Although Christian businessman Ed McAteer died in 2004, his name resurfaced last week in connection with the relocation of the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Writing for Baptist News Global, former journalist Mark Wingfield said McAteer helped plant important seeds from the 1970s through ‘90s. 

Many evangelicals have never heard of McAteer. Yet, the “reality is that Donald Trump would not be president today, the Moral Majority would not have existed, and the U.S. Embassy would not be in Jerusalem today,” wrote Wingfield, now associate pastor of Wilshire Baptist Church in Dallas. 

McAteer was a longtime member of Bellevue Baptist Church in suburban Memphis, Tennessee, under Pastor Adrian Rogers. The former Colgate-Palmolive executive ultimately left the business arena for Christian activism. His first major impact: helping organize the National Affairs Briefing in 1980, where 15,000 pastors and conservative Christian activists gathered in Dallas.

“It was there that presidential candidate Ronald Reagan cozied up to the nascent Religious Right by famously declaring, ‘I know you can’t endorse me, but I endorse you,’” Winfield said. “With those words, the Religious Right and the Republican party got hitched in a way that reverberates to this day.”