University of Virginia Library

Chapter 8
The Establishment Strikes Back

Movements seek to change existing conditions and the greater their perceived threat, the greater the mobilization of those who seek to protect the status quo. This chapter traces the counter-mobilization of those who perceived the religious right to be a serious threat to "the American way."

Donald Kaul, Des Moines Register

On November 23, 1 98O, the American Civil Liberties Union paid $20,000 for a full-page advertisement in the Sunday New York Times whose banner headline read: IF THE MORAL MAJORITY HAS ITS WAY, YOU'D BETTER START PRAYING. Simultaneously, the ACLU's leaders sent a first-class mailing to their membership with an urgent plea for funds to fight for the preservation of the Bill of Rights.

The ACLU, founded by Rodger Baldwin, has never been afraid of a ruckus. It has often come to the defense of unpopular causes and groups that a lot of Americans would just as soon see silenced. Its decision to defend the rights of the Nazi party to march in a heavily Jewish Chicago suburb a few years ago offended the civil libertarian instincts of a lot of members, who staged their own protests by not renewing their membership. For sixty years the ACLU has been America's self-appointed defender of the Bill of Rights. Former Chief Justice Earl Warren said of the ACLU that it "has stood foursquare against the

recurring tides of hysteria that from time to time threaten freedoms everywhere...."

But there was something approaching a hysterical tone in the ACLU's newspaper ad and direct-mail copy about Moral Majority. The ad in the Times read, in part: "Their [the Moral Majority's] agenda is clear and frightening: they mean to capture the power of government and use it to establish a nightmare of religious and political orthodoxy . . . . they are dangerously deceptive . . . . the new evangelicals are a radical anti-Bill-of-Rights movement. They seek not to conserve traditional American values, but to overthrow them."

The ACLU's assault on the Moral Majority is a rather significant departure from its carefully reasoned justification for defending Nazis. Did the ACLU overreact to the perceived threat of Moral Majority and its New Christian Right colleagues? A lot of people don't think so.

James Dunn, executive director of the Southern Baptists' Christian Life Commission in Texas, told an annual meeting of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State: "They don't want a democracy, a free people, a pluralistic society. They want a theocracy. And if you listen very carefully to the number of times the first person singular pronoun is used, you'll realize they not only want a theocracy, but every one of them wants to be Theo. "

During the weeks immediately preceding and following the 1980 elections, organizations created to combat the influence of the New Christian Right proliferated. Daniel Maguire, a nationally known theologian and ethicist from Marquette University in Milwaukee, organized a group called Moral Alternatives in Politics. Maguire, who labeled the New Christian Right "religious fascism," assembled a board of directors that included such prominent figures as theologian-historian Martin Marty of the University of Chicago, Charles Curran of Catholic University, and Rabbi Balfour Brickner of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York.

Senator George McGovern saw his defeat and that of other liberal senators as the handiwork of the New Christian Right. In his view, these people are at war with the whole Judeo-Christian ethic of compassion and commitment to care for the disadvantaged.

Shortly after the election McGovern announced plans for the creation of an organization called Americans for Common Sense. In Virginia, home of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, a group calling itself Virginians Organized for Informed Community Expression (VOICE) was organized in Norfolk and quickly spread to other communities in that state. All over the United States there was the same kind of spontaneous reaction to the New Christian Right, suggesting that a lot of people besides the ACLU believed the nation's liberties were threatened by these born-again Christian zealots.

The most visible new organization, and possibly the organization most likely to remain in the struggle over the long haul, is a group called People for the American Way. Spearheaded by Norman Lear, creator of "All in the Family," "Maude," "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman," and several other television sitcom successes of the 1970s, PAW assembled a board of advisers that included such prominent religious leaders as Father Theodore Hesburgh, president of the University of Notre Dame; M. William Howard, president of the National Council of Churches; Rabbi Marc Tannenbaum of the American Jewish Committee; William P. Thompson, stated clerk of the United Presbyterian Church; Bishop James K. Mathews, former presiding bishop of the United Methodist Church; and Colin Williams, former dean, Yale University School of Divinity. Also on the list were prominent magazine editors and business persons, along with former members of Congress and presidential cabinets—all in all, an impressive display of establishment clout.

People for the American Way started gaining visibility just before the election through a series of television spots featuring a variety of Learesque characters plugging religious pluralism as the American way. One featured a forklift driver who said he was proud to be a 100-percenter on the preacher's morality list but troubled by the fact that his son had missed one item on the preacher's test and his wife two. He was confident that his son was at least as good a Christian as he, and he knew for sure his wife was a "whole lot better Christian" than he. Another spot presented a man whose family is in the background arguing about a movie they have just seen on TV. He asks the viewers how Americans can be expected to agree about things as important as

religion when his family can't even agree about a movie. At the conclusion of each commercial spot, sympathetic viewers are told to write to the box number on the screen or call a toll-free number for more information about People for the American Way.

Those who called or wrote received a letter, a brochure, a reprint from the New York Times, and a postage-paid envelope to use for sending in a contribution to help support People for the American Way. The brochure contained these statements: "There's an alarming new movement in America—the Religious New Right. A coalition of ultra-conservative political groups, spearheaded by a new breed of politically oriented electronic evangelists, the Religious New Right is using television and radio to preach a new gospel to millions across America. They fill their followers with passion of holy war. And they label those who disagree as un-American, immoral and ungodly. In effect, they are teaching people to hate, but in a ‘Christian’ way."

The letter, signed by Michael MacIntyre, a young Methodist minister, was toned down considerably from one Norman Lear had circulated earlier. In that letter, which Lear described as probably the most important he would ever write—even if he lived to be a thousand—he used phrases like "ominous," "extraordinary and dangerous," "single-issue zealots," "pernicious danger," and "fascism masquerading as Christianity" to describe the New Christian Right. What these people are doing, Lear wrote, "is the ultimate obscenity, the spiritual pornography of a debased religiosity."

Several prominent liberal religious and political figures expressed concern about the tone of Lear's attack and the accuracy of some of his charges, as well as surprise that such prominent persons would identify themselves with a campaign that seemed not very different in spirit and content from the mudslinging that was coming from the most vicious elements of the New Right. Some of the members of Lear's advisory committee apparently felt the same way, because the mass mailing was tempered considerably.

There was a lot of hysteria and near hysteria about the New Christian Right among editorial writers. By and large, liberal syndicated columnists had a heyday. None was probably more exercised than Nicholas von Hoffman, former sparring partner

with conservative James J. Kilpatrick on the Point/Counterpoint segment of "60 Minutes." It took von Hoffman only a few days after the Dallas briefings in August to sharpen his pen and drive unrelentingly into the hearts of "these Christian Stalinists." Von Hoffman thought the time was nigh to organize the Immoral Minority. "Excluded from this fraternity of immoralists," he wrote, "would be those who mistake the not terribly well informed creakings of their own minds for the Divinity." But von Hoffman was just getting warmed up. Here are some excerpts from his column:

As if they were back on "60 Minutes," Kilpatrick responded by defending Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority, at least in a backhanded sort of way. ". . . this sawdust apostle and his God-fearing flock have every right to pursue their political aims in whatever legal way they wish," Kilpatrick wrote. But his defense of Falwell was really more an attack on "ultra-lib editors" who were attacking Falwell. "By and large," Kilpatrick admitted, "the Reverend Dr. Falwell, his brethren and sistren, give me the willies." Then, to retain the symmetry with von Hoffman's Immoral Minority, Kilpatrick said that if he ever succumbed to the urge to organize a political group, he would likely organize the Immoral Majority. Perhaps prophesying the election outcome, Kilpatrick continued, "There are more of us than there are of them."

Some of the attacks on the New Christian Right were colorful, but most were dulled by the deadpan seriousness of the critics. Political cartoonists had a field day depicting the pious "moral

majority," but there was a distinct absence of humor in the work of most cartoonists and syndicated columnists. Mike Royko of the Chicago Sun-Times was an exception. He wrote a column about a friend who had a terrible nightmare that Ronald Reagan had become president and Jerry Falwell had replaced Johnny Carson as the host of late-night television. His guests, of course, included the likes of the head of the National Rifle Association.

Heated rhetoric is not unusual in political campaigns. What was unusual about the 1980 campaign was that the candidates' strongest language was reserved not for the opposition, but rather for the leadership of the New Christian Right. Jerry Falwell caught most of the heat. Except for the fact that the combatants took themselves so seriously, the battle might have lightened a campaign between two candidates between whom the real majority of Americans probably would have preferred not to have to choose. Jerry Falwell has never been known for walking away from a good fight, so when the politicians took out after him, he fought back.

On September 23, 1980, Secretary of Health and Human Services Patricia Roberts Harris made a speech in which she decried the Moral Majority as "a serious threat to the democratic process. " She added, "I am beginning to fear that we could have an Ayatollah Khomeini in this country." Jerry Falwell went to Washington and called a press conference at the Department of Health and Human Services to lob a few verbal assaults back at Secretary Harris. "The truth of the matter," Falwell said in a prepared statement, "is that as long as it is a liberal group or an ineffective conservative group speaking out, Secretary Harris and others have no objection. However," he continued, "the left see this new level of involvement by the Judeo-Christian community bringing masses of new recruits to the conservative side of the spectrum and so they are desperately trying to discredit the movement. "

A few days after Secretary Harris's statement, the Congressional Black Caucus appealed to blacks to mobilize in opposition to what they viewed as a "frightening" political movement aimed at "turning back the clock of hard-fought and hard-won justice for the over 25 million black Americans who live in this country." The Congressional Black Caucus also sent out signals

that it might have to investigate the Moral Majority in order to identify the "powerful corporate money interests" that were bankrolling the organization. Falwell shot back: "An investigation of the people who contribute to Moral Majority will reveal that our average gift is $20 and that more than 400,000 ‘little people’ are the backbone of the financial support...." And then he challenged the Black Caucus to examine the financial records of Moral Majority. No one accepted his challenge.

In the same week independent presidential candidate John Anderson spoke out forcefully against the Moral Majority: "The political marriage of the so-called Moral Majority and the New Right is not one ordained in Heaven. It is a union which seeks to inject unbending rigidity and intolerance into church pew and polling booth alike. It is an alliance that seeks to purge from the political process ideas and ideals and those hapless souls who hold them dear." Like the great majority of Americans on election day, Falwell passed by the opportunity to endorse Anderson's position.

Most of the critics of the New Christian Right did not challenge the leaders' right to be involved in politics—such a posture would have been blatantly inconsistent with the knowledge that liberal Protestantism and Catholicism have long been politically active. What appeared illegitimate about the New Christian Right's move into politics was the way in which it took place.

That word, way, meant a lot of things to different people. To some it meant being involved without being well informed about the complexity of issues. To others it referred to the tactics—the "dirty tricks" members of the New Christian Right allegedly used. To still others, way referred to what these people, if they gained power, would do to violate the rights of others. And there was a strong sense that the application of "Christian principles" in evaluating a candidate constituted a violation of the meaning and implications of the principle of separation of church and state.

Predictably, much of the criticism directed at the New Christian Right during the 1980 campaign came from mainline Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish leaders and the organizations with which they were associated. In a tradition-breaking move, William Sloane Coffin, senior minister at the prestigious Riverside

Church in New York, opened his sanctuary to television cameras for the first time in the history of that church as he lashed out at evangelical preachers for their association with right-wing politics. Coffin said that he would agree with the fundamentalist preachers that the Bible contains "all the answers, at least all the significant ones." But the Bible is a source of insight, inspiration, and wisdom, not a storehouse of unbending literal truths. "The Bible," Coffin stated, "is something like a mirror: if an ass peers in, you can't expect an apostle to peer out."

Later in the political campaign, Coffin, who is best known for his role as a civil rights and antiwar activist, met Jerry Falwell to debate on the "Today" and "Donahue" shows. Again, he attacked Falwell's theology as "shallow" and "simplistic": "I think deep down, he is shallow. His biblical positions are not sound biblical study. Anybody who has done any real Bible study knows you can't come up with those conclusions from the Bible. I think what he calls a simple moral issue is very complex. It is very rare to get a Christian position. You get Christians believing different things" (emphasis added).

If there is condemnation in the rhetoric of fundamentalist preachers when they chastise "modernists" or "liberals " for not accepting the Bible as the inerrant, literal truth of God, the condescension in the language of the liberals is no less real when they call fundamentalists "shallow," assert that they have not "really" studied the Bible, and therefore imply that they are "nobodies." The same tone is apparent in remarks made by the Right Reverend Paul Moore, Jr., Episcopal bishop of New York, to the 203d annual convention of the dioceses, which were reprinted on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times: "They [the Moral Majority] call themselves Christian Conservatives, but it is the traditional churches who merit the description of truly conservative." Elsewhere in the editorial, Moore used such phrases as "this strange breed of Christians" and "false conservatism" to characterize the "so-called Moral Majority."

The language of many of the New Christian Right leaders is strident and not to be defended. But if one examines the language of the liberals as they launched a counterattack, from the perspective of a conservative, their language is also pretty

offensive. What is most offensive to conservatives is the liberals' aura of ontological superiority—the fact that they take for granted the intellectual and moral superiority of their perspective.

As the 1980 campaign built up a head of steam, so also did the attacks on the New Christian Right from the "religious establishment." Leaders from fifteen of America's largest Protestant denominations released a statement that condemned the New Christian Right as theologically and politically unsound and, by implication, un-Christian. The statement; entitled "Christian Theological Observations on the Religious Right Movement," read, in part, as follows: "There is no place in a Christian manner of political life for arrogance, manipulation, subterfuge or holding others in contempt.... There is no justification in a pluralistic and democratic society for demands for conformity along religious or ideological lines."

Throughout the country there were collective statements of condemnation where the New Christian Right was active. In Oklahoma, for example, the Oklahoma Conference of Churches, which represents seventeen major religious bodies, unanimously passed a resolution that cautioned against "religious partisanship which . . . threatens American religious freedom." Max E. Glenn, executive director of the Conference, further warned that making ". . . judgments about the character and motives of others is in danger of being unjust, simplistic and selfrighteous." Furthermore, Glenn added, "Uncritical endorsement which ignores the humanity of candidates is dangerously naive."

Criticism of the New Christian Right by mainline Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish leadership was extensively reported by the press. What the press nearly missed, however, was the extent to which conservative evangelical church leaders raised doubts about the appropriateness of Christian involvement in partisan politics.

No one is more responsible for reshaping evangelical thought about political engagement than Carl F. H. Henry. He is the founding editor of the country's most influential evangelical journal, Christianity Today, and is broadly recognized as one of the foremost evangelical theologians in the United States. For more than thirty years Henry has been prodding conservative

Christians toward social and political involvement. His little book, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (1947), indicts evangelicals for their preoccupation with "individual sin rather than social evil." He saw evangelical Christianity divorced from the great social movements of modern times and challenged his brethren to become engaged.

Still, when the born-again politicians moved into high gear in the 1980 elections, Henry expressed "grave doubts" and caution about the surge of activity: "I've pleaded ever since Uneasy Conscience that evangelicals get involved. So, formally, I can do nothing but commend their getting in. But the swiftness with which they've gotten in and the identification of specific objectives troubles me. They want a quick fix, that's what troubles me most.... [And] when they were criticized, they backed off from particulars and said they were interested in principles. But they took the higher ground only under criticism rather than in their initial formulation of the problem. I think one of the weaknesses of evangelical Christianity is that it has leaped from one-issue and one-candidate solutions without doing all the intermediary spade work that is involved in the formulation of a political philosophy predicated on principles with its implications for platform and candidates. "

Henry told those assembled at the annual meeting of the National Association of Evangelicals that he was worried about the "goose-step morality of a handful of vocal religious leaders who have suddenly become politically active." The most troubling and regrettable aspect of their involvement, Henry stated, is"the implication that one is not a morally sensitive Christian unless he shares an indicated stand on political specifics."

Like Carl Henry, Stanley Mooneyham, who heads World Vision, an organization that utilizes telethons to raise $45 million a year to feed the world's hungry, is an influential and respected man. Many denominations and independent religious organizations, as well as hundreds of individual churches, have cooperated with World Vision in carrying out various missionary endeavors. Mooneyham, too, is concerned about the motives of evangelicals who have suddenly gotten into politics. His thoughts, published in the April issue of his magazine, World Vision, echo the chilling reminder of Lord Acton that power

corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. "Political power has long been recognized as a seductive secular temptation," wrote Mooneyham. "It also must be seen as a seductive religious temptation." Sensing the mood of some of his evangelical friends in 1980, Mooneyham stated forthrightly that "it scares the daylights out of me. "Then he issued a stern warning: "I see little to convince me that evangelical power—past or present—is less immune to . . . misuse than any other kind of power . . . . I am as scared of an evangelical power bloc as I am of any other. Worldly power in religious hands—Islamic or Christian—has hardened into more than one inquisition. That God has delivered us from the hands of zealous but misguided saints is all that has saved us at times."

Mooneyham doesn't exclude the possibility of harmonizing religious power and political power, but his mood is clearly cautious. Christianity, he believes, finds its strength in powerlessness and love, whereas politics acknowledges no place for love and the ends tend to justify the means.

At the far right of evangelical theological thought stand three generations of Bob Joneses who view themselves as the standard bearers of fundamental biblical truth. Bob Jones University, where their brand of literal biblical truth is taught to new generations, publishes a periodical entitled Faith for the Family. The September 1980 issue contained separate articles by Bob Jones, Jr., and Bob Jones III attacking Jerry Falwell for creating the Moral Majority. So eager were the Joneses to get their message out that they mailed the articles as letters to BJU "preacher boys" in early June, almost three months ahead of scheduled publication.

The Joneses had two bones to pick with Falwell and Moral Majority. First, they contended that it is not the business of the church to clean up America's morals. "Preaching Christ is our mission," wrote Bob Jones III. "When purging the country's immorality is the pulpit's objective, we have lost sight of our goals. America's problems are not moral; they are spiritual." Their second concern was that a group like Moral Majority could well foster ecumenical cooperation—a cardinal sin for doctrinal purists.

At the other end of the conservative religious spectrum stand

the Southern Baptists, the largest denomination in the United States. Even before the issue of Christian involvement in politics came to a head, the Baptists were seriously divided over internal political struggles between theological conservatives and moderates. The present and immediate past presidents of the SBC, Bailey Smith and Adrian Rogers, are theological conservatives, and both have aligned themselves with the New Christian Right.

In 1976, without a lot of fanfare, Southern Baptists lined up pretty solidly behind their own Jimmy Carter. When Baptist influentials, the likes of Rogers, Smith, W. A. Criswell, and Charles Stanley, began to identify with other New Christian Right leaders in support of Reagan, other Baptist leaders went on the attack.

Jimmy Allen, another former president of the SBC, who now heads the Baptists Radio and Television Commission, led the attack by moderates. He took the occasion of an address before the American Jewish Committee to call the union of religion and right-wing politics "divisive and ultimately damaging to both religion and government." And in the Radio and Television Commission's newsletter he wrote: "Involvement in public decision-making processes on moral issues is a positive responsibility for spiritual leaders. However, the effort to create a religious party bloc vote is a dangerous one. Dependence on political power to enforce a moral point of view can lead to weakening the element of voluntary commitment."

So, from within the ranks of evangelicals, the political activists have been challenged on the grounds of principle, methods, and motive. And the attacks have been fairly widespread rather than isolated events. Criticism has spread from national denominational leaders to state and local leaders. They attack different aspects of political involvement, but there seems to be a grassroots swell of discontent over the engagement of evangelicals in politics. The full implications of evangelical opposition to mixing religion with right-wing politics may not be clear at this early date, but some conclusions do seem fairly obvious. Most of the leaders of the New Christian Right are from the southern region of the United States. They are theologically evangelical and fundamentalist. Those involved in television ministries, particularly

Jerry Falwell and James Robison, draw their audiences disproportionately from the South. Thus, even on their own home turf, where presumablythey have the greatest potential to build their political strength, there is significant resistance. Part of this is based on the theological supposition, grounded in early twentieth-century fundamentalism, that man's work is to bring men to Christ, not to deal with social evils. Still another part of the resistance is grounded in some fairly strong ideas about separation of church and state. And yet another source of resistance is a strong thread of individualism that resists preachers, political parties, labor unions, or anyone else treading on one's individual right to choose—including the right to choose not to be concerned about politics.

This strong sense of individualism was expressed by Zola Levitt, a minor-leaguer in syndicated religious TV, in a newsletter to his supporters just before the election: "I feel sort of uncomfortable about being told how to vote. With all the talk about things called ‘the Christian vote’ or ‘the fundamentalist stand,’ I feel like I'm not getting my privilege of telling Caesar what I think . . . . I don't want to be disenfranchised by group thinking . . . . the way I think politically would surprise very few people . . . . All the same . . . I want my own chance to express [what I think] . . . "

From almost every sector of society, and for a wide array of reasons, there has been a flood of protest about the movement of a few evangelicals into politics. But social movements are seldom silenced because of opposition. Opposition, rather, gives a movement visibility, which helps to recruit kindred souls to the cause. And being attacked often serves to solidify otherwise disparate groups into a unified front.

There is great competition for leadership in the struggle to return America to God. Even as the New Christian Right was coming together in Dallas, there was evidence that some individuals were placing social and political distance between themselves and others who were seeking leadership roles. In time, it is inevitable that they will discover differences that make a difference. Right now, they are euphoric about their successes in the 1980 elections, and they are committed to cooperation on general goals. They believe, with Jerry Falwell, that "when people begin

to cooperate with what God is doing, you have an unbeatable combination." And the success of Moral Majority means that much of the New Christian Right leadership is going to watch carefully and take its cue from Jerry Falwell.

Jerry Falwell may have hoped that someone else would come along and pick up the leadership role the New Right coaxed him into accepting, but for the immediate foreseeable future, that role belongs to him. In considerable measure he will determine whether the New Christian Right, having tasted political power, will begin to inch toward the center of American politics, where it can build a real power base, or will fulfill the deepest fears of those who already see it as the most serious threat to democracy and individual liberties since Joseph McCarthy.