Jerry Falwell e a maioria moral: um estudo sobre a relação entre religião e política no espaço público americano entre 1979 e 1989

Abstract

This PhD dissertation’s general goal is to evaluate the politics lobby organization called Moral Majority, established and leaded by the fundamentalist evangelical pastor Jerry Falwell. This organization, that it was the more prominent of the New Religious Right, acted in the U.S.A. political landscape between 1979 and 1989, in an attempt to implement a theological-political agenda, based on its religious and moral values, in the context of the American public arena. The Moral Majority’s action had outcomes that modified significantly the party-political dynamics of the United States. In seeking to make possible and implement their religious perspective agenda, the politics activists of the Moral Majority, conservative or fundamentalists, considered that the American society was under the threat of “great evils”, and acted to mobilize the religious people that shared their perspectives to an active and intense involvement in the public and party-political sphere, deconstructing the previous religious orientation of separation between religion and politics. This action implied in the emergence of a new kind of sociopolitical cleavage, in which the religion reemerges in U.S., embodying and consolidating very significant and long-lasting cultural cleavages, that result in culture wars between different moral and religious understanding systems. Although being dissolved in the end of de 1980s, the Moral Majority contributed significantly to the still in progress polarization of the cultural differences in the inner American public life and culture, that assumed a nationally organized party-political dimension.