Like John McCain today, Ronald Reagan had his work cut out in winning over the Christian Right during his 1980 campaign, when a new organization called Moral Majority was mobilizing evangelicals and other conservative Christians in a way not seen since fallout from the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial scared many of those voters away from public life.
Reagan, after all, had been a Hollywood export with a scant church attendance record, a second wife, and a reputation for having signed a liberal (for its time) abortion law as governor of California. So Reagan studied up on how to connect with evangelicals and crafted a line that made the movement love him when he uttered at before a crowd of 15,000 pastors in Dallas: “I know you can’t endorse me, but I want you to know that I endorse you.”
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