One advantage they had that we don't have is that they did it at a time of occupation of the government by the Far Left.
Easier to rally people to oppose horrid liberalism than to organize coalitions for a positive and pro-active push for conservatism when the Left isn't oppressing everyone with their control of government power.
Good point and good post.
Also, our politics are a lot more regionalized now. The Sharon Statement was largely written by college students in what are now the blue states. There are still kids like that around there, but a call for conservative movement activism today is likely to be interpreted by many as a rallying of evangelicals from the South and the Plains states against the big cities. So one wins half the country and loses the other half.
Thirty or forty years ago, there were two strong ideological groups on the left and the right, and the rest of the country was just Republican or Democrat by habit and tradition. Today, the country's a lot more ideological and divided between strongly opposed camps, so there's less room to win converts and make headway.