Following the 1980 election, a major shift in Jewish political behavior appeared to be under way. For the first time in seventy-five years, a Democratic presidential candidate, Jimmy Carter, received less than a majority of the Jewish vote (45 percent). Reagan received a record 39 percent. (Independent candidate John Anderson got 15 percent.) Four years later, however, and despite his strong support for Israel, the Jewish vote for Reagan fell to 31 percent. The return of Jews to their traditional Democratic moorings resulted mainly from growing fears of a reinvigorated Christian Right. Concerns about the impact of the New Left's and Jesse Jackson's influence within the Democratic Party had briefly shaken these loyalties but were soon trumped by an even more worrisome figure, according to one analyst: the Rev. Jerry Falwell.

The rise of Falwell and the Christian Right had its origins in August 1978, when President Carter's director of the Internal Revenue Service ruled that any private schools set up after 1963 would be viewed as discriminatory and must forfeit their tax deductible standing. Since the vast number of private schools in the South were Christian, Southern Baptists and other fundamentalist bodies saw the ruling as troublesome. The threat forced them to do something they had avoided for many years: organize politically.

During the 1920s and 1930s, evangelicals and their fundamentalist wing had suffered a number of setbacks, including the Scopes “monkey trial” in Tennessee and the country's ill-fated experience with Prohibition.