Beverly LaHaye, a timid pastor’s wife who became a fierce champion for conservative Christian politics and a force mobilizing a whole lot of 1000’s of spiritual women, died on Sunday in a retirement home in El Cajon, California. She was 94.
President Ronald Reagan once praised LaHaye as “one among the powerhouses” of the conservative movement and said she was “changing the face of American politics.”
Paul Weyrich, the conservative activist who helped start The Heritage Foundation and coined the term moral majority, called the group LaHaye founded in 1979, the Concerned Women for America (CWA), probably the most effective organization on the Religious Right. He told CT in 1987 that the CWA had “the perfect follow-through” of any political group he’d ever worked with.
At the peak of LaHaye’s power, she could get the ladies she called “my ladies” to send greater than 1,000 postcards to a US senator who had slighted her in a public hearing; 2,000 to support a Republican administration official who had been caught selling weapons illegally to Iran; 64,000 to support a controversial conservative candidate for the US Supreme Court; and 778,000 to protest a TV station that ran an commercial for condoms during prime time.
LaHaye “gave a number of women a language for understanding women’s conservative activism as absolutely crucial,” historian Emily Suzanne Johnson told The Washington Post. “Women have been the driving force of this movement in a number of ways, particularly on the grass-roots level. I’m unsure that happens without Beverly LaHaye.”
Her success earned her the ire of those on the left, especially people concerned about LGBTQ rights. In 1993, the spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign called her “knowledgeable hatemonger.”
LaHaye also became a subject of fascination for mainstream media.
According to the Chicago Tribune, LaHaye had “a spun-sugar exterior” but directed her organization “with the fervor of a general.” The Washington Post reported she “combined combative rhetoric with a cheery public image, handing out pink business cards and decorating her organization’s Washington headquarters with pink chairs and pink curtains.” And the Philadelphia Inquirer wondered how she could call herself a traditionalist while running a national organization with a $6 million budget, waging high-profile political battles, and drawing crowds that dwarfed those of her husband, the distinguished evangelical minister Tim LaHaye.
LaHaye’s answer was that her husband, who would go on to co-author of the favored apocalyptic Left Behind novels, supported and encouraged her political activism. And she was just attempting to answer God’s calling on her life.
“I believe God just pushed me up out of my chair and said, ‘Beverly, go for it.’ Anything I’ve done just isn’t my natural way, but God has put it in my heart to do it,” she once said. “You know, if you say, ‘Whatever Lord, wherever you send me, whatever you wish me to say, whatever you wish me to do, here I’m,’ you higher hang on. You higher hang on tight.”
LaHaye was born in Detroit on April 30, 1929, the second daughter of Lowell and Nellie Davenport. Her father died when she was 2, and her mother was forced to maneuver in with a neighbor and work for the phone company until she got remarried to a tool-and-die maker who worked at Ford.
Watching her mother, LaHaye later said she learned that “women could be very powerful, in quiet ways.” LaHaye needed to summon that strength during difficult times in her childhood. Her mother got sick with a heart condition, and LaHaye took time without work school to look after her and take over her domestic responsibilities while still a young person.
At 17, LaHaye left home to review at Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina. There she met her husband Tim, then a 21-year-old veteran who had been an Air Force gunner in World War II and aspired to develop into a pastor. They got married a yr later.
LaHaye left school to support her husband in ministry. In the early days, he made so little money serving Baptist congregations in Pumpkintown, South Carolina, and Minnetonka, Minnesota, that she needed to work outside the house to financially sustain the family. Things modified in 1956, when Tim was called to a 300-member church in San Diego. Under his leadership, Scott Memorial Baptist grew right into a megachurch.
In Southern California, the 27-year-old pastor’s wife threw herself into any work that needed to be done. When the position of church secretary was vacant, LaHaye filled in. When the church needed someone to direct junior Sunday school, she volunteered.
But LaHaye shrank from the highlight when she was asked to guide Bible studies and speak to women’s groups. She was so shy that Tim called her a turtle.
“I had an inferiority complex,” LaHaye later said. “I didn’t really think I had much to supply the world.”
At the identical time, she struggled with a “smoldering resentment” on the drudgery of household chores and the numerous menial tasks assigned to her as a wife and mother.
“Day after day I’d perform the identical routine procedures: picking up dirty socks, hanging up wet towels, closing closet doors, turning off lights that had been left on, making a path through the clutter of toys,” she wrote.
While similar experiences pushed many ladies toward feminism, LaHaye got here to think this wasn’t a problem of inequality and the unfairness of social expectations placed on women. It was a spiritual issue. She believed she needed to learn submission, because “submission is God’s design for girls,” and that might transform her experience of the each day tasks of a wife and mother.
“I wasn’t just picking up dirty socks for my husband,” she wrote in The Spirit-Controlled Woman. “I used to be serving the Lord Jesus.”
In the Seventies, LaHaybe began to beat her timidity and begin teaching others what she had learned. She and Tim began Family Life Seminars, offering eight lectures on the biblical principles they said that God gave to “guarantee the happiness and success He intended for the Christian home.” LaHaye spoke on overcoming anxiety, discipling children, “Spirit-controlled” family living, and sex.
When the youngest of LaHaye’s 4 children turned 18, LaHaye began publishing books. The Act of Marriage, which she coauthored along with her husband in 1976, became a bestseller.
A “deliberately frank book,” The Act of Marriage told readers that “God never intended any Christian couple to spend a lifetime within the sexual wilderness of orgasmic malfunction.” In fact, “Spirit-controlled Christians” following biblical principles would “enjoy the fantastic thing about sexual lovemaking greater than anyone else.” It was commonly utilized in evangelical marriage counseling and premarital counseling, and the book sold greater than 1 million copies a yr for 20 years.
LaHaye became a political activist in 1978. As she often recounted through the years, she and her husband were watching the feminist Betty Friedan being interviewed on television, and he or she grew frustrated that Friedan acted like she represented all women. She didn’t speak for LaHaye. She didn’t speak for all of the “average, normal, and traditional women” who were committed to their families, their churches, and the normal values sustaining America, LaHaye said.
LaHaye decided to arrange a coffee klatch for local women against feminism and the Equal Rights Amendment, and in the method she founded Concerned Women for America.
“I used to be just type of swept along,” she explained later. “The hall owners said, ‘What’s the name of the organization?’ When I said, ‘We’re just a gaggle of girls locally,’ the reply was, ‘We only rent to organizations.’ … Then I said, ‘Oh, Concerned Women for America.’ I laughed after I said it—I never meant it to be serious.”
More than 1,000 people showed up on the coffee and the CWA was soon organizing chapters across the country.
“Churchwomen throughout America were hungry for somebody to sort out the things that might affect families and the religious values systems they’d,” LaHaye said. “From there, it took off like a prairie fire.”
In the early days, the CWA rallied opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, which might have added a prohibition to discrimination on the premise of sex to the US Constitution. The CWA, together with other conservative activists resembling Phyllis Schlafly, helped the amendment from being ratified by the required 35 states.
Under LaHaye’s leadership, the group also engaged with a wide selection of other political issues. The CWA put a serious emphasis on opposition to abortion and mobilized women to call for prayer in schools, abstinence-only education, and fogeys’ rights to exempt their children from curriculum they found offensive. The organization also advocated for more military spending and raised concern in regards to the growing Communist influence in Latin America.
The CWA opposed legal protections for the civil rights of LGBTQ people and supported laws that might prohibit them from having contact with children. LaHaye argued that homosexuality was unnatural and that gay people recruited converts through sexual abuse.
“I’m not saying all of them are,” she told the Chicago Tribune, “however the movement itself is aggressively attempting to go after boys.”
By the mid-Eighties, the CWA boasted 500,000 dues-paying members and nearly 2,000 prayer/motion groups across the country.
“When they hear about issues, women should not content to take a seat back and say, ‘Well, anyone’s got to do something.’ They say, ‘What can we do?’” LaHaye told CT. “We try to present them not only prayer requests, but motion ideas, too. There is motion in any respect levels, whether a girl sits at home and writes a letter, or has time to go to the nation’s capital.”
LaHaye moved to the capital herself to be “closer to the middle of the motion,” as she explained to the Arizona Republic in 1985. She oversaw a staff of greater than 25 people, including lawyers and skilled lobbyists, who pushed conservative priorities within the Reagan White House and each houses of Congress.
On some occasions, LaHaye took center stage within the national political discourse. In 1987, for instance, she testified on behalf of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, who faced fierce opposition from liberals. She defended him at a hearing broadcast on live television and answered aggressive and tricky questions from Democratic Party leaders, including Joe Biden, then the senator from Delaware.
“Beverly wouldn’t hesitate to just accept the chance to be the voice of Christian women,” in line with a family-authorized obituary. “She at all times conducted herself with grace and dignity and spoke truth with strength and clarity.”
LaHaye served as president of the CWA until 2006. She retired from its board in 2020.
“Her life is a testament to the impact one woman with a vision and mission can have on the course of history,” said Penny Nance, the present president of the CWA.
LaHaye’s husband died in 2016 after 69 years of marriage. Her son Lee died the next yr. LaHaye is survived by her children Linda, Larry, and Lori, in addition to 9 grandchildren and 20 great-grandchildren.
