Francis Schaeffer, an American Presbyterian theologian based at the L'Abri Fellowship in Switzerland, publishes How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture — accompanied by a ten-episode film series that tours evangelical churches and campuses across America. The book and film argue that Western civilization is collapsing because Christians abandoned cultural and political engagement, retreating into pietistic separatism while secular humanism captured every institution. The implicit command: re-engage. Retake the institutions.
Schaeffer's significance is as a translator. R.J. Rushdoony's Christian Reconstruction theology is intellectually rigorous but inaccessible to most evangelicals. Schaeffer repackages the core insight — that Christians must not merely save souls but capture institutions — in language that mainstream evangelicals find compelling. He doesn't call for theocracy; he calls for "co-belligerency" with anyone fighting secular humanism. The distinction is strategic, not substantive.
In 1979, Schaeffer and pediatric surgeon C. Everett Koop (later Reagan's Surgeon General) publish Whatever Happened to the Human Race? and produce an accompanying five-episode film series. This work explicitly connects abortion to a broader narrative of civilizational decline — the argument that legal abortion leads inexorably to euthanasia, infanticide, and the devaluation of all human life. The film tours 20 American cities. Jerry Falwell, Tim LaHaye, and other future Moral Majority founders attend screenings and cite Schaeffer as the catalyst for their political awakening.
Schaeffer provides the intellectual permission structure for the religious right's formation. Before Schaeffer, most white evangelicals viewed politics as worldly distraction from spiritual mission. After Schaeffer, political engagement becomes a Christian obligation — failure to fight for cultural institutions is reframed as sin. This theological shift is the necessary precondition for everything that follows: the Moral Majority, the Christian Coalition, the Council for National Policy, and ultimately the Christian nationalist capture of the Republican Party.