Reagan-Era Religious Right Footloose

The film opened in the middle of a culture war

Footloose was released February 17, 1984, three years into Ronald Reagan's first term and a year before the Parents Music Resource Center hearings would put rock lyrics on national trial. The Bomont dance ban is a fictional version of a real political project — the assertion, by an alliance of evangelical clergy and conservative political operatives, that American popular culture was corrupting American youth and that government had a role in stopping it.

"Ronald Reagan was in office, Christian Conservatives like Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority had risen to power, there was an ongoing witch hunt in the form of the Satanic Panic, and basically the 1980s seemed to be a time where powerful social forces were trying to push back against stuff they just didn't like." — Mutant Reviewers, Mutant Reviewers (2012)

Falwell, the Moral Majority, and the rhetoric Pitchford was drawing on

The Moral Majority — founded in 1979 by Jerry Falwell — had become, by 1984, one of the most effective political organizing operations in American religious life. Its targets were broad: abortion, gay rights, school prayer, sex education, secular textbooks, and, repeatedly, popular music and film. The rhetoric was familiar enough that Pitchford (in Footloose) could write Reverend Shaw Moore's pulpit voice without parody — Shaw's opening sermon on "this gospel of easy sexuality and relaxed morality" reads as direct quotation from the period's pulpit literature.

The book burning at the school library in Footloose is not exaggerated. American school districts in 1982–84 were actively challenging the same titles named in the film:

• Slaughterhouse-Five (Vonnegut) — challenged in school districts across the country, removed from Drake, North Dakota and burned by school administrators in 1973; still under challenge in 1984.
• The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger) — among the most-challenged books of the early 1980s.
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain) — repeatedly removed for racial language.

The film's bonfire scene — which Shaw himself shows up to stop — is composite, but the books on it are titles that real Americans were really removing from real school libraries the year Footloose came out. (jstor)

The PMRC was eighteen months away

The Parents Music Resource Center, founded in May 1985 by Tipper Gore and three other Senate wives, would in September of that year hold the famous Senate Commerce Committee hearings on "porn rock" that produced the parental advisory sticker.

"In 1985 a group of concerned women formed the Parents Music Resource Center, also known as the PMRC. Headed by Tipper Gore, the wife of then-Senator Al Gore, and also other powerful Washington wives, the PMRC was very worried that rock music had gotten too out of hand." — Houston Press, Houston Press (2015)

"On October 9, 1985, Reagan stated that the music business was exposing children to a 'glorification of drugs and violence and perversity.'" — Mathieu Deflem, Deflem blog (2020)

Footloose pre-dates this hearing by eighteen months but is unmistakably its cultural prelude. The film's antagonist is the moral logic the PMRC would translate into legislative pressure.

The film's resolution is generous to the religious right

What separates Footloose from a pure satire of evangelical authority is that it refuses to caricature its antagonist. Reverend Shaw Moore is not a hypocrite. He has not banned dancing because he hates joy. He has banned dancing because his son died driving home from a dance, and the ban is what he can do.

The film's resolution — Shaw releases the kids, voluntarily, from the pulpit — implicitly argues that the religious right was made of real people with real grief, and that the way out of the culture war was not to defeat them but to help them through it. Whether that reading is too generous depends on the viewer. But it is the reading the film is unmistakably making.

"The story of the movie is essentially the story of Reverend Moore being convinced. The kids never win an argument. The kids win a heart." — Philip Meade, Philip Meade (2018)