Page 58 - Historical Dictionary of Political Communication in the United States

COMMUNICATION
PATTERNS
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FAMILY
FALWELL, JERRY (1933- ). Soon after graduating from Baptist College in
1956, Falwell established his own church in an abandoned pop-bottling plant in
his hometown of Lynchburg, Virginia. Within a week, he was broadcasting his
sermons on radio, and within 18 months he had his own television specials. By
1967 his Old-Time Gospel Hour aired weekly on local television. By the 1970s,
his congregation numbered 18,000, and his audience on television and radio
exceeded 25 million. His radio show, carried by almost 400 stations, at one
point had a bank of 62 telephone operators standing by to take pledges. Falwell's
influence even extends to academe because he founded Liberty University. In
1979, a group of secular "New Right" leaders became disaffected from the
Republican Party due to their inability to move the party from the middle po-
litically. They approached a number of popular evangelists to lure them into
politics. Falwell at first refused, but when asked a second time, he agreed to
front the Moral Majority. He has since served both as president and as chairman
of the Moral Majority, which operates a $100 million annual budget. An out-
spoken opponent of pornography, this group successfully orchestrated a boycott
against 7-11 stores that forced them to stop selling adult magazines.
SOURCES: Sharon Linzey Georgiannam, The Moral Majority and Fundamentalism,
1989; David Snowball, Continuity and Change in the Rhetoric of the Moral Majority,
1991.
Marc Edge

FAMILY COMMUNICATION PATTERNS. The family has long been con
sidered a key agency in the political socialization of children—or the process
by which they acquire their orientation to the political world. Yet the evidence
indicates that few political orientations, with the limited exception of partisan-
ship, are transmitted directly from parent to child. Instead, the family environ-
ment, as characterized by the patterns of parent-child communication, appears
to be more influential in developing the political character of children.
Research by Jack McLeod and Steven Chaffee at the University of Wisconsin-
Madison in the 1960s demonstrated two politically relevant dimensions of par-
ent-child communication in the family. In socio-oriented families, children are
consistently told to maintain good relationships with their parents and other
authority figures, often being advised to repress their anger, to avoid expressing
their own points of view, and to stay away from trouble in general. In the
concept-oriented family, children are encouraged to express their own ideas and
to challenge those of other people, resulting in frequent participation in contro-
versial discussions at home, where they are exposed to differing points of view.
Although these were originally assumed to be polar opposites, research has
indicated that some families actually have a mix of both socio- and concept-
oriented communication, while others exhibit no clear patterns of parent-child
interaction along either dimension. However, children from homes with higher
levels of concept-oriented communication tend to be heavier users of the public