Beverly Lahaye, influential evangelical activist, dies at 94
Beverly Lahaye, an evangelical activist who helped organize a powerful rightwing backlash to the feminist movement, rallying opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, abortion, gay rights and other perceived threats to “traditional family values,” died April 14 at a retirement home in El Cajon, Calif. She was 94.
Her death was announced in a statement by Concerned Women for America, the Washington-based public policy organization she founded and once led. The statement did not give a cause.
While her husband, Southern Baptist minister Tim Lahaye, preached about the “end times” and made a fortune as a co-author of the best-selling “Left Behind” series of apocalyptic novels, Mrs. Lahaye developed a following of her own as the longtime president of Concerned Women for America, or CWA.
Formed in San Diego in 1979, the organization was envisioned as an evangelical answer to feminist groups such as the National Organization for Women and helped propel the rise of the Christian right through its advocacy efforts, legal campaigns and educational programs.
Within a decade of its creation, the group boasted of having more than 500,000 members, with “Prayer/action” chapters in all 50 states and an army of “kitchen-table lobbyists,” as Mrs. Lahaye called her supporters, who learned how to organize their neighbors and lobby government officials on behalf of school prayer, the criminalization of abortion, the teaching of creationism and other evangelical causes.
The organization’s political clout was so strong that President Ronald Reagan delivered the keynote address at its 1987 national convention, praising Mrs. Lahaye as “one of the powerhouses on the political scene today, and one of the reasons that the grass roots are more and more a conservative province.”
Critics such as Gregory King, a spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign in Washington, called Mrs. Lahaye “a professional hatemonger,” arguing in a 1993 interview with the Detroit Free Press that “she uses bigotry to make a buck” through her condemnation of LGBTQ+ people and others who shunned her right-wing views.
But for the better part of two decades, she remained one of the most prominent female leaders in the new Christian right, a movement that was otherwise dominated by men such as Pat Robertson, the head of the Christian Coalition, and Jerry Falwell, who launched his Moral Majority movement in the 1970s with backing from Tim Lahaye. In 2001, Falwell called Mrs. Lahaye “without a doubt the most influential woman in America.”
“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,” said Emily Suzanne Johnson, a history professor at Ball State University in Indiana and the author of “This Is Our Message: Women’s Leadership in the New Christian Right.”
At a time when some evangelical churchgoers were uneasy about mixing faith with activism, and when politics was seen within much of the community as the work of men, not women, Mrs. Lahaye “gave a lot of women a language for understanding women’s conservative activism as absolutely necessary,” Johnson added in a phone interview. “It’s not just that women should join in to what men are doing, but that conservative voices are really needed to counter this narrative that feminism is women’s politics and the Christian right is misogynist.”
Mrs. Lahaye, she said, was among the only leaders in the Christian right arguing that women “need to be part of this movement if it’s going to be successful.”
Mrs. Lahaye rose to prominence while condemning mainstream feminism, which she considered “a philosophy of death” that was “threatening the survival of our nation.” As she saw it, “the churchwomen had been asleep” and needed to be awakened to the menace posed by “lesbianism, Marxism and extreme social change.”
Her turn toward advocacy had unexpectedly feminist undertones, coming amid a frustration with domestic drudgery that “might sound familiar to early readers of Ms.” magazine, as journalist Susan Faludi put it in her 1991 book “Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women.”
As late as her mid-30s, Mrs. Lahaye said, she had been a “fearful, introverted” homemaker, hiding under a “turtle shell” of shyness while raising four children and supporting her husband, who ministered at a Southern California megachurch, Scott Memorial Baptist in El Cajon.
“In my case it was not the major problems that succeeded in wearing me down; it was the smoldering resentment caused from the endless little tasks that had to be repeated over and over again and seemed so futile,” she wrote in her 1976 book “The Spirit-controlled Woman.” “Day after day I would perform the same routine procedures: picking up dirty socks, hanging up wet towels, closing closet doors, turning off lights that had been left on, creating a path through the clutter of toys.”
As Mrs. Lahaye told it, she set about transforming her life after attending a 1965 motivational conference for Sunday school teachers, where Christian psychologist Henry Brandt lectured about the importance of self-improvement and expression.
She began lecturing at church clubs and leading seminars on family life with her husband, with whom she later cowrote books and appeared on a Christian television show. She also built her confidence by going to work, with her youngest child still in diapers, as a teletype operator at Merrill Lynch - partly to help pay the bills, she told Faludi, and partly because she found the job and its Wall Street hours “kind of exciting.”
In books such as “The Spirit-controlled Woman,” Mrs. Lahaye called for women to prioritize God first, followed by their husband and their children, declaring that “submission is God’s design for women.” She came to realize, she wrote, that “I wasn’t just picking up dirty socks for my husband; I was serving the Lord Jesus by doing this.”