Yes, he did. The whole "Moral Majority" thing was one lane that he really widened (looking at you, Doug Coe) that set a terrible and worsening precedent as you say for decades to come. He also cut so many services that large cities were suddenly flooded with mentally ill people who really needed help, who ended up homeless in the streets en masse.

And of course the major expansion of the Crime Control Act, which was basically a way to up the budget on the so-called "war on drugs", magically simultaneous to the US-funded Contra cocaine smuggling operations.