religious communities. Weyrich, Viguerie and Phillips also abandoned the group in 1978 after Grant announced that the Christian Voice was "a sham" that was "controlled by three Catholics and a Jew;" they then decided to align with rising televangelist Jerry Falwell and form the Moral Majority. Christian Voice sought to counter US President Jimmy Carter's influence over the American Christian community. A Democrat who embraced the born-again Christian label, Carter gained high levels of popularity among Christian conservatives during his 1976 campaign. After he took office, however, Carter disappointed many Christian conservatives by supporting the Panama Canal Treaty and by taking what many Christian conservatives considered to be a soft stance on Communism. This perception caused Christian Voice and other Christian right organizations to rally behind Republican nominee Ronald Reagan in 1980. During the 1980 US Presidential election, Christian Voice organized "Christians for Reagan" as a subdivision with the group and it also sponsored an advertising campaign that implied Carter approved of homosexual lifestyles. The group gained even further notoriety when it issued "moral report cards" to grade the social voting patterns of members of Congress. Christian Voice was the first of the Christian Right groups, pre-dating the Christian Coalition, American Coalition for Traditional Values, Concerned Women for America, Moral Majority, Family Research Council, and other Christian political groups. Christian Voice has employed hundreds of political organizers, including Susan Hirschman, Chief of Staff to former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, Congressman Tom Hagadorn, who chaired the organization for several years, and Tim LaHaye, co-author of the Left Behind series. At one point, US Senators Orrin Hatch (Utah), Roger Jespen (Iowa) and James McClure (Idaho) all served on the organization's board of directors. Many of the techniques used by current independent and 527 political campaigns were originally developed by Christian Voice (Most notably, a commonly used "Political Report Card" used to inform voters of how their representative voted was created by Christian Voice chief architect Colonel V. Doner). Decline The group's bare-knuckle politics angered many Christian Voice supporters, including some of the Congressmen on the board of directors. Christian Voice's primary legislative objective, a constitutional amendment to allow prayer in public schools, failed near the end of Reagan's first term. After Reagan's second term began, Christian Voice shifted its activities away from lobbying and toward the publication of campaign literature, especially the aforementioned "report cards." The group claimed to have distributed