Elmer Gantry for President

Some of the holy men and strange prophets who have drifted across the deserts of Washington in recent years have at least been good for a laugh. Sun Myung Moon, the visiting Korean who hinted he was Jesus Christ and spent most of his time singing patriotic songs in the park across from the White House—we'll miss him, now that he's gone into eclipse with his hero Nixon. And we'll miss those funny fellows who used to turn up to preach a sermon for select White House congregations, preachers such as Rabbi Louis Finkelstein of New York, who once declared passionately, "The finger of God pointed to Richard Milhous Nixon, giving him the vision and the wisdom to save the world and civilization."

But while these gauche clergymen were amusing us, something more ominous in the way of a (continued on page 118)Elmer Gantry(continued from page 97) religious movement was beginning to take place. It may increase its pace under the Administration of Gerald Ford, for Ford, unlike Nixon, looks on religion as more than a political gimmick. Ford actually thinks God talks to him. Moreover, he is surrounded by men who encourage him to think he is a vessel of the Almighty.

One of Ford's closest spiritual coaches is the evangelist Reverend Billy Zeoli of Grand Rapids, Michigan, who is also sometimes a traveling chaplain for athletic teams and a red-hot in such activities as Youth for Christ. Every week, Zeoli sends Ford a written pep talk and suggested prayer. One of his memos suggested that the President pray: "My Dear God, why don't You just come and sit down in this chair and tell me what to do?"

The unsettling truth is that Ford probably believes God takes that chair and gives that advice. When Ford went on television to tell a stunned nation that he was going to pardon the biggest crook since Dillinger, he flatly confessed that he had taken directions from God, not the Constitution. He said, "The Constitution is the supreme law of our land and it governs our actions as citizens. Only the laws of God, which govern our consciences, are superior to it." So, Ford—who said that he was acting "not as President but as a humble servant of God"—followed what his poor old scrambled U of M football brain told him were holy orders and pardoned the unindicted coconspirator.

It was a predictable move. Eleven days earlier, in a press conference, Ford had said that he had "asked for prayers for guidance" on what to do about the pardon. Right then, we should have known Nixon was home free. Any time a politician starts laying things at heaven's gate, you can expect the worst.

In his very first utterance as President—an inaugural speech of only about 850 words—Ford mentioned prayer four times and God four times, which by modern Presidential standards was an incredible gush of piety. At the forefront of the movement, it's plain, stands a zealot.

The movement I'm talking about was correctly described by one magazine (though with no apparent awareness of the dangerous qualities of the phenomenon) as "an intricate web of groups and individuals—almost an underground network—stretching well across religious and political boundaries, all of them part of a small but growing spiritual renaissance in Washington."

The prayer groups, springing up like toadstools all over Washington, have been well publicized. From the President to the leaders of Congress to the mandarins of the Pentagon, in every pew of the bureaucracy and the Federal legislature, the big boys and little boys are falling on their knees to ask God's guidance in their plundering of the republic.

The most notorious of the prayer groups is the one in which Ford participates (a very intimate group that includes only ex–Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, House Minority Leader John J. Rhodes and Congressman Albert H. Quie) and the one on Capitol Hill that allegedly converted ex–White House hatchet man Charles Colson before he toddled off to prison.

But there are literally hundreds of other knots of prayerful folks in Government, all loosely tied together in an eerie fashion through something informally called The Fellowship. Usually it is not even spelled with capital letters. It gets its name from the fact that many of its leaders are somehow associated with the Fellowship Foundation and its predecessor, the International Christian Leadership, and often meet at Fellowship House, which has for years been headquarters for the I.C.L.

The I.C.L. has sponsored the annual glorification of the status quo, the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, for the past 21 years. It has become a command-appearance occurrence, to which about 3000 of the most powerful men, including most of the Cabinet, members of the Supreme Court and the cream of big business go each year. The I.C.L. and the Fellowship Foundation have also helped organize hundreds of mayors', governors' and businessmen's prayer groups across the land.

The Fellowship Foundation gets its impetus and its financial support from a largely anonymous group of wealthy businessmen, conservative politicians and conservative clergymen who are interested in promoting a civil religion that smothers political dissent and homogenizes social protest.

That's apparently what the big prayer revival in Washington is aiming at: a revival of the religio-political trance of the Fifties, when the 11th Commandment was "Thou shalt not criticize thy leaders or thy fatherland." The hysterical anti-communism of the McCarthy-Eisenhower era coincided, not by accident, with a religious revival that saw the rise of political chaplains such as Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, Billy Graham and Billy James Hargis, who preached the right-ness of controlling the country in the name of Christian Corporate Profit, and, if war should come, killing a million Commies for Christ. The Fifties were the golden era of political Christianity, an era, as one scholar noted at the end of the decade, that was "marked by an extraordinarily large component of pious utilitarianism in which religion has been made ulterior to almost every conceivable human need, from nationalism and free enterprise to business success and 'praying your fat away.' "

That old-time religion is coming back. To the religious establishment of Washington—that is, to men such as Dr. Edward L. R. Elson, chaplain of the U. S. Senate and Eisenhower's former pastor (he baptized Ike shortly after he went into the White House in 1953)—the rebirth of the Fifties means a turning away from the militant activism of the Sixties, when, as Dr. Elson remembers, "too many clergymen substituted grabbing a placard and getting out on the streets for praying. They should have been sitting in their studies and poring over books and producing a message for the people, but instead they were out politicizing the church." But now, says Dr. Elson, in the trumpeting voice with which he summons God's blessings upon the Senate each morning, "We are into the Seventies and religious people feel there's been an empty space, there's been a need for the transcendent, for God. I think it's been here for the past two years, but it's becoming more and more intense. It's very clear that we are in the incipient stages, if not in the full flush of a new spiritual awakening, the most impressive I've seen in the 28 years I've been in Washington."

Not everyone in Washington rejoices at this development. Some agree with Congressman John Brademas, who is active in the Methodist Church but avoids the political prayer groups around the House of Representatives because he has "reservations about the dangers of religion being used to reinforce the state."

If the watering down of dissent is one of the objectives of the religious movement, the question is: How far would the leaders of the movement go to squelch opposition? The answer has not clearly surfaced as yet in the United States, although there have been suggestive moments. As when, at a massive revival meeting in Knoxville a few years ago, Nixon strode onstage while a 5500-voice choir sang, "How great Thou art! How great Thou art!" and the Reverend Billy Graham exhorted the crowd, "I'm for change, but the Bible teaches us to obey authority"; and then, when some dissenters on the fringe of the crowd began to chant, "Peace now, peace now," a claque of good Christians who were worked up with patriotic piety threatened to beat the shit out of them.

Nixon and Graham were always a pretty effective bully-boy team. At a Charlotte rally to honor Graham at which Nixon spoke, the crowd was "sanitized" by bouncers who moved through the audience, picking out people wearing Mod clothes and with longish hair and throwing them out in a style that a Federal judge later described as "a wholesale assault upon the civil rights and liberties of numerous citizens." Nixon personally (continued on page 160)Elmer Gantry(continued from page 118) thanked the chief bouncer "and the men you recruited."

That sort of violent demonstration of allegiance to the national religion is still, as yet, a sometime thing in the United States; but in other countries where some of the same organizations are at work—supported by the same U. S. dollars—suppression in the name of patriotic godliness has become a real burden. Few leaders of The Fellowship acknowledge this publicly. One who does is Wesley Michaelson, legislative assistant to Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon. Both Hatfield and Michaelson have been among Washington's most vigorous Christian-political evangelists and were for years before the present movement took off. They are, however, mavericks. They believe that there is a dangerous and essentially un-Christian strain in some of the present revival. As Michaelson puts it: "The latent assumption is that the solution to political problems is to get people converted and committed to one another. [But] overseas some of The Fellowship people are the same generals who carry out martial law."

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Campus Crusade for Christ International has sponsored a number of evangelical events in Korea in recent years, with the help of such church luminaries as Billy Graham. South Korea is run by one of the most brutal dictatorships in the Orient. Preachers who oppose the government are clapped in jail. William R. Bright, the California businessman who is president of Campus Crusade, publicly announced his support of these jailings on the grounds that if dissent were allowed, the government would be in danger. The only thing that matters, said Bright, is that "in no country in the world, including the U. S., is there more freedom to talk about Jesus Christ than in South Korea." Imprisonment to suppress religious freedom is wrong, he conceded, but imprisonment to suppress political freedom is OK.

Campus Crusade has close ties with the organizations that now dominate the religious scene in Washington and has at times pushed its influence into the White House. Julie Nixon Eisenhower and a number of Congressional wives meet periodically for Bible study at the home of Mrs. George Page, who is affiliated with the national Campus Crusade for Christ. (Some of Washington's best snoops, including columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, have spread the rumor that it was the prayerful Julie, always a favorite of Ford's, who got to him at a moment when he was feeling Christlike and persuaded him to speed up the pardon.)

C.C.C.I. president Bright's wife, Vonette Bright, cofounder of C.C.C.I., received the Churchwoman of the Year award from Religious Heritage of America in 1973. Religious Heritage's president is Chicago insurance man W. Clement Stone, whose $4,000,000 contribution to Nixon also made him the biggest supporter of God's chosen one. Nixon got R.H.A's Churchman of the Year award in 1970. George Romney in 1969.

Although neither Campus Crusade nor Religious Heritage has advocated violent suppression of sin and dissent, they have worked closely with our Government in propaganda campaigns. When dissent was really busting out all over in 1970, Religious Heritage of America's Progress Report (signed by Stone and by Wallace E. Johnson, president of Holiday Inns of America as well as chairman of R.H.A.'s executive committee) noted: "President Nixon has asked Religious Heritage of America to undertake a program which would ease tensions in our nation and unify Americans. R.H.A. is embarked on a ten-point program to achieve that." The crusade would include a press campaign, bumper stickers (I Love America), an advertising blitz through the Advertising Council of America ("Selling America to Americans") and a TV series entitled The Miracle of America, starring Pat Boone.

These aren't mom-and-pop store owners who are financing such affairs. The R.H.A. newsletter chirped, "Our thanks to Eddy Scurlock (chairman of Scurlock Oil Company, Houston) for obtaining the loan of a Learjet to fly Pat Boone from Las Vegas to Washington so Pat could sing the national anthem at the religious service. And a big thanks to Harry Smith, Big 3 Industries, Houston, for loaning [sic] the plane. Harold McNaughton, Palmdale, California, was the first to come through with a $1000 gift to help pay the hotel bill.... Bless you, Harold."

Don't shrug off R.H.A. as a business-suited equivalent of the D.A.R., either. Since R.H.A. was launched 24 years ago—"to deepen our faith in a power behind creation, to which we all feel a sense of awareness and responsibility, as an antidote to communism"—it has lured most of our biggest industrial and political big shots to come panting for its awards, signifying their piety. There is a deep right-wing tinge to this organization, but liberals and moderates in public life are afraid not to join its activities. Along with rightists such as Nixon and Francis Cardinal Spellman, its hallelujah-for-America festivities have also drawn the likes of R. Sargent Shriver and Arthur Goldberg (despite a memo to him from a friend, warning that he might find himself "being used by right-wing extremists when [you act] as honorary chairman of the Washington Pilgrimage of R.H.A."), along with pillars of Americanism such as Cecil B. De Mille, Lawrence Welk and Paul Harvey.

The turnout of moneyed opinion shapers at R.H.A.'s annual America Awards Banquet likes to hear such messages as that brought by Dr. Ernest L. Wilkinson, past president of Brigham Young University. He pointed out that all our troubles started in this country with President Franklin Roosevelt, when we strayed "from government by divine will and relied more on government by human intellect"—by which he meant leaders who told us "we must abandon our former principles in order to 'help the poor,' "protect minorities,' 'provide for social justice' and promote the general welfare.' " As a result, "we are being plagued by a creeping cancer of moral decay."

Does an outfit like R.H.A. have clout? It was largely responsible for persuading Congress to stick the phrase "under God " into the Pledge of Allegiance, and any group that can pull off an abomination like that is capable of anything.

The most celebrated religious bonfire in Washington is fueled by the Fellowship Foundation. The Fellowship, too, has clout of a disturbing sort. For example, when a swarm of Vietnam veterans showed up in Washington last year to lobby for more veterans' benefits and for amnesty for draft dodgers, they wanted to stage a four-day camp-in on the Mall. But the National Park Service refused to give them a permit. At the very same time that the vets were being shooed away, an outfit called Christ Is the Answer showed up in Washington and asked permission to throw up two circus-size tents and park their caravan of double-tandem trucks, covered with evangelistic messages, right on the Mall, one tent right next to the Washington Monument and the other next to the Smithsonian museum. They wanted to hold a monthlong revival. The Park Service at first turned them down, too, claiming that the Constitution frowned on using Federal land for church work. But after Christ Is the Answer officials met with the Senators who belong to the Fellowship Foundation, the Park Service changed its mind and let them set up their tents and preach against dissenting vets, against abortion, against queers and against dirty magazines.

The Fellowship Foundation owes most of its present notoriety to the fact that its chief apostles allegedly converted Charles Colson to Christianity and gave his dirty-tricks lieutenant, Egil "Bud" Krogh, Jr., a prayerful send-off before he went to jail for his part in the burglary of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office. The Fellowship Foundation's long-term basis for fame is that it has taken over much of the work of its predecessor, the I.C.L.

To understand the dangerous side of the current religious movement, one should go back to the beginnings of the I.C.L. in Seattle in 1935. Seattle was a center of labor radicalism in those days and the local businessmen were afraid it would flame up in widespread strikes. The business community launched I.C.L. under the guidance of Abraham Vereide, a vain, arrogant, pious fellow who, before arriving in Seattle, was an itinerant Methodist preacher in Montana who liked to strut around with a six-shooter in one hand and a Bible in the other. Like many immigrants (Vereide was a native of Norway), he was determined to be more patriotic than the native-born. Later he would boast that he "was led to take the offensive against corrupt, anti-American forces that were infecting his community. The heart of a viking immigrant was the womb in which I.C.L. was conceived by God."

So successful was Vereide in Seattle that he was persuaded in the Forties to take his viking heart and his bag of godly tricks to the nation's capital, where conservative politicians and industrialists helped him launch the I.C.L. Once again, the purpose was to develop an atmosphere that protected the status quo and retarded dissent. By the Fifties, he was going great guns.

As in Seattle, the Devil in Washington was portrayed as "anti-American forces," or communism. It fitted in perfectly with the spirit of the Fifties, with the spirit of McCarthyism, with the spirit of Eisenhower's big-business theology. It was the era in which godliness and anticommunism were one and anticommunism and proestablishmentarianism were one.

In 1953. Vereide and his big-business backers—with a special assist from hotel magnate Conrad Hilton—persuaded Eisenhower to establish the National Prayer Breakfast under the auspices of Vereide's I.C.L. Billy Graham became a fixture at it and for the next 15 years he delivered a sermon at the annual event.

Among the officials of the I.C.L. in the Fifties and Sixties were men such as John C. Broger, director of the Armed Forces Information and Education Directorate at the Pentagon. Broger, who was also a special advisor to Admiral Arthur Radford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Fifties, was the fellow who later authorized the broadcast to U. S. troops overseas of a religious series prepared by the notorious bigot and rabble rouser Gerald L. K. Smith.

Sometimes the I.C.L. appears to have been no more than a propaganda arm of the Pentagon. It produced the film Militant Liberty, which was conceived by Broger and produced by Frank B. Fuhr as part of the I.C.L.'s "world-wide spiritual offensive" against communism. It was adopted by the Department of Defense for its training program.

At the height of the Vietnam war, the National Prayer Breakfast was one of the White House's most important podia for selling the war as a sacred venture. Graham told one of the breakfasts that "there are those who have tried to reduce Christ to the level of a genial and innocuous appeaser; but Jesus said, 'You are wrong—I have come as a fire setter and a sword wielder.' " L.B.J. liked that a lot.

There has always been a strong military tone to the National Prayer Breakfasts. Not only have the U. S. Army Chorus and Navy Sea Chanters been on hand for the hymn singing, not only have admirals and generals been there to deliver the prayers and addresses, not only have the lay ministers chosen blood-and-guts topics for their sermons but, at a more practical level of brainwashing, the breakfasts have often been broadcast to hundreds of military bases, where many thousands of military personnel convened for simultaneous prayer exercises. A few years ago, the prayer breakfast was broadcast to 1400 military bases around the world, touching the minds of 200,000 Servicemen. Members of the President's Cabinet will often give sermons at the breakfasts. Congressional leaders will often tell how God influenced their lives. But needless to say, no equal time for agnostics on the program: no atheists. The thousands of military personnel who tuned in must have got the idea that all their leaders, bathed in a warm cocoon of certitude, thought Christianity was the cat's meow. There was no suggestion that many of our leaders are paralyzed by honest doubts and dark cosmic fears about their own and the nation's future. America, like its flag, seemed to snap smartly in the breeze.

The I.C.L./Fellowship Foundation spends nearly a half million dollars a year not only on the National Prayer Breakfast but also to support hundreds of mayors' prayer breakfasts and governors' prayer breakfasts and professional-athletes' prayer breakfasts and campus prayer breakfasts. It's uplift all the way. Former New York Yankee star Bobby Richardson became a representative of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and his pitch was just super: "God's Hall of Fame is for eternity." Allen Morris, the Miami millionaire realtor who helped organize the first Orange Bowl prayer breakfast in 1973, contributed to an organizers' handbook the advice that at every breakfast God should be thanked for "the blessings of living in America, of free enterprise."

At the Pentagon, there are a dozen or more prayer breakfasts each week for everyone from clerks to brass (but no radical mixing of ranks); one of these sessions, according to The New York Times religion editor, Edward B. Fiske, takes place at 6:30 A.M. every other Tuesday, when "before concentrating on matters of war and peace, a dozen admirals and generals assemble in the Secretary of the Army's private dining room at the Pentagon for coffee, doughnuts and 90 minutes of Bible study."

This is nothing new, of course. When Laird went in as Secretary of Defense, he summoned the top-ranking military chaplain and asked if the Pentagon had a prayer room. He was informed that there were dozens of rooms already in ad hoc use for prayer and worship, but none specifically designated as a prayer room. "Build one," he ordered, and it was done. Generals who were about to send more bombers into the North Vietnamese air to kill nonbelievers regularly went to Laird's Meditation Room for a spiritual briefing ahead of time.

Out of the Pentagon have come such zealots as General (four-star) Ralph E. Haines, Jr., who was in command of all U. S. Army land forces until he quit the Service in 1973, after receiving the Holy Spirit at a Full Gospel Business Men's Fellowship International meeting. He shucked his uniform with the declaration, "I would rather be a private in the army of the Lord than a general in the U. S. Army." Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference.

The Full Gospel Business Men's Fellowship International, which claims "His banner over us is love," has set out to alert every member of Congress, the Supreme Court Justices and the President to "the invasion of the green atheistic cancer of communism which has so stealthily extended its corrupt tentacles into virtually all areas of our national life" and that "a satanic minority are actually controlling our country." Judging from some of its literature, its idea of a satanic minority is anyone who participates in a protest against war or discrimination. One of the F.G.B.M.F.I.'s favorite pamphlets for proselytizing is a speech by the chairman of Acacia Mutual Life Insurance Company, who warns that "if communism were to prevail in this country—life insurance would fail!" That level of evangelism, the F.G.B.M.F.I, claims, has lured nine Senators and 23 Congressmen (including Ford when he was still in Congress) to its meetings. Most of them are leaders in the current prayer movement and The Fellowship.

As already indicated, the alliance of the military and the politico-religious movement in Washington is so close it looks like Thor has come into his own at last. Scratch a member of The Fellowship and you will almost invariably uncover a devout Christian who believes in international mass slaughter. The guiding power of the Senate Prayer Breakfast is Senator John Stennis, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. It was through Stennis' nomination that the Senate selected as its chaplain the Reverend Dr. Elson, a retired colonel in the U. S. Army Chaplain Corps. Elson is one of the guys Johnson sent to oversee the South Vietnam elections in 1967, as a way of laying a sheen of respectability on the dictatorship.

The Fellowship is always quoting somebody like Lieutenant General Willard S. Paul or Admiral Radford or General Matthew B. Ridgway to the effect that "the Spiritual Power of God is the answer to communism." For a long time, one of the I.C.L.'s vice-presidents was Lieutenant General M. H. Silverthorn, U.S.M.C. (Retired), who took time out from praising God to help put together the Victory in Vietnam Banquet Committee of America's Victory Force in 1968.

Religious Heritage of America has the same ties. Its award for Clergyman of the Year in 1974 went to Rear Admiral James W. Kelly, former Navy Chief of Chaplains. Colonel Paul H. Griffith, past national commander of the American Legion and former Assistant Secretary of Defense, was once R.H.A.'s president.

But putting aside the militaristic leanings of the prayer leaders, there remains their just plain thuggish attitude toward the general public. At the height of the Vietnam war, Stennis proclaimed, "Great Society programs with the billions they are gulping down should be relegated to the rear.... They should be secondary to the war." He put them secondary by voting against Medicare, the poverty program, urban-assistance funds, child-care programs, legal services for the poor, manpower training and food stamps.

Does that sort of voting record come from divine guidance? Stennis insists that he is in tune with God and that when a gunman shot him in the lung several months ago, he survived strictly because "a high hand" intervened on his behalf.

Stennis' counterpart as the most vigorous supporter of the House Prayer Breakfast was, until he left Congress this year, William Jennings Bryan Dorn of South Carolina. "I like to think that when I come out of there," said Dorn, "I am a little more tolerant and sweeter to people." In fact, his voting record shows that he would go to any extreme to cast a vote against the general public, especially if the vote would reach down and improve the condition of the poor and neglected.

The Congressional prayer groups are packed with fellows like that—Dixiecrat scribes and Republican pharisees. The day of the Senate Prayer Breakfast "is the best day of the week," brightly beams Senator Jennings Randolph, the portly fellow from West Virginia. "At the end, when we join our hands in prayer, you can feel the grips tightening. You sense that we are going out strengthened." Strengthened for what? When Randolph first went to Congress more than a quarter of a century ago, he was a vigorous New Dealer and was voted by his colleagues the member who did most for his constituents. Nowadays, he works mostly for the interests of coal-mine owners and oil companies. After 78 men were killed in an explosion in Consol's number-nine mine at Farmington, there was a strong movement on Capitol Hill, a movement eventually successful, to write an effective coal-mine-safety law; Randolph, participating in what The New York Times called a "skulking maneuver" directed by the National Coal Association, tried his best to gut the reform legislation. What does this man pray for when he holds the hands of his colleagues at the weekly breakfast?

The I.C.L./Fellowship Foundation does not tell whom it gets its money from; it tries to keep that a secret. But it is known that some of The Fellowship's more generous support has come from outfits such as the Eli Lilly Endowment and the Pew Memorial Trust (Sun Oil Company money), both of which have helped keep alive such right-wing groups as the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade, Truth About Cuba Committee and the All-American Conference to Combat Communism, organizations whose primary purpose is to keep Americans shaped into rigid political orthodoxy and to spread the Gospel that "un-Americanism" is the most venal of all sins.

The Fellowship Foundation lives from the largess of such businessmen as that nameless executive (presumably with an oil company) who is listed in its 1973 financial statement as having donated the royalties to be derived from certain mineral rights located in the continental shelf of Australia. Four months later, the rights were sold (probably back to the donor; that kind of "charitable" shuffle is common in the oil industry) for $360,000.

The Fellowship now has its eye on a $3,500,000 estate—its 20 acres being one of the last big hunks of private real estate in the center of Washington, D.C.

If the deal goes through, this estate will be general headquarters for the national prayer and politico-Christian movement to be headed, apparently, by Senator Harold Hughes, who dropped out of the Senate in January 1975. Hughes recently conceded that "we've been praying for it [the mansion]. We've asked the Lord to give it to us. If he does, we will consider that several miracles have taken place." This is the kind of sanctimonious hyperbole one must expect; actually, The Fellowship hasn't been asking the Lord for the mansion nearly so much as it has been asking its fat-cat supporters, and if they come through it will be no miracle, for money flows easily in the trough of these pious patriots.

In the late Sixties, The Fellowship's tone underwent a subtle change. Partly, this was because the godly Vereide went to his heavenly reward in 1969. Partly, it was because, with Nixon, R.H.A.'s 1970 Churchman of the Year, going soft on international Communists, the religious crowd felt it expedient to begin tuning down the old hard line. Anyway, it was no longer so fashionable. The wild anticommunism of the Fifties no longer sold so well: Witness the decline of Dr. Carl McIntire, who still preached a rabidly anti-Communist line but could muster only a handful of supporters for his marches in support of Nixon's war policy. The prayer leaders on Capitol Hill felt their image slipping: Their ranks were too heavy with the likes of the late Congressman James B. Utt of Orange County, California (honorary doctorate from Bob Jones University). "Frankly," said the Congressman who headed the prayer movement in the late Sixties but who wants to remain anonymous for obvious reasons, "we had a pretty lousy reputation. Most of the people who showed up for the prayer breakfasts were hard rightwingers, Elks Club types. After they said a prayer, you almost expected them to yell, 'OK, bring on the girls!' I decided it was time to put a different image on the group, so I began getting people like Mo Udall to come around."

It paid off. The reputation of the Capitol Hill prayer groups did improve. They seemed slicker, more contemporary, more sophisticated—or slightly more. The God they invoked was still a capitalist god, He still loathed communism, He still sniffed at dissenters, He still vomited on military deserters. But He was also more decorous. He was now a more acceptable God, in that He wore a vest and, like most high-class lobbyists around town, had a spastic colon for which He drank milk regularly.

Vereide's mantle fell on the shoulders of Douglas Coe, who had been an assistant to Vereide since 1959. Under Coe, politico-Christianity on Capitol Hill has been reduced to the roll of a Welcome Wagon. Criticism is verboten. It is a Christianity with all the character and transparency of Saran Wrap, fitting neatly and sanitarily over any bowl of political-corporate corruption. Odor is reduced to a minimum. The essential mission of The Fellowship remained what it had been under Vereide, to emphasize the "personal" immorality of things like coveting your neighbor's wife and de-emphasize the public immorality of stealing elections.

So, naturally, it was just the kind of fellowship to embrace Krogh and Colson.

Colson says he turned, or began turning, to Christianity in March 1973, when, having done what he could to blacken the reputation of Ellsberg and hundreds of other Americans on the "Enemies List" that he helped concoct, he became bored with life. The source of his conversion is significant. He claims that none other than Thomas L. Phillips, president of the Raytheon Company, started him up the sawdust trail. (Raytheon is one of the nation's biggest defense contractors.) One day, when he was visiting in Boston, he ran into Phillips, an old friend, and told him he was feeling low. "Try Christianity for a pickup," Phillips said, or something to that effect. Phillips urged him to put himself in the hands of Coe when he returned to Washington.

Coe processed Colson through three of the faithful—Senator Hughes, former Congressman Graham Purcell and Congressman Albert Quie. The processing entailed prayer meetings at which Hughes, Purcell and Quie prayed over Colson, sometimes wept over him, and brought him into The Fellowship by holding his hand and hugging him. Hughes is a great believer in body contact.

To say that the world was skeptical of Colson's intentions is putting it mildly. It was suggested that his conversion was prompted by everything from mental dehydration to a crafty effort to help Nixon. The skepticism was, of course, based mainly on the difficulty of believing such quick change could come to a man who was, as one editor noted, just basically rotten.

And the skepticism, as it turned out, was apparently justified. Hughes assured reporters that "this baby in Christ," as he called the hatchet man, would forthwith tell everything he knew about Watergate. But Colson's rebirth of candor didn't pan out. He refused to publicly admit in full detail his rascality, refused to implicate any other wrongdoers in the Watergate mess, refused to disavow his allegiance to the biggest crook of them all. The only thing he said he was sorry about was that the tapes had been released. When CBS interviewer Mike Wallace asked Colson (who was being accompanied by his spiritual keeper, Hughes) if he had tried to "make amends" for his more obnoxious actions, he said that he didn't think reform meant having "to go back and try to redo things … done in the past."' Furthermore, he denied having pulled most of the dirty tricks Wallace mentioned. "Well," said Wallace, no doubt voicing a common bafflement among 60 Minutes' viewers, "I confess you leave me somewhat bewildered, then, as to the meaning of your faith." And on another occasion, when a Newsweek reporter tried to pin Colson down on what his new faith meant in practical terms, he turned the question away with the kind of fluffy response that is typical of The Fellowship: "Oh, it would take about a half hour or more to explain it all. Peace. Peace. Serenity. It is hard to explain."

It is clear that for such men as Colson and, indeed, for men at his level of Government who are charged not with crimes but only with antisocial mischief, The Fellowship serves beautifully as a kind of Lighthouse Mission for the Powerful, where they can get a free bowl of good publicity and a deloused cot on which to sleep off their latest, if not their last, power drunk.

Why would a fellow like Hughes want to quit the Senate to become some sort of high priest in an outfit like that? He is no Dorn or Randolph or Stennis. He is a decent man, judging from his voting record. Why would he want to act as a paid front for this crowd? And what exactly will his duties be when he leaves the Senate and joins The Fellowship professionally?

At this point, such questions disappear down a black alley. Hughes has intentionally built a mystery: "I have no fully structural outline of the initiatives I will take in this new work, but the arrangement I have with the two foundations [Fellowship and I.C.L.] leaves me almost unlimited freedom to proceed in whatever creative direction I consider best."

It is obvious that one of his duties, whether he interprets them that way or not, will be to serve as a pious envoy for top-drawer rascals in need of a patina of repentance. It is also probable that he will help lead the gullible Christians of America away from thinking about things like crooked corporations and into thinking about alcoholism, a nice diversion. Hughes is a veteran Bible thumper on the I-was-a-drunk theme: "I was beaten to my knees in despair [by alcoholism]! I cried out to God, and from that moment my life changed!" he roared at the 1974 National Prayer Breakfast audience, bringing them to their feet with cheers and thunderous applause, thrilled at the spectacle of this battered Manolete twirling his scarlet cape right over the horns of that old devil, demon rum.

Give him credit for full sincerity; the question remains, is that all he hopes to get out of turning to the lay ministry—just a chance to beat his breast? Which, after all, is something he had been doing on the side (for money) during his Senate career. Isn't he cooking up something else on God's back burner?

A reasonable guess is, yes, he is going to use his lay ministry as a launching pad for the Presidency. He wouldn't be the first. William Jennings Bryan, like Hughes, dropped out of Congress and began making himself available for a Presidential nomination by lecturing all over the country: also like Hughes. Bryan the politician was hard to differentiate from Bryan the evangelist. As a politician, he was always spouting Scripture, always couching his political debates in Biblical analogies and Biblical phraseology. It was no accident that Bryan's most famous oratorical flourish—"You shall not press down upon the brow of labor the crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!"—sounded like something God might have bellowed from a dark cloud over Golgotha.

It worked for Bryan. The hayseeds, the grass-roots Christians, the urban rock-ribbers. the populistic plain-folk salt-of-the-earth types everywhere loved this pseudoprophetic approach to politics and managed to swing a Democratic Presidential nomination for him three times. Unfortunately for Bryan, there weren't enough God-fearing folks to put him in the White House.

Hughes, like Bryan, has a big chest and a big gut and a booming voice; like Bryan, he is ardently antiliquor; like Bryan, he seems to inspire confidence in that mythical creature, the "little man." Hughes's physical and intellectual appeal on the evangelical circuit was accurately forecast by the greatest of boondocks columnists, L. T. Anderson: "Hughes looks like an evangelist. It is easy to picture him in a cowboy hat. If Hughes had Colson's sins and a name like Jimmy Tom, there would be no limit to what he could accomplish, even in a crowded field."

Not only is he an ex-drunk, he is also an ex-football player, an ex-truck driver, an ex-governor of a foursquare state (Iowa) and a lot of other exes that add up to good colorful political copy. He is also an ex-hawk. Nowadays, he sounds as pacific as the dove that settled on John the Baptist's head. He claims that if he were President and we were attacked by the Russians, he would not retaliate atomically. But never forget that this very canny, practical Christian supported the war in Vietnam until very late in the game.

Hughes was a hard-line supporter of Johnson's Vietnam policy until Johnson's last year in office, at which time it hardly took an abundance of either courage or wisdom to change position. What Hughes's army of liberal admirers tends to forget today is that in 1965, it was none other than its hero who helped recruit support for the war by putting together a governors' tour of Vietnam: this was the tour on which Romney later claimed he was brainwashed. Hughes's fans also conveniently forget that he didn't change his position on the war until his most important fund raiser, an Iowa department-store owner, told him to either drop his hawkishness or get somebody else to collect money for his campaign. All of a sudden, Hughes had a vision of peace.

Like most of Hughes's visions, this one obviously had a practical side. And it is reasonable to assume that his new evangelism has a practical side, too. Like giving him a powerful political base from which to launch a Presidential campaign. Hughes was talking about entering the ministry in 1968. when his third term as Iowa's governor would end, but Bobby Kennedy persuaded him to run for the Senate instead. Presumably, he could now be talked into disrupting his ministry to run for the Presidency. Hughes does not pretend he is absolutely leaving politics forever, come what will. Quite the contrary. In just about every interview he has had in recent months, he has left the impression that "if God calls," he will try for the Presidency.

What could be sweeter and neater? Here he will have a built-in campaign organization stretching into every nook and cranny in the nation: prayer groups on every major campus, prayer groups in every state legislature, prayer groups in every major businessmen's organization, prayer groups in Congress—all bubbling with people who, whatever their party affiliation, would be only too eager to get out and ring doorbells or pass the hat around the corporation board room for their man of God, and, best of all, much of it being done with tax-exempt dollars. God will provide.

One can safely predict that a solid front man like Hughes would win the financial support of Christers such as Raytheon's Phillips: Spyros S. Skouras, chairman of Prudential–Grace Lines; William J. Quinn, chairman of Chicago, Milwaukee. St. Paul and Pacific Railroad Company: innkeeper J. Willard Marriott (chief backer of Honor America Day—Billy Graham's idea); W. Clement Stone; and an assortment of oilmen—a group whose enthusiasm has been so evident in Washington's spiritual revival in recent years.

What do they hope to benefit from backing a politician on a God kick? One of two things. The most cynical of the two possibilities is that they could elevate Hughes to the Democratic nomination with the reasonable expectation that he would be an easy candidate for a Republican like Ford to knock off. After all, Ford has his own prayer-group background; Hughes couldn't upstage him as an anointed of God. Furthermore, Hughes has a kookie side to his religion—or a side that most people would consider kookie—and that would be easy to ridicule. Wait till square America learns that Hughes believes he talked to his dead brother through a medium. Wait till square America learns that Hughes believes in extrasensory perception. It would titter all the way to the ballot box.

The second possibility to explain the support of the establishment for Hughes is that whether or not he runs for President, he will be the most eloquent fellow it could possibly recruit for spreading the word that America is blessed, take it as it stands, forgiving corporate and political sins, looking away from the fact that Exxon is stealing us blind and toward the bliss of the sweet by-and-by. Hughes's version of Christianity is not likely to upset the profits of Tenneco and Mobil and Lockheed. He will preach that we are a kind and generous people, that we are basically a churchgoing, God-fearing people, that we want to live a better life—just like Mobil's ads say in The New York Times. It is the kind of ministry that blunts sympathy for the torch and the dissident march. As the black football player from Baylor told Nixon and Graham at their Knoxville political revival: "I'd be the most militant man in the country today, if I hadn't found Jesus."

Poor old Hughes sounds like he's already being suckered into position. "God can and will use Watergate," he says, "as a rebirth of this nation."

Why Watergate? Why not Vietnam? Or the Alaska Pipeline? Why not the Lake Superior pollution? Or Four Corners? Why not the oil companies' profits? Why has God decided to use Watergate?

Can't God see the big picture?

Whether or not the piety of Washington is sincere or false makes no difference, of course, except as it helps win support across the nation for phony programs and harmful politicians. In 1968, Graham's all-but-offcial endorsement of Nixon was used constantly in TV campaign commercials that helped sew up the South solidly for Nixon. Graham, after all, is the Baplists' most admired ballyhooer, and there are about 25,000,000 Baptists in this country. In his inaugural prayer over Nixon, Graham thanked God for helping "in the selection of our leadership." And after that, he stuck so close to Nixon that he won the unwelcome title The Chaplain of Watergate. Graham was, many of his critics feel, pressing quietly for the unofficial establishment of a national religion, a civil religion, a religion that makes no demands on its political leaders, a religion that was summed up very neatly by Billy: "We should work for peace, but all we can really do is patch things up, because the real war is in man's own heart. Only when Christ comes again will the lion lie down with the lamb and the little white children of Alabama walk hand in hand with the little black children."

As early as 1970, knowledgeable religion writers were reporting that Graham and other like-minded Christers both in and out of Washington were hoping to have an interdenominational movement under way by 1973, molding together the 25,000,000 Baptists with 15,000,000 other conservative Protestants—a potential wave of 40,000,000 prayers and votes that would, indeed, the hard for dissidents and liberals to swim against. The distractions of Watergate interfered with that, disrupting its crucial base in Washington, but now the momentum could be redeveloped.

Ironically, the only voices—few, indeed—heard speaking against the establishment of this civil religion come not from the places you might expect: not from the irreligious, that is. They apparently aren't aware of what's up. The few voices of protest come mostly from within the professional religions movement, and mostly from mavericks who have little or no following. Even more ironically, the most eloquent voice of warning comes from dead center in the political-evangelist movement, from Senator Mark Hatfield, who was Graham's personal choice for the Vice-Presidential spot on the 1968 Republican ticket.

Hatfield has warned "how dangerous it is to merge our piety with patriotism," a merger that results in the belief "that God has blessed and has chosen America as He did Israel: that [George] Washington was like Moses, leading the people out of bondage into a new land; and that the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence (and remember their authors were mostly deists) were written after inspired prayer meetings." Hatfield became so upset at what he feared was a drift toward a civil religion that he once contemplated making a public statement denouncing the National Prayer Breakfasts. Instead of doing that, however, he accepted an invitation to address the N.P.B., where he told the shocked gathering. "We sit here today as the wealthy and the powerful. But let us not forget that those who follow Christ will more often find themselves not with comfortable majorities, but with miserable minorities."

His reception was noticeably chilly.