Died: Beverly LaHaye, Pastor’s Wife Who Led Religious Right
The founder of Concerned Women for America was credited by President Ronald Reagan with “changing the face of American politics.”
Beverly LaHaye, a timid pastor’s wife who became a fierce champion for conservative Christian politics and a force mobilizing hundreds of thousands of religious women, died on Sunday in a retirement home in El Cajon, California. She was 94.
President Ronald Reagan once praised LaHaye as “one of the powerhouses” of the conservative movement and said she was “changing the face of American politics.”
Paul Weyrich, the conservative activist who helped start The Heritage Foundation and coined the term moral majority, called the group LaHaye founded in 1979, the Concerned Women for America (CWA), the most effective organization on the Religious Right. He told CT in 1987 that the CWA had “the best follow-through” of any political group he’d ever worked with.
At the height of LaHaye’s power, she could get the women she called “my ladies” to send more than 1,000 postcards to a US senator who had slighted her in a public hearing; 2,000 to support a Republican administration official who had been caught selling weapons illegally to Iran; 64,000 to support a controversial conservative candidate for the US Supreme Court; and 778,000 to protest a TV station that ran an advertisement for condoms during prime time.
LaHaye “gave a lot of women a language for understanding women’s conservative activism as absolutely necessary,” historian Emily Suzanne Johnson told The Washington Post. “Women have been the driving force of this movement in a lot of ways, particularly at the grass-roots level. I’m not sure that happens without Beverly LaHaye.”
Her success earned her the ire of those on the left, especially people concerned about LGBTQ rights. In ...