Beverly LaHaye, evangelical activist, dies; no cause given
Beverly LaHaye, an evangelical activist who helped organize a powerful right-wing 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, 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 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 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.”
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 LaHaye “without a doubt the most influential woman in America.”
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.”