Like all good jeremiads, Falwell’s book was written in the spirit of “the end is near, the time is now.” Falwell saw moral decline and creeping socialism everywhere in 1980s America. “America has been great because her people have been good,” he wrote. But things had changed, he claimed, alleging that “sin has permeated our land.” Pornographers, abortionists, feminists, homosexuals, and secular humanists had been given free rein to adulterate American culture, he contended. How had these miscreants come to acceptance in the United States when the “people have been good”? Liberals. Yes, “liberal forces … have made significant inroads” into Christian America, Falwell preached. This was no time to parse scripture. Now was the time to wage war, to take the country back, he exhorted. Americans “are sick and tired of the way amoral liberals are trying to corrupt our nation.”
As Falwell’s popularity grew, so did the vitriol against secular liberals. The point was to terrify. In his standard “Moral Majority jeremiad,” Falwell often included a story about a student of his who opened a church on Long Island. When the young pastor went grocery shopping with his family, an employee told him, “Listen, don’t let this little girl walk around this store. Blond, blue-eyed, four-year-old girls are going at a very high price at the kiddy-porn and the prostitution market. And your child will disappear instantly. You hold that child.” Without pausing to investigate the veracity of the story, instead relying on a nationwide panic about child safety to attest to its truth, Falwell simply repeated the story hundreds of times. Liberals were, he argued, waging “a global war against the little children.”
Gauntlet thrown, nearly every force in the emerging religious right picked it up, echoing the theme that a liberal secular elite had seized power from everyday citizens and was using the government to enact its amoral, atheistic vision. Sam Francis, a conservative intellectual advising the likes of the televangelist minister Pat Robertson (before moving in increasingly white-nationalist directions), argued, in an influential 1982 essay, “Liberalism flourishes almost entirely because it reflects the material and psychological interests of a privileged, power-holding, and power-seeking sector of American society.” Francis alleged that liberals were attacking core American values by portraying “the small town, the family, class, religious, ethnic, and community ties as backward, repressive, and exploitative; the values of work, thrift, discipline, sacrifice, and postponement of gratification (on which, as values, the moral legitimacy of the older elites rested) as outmoded, absolutist, puritanical, superstitious, and not infrequently hypocritical.”