During 1948 – 1950 he served as Pastor of Baptist churches in Pickens , S.C. , and then in Minneapolis , Minn. 1950 – 1956. From Minnesota he moved to El Cajon , California , and became the senior pastor in Scott Memorial Baptist Church during 1956 - 1981.

Tim LaHaye founded the largest Protestant high school and a school system of ten Christian schools including two accredited Christian high schools, and a Christian Heritage College, where he became president in 1970- 1976. He also assisted Henry Morris in finding the Institute for Creation Research.

In 1980 he started Californians for Biblical Morality, a branch of Moral Majority, where he was one of the founders. In the same year, he formed a coalition of religious right leaders, named the Council for National Policy. (Argazili, read more at: http://slisweb.lis.wisc.edu/~jcherney/argazali.html)

LaHaye starts writing his series on the secular humanist conspiracy, at a time when this is a hot issue on the Christian Right. In 1976 the Heritage Foundation published Secular Humanism and the Schools: The Issue Whose Time Has Come, a tract by Onalee McGraw, in which she argues that humanistic education in the public schools does not focus on “the traditional and generally accepted virtues” based on “Judeo–Christian principles taught by most families at home,” but on secular humanist theories of “moral relativism and situation ethics” that are “based on predominantly materialistic values found only in man’s nature itself” and “without regard for the Judeo–Christian moral order, which is based on the existence and fatherhood of a personal God.”(McGraw 1976)

This may seem odd coming from the Heritage Foundation, but recall that it was Christian Right strategist Paul Weyrich who had been sent to DC as agent of Joseph Coors to found the Heritage Foundation in 1973. The next year Weyrich set up a lobbying group, the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress. As Heritage became more Inside-the-Beltway policy wonkish and secular, Weyrich left Heritage to turn the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congressinto the Free Congress Foundation, to continue with the battle to extend Christian evangelical influence through what Weyrich called “Cultural Conservatism.” Weyrich and LaHaye helped create the New Right and the Moral Majority in 1979.

Before his series on the Secular Humanist conspiracy, LaHaye attacked the growing gay rights movement. As the Southern Poverty Law Center explained in their timeline of the anti-gay movement, in 1978:

John Birch Society trainer and "family activist" Tim LaHaye publishes The Unhappy Gays (later retitled What Everyone Should Know About Homosexuality). Calling gay people "militant, organized" and "vile," LaHaye anticipates anti-gay arguments to come.(SPLC 2005, http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=523)

John Cloud in Time magazine noted that:

On another subject—gays and lesbians—LaHaye's views are not just eccentric but downright odious. In his 1978 book The Unhappy Gays—which even today LaHaye calls "a model of compassion"—he wrote that homosexuality is "vile" and that gays share 16 pernicious traits, which include "incredible promiscuity," "deceit," "selfishness," "vulnerability to sadism-masochism" and "poor health and an early death." He wondered who was more "cruel and inhuman"—those who accept gays even though they are so unhappy or "those who practiced Old Testament capital punishment" on gays. (Cloud, 2002, http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101020701/books3.html).

In his 1982 book The Batt