Jerry Falwell has been dead for nearly five years. Yet amid the legislative maneuverings on Jones Street, his spirit is very much alive.

A law, recently blocked by a judge, that requires women to get a narrated ultrasound before an abortion? Falwell, more than anyone, helped make opposition to abortion a litmus test for Republican officeholders.

The amendment banning gay marriage? Falwell tried to make gay rights the symbol of American moral decline.

As a new biography of the late Lynchburg, Va., pastor makes clear, Falwell not only shaped the social issues that dominate today’s Republican Party, he turned those issues into party orthodoxy.

In “God’s Right Hand,” Michael Sean Winters shows how the leader of the Moral Majority brought millions of previously uninvolved evangelicals into the Republican Party and rallied them around social issues that have come to define American conservatism. In trying to restore the nation’s moral purity, Falwell, who died in 2007, made a lasting contribution to America’s politics, one to which Jones Street Republicans owe a debt.

That the Baptist fundamentalist should have a liberal Roman Catholic penning his biography is a bit of an irony. Winters, who blogs for National Catholic Reporter, nonetheless does an admirable job of portraying Falwell accurately as a man of conviction as well as provocation.

There are no telltale revelations here. Unlike other televangelists of the 1970s and 1980s, there is no evidence Falwell engaged in extramarital affairs. A devoted family man, he was close to his wife, Macel. And, if the book is to be believed, he was a good father to his two sons, Jerry Jr. and Jonathan, both of whom inherited his mantle, the first at Liberty University, the second at his church, Thomas Road Baptist.

And while the book is useful in situating Falwell within the cultural and social scene of the late 20th-century rural South, this might be called an armchair biography. Winters culls public documents and readily available news archives but does not attempt to interview Falwell’s family or his contemporaries.

Instead, he offers a more detached yet critical exploration of Falwell’s public life and ideas.

A simple man with a bulging dose of self-confidence, Falwell was disgusted with what he saw as America’s libertine habits, including what he regarded as a renunciation of religion. He envisioned a return to an idyllic earlier time that may never have been. Winters speculates that conservative Southerners such as Falwell transferred the racial superiority they had lost in the wake of integration into a national superiority that conflated religious faith with patriotism.

Appalled by the anti-war activism of liberal clergy and outraged by what he saw as government’s hostility to religion, Falwell led “I Love America” rallies at churches across the nation, including Mid-Way Baptist in Raleigh.

Like Ronald Reagan, Falwell believed God gave America a divine destiny. He had no use for competing narratives of America founded by men schooled in Enlightenment ideals and committed to the separation of church and state. And it didn’t matter that Reagan never delivered on the Moral Majority’s demands, overturning Roe v. Wade, or returning prayer to schools, Falwell remained uncritical, and indeed unstinting, in his support for Reagan and the GOP.

For his help in bringing evangelicals to the polls, the Republican Party adopted Falwell’s social positions on abortion, Planned Parenthood and homosexuality, to name a few.

Unfortunately, as Winters insightfully points out, in linking Christianity so intimately with politics, Falwell may have succeeded in alienating a younger generation of Americans that may be rejecting his politics as well as his religion.

Nonfiction

God’s Right Hand: How Jerry Falwell Made God a Republican and Baptized the American Right

Michael Sean Winters

HarperOne, 440pages