The Moral Majority is being dismantled after a decade of leading religious conservatives out of the political wilderness, but analysts said the effects of its lobbying efforts will endure.
"There are those that are saying we are witnessing the end of the religious right," said the Rev. Richard Neuhaus, director of the Center on Religion and Society in New York. "I do not think this is the beginning of the end. To paraphrase Churchill, `This is the end of the beginning.' "Television evangelist Jerry Falwell, founder and chairman of Moral Majority, announced Sunday that the organization will be disbanded Aug. 31.
The lobbying group, which raised $69 million and helped elect three Republican administrations since its founding in June 1979, had accomplished its mission of politicizing religious conservatives, Falwell told a meeting of the Religion Newswriters Association.
"I feel that I have performed the task to which I was called in 1979. The religious right is solidly in place, and like the galvanizing of the black church as a political force a generation ago, the religious conservatives in America are now in for the duration," he said.
Neuhaus, a Lutheran theologian, said Moral Majority's ability to bring Christian fundamentalists out of an isolationist stance and into public policy debates was "a major development of lasting consequence."
"While the work of Moral Majority will go on forever, the Moral Majority organization is no longer needed," Falwell said.
An average of 2 million to 3 million people either donated money or subscribed to the organization's newspaper over the past decade, according to Mark DeMoss, a spokesman for Falwell.
At its height during the 1984 presidential election, the group raised $11 million. DeMoss said revenues this year are expected to drop to $3.5 million. The organization has a dozen employees in Washington.
Moral Majority's work will be taken over by the lobbying groups of religious conservatives it helped pave the way for, such as the American Coalition for Traditional Values, Concerned Women for America, the Rutherford Institute, the Freedom Council, and the American Family Association, Falwell said.
Much of the political agenda of the religious right - including making abortion illegal, allowing tuition tax credits for private schools and silent prayer in public schools - remains unfulfilled.
But Falwell credited the Moral Majority with registering "millions" of voters and leading religious conservatives in electing Ronald Reagan, defeating a dozen liberal U.S. senators in 1980, re-electing Reagan in 1984 and electing Bush last year.
He said the organization also helped place conservative judges throughout the federal courts.