Reply #57: I think these guys were a strong force back in the early '70s as well

[Art_from_Ark]

and could be one of the reasons why Carter was playing up his religion in the '76 campaign

(from the link I posted above):

"A few of these ministers were ferociously ideological and had a distinct political bias; for example, the Reverend Billy James Hargis used his Christian Crusade to denounce Communists, liberals, homosexuals, and the media. Hargis was aided by Conservative Digest publisher Richard Viguerie and his valuable direct-mail lists. Heard on 270 radio stations nationwide, Hargis said "the biggest traitors" were "liberals, welfare staters, do-gooders and one-worlders." "Don't talk to me of liberalism! It is a double-standard, Satanic hypocrisy," he proclaimed. The Christian Crusade published a magazine of the same name and several books, such as The Facts About Communism & Our Churches, Communism: The Total Lie, and The Real Extremists: The Far Left.' (A sex scandal caused Hargis to lose his ministry in 1976.)

The Reverend Carl Mclntire of The 20°' Century Reformation Hour reached some twenty million radio listeners through six hundred outlets, supplemented by mass mailings of "radio letters" and sponsored by Mclntire's newspaper, the Christian Beacon. "His program runs a pattern," as George Thayer elucidated in The Farther Shores of Politics. "He opens with a folksy greeting that is offset by strains of some patriotic music such as 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic' . . . then comes the political pitch . . . 'these communists and these liberals are using the fear of the bomb to frighten us so we won't stand up for our principles of morality and we will retreat from freedom... and our political leaders-some of them - are being intimidated by this propaganda . 6 Dr. Frederick Charles Schwarz of the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade convened "meet and scream" groups in which participants were "ready to condemn, attack, harass or intimidate at the first slip of a liberal phrase."'

Dallas oilman H. L. Hunt, Nelson Bunker Hunt's father, subsidized the Campus Crusade for Christ and broadcast The Facts Forum, later called Life Line, with a nominally religious bent. These radio programs, aired on 387 radio stations nationwide, reached as many as five million listeners per day. Underwritten by advertising from Hunt-owned companies, the programs campaigned against "teachers, psychologists, sociologists, psychiatrists, economists, and politicians," all of whom Hunt considered "practiced brain-twisters turned loose on our defenseless children." Hunt believed that the U.S. government was Communist-controlled. Life Line lost its tax exemption as a public charity in 1963 because its programming was so "one-sided."

What was new in the 1970s was the fusion of religion and partisan politics coupled with technological capacity to reach a wider audience. Weyrich showed fundamentalist evangelical ministers such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell how to politicize religion to the GOP's benefit while making boatloads of cash. Politics was projected onto the TV screen and cast as a morality play, a Manichaean struggle between the forces of light and darkness. Bad intentions, illegitimacy, and even Satanic powers were assigned to the "enemy"' "Rhetoric that equates the political work of the religious right with warfare is commonplace among the movement's leaders," analyst Dan Junas has written. "It reflects in part an apocalyptic vision of politics, and in part a conviction that their agenda reflects divine will." The "central, unifying ideology" of the various strains of evangelical belief, according to Junas, was that "Christians are mandated by the Bible to take control of all secular institutions and build the Kingdom of God on earth."°