I like Richard Lewis but that clip is a cluster-[expletive] rant. If that's the level of discourse seen on MSNBC then the rumors of it being the left's version of FoxNews seem to be true.
A little more historical perspective on the rise of the evangelicals-in-politics movement. Obviously Roe v. Wade was a driving factor in getting very conservative Christians more engaged in the political process. The Roe v Wade decision happened in 1973, during the Nixon administration. It came on the heels of the civil rights movement, several other landmark decisions by the Supreme Court, the Vietnam War and the ainti-war protest movement, and in the context of the Cold War. Christians, and in particular, evangelical Protestant Christians didn't really feel they had an organized political voice. There was a Christian right per se, but it was more of a Catholic-run movement.
Then on the heels of Roe v. Wade and the end of the US involvement in the painful Vietnam War, you had Nixon's Watergate scandal and impending impeachment, which leads to his eventual resignation. This put a relative unknown in the presidencey in 1974, Gerald Ford (Ford had been appointed to the VP position after Nixon's VP Spiro Agnew had been forced to resign under a scandal of his own). Ford was pro-ERA, he was rather soft on the Cold War and Vietnam, and even though he supported the rights of states to decide the abortion issue, his wife Betty went on TV and hailed the Roe v. Wade decision as a landmark ruling and she was a strong advocate for the "women's lib" movement (Gerald Ford himself later declared that he was pro-choice).
Fast-forward to the 1976 presidential campaign beteween Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. Ford had fought a fiercely contested battle for the Republican nomination, challenged by Ronald Reagan. Although Reagan didn't run on social issues, he did position himself as the true conservative alternative to Ford, who was largely viewed as a moderate. Ford narrowly escaped the Republican convention with the nomination, but he was battered by it.
In the general campaign, hawks in the conservative base were unenthusiastic about Ford. Evangelical Christians were reeling from the Roe v. Wade decision and looking to get more organized politically. And Jimmy Carter, the Baptist Democrat from the South openly spoke about his religion and faith along the campaign trail. He talked of how religion could help us heal the wounds left by the social turmoil of the prior decade. And evangelical Christians, with little organization and nowhere else to go, flocked to Jimmy Carter. If you look at the electoral map of Carter's victory, he swept the Deep South. He won nothing in the West and split the states with Ford in the Northeast. Just as an exaple, Carter took Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, and Missouri, Ford took California, Illinois, Washington, and Vermont.
It didn't take long after Carter took office that those Christian evangelicals who supported him didn't get the guy they were hoping for. Carter was (and still is) a very outspoken Christian, but he is a different kind of Christian than what the most conservative evangelicals were looking for. Instead of emphasizing issues like abortion, homosexuality, censorship, and the traditional family with a traditional role for women, Carter channelled his Christian beliefs into things like tolerance, charity, and reconciliation.
So it was during the Carter administation, which was plagued by many other problems, not the least of which was the energy crisis and then the hostage crisis in Iran, that the Moral Majority was founded by Jerry Falwell and others. This was the beginning of the very organized political movement by Evangelical Christians that has evolved to what we see today. Falwell and his supporters abandoned Carter and threw their weight behind Reagan in 1980, helping carry him to easy victory. They remained loyal to Reagan through two terms, and were less enthusiastic about his successor Bush. Bush won an easy election in 1988, but when challenged in 1992 by Clinton, and trailing in the polls, he allowed his convention to be hijacked by people like Pat Buchanan, who gave a very controversial speech that preaching about the "culture wars". This kind of rhetoric from Bush's convention fired up the base, but were largely viewed unfavorably by moderates and independents. Clinton won, and Christian conservatives had their whipping boy for the next 8 years, until W ran for president in 2000, reached out very overtly to evangelicals probably even more unabashedly than Reagan had, and managed to win 2 very close elections with their broad support.
The poly sci geeks on the board can add to or correct any or all of the above which was pieced together by my fuzzy memory and with the help of a few google and wiki searches.
