University of Virginia Library

Ch 9: Politics As the Instrument of a New Ecumenical Movement

I'm frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across the country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in "A," "B," "C," and "D.". . . And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate.

--Former U. S. Senator Barry Goldwater

Evangelicals face a tough assignment. Secular minds virtually dismiss biblical values as a legitimate basis for public policy. Some are openly hostile, gratuitously tolerating religious beliefs as innocuous enough when confined to the purely personal, but off limits in the "real world."

--Robert P. Dugan, Jr.,
National Association of Evangelicals

Are we bigots? Are we trying to force everyone into our narrow molds? Or are we, as Christians, merely trying to act in self-defense?

--Vern McLellan,
Christians in the Political Arena

Long before the New Christian Right had a name or its constituency had a self-conscious identity, there were tens of thousands of evangelical Christians who had become fed up with a number of trends in American society. The issues that

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concerned them were not new. Education, abortion, and pornography-to identify three of their concerns-were issues that had been troubling them for a long time, but each issue took on renewed significance and urgency during the 1960s and 1970s.

Evangelical Christians were not alone in their concern for the quality of public education. Books such as Crisis in the Classroom and Why Johnny Can't Read were national best-sellers during the 1960s. For evangelical Christians, the crisis went beyond the failure of public schools to produce students competent in basic skills. The public schools, they believed, had become institutions for the indoctrination of students with values antithetical to their fundamental beliefs.

They believed this strongly enough that, at considerable cost and sacrifice, they created private Christian schools, a movement that today remains a rapidly growing alternative to public education.

Parents' continued commitment to this expensive proposition required reinforcement of the values that persuaded them to take the step in the first place. Hence, Christian schools served as consciousness- raising institutions for the parents. The principals and preachers who ran them made certain that the parents remembered why they had sacrificed to pay for their children's alternative education.

The public explosion of hedonism, teenage pregnancies, public flaunting of alternative sexual preferences, pornography, and drug use further reinforced the conviction that they were doing the right thing by enrolling their children in a school system that repudiated the legitimacy of these things as individual options.

By the time various government agencies, including the IRS, began poking around in the affairs of the Christian schools, threatening their tax-exempt status, lots of evangelical parents were ready to fight.

The Supreme Court's Roe vs. Wade decision in 1973, which effectively legalized abortion, readied other evangelical Christians to do battle. The number who joined the National Right-to-Life Committee and other organizations opposed to abortion was not initially large, but the movement was growing slowly, and its members were beginning to make their presence felt nationally.

Phyllis Schlafly, whose Eagle Forum was one of the larger right-tolife groups, led the battle to defeat the proposed Equal Rights Amendment-an objective the New Christian Right achieved though receiving little public notice for it.

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The explicitness of pornography in magazines and film, as well as its easy accessibility, was another issue of mounting concern to conservative Christians. The Report of the President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography failed to condemn sexually explicit material. On the contrary, it concluded that pornography had no proven deleterious effects; it might, in fact, have some beneficial qualities. Even though President Richard Nixon refused to acknowledge or receive the report, its very existence reinforced evangelical Christians' belief that the government had become a partner in promoting harmful trends in society.

The Vietnam War took its toll on conservative Christians' trust in government, as did the Watergate scandal.

Disturbed by the direction of government, conservative Christians significantly contributed to the election of Jimmy Carter, a self- professed "born-again" Christian. But four years later, they had come to see Carter as indecisive, too willing to compromise Christian principles, and ineffective in rebuilding either America's military or its self confidence. So in 1980 they dumped Carter in favor of Ronald Reagan, a man who spoke their rhetoric more explicitly, and also claimed to be "born again."

Even in early 1980 there was not yet a conscious sense among evangelical and fundamentalist Christians that they were participating in a significant social movement. Yes, the Washington for Jesus rally in April of that year had certain unmistakably political elements. But for a large proportion of the participants, their involvement was motivated by a feeling of angst. They prayed fervently that God would deliver America from the malaise in which she had become engulfed.

There was still no recognized leader of an emerging New Christian Right.

Both Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson underwent long and difficult personal struggles over the decision to become publicly involved in the political process. Back in 1965, Falwell had said that he could not imagine ever turning his attention from preaching the "pure saving gospel . . . [which] . . . does not clean up the outside but regenerates the inside." [1]

After months of moving toward political engagement, Robertson withdrew after the Washington for Jesus rally. If he were destined to become a political leader, he felt, his time had not yet come.

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By the time of the rally, Jerry Falwell had already created the Moral Majority, although it had yet to receive any significant national publicity. Falwell did not participate in the rally, claiming that it was not quite a political rally nor a real prayer meeting.

Falwell's interest in the political arena as an instrument for changing America began several years before the 1979 creation of the Moral Majority. By the middle of the decade, Falwell's sermons on "The Old Time Gospel Hour" were laced with practical suggestions for addressing the social ills of America. And in conjunction with the nation's bicentennial celebration, Falwell held I Love America rallies on the steps of state capitols all over the nation.

Falwell gradually inched himself into the role of reformer until he seemed like a nineteenth-century postmillennial urban revivalist. Although he is a premillennialist, he became passionately committed to addressing and changing the ills of this world. He called for reform. He called for prayer. He called for national repentance.

By the time Falwell formed the Moral Majority, he seemed to have no lingering doubts about his responsibility to help change this world as well as prepare people for the next. While he once viewed his role as limited to preaching the gospel of individual salvation, Falwell's ministerial agenda also came to incorporate the well-being of the nation. In his 1980 book called Listen, America!, he wrote:

He called the 1980s a Decade of Destiny. In his television sermons and in hundreds of speeches around the country, he summoned Americans "back to basics, back to values, back to biblical morality, back to sensibility, and back to patriotism. [3] And he was hopeful:

Falwell was turning back to the old dominion creation myth, with its recurring cycles of sin, repentance, and redemption. Interestingly,

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so does liberal sociologist Robert Bellah. The first lines of his prizewinning book, The Broken Covenant, read as follows:

Utopian socialist Bellah's understanding of why the covenant had been broken and what redressing needed to be done was clearly at odds with that of fundamentalist Falwell. The striking thing is that two men so different in their intellectual orientation were able to agree that America was broken and needed fixing.

It is important, further, to recognize that many others from various ideological perspectives also felt this sense of brokenness. Harvard theologian Harvey Cox's call for the return of the sacred to the secular city is a liberal church vision of repentance and redemption. [6] Neoconservative Richard John Neuhaus would return God to "the naked public square" as a first step toward restoring the covenant, [7] end even Catholic-turned- atheist Michael Harrington agonized about "the politics of God's funeral" and pleaded for national re-crea ion of something like the creation myth. [8]

The American liberal tradition is not in a strong position to direct us out of this perceived cultural malaise. We stand too close in time to too many liberal programs that were supposed to solve the very problems so disturbing today.

While Ronald Reagan's popularity slipped badly as the Iran-contra scandal began to unfold in late 1986, his policies and philosophies have taken the mood of Americans even farther from the liberal solutions that dominated the 1960s. Political moods run in cycles that are not particularly synchronized with electoral cycles. Neo conservative Irving Kristol is quite likely right when he notes:

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The New Christian Right is not responsible for the resurgence of conservatism in America. The roots of conservative economic philosophy-of which Ronald Reagan is the first adherent to ascend to the presidency-were sown in the 1950s. Conservative Christians participated only nominally in that movement. Most significant for them during the same period was the creation of the Christian Economic Foundation, an organization financed in large measure by the late Sun Oil patriarch J. Howard Pew, who turned to it after failing in his efforts to put the new National Council of Churches on a more conservative course than its predecessor, the Federal Council of Churches. In the 1960s, the wide distribution to clergy of its free publication, Christian Economics, may have helped create an intellectual readiness for the political movement that would emerge in the late 1970s.

Liberal culture-watchers largely missed the development of the new conservatism. In the secular political arena, they tended to lump together everyone who was out of step with the dominant liberal mood as fellow travelers with Communist witch-hunters the likes of Joseph McCarthv and John Birch. And on the religious side, Carl McIntire and Billy James Hargis, two noisy, politically minded fundamentalists, were seen as successors to religious demagogues such as Father Charles Coughlin and Gerald L. K. Smith.

When Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority first began to gain some visibility in 1980, it was assumed that he and his televangelist associates were genealogical blood brothers to the fascistic radical right of the 1950s. The emphasis here is on the word assumed. There does not exist, even today, a single scholarly work that genealogically links the New Christian Right with the "Old Christian Right."

The assumption was possible, perhaps inevitable, because of the legacy of American social scientists of the 1950s and early 1960s who developed a theory of political extremism equating conservatism with authoritarianism and paranoia. There were many articulations of this theory, but Richard Hofstadter's Paranoid Style of American Politics, published in 1964, was probably the single most important scholarly work.

Liberals saw themselves as politically "centrist." Those who did not agree with them were extremists, hapless victims of the clinical maladies of paranoia and "authoritarian personality. " This "medicalization" of the motives of conservatives has provided three generations of lib-

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eral Americans with a sanctimonious self-perception as guardians of democracy against extremism of every shape.

It is worth recalling here the wisdom of Kenneth Burke, perhaps the greatest linguist of this century. In his celebrated book Permanence and Change, written some fifty years ago, Burke proposed the profound adage that words are not neutral. "The names for things and operations, " noted Burke, "smuggle in connotations of good and bad- a noun tends to carry with it a kind of invisible adjective, a verb an invisible adverb." [10]

The power of the Left to camouflage ideology in the neutral-sounding language of social science absolutely overwhelmed Senator Barry Goldwater in his 1964 bid for the presidency. He was successfully labeled a member of the paranoid and authoritarian Radical Right. In later years, America learned that Barry Goldwater was not the maleficent creature slick Madison Avenue advertising had portrayed him to be. But in 1964 he was seen, purely and simply, as a "nuclear madman," an extremist destined to lead America into oblivion.

The power of the Left to overwhelm its opposition with word-kill has considerably abated since the mid-1960s. When Ronald Reagan ran for president, he was given the same treatment, but the labels didn't stick.

The TV evangelists have not been so fortunate. From the beginning of their voyage into the political arena, the televangelists have been portrayed, with considerable success, as perpetrators of "holy terror."

Writing about the cleverness with which liberals interwove social science and medical concepts with self-serving ideological principles, Leo Ribuffo summarizes how extremists could be shunted from political participation without seemingly violating commitment to pluralism in a democratic society:

We ought never lose sight of the indiscriminate manner in which McCarthyists sought to label all liberals as Communists or Communist

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sympathizers. But by the same token, it is time to recognize that the Left uses very similar tactics in attempting to disqualify conservative Christians, and TV preachers in particular, from participating in the political process.

In the 1970s Snapping, by Flo Conway and Jim Siege: nan, warned America of a new breed of religious gurus who were able to take control of the minds of young people, transforming their personalities to the point of servitude to their religious masters. So great was the power of these gurus, wrote Conway and Siegelman and many other anticultists, that normal principles of religious liberty could not be sustained.

None of the leaders of the scores of new religious movements that emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s possessed such awesome powers, as British sociologist Eileen Barker brilliantly documents in her awardwinning book The Making of a Moonie (1984). Still, the anticult movement left a legacy of hostility toward sects and cults. During the 1970s, many states introduced legislation that would have denied fundamental liberties to individuals whose parents objected to their involvement in a new religious group. Under the proposed legislation, parents (even of adult children) would have had the right to get a "con ervatorship" order, placing their child in their custody for the expressed purpose of "deprogramming."

The mentality that would severely restrict the religious and civil liberties of individuals who join sects and cults is extended in Conway and Siegelman's Holy Terror to members of "fundamentalist" groups. Holy Terror is an ideological tract that endeavors to terrorize readers into believing that the fundamentalists are poised and ready to take over America. The book warns of a new, more sophisticated fundamentalism waging war on America's freedoms in religion, politics, and private lives:

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The major perpetrators of this threat, not surprisingly, are the televangelists. Although more sophisticated in their exploitation of modern propaganda techniques, these mental terrorists are not very different from the Shiite Muslims led by Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini. From their "electronic mosques" they threaten to tear down the wall of separation between church and state. "Precedent," argue Conway and Siegelman, "would seem to compel the disestablishment of the electronic church." [13] "At the very least," they continue:

From a pair who present themselves as civil libertarians defending human freedom, these are remarkable statements. In the name of defending liberty, they would deny basic constitutionally guaranteed freedoms, including First Amendment rights of free speech and freedom of belief and exercise of religious faith. Conway and Siegelman are alarmed by their own assessment that:

Right-thinking Americans, they argue, "must face squarely the magnitude of this picture." [16] "Surrender to the supernatural" and belief in a proselytizing faith are equated with rejection of "reason and science, caring and compassion, and the basic principles of human freedom on which this country was founded." [17]

Holy Terror aims hate propaganda at all conservative Christians who believe in their faith fervently enough that they want to share it with others and apply the principles of their beliefs to their daily lives and to the institutions that govern them. "In the world of the eighties," ask Conway and Siegelman rhetorically, "how can any missionary group, church or faith defend the principle of global conversion?" [18]

Without admitting it, Conway and Siegelman have argued that these

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times require the suspension of the free-exercise-of-religion component of the First Amendment for groups judged to be dangerous.

And who decides who is dangerous? Conway and Siegelman obviously consider themselves up to the task. And they seem to have many left- wing confederates who are ready to help.

Jerry Falwell and his colleagues in the New Christian Right say they believe in pluralism. He argues, further, that they do not seek to deny basic freedoms to anyone else. They are only trying to protect their own rights from leftist assaults. Being religious, they contend, does not disenfranchise them from participation in the political arena.

Not everyone who has felt threatened by the emergence of the New Christian Right is equally zealous and quick to advocate suspension of First Amendment rights in the name of protecting America. And it is clear that some of the soldiers in the army of the New Christian Right are just as zealous as the likes of Conway and Siegelman. If this were not the case, the verbal wars long ago would have escalated into violent confrontation.

Sociologically speaking, excessive rhetoric is one of the tools all social movements use to denigrate adversaries and label them illegitimate, thereby indirectly legitimizing their own cause.

From the moment that Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority burst onto the political scene in 1980, liberals sensed that something had gone terribly wrong in the American political process. Ronald Reagan s corralling of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and the electorate's repudiation of the greatest number of liberal senators and congressmen since Franklin Delano Roosevelt led the Democrats to victory in 1932, was a shocking blow to liberals. Falwell wasted no time and showed no hesitation in taking considerable credit for the Reagan landslide, and in the early years of the Reagan administration, Jerry Falwell seemed to have replaced Billy Graham as the unofficial White House chaplain. Periodic telephone calls from the president to discuss international issues and such delicate matters as the nomination of Sandra Day O'Connor to the U. S. Supreme Court served to bolster F. Iwell's claim to being a Very Important Preacher in Washington.

THE FUNDAMENTALISTS ARE COMING! THE FUNDAMENTALISTS ARE COMING! warned the print and broadcast media across the land. And writers and publishers rushed to print with such titles as God's Bullies, Religious Pied Pipers, and Holy Terror. Television documentaries and

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dramas such as "Give Me That Big-Time Religion, "Portrait of an American Zealot," "In the Name of God," and "Pray TV" warned of the impending danger.

During 1981 and 1982 the threat from the New Christian Right seemed to grow ever grimmer. But then, almost as suddenly as the New Christian Right story had exploded on the American scene, it was declared nonexistent. National Public Radio reporter Tina Rosenberg, writing in Washington Monthly, broke the news. She called the Falwell/Moral Majority story a gigantic hoax and said it was time to move on to another story and another game. Explained Rosenberg:

Beneath this cynical observation are some important truths about the development of social-movement organizations. Utilizing his own television program and his role as a leader among independent fundamentalists, Falwell had promoted a religious worldview that was preparing conservative Christians for a social movement. Even before he conceived of the Moral Majority, Falwell was preparing a constituency ideologically and emotionally for its political agenda.

While Falwell could and did preach about the ills of society and encouraged people to get involved, Federal Communications Commission regulations limited his ability to use his video pulpit as a platform for organizing the Moral Majority.

To build any kind of national organization effectively, Falwell needed a platform that was bigger than his television program. He seized that opportunity at the Republican National Convention in Detroit in the summer of 1980. With Ronald Reagan s nomination a foregone conclusion, there were hundreds of reporters looking for an interesting angle. Falwell's presence proved to be one of the more interesting "sidebar" stories at the convention. On the day after his nomination, when he was trying to select a vice presidential running mate, Ronald Reagan spent more than an hour with Falwell. And that meeting escalated interest in the noisy Baptist.

A month later, Falwell was on the platform when candidate Reagan

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addressed the National Affairs Briefing in Dallas. And in weeks following, he was on the cover of several leading newsmagazines.

The attention Falwell received during the 1980 presidential campaign permitted him to communicate to a far larger audience than the few million who tuned in to his "Old Time Gospel Hour." Almost overnight, the conservative Christian social movement that had been burgeoning for a number of years had a national leader.

The Reverend Donald E. Wildmon, the nation's leading crusader against pornography, recently wrote that the most frustrating part of his ministry is getting the Christian community to listen. [20] The publicity Falwell received helped get the attention of conservative Christians. From thousands of pulpits across America, evangelical and fundamentalist preachers echoed Falwell's message that the ills of secular society were not inevitable. A battle was being waged against the evils of secular culture, and preachers were inviting their congregations to become soldiers in that struggle.

The negative press Falwell received helped make him the ogre liberals needed for advancing their case against the conservative Reagan administration. The relationship between movement and countermovement is reciprocal. By warning of the conservative danger, liberal organizations were helping to rally support for the New Christian Right, because the visible pressure of the Left helped confirm their presence as a sinister force.

A fundamental sociological principle regarding intergroup conflict is that external threat breeds internal solidarity. The principle works both ways. Falwell's high profile aroused liberals. Their saber- rattling, in turn, served to reinforce a deepening awareness among conservative Christians of the problems with secular society.

The hoax of it all, which Tina Rosenberg suspected but failed to document, was that Falwell's mighty Moral Majority was a lot more thunder and lightning than a bonafide grass-roots organization.

Despite skepticism on the part of the media, and a great many polls showing that Falwell had grossly exaggerated his support, he clung to the limelight, failing to fade like a morning glory in the noonday sun. Wherever he went, whatever he did, Falwell commanded attention with perhaps as much skill as anyone in America-with the exception of the principal resident of the White House.

Falwell crisscrossed the country, delivering hundreds of speeches

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and sermons that aroused the excitement of the Other Americans. And he drew the ire of the press and liberals the likes of Norman Lear, Ted Kennedy, Walter Mondale, and Phil Donahue. Falwell debated and challenged them with his unflappable countenance, his Cheshire-cat grin, and his conciliatory tone of voice, which infuriated them all the more.

Falwell thus drew attention to the political agenda of the New Christian Right. He became the champion of many of the Other Americans. For others, he was an insistent thorn in the side of their indifference and inaction.

In January of 1986, without advance warning, Falwell boldly announced the creation of a new political arm to be named the Liberty Federation. This new organization would continue the activities of the Moral Majority, while also pursuing a broader agenda. "We want to continue to be the standard bearer for traditional American values. But it's time to broaden our horizons as well," Falwell said in a press announcement. [21]

This dramatic move to disband the Moral Majority bore some resemblance to killing the goose that laid the golden egg. For more than six years, the name of the Moral Majority-as much as the brilliantly combative persona of Jerry Falwell-had served as both a cannon and a lightning rod. The name was also a battle cry, encouraging conservative Christians to become involved in the political process. And it sent tremors of fear and indignation into the hearts of millions of liberals.

Why would Jerry Falwell decide to kill such an important symbol and communications instrument? From the beginning of their high visibility, both Falwell and the Moral Majority were controversial, not just among Christians and media commentators but also among social scientists and scholars. Neither the man nor the organization ever ranked very high in public approval polls. In deciding to bury the name, Falwell apparently reasoned that more was to be gained by jettisoning it than in bearing its liabilities. At least that seemed apparent from his press statement:

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So, like a giant corporation deciding that a new name would be good for business, Falwell said his organization would henceforth be the Liberty Federation.

Most commentators responded to Falwell's change of name with seeming indifference. Many media people believed the name change was a way of camouflaging the demise of an ineffectual organization. It was almost a nonevent. There were only brief notices and little analysis of the reasoning behind the change-a strange response considering the tens of thousands of column inches that had been printed about the Moral Majority over the previous six years.

Among the few national commentators to write on the passing of the Moral Majority was Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory. She saw it as a victory of centrist politics over extremism. ". . . [E]xtremism never does very well for very long in this country," she wrote. America had become fed up with Falwell's "holier-than-thou" behavior. "[I]f Falwell wishes to realize his goal of making this a 'Christian nation,' " McGrory stated with confidence, "it will not be enough to change the name of the Moral Majority to Liberty Federation. He must change his own." [23]

Most of the media had long believed that Falwell and his band of "religious zealots" were neither moral nor a majority. So they moved on to another story. But such a response falls far short of understanding what the organization was or the contribution it made to the New Christian Right social movement in America.

Jerry Falwell had very good reason to kill the Moral Majority, one he only skirted with his statement about the name's negative press image. And, contrary to the general impression, it was actually success that led to the slaying of the goose that laid the golden egg.

From the beginning, Falwell masterminded a media machine that gave him a platform to comment on public issues and to encourage conservative Americans to get involved with those issues. And he had always been vulnerable to the possibility that the media equivalents of Dorothy and her companions in Oz would one day step around behind the curtain to discover that the Great Wizard's powers were

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largely a facade, more amplified-voice-and-wind machine than substance.

There were bits and pieces of evidence along the way to support the image of a paper tiger. For example, during the 1980 presidential campaign, Falwell claimed that the Moral Majority had between 2 and 3 million members. Yet the circulation of the tabloid Moral Majority Report was only 482,000. Since this magazine was widely distributed without charge, why wouldn't it be sent to all of the 2 or 3 million members? [24] Further, the executive director of the Washington State Moral Majority, which the national office in Lynchburg verified to be the largest state chapter, said that he had 12,000 members. A little simple arithmetic, and other morsels of information like this one, belied Falwell's claim of a significant grass-roots organization. [25]

Jerry Falwell was able to create the appearance of a large grassroots organization by tapping into already-existing religious groups with whom he had a natural fundamentalist affinity. Some of these groups were large urban "superchurches."

Falwell claimed that support for the Moral Majority was broadly based among Protestants of every denomination, as well as Catholics and Jews. Yet a study of its leadership-based on a directory in the Moral Majority Report-revealed that forty-five of the fifty state chairmen were Baptist ministers. Further, twenty-eight of them were affiliated with a single small alliance called the Bible Baptist Fellowship. [26]

The authors conducted a systematic analysis of the contents of all the issues of the Moral Majority Report for the years 1985 and 1986 and uncovered little evidence of sustained ongoing activities or projects by state chapters. [27] More than half of the reports from state chapters came from the South (i.e., the Bible Belt); one-third of the states in the East and West never sent even one report. Most important, nearly half of the state chairmen's reports were about future efforts rather than about activities they had done or were doing. The authors tried to follow up and see if any of these plans were actually carried out but could not confirm a single one.

The price Falwell paid for being able simply to wave his wand over preexisting local organizations (many of them church-based) and claim them as Moral Majority chapters was that he quickly built the appearance of a widespread organization but had little control over its

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parts. Sometimes local enthusiasts were so aggressive in the name of the organization or said things so outrageous that they embarrassed Falwell. People such as the West Coast chapter leader who told the press that homosexuals should be executed helped give the Moral Majority and Falwell a reputation for being far more radical than the real Jerry Falwell.

Some of Falwell's closest advisers counseled him early on to proclaim that the Moral Majority had served its purpose and no longer was needed. Falwell was reluctant to let go. But by the end of 1985, he felt that the game had just about run its course. He was anticipating supporting George Bush's bid for the presidency in 1988. Both he and Bush were concerned that the Moral Majority might be more of a liability than an asset.

More important, Falwell had turned fifty and was going through a period of assessing his life goals and priorities. It became clear to him that his top priority was the development of Liberty University into a quality institution of higher education.

Falwell is a man of action. He has little interest in theories or long philosophical discussions of the implications of various courses of action. History may well bear out his prophecy that the 1980s would be a Decade of Destiny.

As a central figure in the New Christian Right's campaign to reshape America toward political and social conservatism, Falwell has seldom paused to reflect upon his actions. Inaction, he believes, is a greater sin than incorrect action. Mistakes tend to be corrected either by greater self-awareness or by the others possessing keener understanding. But inaction is abdication of the responsibility for the destiny of oneself and one's country.

For all of Falwell's emphasis on doing, he is acutely aware of the importance of education. And he recognizes that changing the direction of American history will not be accomplished in a single decade, even a single generation.

An hour's drive northeast of Lynchburg stands the University of Virginia, believed by Thomas Jefferson to be among his most important contributions to the new nation he helped create. Faculty members at the university refer to the founder with awe and reverence-and always, simply as Mr. Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson thought degrees

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and titles were pretentious. Falwell prefers that people just call him "Jerry," although at church it's all right to call him "Preacher." But titles are strictly for ceremonial occasions.

To anyone steeped in the traditions of Mr. Jefferson at the University of Virginia, it is discordant to hear Jerry Falwell refer to the Founder as "Old Tom Jefferson." But the words that follow reveal Falwell's deep understanding, appreciation, and even reverence for education and for the role Mr. Jefferson's "academical village" has played in shaping America's destiny for more than 200 years. "Old Tom Jefferson," Falwell says, "had the right idea. If you want to shape history, you shape the minds of young people. And that's what we want to do here at Liberty University." [28]

During 1985 and 1986, as Jerry Falwell was reassessing his priorities and reallocating his time to reflect his renewed commitment to the university and to his congregation in Lynchburg, he could not possibly have imagined what lay in store for him in 1987.

It happened so quickly. When Jim Bakker resigned and asked his friend Jerry Falwell to step in and help to set the PTL Network and Heritage USA back on a stable course, Falwell instinctively recognized the credibility crisis all religious broadcasters would be facing and accepted the challenge.

Falwell was immediately criticized both by his fundamentalist colleagues and by Bakker's Pentecostal loyalists; a Baptist simply has no business "meddling" in the a,fairs of a charismatic camp. Falwell, the man of action, hesitated when Jim Bakker wrote him a month later that, "Due to the unrest in the charismatic world . . . I feel that it is time now for you to turn the PTL ministry over to charismatics. . . " [29] But after a weekend of agonizing over whether to back away from a mammoth crisis, Falwell fired Bakker's closest associates and took firm control.

From the outset, the Falwell- installed board was top-heavy with fundamentalists, and it became even more so after the firing of former Bakker aide Richard Dortch and the resignations of Rex Humbard and James Watt. Still, there was a clear ecumenical motive and thrust to Falwell's words and deeds. He promised that neither Heritage USA nor the PTL Network would be stripped of their Pentecostal origins, but both would build on the ecumenical tendencies that already were present. Heritage USA would be open to the public and the PTL

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Network would broadcast programs reflecting a broad array of theological persuasions.

To the question of how a fundamentalist could preside over a charismatic ministry, Falwell said, first of all, that he was not seeking to make the ministry his own. He was there because Jim Bakker had asked him to come and because he believed that God wanted him there, "at least for the time being." "There is a great distrust out there that we must. must heal...." he told a press conference at Heritage USA after the April 28 board meeting:

Jerry Falwell, the man who once ranted and raved against other Christians who didn't believe as he believed, had matured a great deal since he stepped into the national limelight. Not even the most cynical observer can escape the fact that in taking on the task of trying to clean up a ministry riddled with corruption, Falwell was risking a great deal.

But Falwell had already taken risks when he created the Moral Majority.

As noted earlier, the "new ecumenism" of the religious right in America has emerged around projects rather than the union of groups with disparate theological orientations. It would be difficult to overestimate the degree to which the many evangelical traditions in America have fought among themselves during the twentieth century. But today an unmistakable move toward unity is taking place.

The sense of being a beleaguered minority in a culture increasingly overrun by immorality-or, if you will, secular humanism-has served as an external source of unity. Threatened by these external forces, they must pool resources to fight back.

The new ecumenical thrust is by no means a solid front. The political coalition Falwell sought has materialized only to a degree. Bob Jones III, whose grandfather founded Bob Jones University, sternly rejected Falwell, accusing him of helping to establish the conditions for the rise of the Antichrist. To Falwell's challenge to become involved in

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worldly affairs, Bob Jones III made it clear that he was quite happy to "seek the soul- satisfying contentment of being a scriptural minority." [1]

In short, Falwell has faced the same dogmatic, world-rejecting crowd that Carl Henry and the founders of the National Association of Evangelicals wanted to distance themselves from back in 1942. But it is clear that the number of self-aggrandizing, sanctimonious separatists is shrinking.

Among evangelical traditions that are less doctrinally dogmatic, there are plenty of nay- sayers rejecting alignment with any partisan cause. They prize their duty to exercise responsible free will. To ally with any movement would compromise their independence. They did not become warriors in Falwell's Moral Majority and they are not likely to become champions of Pat Robertson's presidential candidacy. Still, they are committed to the social and moral agendas of Falwell and Robertson.

In a very profound sense, Jerry Falwell's role has been analogous to that of John the Baptist, proclaiming the coming of a new age and a vision of Christians working together in the secular wilderness. And, like John the Baptist, Jerry Falwell never really had any messianic pretensions. From the very beginning, he saw the Moral Majority as a means to a much broader social movement, not an end in itself. Falwell would be the first to confess that he has been in a lot of scrapes; on more than one occasion he must have felt as though his head was about to be delivered on a platter to jeering newspeople, angry mainline Christians, and hostile secularists. But Falwell has self-confidently ducked every effort to mortally wound him or the many projects he has promoted.

Jerry Falwell may long be the man whom liberals love to hate. And he will probably remain a man they do not understand, leaving them content to live with stereotypes that are, at best, bare hints of the man who is helping to change America in ways they perceive as very threatening.

Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority really was the golden egg. He chose to use the glitter of that egg to attract the attention of the media and promote his cause in the press rather than invest the egg in building grass-roots organizational clout. But that was effectively utilizing the

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resources at his command. The Moral Majority was a success. It served Falwell exceedingly well in helping to raise the consciousness of conservative Christians and giving them a vision and hope that America might be restored. Falwell's personal charisma served to arouse a great many independent Baptists. But it did a lot more. It energized and gave a sense of common purpose to literally hundreds of conservative social-movement organizations.

But Falwell's influence extends beyond the alliance of warring fundamentalist factions. In fact, his spirit of a "new ecumenism," consolidating religious conservatives, played better outside the fundamentalist world. Falwell has helped forge working alliances with Roman Catholics, Mormons, Southern Baptists, and Jews. He has appeared on a Unification Church-sponsored platform and on the "Phil Donahue Show" with Mose Durst, president of the American branch of Reverend Moon's church, in the common defense of religious liberty. The fighting fundamentalist has learned that there is much to be gained by joining with other conservative traditions in pursuit of common goals.

There is a certain irony that M. G. "Pat" Robertson has now moved to center stage as the leader of the New Christian Right. Socially, the two men are worlds apart. Falwell is the son of a bootlegger, Robertson the son of a ranking U. S. senator. While Falwell's father was financially successful, he was an uneducated, working- class man who pulled himself up by his own bootstraps. And his son did the same. While Pat Robertson is also a self- made man, his ancestry includes presidents and early Virginia colonists.

Robertson and Falwell are worlds apart theologically as well. While Robertson was ordained as a Southern Baptist minister, he believes in and practices the charismatic gifts of the Pentecostal tradition. Although Falwell assumed interim leadership of PTL and Heritage USA after charismatic Jim Bakker was forced to resign, the practice of the charismatic gifts remain doctrinally heretical to him.

To Falwell, George Bush would make a good president, a logical successor to Ronald Reagan. There is reason to believe that he announced his support for Bush early as a way of discouraging Robertson from throwing his hat into the ring.

There is no question that even the consideration of a Robertson

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candidacy would have been impossible without Falwell's efforts among conservative Christians in America.

And it is also clear that neither could have become significant figures in late- twentieth-century America without the television programs that gave them access to the audiences they gradually transformed into constituencies.

Notes