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Donald E. Wildmon, a conservative activist whose alarm over indecency on television spawned a national organization, the American Family Association, a once powerful cog of the Christian right, and who led boycotts over sexuality and gay themes in some of America\u2019s most popular TV shows and in the arts, died in Tupelo, Miss., where he lived, on Dec 28. He was 85.<\/p>\n
The cause was Lewy body dementia, according to a statement<\/a> posted by the American Family Association.<\/p>\n Mr. Wildmon\u2019s crusades beginning in the 1970s against boundary-pushing trends in popular culture and the arts \u2014 including high-profile attacks on the National Endowment for the Arts \u2014 were an early thunderclap of the culture wars that have moved from the fringe of the Republican Party to its mainstream.<\/p>\n A former pastor in the United Methodist Church, Mr. Wildmon became a lightning rod for liberals, who attacked him for bigotry and stifling free speech. In 1981, the president of NBC, Fred Silverman, a champion of socially conscious television, said that Mr. Wildmon\u2019s threats to boycott advertisers were \u201ca sneak attack on the foundation of democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cA boycott,\u201d Mr. Wildmon responded in an interview<\/a> with The New York Times that year, \u201cis as legal and as American as apple pie.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Over more than three decades, groups that Mr. Wildmon led boycotted Target stores for substituting the word \u201choliday\u201d for \u201cChristmas,\u201d ran full-page ads denouncing the 1990s police drama \u201cNYPD Blue\u201d for \u201csteamy sex scenes\u201d and picketed a Hollywood studio over Martin Scorsese\u2019s \u201cThe Last Temptation of Christ,\u201d which portrayed Jesus as having sexual desires.<\/p>\n Mr. Wildmon also called for national brands to withdraw their ads in 1982 from an NBC-TV movie written by the poet Maya Angelou, \u201cSister, Sister,\u201d in which a woman has a relationship with a minister who embezzles from his church. Mr. Wildmon said the movie \u2014 which he had not seen \u2014 promoted \u201cnegative stereotyping of Christian people.\u201d<\/p>\n Though he sometimes played up a folksy country persona in national TV interviews, Mr. Wildmon was sophisticated about the bottom-line ways of TV executives and big brands.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople may call me an ignorant bumpkin,\u201d he once said. \u201cI don\u2019t mind. The more they are mistaken, the better it is for me.\u201d<\/p>\n His boycotts did not always hit the mark. The protests against \u201cThe Last Temptation of Christ\u201d in 1988 only raised awareness of the movie, which opened to long lines and sold-out shows in major cities.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In 2006, the American Family Association and other groups announced a boycott of Ford Motor<\/a> over its sponsorship of gay pride events and advertising in publications aimed at gay readers. Nearly a year later, Ford had not changed<\/a> those practices.<\/p>\n Other Wildmon campaigns were more effective. He was credited with pushing the Southland Corporation to remove Playboy and Penthouse from 7-Eleven stores in 1986 after testifying before a Reagan administration commission that pornography was linked to violence.<\/p>\n In 1981, the chairman of Procter & Gamble, Owen B. Butler<\/a>, said it had withdrawn ads from 50 TV shows after threats of a boycott from Mr. Wildmon and the Rev. Jerry Falwell<\/a>, the leader of the Moral Majority, who teamed up to form the Coalition for Better Television.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cWe think the coalition is expressing very important and broadly held views about gratuitous sex, violence and profanity,\u201d Mr. Butler said at the time. \u201cI can assure you that we are listening very carefully to what they say.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n While still a pastor, Mr. Wildmon had a revelatory moment over the Christmas holidays in 1976 when he gathered around the television with his family. He kept switching channels \u2014 from a program with an adultery scene, to another with profanity, to a third with a man attacking someone with a hammer \u2014 before telling his children to turn off the set and resolving to do something about what he considered immoral content.<\/p>\n He challenged his church in Southaven, Miss., to forego TV for a week. The story was picked up by local news media, then nationally, and Mr. Wildmon found a new calling. He resigned from the ministry and moved his family to Tupelo, where in 1977 he founded the National Federation for Decency, later renamed the American Family Association. By 1989, his campaigns against popular culture brought in $5.2 million that year in donations into his group.<\/p>\n That year, Mr. Wildmon was at the forefront of<\/a> attacks against the National Endowment for the Arts over grants for work that conservatives considered obscene. As a right-wing fury enveloped the small federal agency, hearings over its budget brought the actress Jessica Tandy, the cellist Yo-Yo Ma and others to Washington to passionately defend it.<\/p>\n Mr. Wildmon had sent a photograph in 1989 to every member of Congress of a work by the artist Andres Serrano of a small crucifix submerged in the artist\u2019s urine, which had appeared in an exhibition with partial N.E.A. funding. \u201cI would never, ever have dreamed that I would live to see such demeaning disrespect and desecration of Christ in our country that is present today,\u201d Mr. Wildmon wrote lawmakers.<\/p>\n The Serrano work, along with an exhibition that included sexually provocative photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe that the N.E.A. also helped underwrite, led Republicans in Congress to pass legislation requiring the N.E.A. to uphold \u201cgeneral standards of decency\u201d when funding art. The Supreme Court later ruled<\/a> that the requirement did not violate the First Amendment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In 1990, the chairman of the N.E.A., John E. Frohnmayer, clashed with Mr. Wildmon during an appearance together on CNN. \u201cMy question for you,\u201d Mr. Frohnmayer angrily asked, \u201cis what has your association done for the family lately?\u201d He was forced out of the job by President George H.W. Bush two years later when N.E.A. funding became an issue in Mr. Bush\u2019s re-election campaign.<\/p>\n Donald Ellis Wildmon was born on Jan. 18, 1938, in Dumas, Miss., the youngest of the five children of Ellis Wildmon, a venereal disease investigator for the state health department, and Bernice T. Wildmon, a schoolteacher. He graduated from Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss., in 1960 and from the Candler School of Theology at Emory University in 1965. Ordained by the United Methodist Church, he was appointed to several congregations in Mississippi and Georgia before leaving the ministry to start the activist group that would become the American Family Association, whose leadership he passed on to a son, Tim Wildmon, in 2010.<\/p>\n In addition to his son Tim, he is survived by three other children, Angela and Mark Wildmon and Donna Wildmon Clement; his wife of 62 years, Lynda Bennett Wildmon; a sister, Louise Yancy; and six grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren.<\/p>\n In many ways, Mr. Wildmon\u2019s crusades sought to hold back powerful tides of modern American life, where acceptance of gay rights has gradually become mainstream and most restraints on violence, profanity and sex on television, especially streaming, gave way long ago.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not sex per se I object to,\u201d Mr. Wildmon said in 1981<\/a>. \u201cIt\u2019s the constant, gratuitous dwelling on it. I\u2019m saying there ought to be more balance.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n