Reddit reviews The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics.

>Jerry Falwell was a fundamental baptist preacher who organized the, until then, isolated church estimated to number about ~60 milllion, encourage them to infiltrate mainstream culture and take control of government to remake the United States into a Christian state. He eventually created a coalition with the more conservative Evangelicals of the time (both the fundamentalists and the Evangelicals are often considered Evangelical today). He is responsible for the Moral Majority, a conservative political activist and lobbying group, and his agenda was explicitly government takeover for Christian republicans—you'll still see sects of Evangelicals (literally, 53:39) worshiping politicians today.
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>25% of Americans today are Evangelical and the majority of them have adopted similar views on US government. We should be religiously tolerant and we should be a country with an endless capacity for alternative views, but we have a hostile insurgency that is largely ignored. My only subjective input in this is calling them "hostile", everything else is from their own lips. This isn't propaganda, this isn't fear mongering, this is reality.
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>https://www.amazon.com/Book-Jerry-Falwell-Fundamentalist-Politics/dp/0691089582

Edit: my phone makes returns disappear apparently.

First, you may find this earlier thread helpful in answering your question because it involves a general history of 20th century Christian fundamentalism.

Second, I am going to make the assumption that when you say "secular" you mean "not told from a religious perspective," as opposed to secular instead meaning "the opposite or opposed to religion" (see: Richard Dawkins). Any good work in the field of religious studies should be able to satisfy that first definition.

Now to the meat of the question. I would recommend Susan Friend Harding's The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics. Harding is an anthropologist by training who embedded herself within Jerry Falwell's community over a span of several years concurrent with the rise of the Moral Majority in the United States. Although the text focuses primarily on Falwell's influence, it goes a long way to addressing your question about the success of the movement by examining how the religious right's use of Biblical language created a compelling message for the faithful that was in keeping with their interpretation of contemporary history.

A general work on Protestantism in America is Mark Noll's The Work We Have to Do. Noll offers up a short, accessible history of Protestantism in the United States up until the modern day that may provide some context that you may find helpful.

Two words: Jerry Falwell.

Read The Book of Jerry Falwell for some insight on how conservative politics and Christianity have been merged.

Suburban Warriors doesn't exactly take the opposite view, but it shows how right-wing political organizers were happy to be associated with Christianity.