Falwell framed domestic moral decay as a foreign communist threat

Evidence

However, the first pages of Listen, America! aren’t about America at all. Instead, Falwell opened with graphic details of atrocities committed by the Russia-backed “Vietnamese Communists” and the “Red China”–backed Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Such slaughter would soon be upon America, he warned, if they didn’t hold communism at bay and fight the “moral decay” destroying American freedoms. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 222

Categorization

• SEED: An essay angle: how white evangelical rhetoric collapses foreign geopolitical enemies into domestic cultural ones — moral panic as a translation mechanism between Cold War and culture war.