University of Virginia Library

Chapter 7
Born Again Politics

Seldom has a social movement attracted so much attention so swiftly as the New Christian Right in 1980. A two day rally on the Washington Mall in the Spring attracted perhaps 400,000 participants and caught the attention of the press. Jerry Falwell was highly visible at the Republican National Convention and Candidate Reagan openly embraced the religious right during his campaign. Post election polls and analysis credited the Moral Majority with responsibility for Reagan's margin of victory and moved the politically minded preachers to center stage in American politics.

Congressman Guy Vender Jagt
addressing the National Affairs
Briefing in Dallas, August 1980

Pollster George Gallup declared 1976 the "Year of the Evangelical." It was really the year that the press discovered the millions of evangelicals in this country, estimates of whose numbers vary from 30 to 85 million. Jimmy Carter's public profession that he was a "born-again" Christian had much to do with the discovery. And when the votes were counted and the analysts had finished their scrutiny of voting patterns, it seemed probable that Jimmy Carter's margin of victory on his improbable march to the White House may well have been provided by evangelicals.

Most analysts, however, either missed or underplayed the importance of this group as a potentially powerful voting bloc in future elections. There was a tendency to see Carter's candidacy and victory as an aberration. He ran primarily against Washington in the fallout of Watergate. His opponent was an accidental president who was prone to accidents. Television cameras frequently caught President Ford stumbling down steps and bumping his head on helicopter doors, and when he played golf he sometimes bumped other people's heads. And no one could ever forget those immortal words, attributed to Lyndon Johnson, about Jerry Ford's being too dumb to walk and chew gum at the same time. In many people's minds, Jimmy Carter was also a kind of accidental president. Thus, there was no real need to assess seriously the significance of the "evangelical vote." All that changed in 1980.

George Gallup didn't get a chance to declare 1980 the "Year of Born-Again Politics." The evangelicals beat him to it.

Seldom in modern history has the emergence of an interest group attracted so much attention so swiftly as this group of conservative Christians who have been labeled the New Christian Right, headed by Jerry Falwell's political arm, the Moral Majority. It is not particularly difficult to understand why. The high visibility that a few of its leaders received immediately after a symposium they organized, the National Affairs Briefing, in Dallas in August 1980, led many Americans to perceive them as a threat. The 1980 elections resulted in greater losses in liberal leadership in government than in any election since the emergence of Roosevelt's New Deal in 1932, thus seeming to confirm that the perceived threat was real. Furthermore, the election of Ronald Reagan as commander-in-chief shattered an old folk wisdom that Americans don't elect extremists. Ultraconservative Barry Goldwater had been overwhelmingly rejected in 1964, and the very liberal George McGovern suffered the same fate in 1972. What was happening to America?

The attribution of cause is a social and political process. The events that occur in the world around us are screened through our value presuppositions. We interpret things as good or bad, right or wrong, by subconsciously calling on our religious beliefs, political ideologies, and other systems of meaning that are a part

of our consciousness. But we experience directly only a tiny fraction of the events of the modern world that require explanation or understanding. They come to us through the medium of mass communication—newspapers, magazines, radio, and television. However diligently the media may try to transmit messages without bias, there are all sorts of biases that affect what is brought to our attention and how. The most powerful of these biases affects the selection of what is newsworthy.

During the summer and fall of 1980, the attention the media gave to the New Christian Right's involvement in the election was out of proportion to any objective measure of their political strength, thus heightening their visibility and, hence, their influence. But media coverage occurred because all sorts of groups, having heard about the New Christian Right and listened to them boast of their objectives, took them seriously. Each time some group or influential person spoke out against some New Christian Right group or its leader, the born-again politicians were made more viable.

The first major political happening of the electronic preachers was a prayer gathering called Washington for Jesus. Organized by a group incorporated under the title One Nation Under God, WFJ was a two-day affair that took place on April 28 and 29, 1980. Scheduled activities included a twelve-hour marathon of singing, praying for the sins of the nation, and listening to seventy-five speakers and entertainment groups. The National Park Service estimated that 200,000 people showed up for the event. The organizers claimed there were 300,000 to 400,000 present. Whichever estimate one chooses to believe, the evangelicals fell far short of the one million participants they sought to organize by saturating Christian radio stations with promotional announcements.

The idea of gathering in Washington to pray and repent came from the Reverend John Gimenez, a Puerto Rican who grew up in New York City. His testimony includes sixteen years on drugs and four prison sentences before he was born again. Following his salvation he became a traveling evangelist and eventually settled down in the backyard of the Christian Broadcasting Network in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

Gimenez credits the idea for a gigantic prayer meeting on the

Mall to a vision sent from God. When he told his friend Pat Robertson about this, Robertson agreed to chair the program. From the beginning there were two rationales underlying the Washington for Jesus effort. The first was scriptural; 2 Chronicles 7:14 reads as follows: "If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land." This is an Old Testament promise God made to King Solomon to save the Kingdom of Judah. The organizers of WFJ believe that God will honor this promise again if this nation turns from its fallen ways. Washington for Jesus, thus, was conceived as a way of honoring God, confessing personal sin, and calling upon the nation to repent.

The second rationale for the rally was a historical precedent established by Abraham Lincoln in the midst of the Civil War. At the request of the Senate, Lincoln declared April 30, 1863, a national day of "humiliation, fasting, and prayer. " In the eyes of the leaders of the modern rally, the multiple crises facing America today are similar in magnitude to those of the Civil War.

At a meeting in Arlington, Texas, in September 1979, Bill Bright, head of the Campus Crusade for Christ, told a group of people that he believed God was leading him to call a conference in 1980 at which 25,000 pastors would gather to pray and, in turn, to influence their constituencies of millions. Learning of this, John Gilman, national publicity coordinator of WFJ, approached Bright about lending his support to the rally in the nation's capital. Bright wasn't sure whether this scheduled gathering was one and the same as what God was laying on his heart, but he felt confident that it was of God, and he agreed to cochair the program with Robertson.

Bright's participation was important because he commands influence in different religious circles from Robertson and Gimenez. In fact, the Washington rally was to be the first time that charismatics, headed by Robertson, and evangelicals, headed by Bright, had ever cooperated on anything of significance. The roster of sponsors read like a Who's Who of the electronic church: Ben Armstrong, Jim Bakker, Bill Bright, Paul Crouch, Rex

Humbard, James Kennedy, W. Stanley Mooneyham, Pat Robertson, James Robison, and Robert Schuller. The only major figures missing were Oral Roberts, Jerry Falwell, and Billy Graham; Roberts is not a joiner, Falwell was busy organizing Moral Majority, and since getting caught out on a limb in support of Richard Nixon, Graham has been extremely shy of anything that looks even remotely political.

The organizers of the event called it nonpolitical, but it was hard for many to buy that. For one thing, there was a document entitled "A Christian Declaration," drafted on January 10, 1980, which was to have been a statement of purpose for the rally. It contained explicitly partisan political and economic views. Under heavy criticism the statement was withdrawn, but not until it had been fairly widely distributed. Then there was a letter to all senators and representatives from a congressional liaison for Washington for Jesus. It boldly invited the nation's legislators to contact the rally's representatives so that they could learn "how we want you to vote" on various issues.

These documents brought threats to investigate the tax-exempt status of One Nation Under God as well as of the ministries of the organization's leadership. Those threats, plus internal disagreement regarding the line between praying and politicking, resulted in a swift retreat from the overtly political activities. Still, on the day of the rally, delegations from every state swarmed Capitol Hill to call on congressmen, presumably to convey the message that the nation needed to pray.

The principals in the WFJ rally sincerely believe that what they went to Washington to do was nonpolitical. But you also have to believe that they are sincerely naive about the nature of the political process. To veteran Washington watchers, it is difficult to imagine that anything happens in the nation's capital without a political motive. One certainly doesn't assemble nearly a quarter of a million people on the Mall and dispatch representatives to visit Congress unless there is a message to be sent.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about the April gathering was that it received so little attention when, in fact, it was the third—possibly the second—largest group ever to assemble on the Mall. Oh, it was in the news all right, but not very

prominently. The attention it got from both print and broadcast media was far less than has often been devoted to gatherings only a fraction that size.

Media awareness of the movement of conservative Christians into politics began to increase gradually through the spring and summer of 1980. Their consciousness increased severalfold when Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority showed up in force at the Republican National Convention in Detroit. Some of the more conservative planks in the Republican party's platform were broadly credited to the Moral Majority. And on the day after the "dream ticket" of Reagan and Ford fell apart, Jerry Falwell and other representatives of the New Christian Right spent an hour with the governor trying to persuade him to select almost anyone as his running mate but the "liberal" George Bush. Immediately after the convention, Robert Billings, executive director of Moral Majority, joined Ronald Reagan's staff as liaison to the religious community. When Reagan prefaced his silent prayer at the conclusion of his acceptance speech with the comment that he was a little afraid to do so, but more afraid not to, the media knew that something important was happening in U.S. politics.

The National Affairs Briefing held in Dallas on August 21 and 22 and sponsored by another conservative Christian caucus, the Roundtable, was a masterfully planned and executed media event. Advance publicity described it as a forum for pastors to be briefed by national authorities on all sorts of topics vital to making informed and responsible decisions about the forthcoming election. The speakers included many figures from the ultraright in American politics: Senator Bill Armstrong, Congressman Philip M. Crane, Senator Jesse Helms, Major General George Keegan, Brigadier General Albion Knight, Tim LaHaye, Connie Marshner, Ed McAteer, Howard Phillips, Adrian Rogers, Ed Rowe, Phyllis Schlafly, and Paul Weyrich. Then there were several of the big TV preachers—Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and James Robison—along with a supporting cast of many local and regional stars. Add to this Congressman Gay Vander Jagt, who three weeks earlier had ignited the Republican convention with his keynote oratory. And finally, the big catch: presidential candidate Ronald Reagan.

This time the press was ready; they showed up more than 250

strong. All the network radio and television stations were represented, as was every major newspaper and newsmagazine, and there were more than a dozen foreign correspondents. Another hundred or so media personnel showed up with Reagan for the closing ceremonies of the conference.

The National Affairs Briefing received news coverage on all the television networks as well as front-page coverage in major newspapers across the country. This was followed by scores more in-depth analyses of the movement of politically conservative evangelicals into the political arena. On September 15 Jerry Falwell made the cover of Newsweek, and that same week "Preachers and Politics" was the lead feature story in U.S. News and World Report. Born-again politics was clearly destined to be one of the big stories of the 1980 campaign.

Jimmy Carter was also invited to address the National Affairs Briefing, but he knew his relationship with that group of Christians was strained and chose not to risk an embarrassing scene. Carter's instincts were right. Of the sixty-some speakers who were crowded into the two-day schedule, only one uttered words of kindness for President Carter. And for his voice of moderation the speaker received a solid round of boos and hisses. There's an Old Testament story about Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who were delivered by angels unsinged from the fiery furnace of the wrathful King Nebuchadnezzar. Schooled in the Bible and politics, Jimmy Carter correctly sensed that no angel could possibly deliver him unsinged from the Reunion Arena in Dallas. The irony of it all was that four years earlier, candidate Jimmy Carter had persuaded a lot of evangelical Christians that it was all right to get involved in politics.

It was 104 degrees outside the Reunion Arena on the day Ronald Reagan spoke to the National Affairs Briefing. He arrived promptly on schedule to deliver his address, but the preachers weren't ready for him. So the man who at that moment appeared destined to be the next president of the United States waited. Before he finally got his chance to speak, he got a taste of the hellfire-and-brimstone religion that was giving birth to a new way of doing politics.

He waited for Senator Jesse Helms, a dull orator but darling of the New Right, to complete his remarks. Then he waited to hear

James Kennedy, pastor of what has been called for fifteen years the fastest-growing church in the country, introduce James Robison, the fast-rising star of the electronic church. Then the governor listened as Robison demonstrated his skills as a pulpit pounding, Bible-waving, crowd-rousing evangelist.

"Don't you commit yourself to some political party or politician," Robison commanded a crowd that belonged to him. "You commit yourself to the principles of God and demand those parties and politicians align themselves with the eternal values in this word [the Bible]!" As the crowd came to its feet, so did Reagan. For a moment, at least, he must have felt as though the preacher and all 15,000 members of the audience were speaking directly to him. The audience interrupted the fiery young TV evangelist fifteen times before he sat down.

But it was not yet Ronald Reagan's turn. Such an honored guest deserved two introductions. James Kennedy made his. Before W. A. Criswell, pastor of the 20,000-member First Baptist Church of Dallas, could rise and walk to the podium for the second introduction, however, Jerry Falwell cut him off. Like any good Baptist, Falwell realized that he could not let this crowd get away without taking an offering. So Reagan listened and watched for another ten minutes as Falwell displayed his rather considerable skill as a fund raiser. He announced that an offering of $100,000 was needed to meet the budget of the National Affairs Briefing. "And that's what it's going to be"—with a wry grin on his face—"because the doors are locked." After he worked his magic, which included asking a thousand persons who would pledge $100 to stand, he concluded by jesting, "We'll have it counted while the governor is speaking. If it isn't adequate, we'll take another. " It wasn't a bad demonstration that Jerry Falwell put on for Reagan: $10,000 a minute!

Finally, an hour behind schedule, two motorcades and a 1,500-mile plane trip from home, it seemed it was the sixtynine-year-old presidential candidate's turn to speak. But not quite yet. He had to wait still longer while Falwell heaped accolades of praise on W. A. Criswell. Falwell declared Criswell to be "the Protestant Pope of this generation," which brought another tremendous ovation. Criswell's introduction of Reagan was mercifully brief. "My assignment," Criswell said, "is to get out

of the way." He did. In one long breath he welcomed Ronald Reagan, on behalf of the governor of the great State of Texas, the people of the Queen City of Dallas, and 30 million evangelicals, to "one of the greatest assemblies of the twentieth century,!"

Had the governor been a Bible scholar, he might have wondered, as he watched and waited, if he too were in King Nebuchadnezzar's fiery furnace with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. He thought it was to be a friendly crowd, but James Robison, the man who warmed up the crowd for him, had told those folks not to commit themselves to a candidate, and they loved it. And with all the introductions and offerings and other carryings-on, no one seemed the slightest bit interested in hearing Reagan. Certainly they didn't have any respect for his grueling schedule, his age, or his position.

But Ronald Reagan hadn't spent all those years as an actor for nothing. When he finally got his turn, he knew just how to handle it: "A few days ago I addressed a group in Chicago and received their endorsement for my candidacy," he told the Christians. "Now I know this is a nonpartisan gathering and so I know you can't endorse me, but I only brought that up because I want you to know that I endorse you and what you are doing." Those now famous words were not in the advance text, but they worked magic as 15,000 enthusiastic Christians came to their feet with wild applause and exuberant shouts of "Amen!" It was the governor's turn to collect his share of the cheering.

Who are these people, the New Christian Right? Why their seemingly sudden move into politics? What are their goals? What strategies do they employ? What resources do they command?

The New Christian Right is a coalition of a range of diverse and previously only loosely connected groups. Many, such as anti-abortion and anti-ERA organizations, are concerned with a single issue. The hallways of the Reunion Arena in Dallas were crowded with the exhibits and literature of two dozen groups, including Christian Voice, Pro-Family Forum, National Prayer Campaign, Eagle Forum, Right to Life Commission, Fund to Restore an Educated Electorate, and the Institute for Christian Economics. And there were several newspapers, like Christian Inquirer and Christian Courier, which have sought to be catalysts

to bring together the diverse causes and interests represented in these groups.

Although they have diverse interests and goals, these groups are united by their anger, grounded in their evangelical faith, about what is happening in the United States today. American society has moved significantly in directions that seriously affront their personal moral beliefs. Explicit sex in print and the broadcast media is morally wrong, they feel, and there is a definite relationship between it and the soaring divorce rate, living together out of wedlock, casual sex, and other evils. Abortion is the taking of human life. To them, talk of the right of a woman to decide whether to carry a pregnancy merely disguises the fact that millions of unborn babies have been murdered.

But these issues represent only the tip of the iceberg. The anger and moral indignation of these conservative groups run deep and their resentment has been building for a long time. Perhaps what infuriates them most is the fact that they don't believe the rest of society, and the government in particular, has taken them seriously. They are tired of being treated as a lunatic fringe or just another interest group that isn't strong enough to be factored into political decisions. Partly because their own values have held politics to be dirty, and partly because the political process has discounted their importance, they have developed feelings of powerlessness and second-class citizenship.

From their vantage point, this nation has fallen from greatness because it has turned its back on God. Getting right with God requires repentance and eradicating a lot of individual and collective sin. Evangelicals have shared substantial segments of this belief system for many years. Billy Graham's crusades haven't strayed very far from those themes in a quarter of a century.

The new ingredient in the emerging coalition is the belief that it is the responsibility, indeed the duty, of Christians to engage in the political process as a means of bringing America back to God. And like the liberals of the 1950s and 1960s, they believe morality can be legislated. Therefore, it is important to get the right people elected to office.

The dynamos behind the thrust of born-again politics are the televangelists. Whether or not they directly advocate political

involvement, most constantly remind their audiences of the collective sins of the nation and the need to repent.

Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority is by far the best organized and best known of the several organizations that collectively make up the New Christian Right. To understand them better, we need to know something of their beginnings.

Robert Billings was president of Hyle-Anderson College, a fundamentalist school in Hammond, Indiana, in the mid-1970s when he was invited to attend a seminar on government and politics in Washington sponsored by the Christian Freedom Foundation (now defunct, it was for twenty years the most influential of the "old" Christian right organizations). A onetime English professor, Billings now admits it was his ignorance about politics that brought him to Washington. "As a college president," he told us, "I thought I ought to know something." So turned on by the seminar was Billings that shortly thereafter he resigned his college presidency and ran for Congress. Unsuccessful in that effort in 1976, Billings moved to Washington anyway and in January 1977 founded a group called Christian School Action for the purpose of monitoring legislation that had implications for Christian schools. Two years later, in December 1978, the organization's name was changed to National Christian Action Coalition and its mission broadened to include lobbying.

Billings developed ties with New Right political groups and began envisioning ways to draw the potential clout of religious television into their common concerns. Jerry Falwell was a prime candidate to enlist. Billings first approached Falwell in 1977 about creating an organization very much like what Moral Majority was to be, but Falwell wasn't ready. When Billings approached Falwell again in 1979, he brought along most of the big guns of the New Right. The alliance was forged, and Billings became executive director of the Moral Majority, a post he held until he became Reagan's liaison to the religious community during the campaign.

Jerry Falwell's views about mixing religion and politics and his decision to create Moral Majority developed gradually over several years. When Billings first approached him, Falwell had already been engaged for nearly two years in holding patriotic rallies around the country. His message, timed to correspond to

the celebration of the nation's bicentennial, was that we are a nation under God that is now violating "His principles and His heritage." As Falwell traveled, ministers continually approached him and said, "We must do something."

"I think I was really hoping," Falwell told us, "that somebody else would do it." Finally, the pressure on him to spearhead a political organization built to the point that he consented to do so. The critical meeting took place in March 1979. But it wasn't until June 1979 that the lawyers were called in to draw up incorporation papers for Moral Majority. Then, in September, Falwell debuted his new organization with a rally on the steps of the Virginia State Capitol in Richmond. From there he set out with an entourage of clean-cut Liberty Baptist College singers to stage I Love America rallies in the capitals of all fifty states. Technically, the I Love America rallies were sponsored and paid for by "The Old-Time Gospel Hour," but on the same days rallies were held, pastors were invited to Moral Majority luncheons. So if a state chapter of Moral Majority had not yet been established, the luncheons provided an occasion to do so.

The original design called for rallies in all fifty states over a period of eighteen months. But patience is not high on Falwell's list of virtues. When he decides to do something, he moves. It took Falwell only about half that time to organize semiautonomous chapters of Moral Majority in all fifty states. In June 1980 he bought prime time on 215 television stations nationwide to air a special entitled "America You're Too Young to Die." This patriotic program featured extensive footage from the I Love America rallies, especially clips of U. S. senators and congressmen, governors, and other political celebrities. Immediately thereafter the program was repackaged, and three teams of Life Action Singers fanned out to present live entertainment along with multimedia sight and sound spectaculars to scores of audiences in large and small communities. Each stop was an occasion to pass out pledge cards, take a collection, and build a mailing list for Moral Majority.

In the meantime, Falwell lost no time in putting together other pieces of a mass communications political organization. In January 1980 he started a newspaper called Moral Majority Report. In April he began a five-day-a-week radio newscast, also

called "Moral Majority Report," which the promotional material described as being "much like the Paul Harvey newscast." The program was offered to stations without cost. Viewed from the other side, Falwell was asking for free air time—and he got it. At the end of the first six months, he was on 260 stations, most of which were Christian radio stations. The newscast involved no direct solicitation, but listeners were offered a free subscription to the newspaper Moral Majority Report.

The I Love America rallies and the radio program provided the means to build a subscription list for the newspaper. The first edition of Moral Majority Report had a circulation of 77,000. In mid-October 1980, 482,000 copies were being printed, a six fold increase from the beginning of the year and an increase of nearly 50,000 over the previous month. The newspaper, of course, serves an important educational function. But more important to the magic of building a financial base for this burgeoning political organization, each name on the subscription list is also a target for direct-mail solicitation. Following the same formula that was used to build a financial base for "The Old-Time Gospel Hour," the direct mail comes racing out of the computer with clockwork precision. Each month the letter addresses a different issue—homosexuality, pornography, ERA, and so on. And each letter bears a personal touch, including the addressee's name and/or home community in the body of the letter.

It's a formula that works. Moral Majority's vice-president, Dr. Ronald S. Godwin, told us that the organization raised a total of $3.2 million in calendar 1980—not a bad accomplishment for an organization in its first full year of operation. Godwin was unable to identify what proportion of this was raised by direct mail, but he conceded that it was probably the lion's share.

Moral Majority has gotten most of the publicity, but other organizations are also working diligently on the New Christian Right political agenda. Ed McAteer, founder of the Roundtable, is another person who stands with a foot in both the secular and religious political camps. He was with the Colgate-Palmolive Company for twenty-eight years, and when he resigned in 1976 to work full-time for the Christian Freedom Foundation, he was a district sales manager stationed in Memphis. Long interested in encouraging Christians to apply their faith to economics and

politics, McAteer was a member of former Southern Baptist Convention President Adrian P. Rogers's Bellevue Baptist Church.

McAteer's job with the Christian Freedom Foundation was to travel around the country and promote the very point of view he has so long cherished. In fact, it was one of his seminars that ignited the political interest of Robert Billings. Later, McAteer went to work for Howard Phillips and the Conservative Caucus. With knowledge, experience, and friendships in Christian circles, it was McAteer more than anyone else who built the bridge between the New Right and the emerging New Christian Right. During the time Billings was encouraging Falwell to make a decisive move into the political arena, McAteer passed frequently through Lynchburg to make similar encouragements.

Then, in 1980, McAteer put together the Roundtable (the original name was the Religious Roundtable, but it was changed in a calculated move to broaden its appeal). In creating a Council of 56, McAteer spoke often of the signers of the Declaration of Independence: "The fifty-six signatures on that Declaration of Independence were kept secret for one half year because the gallant fifty-six who made that promise knew when they signed that they were risking everything. If they won the fight, the best they could expect would be years of hardship in a struggling new nation. And if they lost . . . they would face a hangman's rope as traitors.... If those fifty-six men were willing to risk everything in order to give birth to freedom, can we do any less to preserve it in our generation?"

Conscious of the need for media visibility in forging a political organization, McAteer recruited TV evangelist James Robison to be the Roundtable's vice-president. Dallas was probably chosen to be the site of the National Affairs Briefing, the first major Roundtable event, precisely because Robison could be counted on to attract a crowd. If McAteer had any doubts about the appropriateness of Robison as his media man, those doubts were put to rest during the two days of the Briefing when, on successive evenings, Robison repeatedly brought a wildly enthusiastic crowd to its feet.

With key personnel in place and some national visibility, the Roundtable is now prepared to go about the business of building

Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell commutes to a meeting . . . but keeps in touch. Courtesy "The Old-Time Gospel Hour."

[Description: Black and white photo of Jerry Falwell on the telephone. ]

Jerry Falwell and the "Old-Time Gospel Hour" singers at the I Love America rally in Washington, D.C.
At the same rally Falwell and Phyllis Schlafly, head of the stop era campaign, stand side by side during the singing of a patriotic song. Courtesy Wide World Photos .

[Description: Black and white photo of Jerry Falwell and the "Old-Time Gospel Hour" singers at the I Love America rally in Washington, D.C. Photo of Falwell and Phyllis Schlafly at the same rally. ]

More than 200,000 people turned out for a Washington for Jesus rally in April of 1980. Although organizers claimed it was a nonpolitical event, the agenda was to call the national leadership back to God. Courtesy Wide World Photos.
Many in attendance at the day-long rally on the Mall appeared the night before, and as the sun broke over the horizon the crowds joined in early morning prayers. Courtesy Wide World Photos.

[Description: Aerial photo of crowd at Washington for Jesus rally in April of 1980. Another photo of sign reading "Our God reigns" at the rally. ]

Rain failed to dampen the spirits of singer Pat Boone and his wife, Shirley, as they opened the previous day's rally at Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium. Courtesy Wide World Photos.
Jerry Falwell addresses a summit meeting of Moral Majority state chairmen in Lynchburg, Virginia, in October of 1980. Photo by Les Schofer.

[Description: Photo of singer Pat Boone and his wife, Shirley, as they opened the rally. Photo of Jerry Falwell as he addresses a summit meeting of Moral Majority state chairmen in Lynchburg, Virginia, in October of 1980. ]

Organized by the Roundtable, the National Affairs Briefing in Dallas brought 15,000 Christians—and Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan—together in August 1980.
James Robison, vice-president of the Roundtable, assumes a familiar pose in front of the National Affairs Briefing audience. The meeting galvanized the televangelists' political ambitions.

[Description: Three black and white photos: one from above of the crowd at the National Affairs Briefing in Dallas, one of Ronald Reagan at the podium, and one of James Robison, vice-president of the Roundtable at the podium. ]

Jerry Falwell, Ronald Reagan, and Howard Phillips pose for the cameras during the 1980 presidential campaign. Phillips, national chairman of Conservative Caucus, was one of several New Right leaders who encouraged Falwell to form Moral Majority. Photo by Les Schofer, courtesy "The Old-Time Gospel Hour."

[Description: Black and white photo of Jerry Falwell, Ronald Reagan, and Howard Phillips. ]

an organization. You used to have to build organizations the other way around—from the ground up—but modern communications technology has changed that too.

Christian Voice, Inc., is a nonprofit organization created for the explicit purpose of lobbying and expressing political viewpoints from a Christian moral position. It is the product of a "grass-roots" effort that began in California. Richard Zone, executive director of Christian Voice, relates that the organization began as a result of a threat from the IRS to challenge the tax-exempt status of his church in Glendale, California. He and members of his congregation were working for the defeat of Proposition 6, a referendum to give homosexuals equal protection under the law. "I realized," said Zone in an interview with Christian Life, "that this moral issue had been politicized and that our government was telling the moral conscience of the nation [the church] to stay out of the battle."

Organized in October 1978, but not officially launched until January 1979, Christian Voice claims to have 190,000 members, including 37,000 ministers. The organization has been built by the direct-mail route with few financial contributions of any size. What has most given Christian Voice visibility is its "Congressional Report Card." "Report Card" scores are a reflection of the number of times a member of Congress voted "correctly" on fourteen "key moral issues."

The "Report' Card" probably would not have received such considerable attention save for the fact that Congressman Richard Kelly of Florida, convicted of accepting an ABSCAM bribe, and Congressman Robert Bauman of Maryland, a pet of the New Right who has confessed to "homosexual tendencies," scored 100, whereas the ordained clergymen on Capitol Hill failed to receive even passing grades. Catholic priest Father Robert Drinan of Massachusetts scored a big fat zero, and Robert Edgar, a Presbyterian minister from Pennsylvania, received a score of 8. In many people's minds, these seeming anomalies raised questions about the extent to which moral principles were the underpinning of the "Report Card."

Examination of the specific issues that constituted the votes revealed a significant equation of ultra-right-wing partisan views with morality. For example, voting for a resolution that would

"guarantee the United States' commitment to defend Taiwan" was considered a moral vote. Opposition, by implication, was immoral. The issue was black and white and allowed no room for dealing with the complexities and ambiguities of the past twenty-five years of dealings with Taiwan and the Communist government of mainland China. So also was it immoral to vote against an amendment that would have eliminated $4 million from a National Science Foundation appropriation for biological, behavioral, and social science research. The authors of the "Report Card" were confident that "most of these funds are used to stack the ideological deck in favor of Godless behavioral humanist research. . . . "

Despite the obvious flaws in conception and content—and many would wish to add moral integrity—of the "Report Card," it is an effective political weapon. A summary statistic that rates the moral character of a congressman is a handy device for those who don't think and are willing to follow blindly anyone who claims to represent their views.

There is another sense in which the "Report Card" is effective. In an era in which we get most of our information in blips, congressmen know that they will not have the opportunity to go home to their constituencies and offer a penetrating, perceptive critique of the "Report Card." And there are few congressional districts left in the United States where a zero on the Christian Voice "Report Card" can be worn as a badge of courage and independence. Hence, many congressmen are going to be much more cautious about how they vote on all sorts of issues. That, itself, is not a bad idea. When the contemplation of how to vote becomes even subconsciously guided by fear of being targeted by Christian Voice as immoral, however, the integrity of individual conscience is no less compromised than when a congressman votes in a certain way because he has accepted a bribe or is beholden to a special-interest group for large financial contributions.

The fourth significant political group of the New Christian Right is National Christian Action Coalition. NCAC was organized in 1977 by Robert Billings as Christian School Action and at that time had a narrower objective of monitoring and lobbying on legislation pertaining to Christian schools. It has a

full-time staff of three, headed by Billing's son, William, and it provides a variety of service functions for regional and single issue groups of the Christian right. NCAC has produced and distributed a movie featuring Senator Jesse Helms which tells Christians how they can get involved in politics. Other materials on how to develop a political organization and legislative alerts are sent to approximately 1,200 churches and an undisclosed number of individuals. The group has also produced a "report card" of congressional voting on family issues which is distributed by their political action committee called the Christian Voters' Victory Fund.

There has been a great deal of confusion in the media about the New Right and the New Christian Right. Many have failed to understand that the concept of New Right does not refer to the resurgence of conservative forces in the United States, but rather to a fairly small group whose common bond is mastery of the uses of modern communications technology. Almost without our recognizing it, that technology has transformed politics from an art form into a science—an inexact science to be sure, but one in which the likely outcomes of alternative strategies can be estimated.

Consultants, advertising specialists, pollsters, and direct-mail experts are the new king makers of American politics, having replaced the political bosses in the smoke-filled rooms of another era. Ironically, it was the efforts of a liberal Congress to enact post-Watergate election reforms that gave great momentum to the New Right. When the reforms cut out the fat cats, those who were experts at direct-mail fund raising took on greatly enhanced importance in U.S. politics. Previously considered to be nickel-and-dime junk dealers by a lot of political pros, the direct-mail experts were able to demonstrate that if they zeroed in on the right audience, a lot of little contributions could add up to big bucks.

All the components of modern communications technology are now widely employed by Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals alike. What has made the New Right such an important force is that it got a big jump in mastering the technology, which it has utilized effectively to tap discontents and frustrations of that sector of society which Spiro Agnew

labeled the "silent majority" back in the early 1970s. The active participation of the New Right in the political sweepstakes dates roughly to that period.

The New Right stands largely outside the party structures and the inner circles of power in Washington. Howard Phillips, who heads Conservative Caucus, is an exception. He was the architect of Richard Nixon's "southern strategy" and the person Nixon tapped to dismantle Lyndon Johnson's "war on poverty" program. Whether he was the first among the New Right leadership to recognize the importance of drawing Christians into the conservative coalition, he certainly understood the importance of such an alliance. He has called the movement of conservative Christians into politics "the most significant development in American politics since organized labor discovered the ballot box. "

The New Right sought to recruit television preachers for some time before it succeeded. Its leaders understood well the lessons of history. When you lock horns in social conflict, it's good to have God on your side; your people fight harder and the opposition wilts more easily. The liberals won the battle to define whose side God was on in the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. Staking out the territory of life, family, and country as theirs has given conservatives some pretty good ammunition for the ensuing battles of the 1980s. They frequently invoke the name of God as the progenitor of their cause, but they need highly visible religious leaders to sanctify the invocation. The TV preachers could serve them well as legitimizers of their cause, but they could also mobilize their own large conservative constituencies. So it happened that Jerry Falwell was sought out to create Moral Majority.

The New Christian Right, thus, obviously owes its genesis to the master plan of the New Right. The New Right needs the New Christian Right to broaden its base of support and to render legitimate its causes. For the present, the New Christian Right needs the New Right, because the leaders of the former are no more than novices at big-league politics. But they are fast learners, and the New Right can expect to equate its agendas with those of the New Christian Right only as long as the Christians agree. The one big carrot the New Right has to dangle before

conservatives to induce them to join the club is a command of modern communications technology. But this won't get the New Right very far with the New Christian Right, which has pioneered in the field. The technology that the New Right is using to transform American politics is essentially the same technology that the televangelists are using to build their religious empires. If they choose to use it to develop political empires as well, there is nothing that can hold them to the New Right if they choose to go in other directions.

The National Affairs Briefing in Dallas provided crucial momentum for the emergence of the New Christian Right. The extensive news coverage of that event announced to the nation the emergence of a budding social movement. News coverage begets news coverage just as certainly as yeast leavens dough and television hits beget spin-offs and imitations. The media's discovery of the born-again politicians served also to legitimize their efforts to become politically active. Although the notion that religion and politics don't mix is historically a myth, it had guided the consciousness of most evangelicals in recent history. Separation of church and state was one of the chief rhetorical weapons that conservative churches used to oppose the entanglement of liberal churches in civil rights during the 1960s.

Undoing old beliefs is not always easy. People have to be assured and reassured that new beliefs or behavioral patterns are all right. Most of the evangelical in the United States were not getting the message that involvement in politics is all right from watching religious programs on television, first, because only a few of the many television preachers delivered the message that Christians should involve themselves in the political process. More important, a lot of evangelicals, perhaps a majority, never or seldom watch the TV preachers.

News coverage of the National Affairs Briefing served, thus, to draw attention to the efforts of a minority within evangelical ranks to draw the majority into the political arena. Sheer awareness of the fact that kindred souls are doing something provides confirming evidence that it might be all right to do. When one's own pastor becomes bold about political issues, the awareness that the same thing is happening elsewhere may cause people to listen rather than question the wisdom of his mixing

religion and politics. Even if they are not prepared to follow his invitation to become organizationally involved, the fact that they choose not to oppose his engagement is an important step in legitimizing born-again politics. The shift from a generally negative or neutral posture toward political activism, thus, is an important step in developing support for a broad-based movement.

The media coverage of those scorching hot August days in Dallas served another important function—it aroused the anxieties of those who view right-wing Christians as a potential threat to their interests. The mobilization of any group is certain to trigger the counter-mobilization of those who stand to lose something if the newly organized group gains power. It was only a matter of days before the New Christian Right knew it was in a dogfight as organized opposition began to appear from almost every sector of society.