In 1978 Beverly LaHaye, the 50-year-old wife of a Californian megachurch pastor and television evangelist, sat in her living room watching Betty Friedan, a leader of the feminist National Organization for Women, promise to liberate enslaved women in an interview with Barbara Walters.
She was enraged by what she heard. Friedan’s goal was to “dismantle the bedrock of American culture — the family”, she said. “Betty Friedan doesn’t speak for me and I bet she doesn’t speak for the majority of women in this country.”
As LaHaye told it, she convened what she expected to be a small meeting in a local hall to discuss threats to “traditional family values”. To her astonishment, 1,200 women turned up. “The women got so excited, they kept saying ‘We’ve got to do something, we’ve got to do something’,” she said, and so she founded Concerned Women for America.
Within a decade CWA attracted half a million members and branches in every state. Addressing its national convention in 1987, President Reagan called it “the largest politically active women’s organisation in America” and described LaHaye as “one of the powerhouses on the political scene today”. Thanks to her, he added, “the grassroots are more and more a conservative province”.
He was scarcely exaggerating. Working with Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition and Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, the CWA fuelled the rise of the religious right as a powerful political force during the latter part of the 20th century. It rallied opposition to feminism, abortion, gay rights and other “wiles of the devil”. It championed evangelical causes such as school prayer and the teaching of creationism. It helped Reagan and the Bushes — senior and junior — win the White House.
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The Chicago Tribune described LaHaye — articulate, smiley and immaculately dressed — as having a “spun-sugar exterior” while directing her organisation with “the fervour of a general”. Her foes in progressive America called her “a professional hatemonger”.
Beverly Jean Davenport was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1929, the younger of two daughters of a factory worker, Lowell Davenport, who died of a ruptured appendix shortly before Beverly’s second birthday. Soon afterwards her mother, Nellie, married Daniel Ratcliffe, a machine tool worker in a car plant, and her daughters adopted his surname.
The family lived in some poverty after Ratcliffe lost his job in the late 1930s, and Beverly had to take time off school to care for her mother after she was confined to bed with a heart condition. From high school in the Highland Park district of Detroit she went to Bob Jones University, a deeply conservative Christian fundamentalist college in Greenville, South Carolina. There she met a fellow student, Tim LaHaye, who also came from Detroit and had lost his father while young. He had served as a machinegunner on bombers during the Second World War.
They married in 1947, at the end of her first year. He earned a degree and she started a family. They had four children: Linda, Larry, Lee and Lori.
A small, dapper man with dyed hair, Tim LaHaye worked as a pastor in Minnesota until 1956 when he moved to the Scott Memorial Baptist Church in San Diego. His career went from strength to strength. He founded several private Christian schools, a college and an institute for creation research; he also became politically active in the 1970s, helping Falwell to set up Moral Majority, founding the American Coalition for Traditional Values, and serving as a co-chairman of Jack Kemp’s 1988 presidential campaign until he was dropped when his anti-Catholic views were revealed. His greatest success were the 16apocalyptic Left Behind novels, set in the “end times” before Christ’s second coming, which he produced between 1995 and 2007. The books sold more than 70 million copies, spawned films and earned him a fortune, although he left the actual writing to a collaborator.
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Beverly LaHaye achieved prominence somewhat later in life. Initially, in San Diego, she did odd jobs for her husband’s church while raising their children. She was, by her own admission, “fearful” and “introverted”, saying: “I didn’t really think I had much to offer the world.”
She resented the drudgery — “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, clearing a path through the clutter of toys”. But instead of embracing mainstream feminism, which she believed was “threatening the survival of our country”, she reasoned that “submission is God’s design for women”, and that “I wasn’t just picking up dirty socks for my husband: I was serving the Lord Jesus by doing this”.
She found a job as a teletype operator, began to give talks to church groups and wrote a couple of books, The Act of Marriage: The Beauty of Sexual Love and The Spirit-Controlled Woman. Then came the Betty Friedan interview and her moment of epiphany.
The CWA “took off like a prairie fire”, LaHaye said. Its first victory was to team up with Phyllis Schlafly’s equally conservative Eagle Forum to block ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment to the American Constitution, which would have banned discrimination on grounds of sex.
In 1985 it moved its headquarters from San Diego to Washington DC to be “closer to the centre of the action”, prompting Reagan to quip that “the reinforcements have arrived”. It set up a legal defence department to fight test cases in the courts. LaHaye launched her own radio programme, became a regular on television, wrote more didactic books and testified before congressional committees. She championed right-wing nominees for the Supreme Court including Antonin Scalia, Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas.
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The CWA lobbied presidents and congressmen on six core issues: family life and marriage; abortion; education; pornography; religious liberty; and national sovereignty. At the height of LaHaye’s powers, according to Christianity Today, she could enlist the army of women she called “my ladies” to send more than 1,000 letters to a senator who slighted her in a public hearing, 2,000 to a Republican official caught selling weapons to Iran, 64,000 to support a controversial Supreme Court candidate and 778,000 to protest against primetime televised advertisements for condoms.
LaHaye served as the CWA’s president until 2006 when she and her husband returned to San Diego. He died of a stroke in 2016 after 69 years of marriage, and her son, Lee, died ten months later.
Interviewed by the Christian Examinerin 2009, she insisted she was not a born activist. She explained: “I think God just pushed me up out of my chair and said, ‘Beverly, go for it’. Anything I’ve done is not my natural way, but God has put it in my heart to do it.”
Beverly LaHaye, evangelical activist, was born on April 30, 1929. She died on April 14, 2024, aged 94
