WWII of the 1950s was a rejection of the risk-taking 1920s that led to the Great Depression. The hippies of the 1960s were a response to the rigidity of his own generation, although he was unnerved by their libertine ways. In response to the sex, drugs and rock and roll of the 1960s came a group that feared the end of America as we knew it—an end to the nuclear family, an end to a Christian nation. And thus was born The Moral Majority.

What was The Moral Majority? Well, in its heyday critics said it was neither moral nor a majority, but it was a powerful political force in the decade from the late 1970s to the late 1980s. The group was led by Jerry Falwell, a fundamentalist Christian evangelical pastor of the Thomas Road Baptist Church, a congregation that served as the template for megachurches that would spring up all over America in the 1990s. More importantly, the group was a social and political powerhouse which sought to legislate conservative Judeo-Christian values into codified law. Like all political movements, The Moral Majority had its bogeymen and positioned itself as fighting evil forces in an epic battle for the nation’s virtue.

What Falwell and his followers failed to see was what my father told me: “The pendulum swings.”

Well into the 1990s, the opposition to The Moral Majority repeatedly accused the Christian right of attempting to “legislate morality.” I remember a heartwarming moment in 1999, when Eleanor Clift was a guest on Hannity and Colmes. She trotted out the cliché, and Sean Hannity hit back at her, saying it was liberals who were trying to legislate morality, which left Clift flustered and unable to answer. I had come to see the pendulum swinging back the other way, and was glad that someone else saw it too.

While the modern Left shares few values with those who supported The Moral Majority, their goal is actually not dissimilar: make everyone live by their code of virtue, whether they like it or not. Coercion begets backlash and rejection, and by 2017, the fears of The Moral Majority look prophetic.

The Left has tremendous sway in popular culture, but it was battered at the ballot box in 2016. The Left has proliferated its platform of virtues and has demanded adherence and obedience to its political correctness, which it has successfully codified into regulations, statues and ordinances all over the country.

Here are seven ways the Left is the New Moral Majority.