 | Are the Prime Time Preachers Past Their Prime? |  |
Are the Prime Time Preachers Past Their Prime?
After a half-century of working out the implications and permutations of the New Deal, America is struggling with changes that challenge many of its values and policies. It is a struggle about the role of government in our lives -- what it may and may not do, what it should and should not do, and what it must and must not do.
The challengers to both traditional liberal and conservative interests and ideology have been lumped together as "the New Right." However, there are sufficiently different goals between those who seek sweeping changes in America to warrant differentiating between the political New Right and the New Christian Right.
The power base of the political New Right in this struggle to change America is substantially secular and finds its locus in interests, largely economic. The power base of the New Christian Right is sentiment and ideology, which are only partially religious in character. When the organizational skills of the former are combined with the potential of the latter to mobilize broad support, the resulting coalition can muster considerably more power than is possible among just the New Right's network of special interest groups.
In our book, Prime Time Preachers, we argued that the New Christian Right has a long-range advantage in the struggle to reshape AmericaÑan advantage not only over the political New Right but also over every other competing interest group currently on the scene. We gave them this edge because of their mastery of modern communications technology and their unique access to mass media. But there is more to it than this. Here is a summary of the resources and potential which uniquely position the Radical Religious Right to play a vital role in shaping this nation's future.
Media Access. No other interest group has ever possessed as much access to media to promote ideology as the Christian religious broadcasters. The latest figures reported by the National Religious Broadcasters show that there are 1,108 religious radio stations and 65 religious television stations in this country. Three Christian networks broadcast programming 24 hours a day which can be picked up via satellite nationwide, and several other networks are on more abbreviated schedules.
The latest Arbitron figures show that 88 daily or weekly syndicated religious programs are drawing 22,844,000 combined viewers. While the total combined audience for religious television programs has been relatively stable for seven years now, recent developments suggest that there could be sizable audience growth ahead.
First, the number of syndicated programs has grown by 40% during the last two years. This offers a significant pool of talent from which new leaders may emerge as some of the current televangelists advance in years and retire. Second, Oral Roberts and Rex Humbard, the long-time leaders in the audience sweepstakes, have
Furthermore, as direct-mail research has made abundantly clear, it is not the size of the audience that is critical, but the congruence of interests between what is promoted and who receives the message. Those who like what they hear from Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson or James Kennedy will likely end up on mailing lists which will provide them with printed material to reinforce their commitment to the cause. Already the politically oriented televangelists are speaking to far larger audiences than Martin Luther King, Jr., addressed, for example, when he was the unchallenged leader of the civil rights movement.
While many evangelicals and fundamentalists have been taught that religion and politics don't mix, there is a natural affinity between fundamentalist theology and right-wing politics. To date, only a few radio and television preachers have tried to politicize their audiences. But the very warm receptions New Right political speakers have received at the annual conventions of the evangelical National Religious Broadcasters in recent years suggest that their latent political consciousness is merely waiting to be mobilized.
Finances. Social movements can be launched by voluntary labor, but to become effective agents of social change, they need money. The televangelists could not survive without converting audience response into financial contributions to pay for air time. It takes over
a million dollars a week to fund Falwell's "Old-Time Gospel Hour" and the various Liberty Baptist College projects he promotes on the air. He can't afford to lose TV program contributions to the Moral Majority, but he has all the technical skills he needs to raise significant sums of money for his political activities as well. So do the other politically minded televangelists.
Organization. No political organization, however popular its ideas, can be built overnight. The claims of organizational strength made by groups like Moral Majority and Christian Voice in 1980 were a sham; only political novices would have tried to get away with them. But in the two years since these organizations first gained national visibility, they have begun to acquire organizational skills. This is so, in large measure, because of alliances between New Christian Right and political New Right organizations. Even Falwell, who is fiercely independent and who initially kept New Right leaders at arm's length, is beginning to pay attention to Paul Weyrich, Howard Phillips, and the New Right's other key organizational development strategists. To the extent that the New Right and the New Christian Right coalition can be held together, the latter will benefit significantly from the organizational skills of the former.
Legitimacy. All social movement organizations claim that God is on their side. No significant social movement has ever succeeded without making a convincing case that its goals and the wishes of the Almighty were the same. Without persuasive God-talk, many otherwise sympathetic bystanders will fail to be transformed into movement constituents.
The American Labor movement successfully borrowed gospel tunes and superimposed labor folk lyrics. Those tunes and lyrics carried the "gospel truth" to the common man in a way that was more
authentic than the pious rhetoric of J.P. Morgan, who tried to convince Americans that God was a laissez-faire capitalist. During the civil rights movement, the lyrics of liberation and faith were often the same, and the key leaders of the movement were men of God. As one ranking Southern Senator allegedly put it, "There wouldn't have been a civil rights movement if a bunch of damned preachers hadn't gotten the idea that segregation was a moral issue."
Demographics. America is on the threshold of a demographic revolution which will reshape the character of this society for as far into the future as anyone can imagine. Simply put, America is growing older. Fewer and fewer people die young and more and more live longer. As a result, ever greater proportions of the total population are old. This aging of the nation is a permanent condition and it has never happened before.
This demographic reality portends a more conservative America for several reasons. First, as individuals become older they tend to accept a religious world view. Second, older people tend to hold more conservative or orthodox religious views. Third, there is a close connection between conservative religious views and conservative political views.
Thus, as America becomes older, it will also become more conservative. Those who believe that the current wave of conservatism is an aberration from the long established progressive trend in America need to study carefully the implications of this gradual aging process. The TV preacher-politicians aren't likely to fade away, despite the predictions and pronouncements of journalists who cover the New Christian Right. As a consequence, much of what we read in the papers is downright misleading regarding the future of the New Christian Right.
The mass media constitute a lens through which we are afforded glimpses of what is happening in the world beyond our immediate experience. What we know about this world is largely determined by the decisions of reporters and editors who define what is news and by commentators who decide what is worthy of analytical treatment.
We do not wish to raise anew all the knotty questions surrounding the issue of objectivity and bias in news reporting. Our thesis is that neither reporters nor the legions of commentators who analyze the news were well prepared for the religiopolitical story which began unfolding in earnest in early 1980. The result has been a great deal of kneejerk reporting which, if analyzed with any care, reveals more about reporters' values than the phenomenon under examination.
A study of journalists' political and religious values, conducted by Robert Lichter and Stanley Rothman and published in Public Opinion last fall, confirms many people's suspicions. Eighty-one percent of the media personnel surveyed voted for Carter over Ford, and an identical proportion earlier picked McGovern over Nixon. In 1964, 96 percent selected Johnson over Goldwater. Half of the media members surveyed reported no religious affiliation. Eighty-six percent said they seldom or never attend religious services, and only eight percent said they attend church or synagogue weekly.
That the large majority of reporters are personally not in tune either with the political or religious values espoused by the television preachers is only part of their problem in reporting a story of this magnitude. Equally important, their lack of cultural knowledge about conservative religious traditions in America hampers their ability to understand what is happening.
We have identified three distinct stages of reporting about the New Christian Right. Each stage reflects reporters' presuppositions, considering their level of understanding at the time.
First came the period of discovery and alarm. Reporters might well have ignored the 1980 "Washington forJesus Rally" if a cadre of Washington-based mainline church leaders hadn't insisted that the media pay attention. Media consciousness of the political involvement of conservative Christians increased several-fold when Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority showed up in force at the National Republican Convention in Detroit. A few weeks later, the media showed up 250 strong in Dallas to watch several leading televangelists share the podium with Ronald Reagan at a two-day meeting called the National Affairs Briefing.
Election results, attributed to the New Christian Right, intensified reporters' alarm. Critics responded with a countermobilization of resources. Established organizations like the ACLU and Common Cause sought to mobilize their existing constituencies. And new organizations like People for the American Way and Americans for Common Sense sprang into existence to do battle with the right.
In the second stage of media response, reporters focused on an assessment of resources as they began to discover that many of the New Christian Right's claims were exaggerated. Jerry Falwell, in particular, had conned the press. He didn't have 25 to 50 million viewers of the "Old-Time Gospel Hour," as he had variously claimed, but something closer to 1.5 million. Neither did Moral Majority have the 4 million members it claimed. Its mailing list was only about one-tenth that size. Simple arithmetic made it clear that Moral Majority
could not possibly have registered and influenced the millions of voters it claimed. Post-election public opinion polls showed that only a small minority of the country considered themselves sympathetic with the Moral Majority. Moreover, when Moral Majority sympathizers were asked for their views on specific issues important to Moral Majority leadership, very large proportions disagreed with the leadership.
The truth of the matter is that Jerry Falwell had for months made fools of the press: the country boy had taken the city sophisticates for a ride. At first, reporters were reluctant to admit that they had been fooled. But when the evidence mounted, the media launched a counterattack aimed at discrediting Falwell. They did their best to present him as a liar while trying to ignore the fact that they had earlier fallen for his made-up statistics.
The Moral Majority story might have gone away quickly, but Falwell failed to fade like a morning glory in the noonday sun. The more publicity he got, the more he seemed to thrive, even when the coverage was unfavorable. By mid-summer of 1981, Falwell was receiving phone calls from Ronald Reagan and Menachem Begin asking for his support. He sassed the President and got away with it, and then led a delegation of TV preachers to Blair House to meet with the Prime Minister of Israel. A man who could command the attention of heads of state must have a power base somewhere. So the media were hesitant to conclude that the emperor had no clothes.
The third period of response is characterized by a debunking and dismissal of Falwell, and with him the Moral Majority and other New Christian Right organizations. Reporters' realistic assessment of resources clearly provided the foundation for the eventual debunking,
but, as noted above, Falwell and company remained too visible to ignore even after the facts were known.
We contributed significantly to the evidence eventually used to debunk Falwell, but dismissing him and the New Christian Right was not the intent of our analysis in Prime Time Preachers. Our intent was to argue that, notwithstanding the limited impact of the New Christian Right on the 1980 elections, their potential as a significant political force should not be measured in terms of that election, or even the 1982 and 1984 elections, for that matter.
We were careful to distinguish between the political New Right and the New Christian Right because they are not the same in terms of origins, constituencies, or goals. It was some time, however, before this distinction became clear to many reporters. Weeks, even months, after the 1980 elections, major New Right organizations, e.g., the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC), Conservative Caucus, Heritage Foundation, and RAVCO, along with their most eminent personalities, were treated by many representatives of the press as merely part of Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority following.
Today, almost all reporters and analysts know that this is not the case. But many have bought the alternative view that Falwell and the entire cadre of political activists of the Religious Right are merely puppets of the New Right strong men. This view is not correct either, but it has played an important role in debunking the political power of the televangelists in general, and Falwell in particular.
Right now, Jerry Falwell and his New Christian Right allies interpret God's will in terms too rigid to
enlist the real majority of Americans. But America stands ready to be mobilized for God, country, and the family. For all of our exposure to cultural relativism, we have not become an amoral or immoral nation. Daniel Yankelovich has his finger on the pulse of a lot of educated, middle-aged, middle-class Americans when he says that while we may personally cherish the changes brought on by the cultural revolution of the 60s, we're not completely comfortable passing this heritage on to our children. Burton Pines also is on target in identifying a significant segment of Americans who feel we have gone far enough and that now it is time to return to traditional values.
How these sentiments may mesh with the agendas of the New Right and New Christian Right are not entirely clear. The economic interests of the New Right are too narrow to command the loyalty of a majority of Americans. We share Kevin Phillips' sense that already Americans are disillusioned with the real agenda of the New Right and that this disillusionment portends an uncertain and unstable political future.
America will not be stampeded into Jerry Falwell's moral and political solutions. But he and his fellow televangelists have already won the battle to define the agenda. To the extent that Jerry Falwell is unwilling to modify his stringent fundamentalist morality to accommodate the mainstream of American conservatism, he will fade from the scene and someone else more flexible will ascend in the electronic pulpit as a moral and spiritual leader.
But the fact remains that those "kooky fundamentalists"--who secular intellectuals thought disappeared from America after the Scopes trial--have returned to define the agenda and thereby shape
the direction of American culture as we rush toward the 21st century. Whether they will contribute to the salvation or the destruction of this nation will only be known as the future relinquishes its mysteries. But those who think that the New Christian Right is a mere footnote to this nation's history are in for a big surprise.
*This is the third in a series of issue papers prepared for PEOPLE FOR THE AMERICAN WAY (1982). Jeffrey K. Hadden is Chairman of the Department of Sociology at the University of Virginia. Charles E. Swann is Vice President of Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginia. Hadden and Swann co-authored Prime Time Preachers: Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc. 1981.
| Are the Prime Time Preachers Past Their Prime? | |