THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, June 1, 1995 TAG: 9506010439
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: THE NEW YORK TIMES
LENGTH: Medium: 77 lines
Robert J. Billings, the evangelistic Christian educator who helped rouse the religious right into a potent political force as a founder of the Moral Majority, died Sunday at the Lakeland Regional Medical Center in Florida.
Billings, who had lived since 1992 in Haines City, Fla., was 68.
His family said the cause of death was cancer.
A tireless organizer who was Ronald Reagan's liaison to the fundamentalist Christian movement during the 1980 presidential campaign, Billings also served six years in the Education Department.
By the time he became politically active in the late 1970s, Billings had been a missionary in the British West Indies, an itinerate preacher in the South and the Midwest, and the president of Hyles-Anderson College, a religious school he helped found in Hammond, Ind., in 1971.
Billings, who made an unsuccessful run for the House in 1976 as the Republican nominee in Indiana's heavily Democratic 1st District, was working as the principal of a Christian high school when he was galvanized into action in 1978 by policies of the Carter administration.
Alarmed by plans to revoke the tax-exempt status of private Christian schools that were founded as a backlash to racial integration, Billings formed the National Christian Action Coalition, packed his belongings in a trailer and hit the road with his wife to preach against what he viewed as a godless humanism dominating American life.
Along the way, Billings, who once estimated that his efforts had led to the founding of 400 Christian schools, met and impressed other like-minded individuals, among them Paul Weyrich, Howard Phillips, Richard Viguerie and Ed McAteer.
In 1979, Billings invited those men and a rising television evangelist named Jerry Falwell to a meeting, where they formed an organization known as the Moral Majority, armed with a plan to induce the Republican Party to adopt a firm stance against abortion as a way of splitting off the strong Catholic voting bloc from the Democratic Party.
Once a powerful force in American politics, Protestant fundamentalism had not been a major political factor since the death of William Jennings Bryant in the 1920s. But with Falwell serving as the public voice and Billings as its first executive director, it re-emerged, and the Moral Majority was widely credited with helping Reagan win the 1980 presidential campaign.
Billings, who figured he had helped register 3 million new voters, had hopes of serving in the White House as Reagan's liaison to the fundamentalist Christian movement, a role he had during the campaign.
But with the new president seeking to distance himself somewhat from the religious right, Billings had to settle for a minor position in the Education Department as a coordinator of its 10 regional offices.
``I hope I am Mr. Conservative at the Department of Education,'' he once said, adding ruefully, ``I am not high enough up the ladder to have a lot of influence.''
After his government service ended in 1988, Billings helped organize a Bibles for Russia program.
A native of Massena, N.Y., Billings was the son of a Mohawk Indian so poor that his son had to be raised in an orphanage.
Billings, who traced his religious fervor to a camp meeting he attended in his early teens, later graduated from the Allentown Bible Institute in Pennsylvania and from Bob Jones University in Greenville, S.C.
The discovery that his ministry had been established on a theological degree obtained from a Tennessee diploma mill created a minor flap during his government service, but Billings shrugged off the implications.
Admitting it was ``not as high a degree as I would have liked,'' Billings said he liked to think ``there's something inside a man that's more valuable than a college degree.''
He is survived by his wife, Charlotte; two sons, Robert of Alexandria, Va., and William of Fredricksburg, Va.; seven grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
KEYWORDS: DEATH OBITUARY
by CNB