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Moral Majority also refers to a political movement within the United States of this kind, which pursued an Agenda of religiously-oriented political Lobbying . The rest of this article is about the latter meaning of the term. __TOC__ Moral Majority got its start out of a bitter battle for control of Christian Voice in 1978. After a news conference by Christian Voice's Robert Grant exposing the Religious Right as a "sham... controlled by three Catholics and a Jew," Paul Weyrich , Terry Dolan , and Richard Viguerie (the Catholics) and Howard Phillips (the Jew) left Christian Voice and recruited televangelist Jerry Falwell to found Moral Majority which, by 1982, surpassed Christian Voice in size and influence. Started in 1979, Moral Majority was an organization made up of conservative Christian political action committees, which campaigned on issues it believed central to upholding its Christian conception of the moral law, a perception it believed represented the majority of people's opinions (hence the movement's name). The organization dissolved officially in 1989 but lives on in the Christian Coalition network initiated by Pat Robertson . With a membership of millions the ''Moral Majority'' was one of the largest conservative lobby groups in the United States . Among issues it campaigned on were:
The ''Moral Majority'' had adherents in the two major United States political parties, the Republicans and the Democrats , though it exercised far more influence on the former than the latter. In 1981, a series of exposés (later nominated for the Pulitzer Prize ) by Memphis reporter Mike Clark led to some condemning the interactions between the Moral Majority and the Republican Party. Despite the group's name, Opinion Poll s as well as election and referendum outcomes suggest that it was less representative of public opinion than its name might have suggested. POP CULTURE REFERENCES
NOTABLE PEOPLE WITHIN THE MOVEMENT
THE MORAL MAJORITY COALITION In November 2004, Jerry Falwell unveiled The Moral Majority Coalition , an organization designed to continue the “evangelical revolution” that helped to bring President Bush back into the White House and saw the election of many pro-life leaders to national office. Referring to the Coalition as a “21st century resurrection of the Moral Majority,” Falwell, the father of the modern “religious right” political movement, commits to leading the organization for four years. SEE ALSO
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