The Astonishing Wrongs of the New Moral Right

On the morning of December 19, 1978, a small group of men and women representing various factions within the disorganized, radical far-right wing of American politics met in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area with representatives of America's right-wing religious fundamentalists.

The meeting was not announced to the public and it went unreported by the press. The details remained a carefully guarded secret for months afterward. But the convocation that morning was historic. It marked the first occasion in the nation's history when political and religious leaders officially joined forces not just to achieve a temporary political goal under the banner of Christian social justice but to restructure the entire framework of American society to fit a set of rigid, doctrinaire political and religious beliefs.

A month before the meeting, a loose coalition of right-wing, single-issue political and religious groups had defeated two United States Senators, Thomas McIntyre of New Hampshire and Dick Clark of Iowa. That was the first national political success the far right had tasted since its take-over of the 1964 Republican National Convention. To the persons present that December morning in 1978, it appeared urgent that this sudden electoral clout be translated into some form of permanent organization or written agreement that would bind with a bold plan of political action all of the disparate, contentious political and religious units of the American right wing.

It is said that the mood of the meeting reflected that feeling of urgency. The political ideologues present knew that for the first time in history, they had the chance to influence a potentially enormous constituency--the followers of the religious fundamentalists. If the right were ever to gain political power in the United States, it would have to take control of that constituency and exploit it. There were just too many fundamentalist votes out there to let them slip away.

Among those present at the meeting, according to most reports, were Connie Marshner, director of the Family Policy Division of the Free Congress Research and Education Foundation--an affiliate of the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress; Gary Potter, president of the Catholics for Christian Political Action; JoAnn Gasper, editor of the monthly publication Right Woman; William Stanmeyer, the attorney in whose offices the meeting was held; Warren Richardson, a Washington lobbyist for the Reverend Jerry Falwell's politically active Moral Majority; Bill Rhatican, a public-relations advisor on retainer to Moral Majority; and the Reverend Robert Billings, president of the National Christian Action Coalition and executive director of Moral Majority.

While a stated purpose of the convocation had been to help Billings and Moral Majority prepare for the American political arena, the real reason behind the Washington meeting was far more pragmatic and potentially ominous than just dispensing sympathetic advice to a politically naïve preacher. The actual purpose of the meeting was to draft a piece of legislation that would address the grievances of groups like Moral Majority while articulating the theories and concepts of government that were supported by America's political far right. The participants agreed to title their legislation the Family Protection Act and planned to have it introduced in Congress by right-wing Senators and Representatives. The legislation would reflect the future of America as envisioned by the right-wing ideologues and Christian fundamentalists at the meeting, and its provisions would take aim at labor unions, the Equal Rights Amendment, abortion, pornography and homosexuals. Also, the Family Protection Act would provide the political and religious right with a seemingly invincible weapon--the "pro-family movement"--through which they could then realize any number of political-religious goals in the decade they had decided was destined to be their own: the Eighties.

In an interview several months after the meeting, Billings revealed exactly why the Family Protection Act was drafted and why an alliance was struck between America's fanatical religious and political right wings. The comments by Billings also disclosed the attitude of the far right toward the American public. "People want leadership," he said. "They don't know what to think themselves. They want to be told what to think by those of us here close to the front."

Potter, one of the leaders of the convocation, later described the nation he envisioned and the America reflected by the writers of the Family Protection Act. "When the Christian majority takes over this country," he said, "there will be no satanic churches, no more free distribution of pornography, no more abortion on demand and no more talk of rights for homosexuals. After the Christian majority takes control, pluralism will be seen as immoral and evil and the state will not permit anybody the right to practice evil."

If the words of Billings and Potter are taken at face value, the meaning of the convocation becomes clear. The Family Protection Act was only a statement of initial far-right intentions, a means to an end. Billings, Potter and the others had gathered that December morning to design a new moral society for the U.S.--and to define what would and would not be tolerated by the far-right dictatorship they envisioned.

•

For years, the American far right provided comic relief on the national political stage. Its leadership was characterized (continued on page 248)New Moral Right(continued from page 118) as a group of trigger-happy nuclear Cold Warriors whose specialty was fantasizing Communist conspiracies. Regularly, such right-wing luminaries as Robert Welch, Phyllis Schlafly and Robert Shelton would discover and then document Communist conspiracies behind such things as decisions of the United States Supreme Court or the levels of fluoride in the nation's water supply.

An isolated, contentious faction, the far right surfaced every election year, voiced a reactionary program for the country and was trounced again and again by moderate and progressive coalitions. Few people took it seriously. Its mildest critics suggested that its programs for America were simply fascist--and consequently more dangerous for the nation than even the wildest Communist conspiracies.

But the far right was nothing if not tenacious, and the most visible of its groups were also the most vociferous. Three organizations--the Ku Klux Klan, the John Birch Society and the Eagle Forum--have been around long enough to enter the folklore, if not the vernacular, of American political horror stories.

Any person who has attended a Klan rally--or even seen one dramatized--and listened to the Klan's depraved litany of hate for blacks, Jews, Roman Catholics and Communists does not have to be warned of the dangers inherent if that group were ever to hold a position of national power. The same is true of the rantings of the John Birch Society and the Eagle Forum. The Birchers distinguished themselves in the public mind by declaring that General Dwight Eisenhower, the 34th President of the United States, was an "active agent of the Communist conspiracy." While the tactics of the John Birch Society have yet to include cross burnings, its list of enemies of the United States is almost as exhaustive as the litany of the Klan.

The Eagle Forum is the most recent of the three groups to have attracted national attention. It served as an anti-Communist, anti-E.R.A. soapbox for the organization's leader, Phyllis Schlafly. In the spring of 1960, Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society, described Schlafly as a "very loyal member" of his organization. As Schlafly moved her Eagle Forum into the national political arena to attack the Equal Rights Amendment, she identified as enemies of America the same groups attacked by the Klan and the Birchers. But the extent to which she would go to expose Communist conspiracies had been established years earlier, during the Korean War. According to a former resident of Schlafly's home town of Alton, Illinois, she once mailed Christmas cards containing a poem about a woman who purchased an imported Polish ham in the United States. According to Schlafly, the money spent for the ham then went to a Russian munitions plant, and from there to Korea, where the woman's son was "killed in your kitchen by a canned Polish ham."

There were countless groups that did not share the extremism of the far right but from which it could anticipate support. The majority of those splinter groups considered themselves politically conservative rather than right wing. But they shared an unspoken hostility to those enemies the right regularly denounced--blacks, labor unions. Communists, immigrants and persons dependent on welfare. So the right could depend on support from, among others, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Young Americans for Freedom, the Defenders of American Liberties, America Wake Up, the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, the American Freedoms Foundation, the American Committee to Free Cuba, Americans for Law and Order, the American Conservative Union, the Conservative Society of America, the Legion for the Survival of Freedom, the Liberty Lobby, the Life Line Foundation, the National States Rights Party and the Women for Constitutional Government.

In more recent years, other organizations not only volunteered their support and services to the right wing but assumed responsibility for implementing its reactionary agenda for the country. These groups included the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, the National Conservative Political Action Committee, the Conservative Caucus, the Moral Majority, the Christian Voice, the Religious Round Table and the National Association for the Advancement of White People. Such organizations, while undeniably important politically, remained insufficient if the right were ever to make a major political move on the national scene.

That was proved to be the case in 1964, when the far right eagerly tested the nation's political waters. To have a national impact, the right's leaders knew they needed two political advantages: control of either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party and a solid, loyal bloc of votes within that party. Since most right-wing and conservative voters generally identified themselves as Republicans, the right took direct aim at the Republican Party. And in order to take control of it, the right-wing leaders carefully studied the national structure of the G.O.P. to locate within that structure the most vulnerable geographical region from which to launch a move.

For over 100 years, the Republican Party in the Deep South was a political anomaly. Those were the years of the "Solid South Democrats," and Dixie was the land of "Yellow Dog Democrats" who continued to blame Reconstruction and the Great Depression on the party of Lincoln and Herbert Hoover. There was a Republican Party present in the South, but its leadership was, if not moribund, at least only titular. The national Republican Party, believing it would never win an election in the South, tolerated as rather decent eccentrics the polite Southern Republicans who appeared every four years for national party conventions. But the party still granted those delegates votes.

Within the agenda of the right wing, the South would be the foothold. It would take Dixie away from the polite, addled Republican leadership and drive a wedge through the national Republican Party with votes from Southern delegates. All that was needed was a bit of luck.

In 1960, the right's prayers were answered. That year, the once-solid South of the Democrats fractured. Rather than cast their votes for a Roman Catholic, Southern Protestant Democrats bolted the party as they had done in the racist Dixiecrat movement of 1948. As the far right studied the 1960 fracture, it realized there were two issues it could successfully exploit--the South's religious bigotry and the virulent racism that was surfacing as a political response to the early days of the Southern civil rights movement.

Exploiting the convulsive racial situation in Dixie proved to be a gold mine for the right wing. The old-line Republican leadership was discarded and replaced by right-wingers. Southern Democrats were encouraged to join a party that had not "betrayed" them on the issue of civil rights. The right's candidate for President, Barry Goldwater, was said to be a man who would have states rights at the top of his list of priorities. And few Deep South Democrats were left unaffected by far-right attacks--in the name of the national Republican Party--on the United States Supreme Court and its 1954 school-desegregation decision. By 1964, the right wing of the Republican Party was prepared to take over the San Francisco Republican Convention with its own "solid South."

Interestingly, years later, on a December morning in Washington, those same tactics would be recalled by participants in a meeting of right-wing extremists. The same national party would be identified by the persons at the meeting as politically vulnerable, and the regional issue of race baiting would be conveniently replaced with a national issue disguised as pro-family morality. And just as in 1964, identical right-wing issues such as opposition to labor unions, hysteria over communism, hostility to blacks and provocative, anti-Soviet militarism would remain intact.

But the crushing defeat of those positions in the 1964 Presidential "election had apparently gone unnoticed by the right wing. Following its repudiation at the polls, it was only momentarily paralyzed. It had not been defeated by the voters of America, the right wing rationalized; it had simply been betrayed by them. The right would hold firm to its issues, believing that one day it would find another politician like Goldwater who would enable it to capture the votes--if not the trust--of the American people long enough to seize power and carry out its plans.

From the right-wing movement of 1964, a number of groups emerged and flourished. Recognizing the fact that Goldwater would not be nominated again by the Republicans, they then identified as their leader Ronald Reagan of California. They backed Reagan in 1968 when he sought to make a deal with Nelson Rockefeller that would block the nomination of Nixon for President at Miami. And in the Nixon campaigns of 1968 and 1972, they begrudgingly gave Nixon tepid support. Then, in 1976, the far right aggressively supported Reagan for the Republican Presidential nomination, only to feel itself not defeated but betrayed once again when it lost at the Kansas City convention. "Secret kingmakers," Schlafly had written in 1964, "using hidden persuaders and psychological-warfare techniques, manipulated the Republican National Convention to nominate candidates who had side-stepped or suppressed the key issues."

Within the right-wing lexicon, those side-stepped and suppressed issues were overt racism, challenges to the Soviet Union to engage in nuclear war and a total assault on the labor movement. To a practical politician, that lexicon would have meant political suicide. Although the Goldwater campaign of 1964 had been destroyed because of those issues, the right pinned those same issues on Reagan and waited until it could support them once again.

By 1980, the far right was organized into one of the most technologically sophisticated, well-oiled political machines in the history of American politics, and it was prepared to do battle to the death for the nomination and election of Reagan. That technological sophistication--plus a formidable amount of the far right's financial support--was developed during the late Seventies, when the right tested its clout on a national level by open opposition to the Panama Canal treaties, abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment, and its efforts to pass a constitutional amendment that would restore prayer in public schools.

Those national moves brought into the far-right fold a number of sympathetic, single-issue groups that the right found could be exploited at the polls. The single-issue groups enabled the right to topple at least two United States Senators, one because of his support for the Panama Canal treaties, the other on the issue of abortion. In each case, the far right manipulated single-issue groups opposed to the treaties or to abortion. But while such opponents of various issues might intersect on one single crusade with the right wing's otherwise eclectic ideology, a single-issue group opposing gun control, for instance, and having within its ranks members of organized labor, could not be trusted by the right in an all-out assault on the labor movement.

Clearly, the political far right needed a total constituency that could be counted on at all times--a constituency with a parallel history of isolation and a comparable desire for retribution. During those years following the 1964 national disaster, the right sat embittered on the bottom rung of American politics. Then, in the Seventies, as American cable-television systems moved across the nation, it watched with undisguised fascination as American viewers turned their dials and experienced their first contacts with the hell-fire-and-brimstone preaching of evangelical, fundamentalist, electronic ministers.

•

Southerners had long been familiar with this brand of fundamentalist Christianity that stood in opposition to all things temporal, that threatened its adherents with the fires of hell if they did not behave and promised its followers the distinct possibility of eternal salvation in heaven if they did. Now each week, millions of Americans were tuning into the cable-system services and sermons of such preachers as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who--through the wonder of television--were delivering those same hell-fire-and-brimstone messages not just to isolated Southern and Bible Belt congregations but to the entire nation.

The televised sermons viewers heard, and to which they were responding with hundreds of thousands of dollars in weekly donations, also seemed more politically motivated than religiously inspired. In fact, they didn't sound much different from the rhetoric of the political far right. It is safe to say that the right-wing ideologues suddenly saw in the new electronic pulpits a certifiable gold mine.

For as the evangelical fundamentalist preachers perceived about themselves a highly complex, technologically sophisticated society drifting irrevocably from their command, the sins they railed against became grave crimes not only against God but against the state.

In a letter to his television followers, Pat Robertson denounced those sins as "a plague of abortion, homosexuality, occultism and pornography, [and] widespread family disintegration." Another passage in the same letter reiterated and dramatized Robertson's concerns. He wrote, "We see a virulent humanism and an anti-God rebellion of which blatant homosexuality, radical feminism, the youth revolt and the Year of the Child, drug abuse, free sex and widespread abortion are just symptoms."

Christian Voice, an organization made up of many representatives from the electronic ministry, identified in its Statement of Purpose "enemies" almost identical to those of the political right wing. Christian Voice said: "The unmistakable signs of moral decay are all around us: Sexual promiscuity and perversion, pornography, legalized abortion, the disparaging of marriage, family and the role of motherhood--all are rampant in our schools, our government and even in many churches. Large segments of our people ... are no longer proud of America. We believe that America's rapid decline as a world power is ... a sign that Satan's strategy is on or ahead of schedule."

But simply listing and identifying sins, or even instilling in congregations and television listeners the fear of hell, was no longer enough for the evangelists. They were losing their grasp on a complex American society that no longer respected pat, simplistic solutions. Now it was time to put an end to the listed evils, and they perceived that the only way to do that was through legislation.

In an undated fund-raising letter, Falwell wrote to his followers: "In recent months, God has been calling me to do more than just preach--He has called me to take action. I have a divine mandate to go right into the halls of Congress and fight for laws that will save America."

Falwell did not have to elaborate on what those laws would be. His message was implicit. America's evangelical movement was about to step inside the political arena. And waiting there to greet the evangelists and lock arms with them were the far-right political ideologues to whom the religious messages of retribution and doctrinaire discipline were as clear--and as harmonious--as a bell.

The American evangelical movement had thus shifted dramatically to the right from its historical foundation. The movement that had led the fight for the abolition of slavery, the extension of public education for all Americans and legislation that guaranteed the rights of women was now ironically presented on the nation's television screens as a religious movement characterized by thinly veiled racism, undisguised hostility to public education and an intractable opposition to women's rights and the Equal Rights Amendment.

Falwell frequently told viewers of his Old-Time Gospel Hour that abortion, the Equal Rights Amendment and "secular humanism" in the public schools were violations of a "moral law." Although he never defined that moral law, Falwell wrote when he established Moral Majority that he was helping "local communities fight pornography, homosexuality, obscene school textbooks and other burning issues."

As Falwell established chapters of Moral Majority in various states, the purpose of his national mission was broadened. He instructed his state chapters in the politics of religious expediency. He defined for them what was moral and what was not. By implication, then, political candidates--on the basis of their platforms or voting records--became either pro-moral or nonmoral, and Falwell's Moral Majority followers, held together by his Old-Time Gospel Hour, were prepared to defeat any candidate characterized as nonmoral.

It was no accident that this modern, negative side of American evangelism originated in the South, or that the leading electronic preachers were Southerners. But to the right-wing ideologues who saw the possibilities of exploiting them, it must have appeared to be nothing less than a profound historical coincidence.

Just as the far right had turned to Dixie to exploit the racial prejudices of its people and build an electoral base in 1964, now it would return to the South to exploit the religious prejudices of its people.

Initially, the electronic evangelists were unaware that they commanded large national constituencies of loyal followers. But as millions of dollars flowed in to support their electronic pulpits, the message came through. It was a historic irony, however, that the national response they received from their politically motivated sermons and programs--television shows they would label patriotic--was alarmingly similar to the response generated by evangelical negativism when it first surfaced in the South alter the Civil War.

This negative evangelism that spread rapidly across the defeated South was essentially a religion born in the violence of war and nurtured in the hatred and bitterness of military defeat. It was a religion that preached an ultimate, spiritual vengeance against the "godless" North, while promising spiritual redemption to a humiliated South. It was a religion that would become associated in the public imagination with rednecks, renegades and poor-white trash. In the name of God, this religion would erect churches by day, lynch blacks by night, elect or defeat political candidates on the slightest provocations and insist that its congregations suffer the indignities of the poverty of a defeated region because they alone would eventually pass through the doors of heaven to a world of streets paved with gold.

To the delight of the contemporary political right, the electronic evangelists had only substituted a few words and phrases in their historic litany. They replaced godless North with godless communism. Blacks were no longer lynched; they were simply nonproductive recipients of a welfare system that should be terminated. Political candidates were still elected or defeated on whims, and life on the border of economic despair would still be redeemed when labor-union officials, international bankers, big businessmen and bureaucrats all burned in hell.

But while the religious litany of revenge and retribution was music to the ears of far-right political ideologues, they recognized an even more vulnerable side of the evangelical movement that they could easily manipulate and exploit--the historical isolation of religious right-wing fundamentalists.

Even within the South during those years that the hell-fire-and-brimstone brand of Christian fundamentalism swept across the landscape, the evangelical ministers and their flocks were regarded by mainstream religious groups as being, at the least, wacky. The evangelicals spoke in tongues. They handled snakes. In public, they washed one another's feet. With vehement language, they took the antics of the Southern Episcopalian and Presbyterian gentry--dancing, playing cards and drinking whiskey--and made of them cardinal sins. Even within their own region, they were outsiders, people on the religious fringe.

Years later, when the direct descendants of those earliest evangelists carried their message to national television, they were received with almost identical skepticism by leaders of national, main-line Protestant denominations. So, once again, they were alone, even within the world of religion, and they lost few opportunities to remind their followers of that fact. They told their faithful constituencies that they would continue their ministries in the face of adversity.

In fact, this tactic appeared to enlarge their television audiences. The evangelists were the underdogs fighting "big churches," as they warned their followers to beware of big business, big government and big labor unions. The contributions to their ministries increased by staggering amounts and the evangelists began to perceive themselves as leaders not only of their particular church congregations but of the faceless, isolated millions seeking identity through a figure on their television screens.

As the letter from Falwell indicated, he would go to Washington and force the highest elected officials in America to reckon with his isolated millions. From their Southern pulpits, televised or on radio, Falwell and the other ministers had warned their followers and were now to warn Congress that America and its system of free enterprise were threatened not only by godless communism but somehow as well by proponents of the Equal Rights Amendment, homosexuals, the Panama Canal Treaty, pornography, abortion, the absence of prayer in public schools, proponents of gun-control legislation and an apparently unmentionable plethora of evils and evildoers all vaguely identified as representatives of "atheistic, secular humanism."

And as the ministers warned of those dangers, they reminded Congress and the nation that it was they who were somehow personally ordained by God to lead America from what they termed its social, economic, spiritual and political darkness. Their faceless millions demanded recognition. Their years of isolation from the mainstream demanded atonement.

So that December morning in Washington, the representatives of America's embittered political right were enthusiastically prepared to strike a deal with representatives of America's religious right. With only the proper encouragement and promises of deference and fealty from the political organizations to the fundamentalist preachers, a seemingly invincible political-religious alliance would be established. Billings would be persuaded to deliver to the politically estranged far right the awesome, evangelical constituency built around Falwell's Old-Time Gospel Hour. And if Billings and Falwell were successfully recruited into the ranks of the political right and given highly visible roles of leadership, it was obviously only a matter of time before other electronic evangelists would be knocking at the door, ready to deliver as well the millions of followers within their own loyal constituencies.

•

The Family Protection Act, as introduced in the Senate by Paul Laxalt of Nevada and in the House of Representatives by Steve Symms of Idaho, would force the restoration of prayer in public schools, undermine the American public-education system by making Federal funds available for the creation of private, racially segregated schools and drastically reduce the social-service programs of the Government that provide aid to millions of Americans. As a reflection both of the preachings of the electronic ministers and of the writings of far-right ideologues, the bill takes direct aim at the American labor movement, denying Federal funds to public school systems where teachers are unionized and exempting from the jurisdiction of the National Labor Relations Board private, segregated schools.

Other provisions of a bill ostensibly designed to protect the family would deny food stamps to college students; prohibit legal-services money from being used for school-desegregation litigation, divorce litigation, homosexual-rights litigation or litigation seeking funding for abortions. The bill would also deny Federal money to any organization presenting homosexuality as an acceptable alternative lifestyle and would encourage employers to discriminate against it.

"Certain things like abortion, pornography and rights for homosexuals will not be tolerated in a Christian society," said Potter. "If the open homosexual begins to thrust his homosexuality forward, he's going to be in trouble. He will be put in jail or similarly punished." Imprisonment for open homosexuals, however, does not quite measure up to what some members of the far right think should happen to women who have had abortions. In a pre-election dossier on his attackers by Senator George McGovern, one pro-life activist is reported to have said that women who have abortions should be executed.

"I believe there're angels and I believe there're devils," said Gasper. "All men of good will should agree on abortion, homosexuality and pornography as being bad. I can foresee a state government making it illegal to be a purveyor of pornography and other perversions."

Even if the state were to balk at the program to sterilize, through censorship, American newsstands, moviehouses and television networks, and even if the state were not to engage in a Khomeini-style purge of the country, the far right still retains within its arsenal its own successfully tested weapon of punishment: moral extortion. That weapon had already demolished the careers of two respected United States Senators by the time the group of right-wing extremists sat down to draft the Family Protection Act. The political success of the tactics of moral extortion could as easily be applied by the right to ensure that its plans for censorship, or for the denunciations of public or private individuals, were equally successful.

"I think that some political figures in the country are going to be surprised," said Paul Weyrich, director of the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress and a far-right leader instrumental in drafting the Family Protection Act. "I think that as the pro-family groups become better educated as to who the friends and enemies of the family are, and as they become better educated in how to participate in the political process, a lot of Congressmen ... are going to be humbled."

Richard A. Viguerie, owner of a mass-mailing operation and editor-publisher of Conservative Digest--in which the above statements by Weyrich appeared--was more direct when he summed up the attitude of the right toward its friends and enemies. "Conservatives have one weapon the White House really doesn't have--the ability to punish," Viguerie stated. "We're going to look very carefully at the [Panama Canal] votes when all this is over and do an awful lot of punishing."

Terry Dolan, chairman of the National Conservative Political Action Committee and one of the leading strategists in the politics of moral extortion, was candid in his assessment of the use of those tactics. "I'm convinced," he said, "that at some point with these types of programs [providing political-training schools for right-wing candidates and other tactical resources] we could elect Mickey Mouse to the House or Senate under the right circumstances."

One of those tactics used by Dolan to pillory political candidates--and generate money for far-right causes--is the mass-mailed fund-raising letter. Written in a manner intended to scare the living hell out of each of its recipients, such letters have been mailed by the hundreds of thousands from Viguerie's operation in Virginia. A fund-raising letter for the National Conservative Political Action Committee, dated March 8, 1976, and signed by U.S. Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, requested urgent donations to the organization for these reasons: "Because your tax dollars are being used to pay for grade school courses that teach our children that cannibalism, wife swapping and the murder of infants and the elderly are acceptable behavior."

Although most rational people would not take such a letter seriously, the effects of almost identical mass-mail tactics, employed against various political candidates, simply cannot be estimated. The bottom line is that the tactical decision by the far right to undermine the doctrine of the separation of church and state was brilliant political strategy in a nation that does care about the religious and moral stances of its leaders. And to impose the issue of "pro-moral," "pro-family" or "pro-Christian" on the political scene has worked with deadly effect.

Helen Wise, a member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, attributed her defeat in a re-election campaign to that strategy. "I was accused of having a lack of moral leadership," she stated. "I was never accused of being immoral, just a lack of moral leadership, whatever that is.... The people who put it over were the religious fundamentalists. Now, I'm in a liberal district, but there were bumper stickers and broadsides and campaign materials given out at prayer meetings."

Legislating prayer in the public schools seriously threatens the doctrine of separation of church and state. It threatens as well the doctrine of the separation of powers, because it jeopardizes the authority of the U.S. Supreme Court. When these ramifications of the Family Protection Act are translated politically, the intentions of its supporters become transparent. These people are not really interested in protecting the American family. They have created, rather, a nonexistent but potentially volatile emotional issue--opposition to the family--as a means of undermining and dangerously weakening the American system of government.

"We organize discontent," said Howard Phillips, the founder of the Conservative Caucus. "We must prove our ability to get revenge on people who go against us."

"We are different from previous generations of conservatives," said Weyrich. "We are no longer working to preserve the status quo. We are radicals, working to overturn the present power structure of this country."

"Conceivably, this country could have a civil war," said Potter. "Every truly serious issue is fundamentally a moral issue. No war--including civil wars--has ever been fought but on moral issues. In a Christian society, force is not ruled out."

Even if other right-wing ideologues are less enthusiastic about the possibilities of a civil war in America, the majority of them acknowledge that a national campaign based on the single-issue tactics of fear and hate, and set into motion to guarantee passage of the Family Protection Act, would amount to the first stage in a take-over of the United States by a totalitarian theocracy.

Then, once it accomplished that, the far right would dismantle all governmental regulatory agencies, repeal the National Labor Relations Act and, with it, the National Labor Relations Board, defeat and roll back all legislation against right-to-work laws, repeal the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, revoke any Congressional restraints on the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the domestic actions of the Central Intelligence Agency, repeal the Freedom of Information Act, institute a tax code favorable exclusively to corporations and the wealthy and launch a censorship campaign under the guise of the pro-family movement aimed directly at the First Amendment, with a repudiation of the Bill of Rights soon to follow.

In its "Target 80" strategy report and fund-raising letter, the National Conservative Political Action Committee listed its goals once it successfully eliminated five targeted U.S. Senators and eventually gained control of the Senate.

We "will put all the ... liberals on notice that if they step out of line and vote for the SALT agreements, taxpayer financing of Congressional elections and all big labor's other special-interest legislation, the voters will rise up and oppose them. We can then count on defeating the SALT disarmament treaty, repeal of the right-to-work laws and other key liberal legislation."

The letter closed with this prophecy: "Instead of just fighting liberal legislation, at last conservatives will start proposing legislation of their own--for the first time in 20 years."

So when the representatives of the various factions within the disorganized American political and religious right left that momentous meeting in Washington, they had become, officially, America's "new moral right." Their agenda for the country could not have been more obvious if they had chiseled it in stone. Riding on the emotional fervor of their pro-family movement, they would prepare to press for Congressional enactment of the Family Protection Act following the 1980 general elections. They would prepare for those elections by targeting no fewer than five Senators--George McGovern, Frank Church, Birch Bayh, John Culver and Alan Cranston--for defeat through the tactics of moral extortion. They would openly work for the defeat of Jimmy Carter in 1980, throwing their support to Reagan (Falwell's man Billings was named religious liaison for the Reagan campaign). By 1982, they would, if successful in the 1980 elections, be ready to launch an all-out bid to seize control of the United States Senate and House of Representatives. If they were not successful in 1980, they would by no means back away; they would simply consider themselves betrayed again and work that much harder for a take-over in the next Congressional election.

And then, with the enactment of their program of repressive legislation, the final twist would come. The new moral right, having successfully organized discontent, humbled politicians and thrown the nation into social and political convulsions, would be in a position to punish the American people who had never before subscribed to the inflexible, doctrinaire programs. The American public, having betrayed the new powers-that-be, would now find itself embroiled in a civil war the right would do nothing to prevent and would gleefully encourage.

•

The form letters were dated May 2, 1980, and were individually addressed to each member of Congress. Such form letters, with their routine lists of grievances, were so ordinary on Capitol Hill that this mailing might automatically have been tossed into appropriate wastebaskets if Congressional staffers had not recognized at once the signature on each of them. Those staffers knew that each week as many as 30,000,000 Americans tuned in to Jerry Falwell's Old-Time Gospel Hour, and that Falwell had set a goal to register as many as 5,000,000 voters for the 1980 elections and to deliver those voters personally to the candidates of his choice.

Falwell was now officially on the move. He had established the Moral Majority organization and by the autumn of 1980 would claim chapters in all 50 states. Now he was simply following up on what he had described as his divine mandate to go to Congress and fight for those laws he felt were right for America.

Falwell had written his form letter to members of Congress, his letter stated, to share with them his "Ninety-Five Theses for the 1980s"--a reference to the 95 theses of Martin Luther, even though Falwell's list of complaints had nothing whatsoever in common with those of the German monk.

Written in a curious, quasi-Biblical tone, Falwell's theses were actually a rather remarkable parody of almost every provision of the Family Protection Act. Yet he did not limit himself to comments on the legislation his letter was intended to support. His theses carried him into such diverse matters of state and theology as the manner in which American foreign policy should be conducted; the proper posture for the nation's military and the amount of defense appropriations necessary to sustain such an aggressive, provocative posture; the necessity for capital punishment; and a defense of the divine origins of the United States and the system of free enterprise.

Why did the members of Congress not toss Falwell's theses into the wastebasket with most other crackpot lobbying letters? Because Falwell had established himself as something different. It wasn't so much that he had put the fear of God in them; it was more the fear of those who use God to get what they want here on earth.

For months, Falwell had traveled back and forth across the United States from his base of operations, his 17,000-member Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia. He had recruited, he would claim in the autumn of 1980, more than 70,000 ministers for the Moral Majority, and he boasted from the pulpit that he had singlehandedly registered 2,000,000 voters for the November election. As he conducted his "I Love America" and "America, You're Too Young to Die" rallies in state alter state (he scheduled all 50 in an 18-month period), his tour of the country was like that of a politician in search of the nation's highest office.

In each of his politically motivated sermons, Falwell's texts were replete with emotion-baiting code words hauntingly reminiscent of the campaign rallies of George Wallace in 1968 and 1972. As Wallace had successfully worked his audiences with constant references to busing and welfare, Falwell politically and spiritually manipulated his audiences with references to welfare cheaters and atheistic, secular humanists. But where Wallace had been the consummate political orator exacerbating the economic fears and racial prejudices of his supporters, Falwell remained the doctrinaire tent evangelist pointing out to his audiences with comparable fears and prejudices those forces he identified for them as either good or evil, Christian or non-Christian, pro-family or anti-family and pro-moral or nonmoral.

The spiritual afterlife Falwell promised his listeners resembled the United States in the days before Brown vs. Board of Education--yet he wasn't content with a "perfect" afterlife. Within the context of his rhetoric, if everything non-Christian were going to be restricted from eternal salvation, then it might as well be eliminated from the temporal world as well. This tactic enabled him constantly to remind his followers of the omnipresent enemies of their earthly, spiritual well-being. By identifying these now-all-too-familiar "non-Christian" elements, Falwell was pointing out enemies of a nation that he believed had been divinely ordained and that he had been chosen by God to lead.

But as Falwell carried his campaign into state after state, his litany of faceless enemies was no longer sufficient to satisfy audiences he had worked into a frenzy. They wanted blood, and Falwell was more than willing to make them happy. And so for perhaps the first time in American history, an evangelist stepped into the political arena not to save the souls of politicians but to incriminate public officials and individuals and destroy their careers--in the name of God and family.

The Alaska chapter of Falwell's Moral Majority was easily one of the most zealous. Its members were in the process of subverting the Republican Party in Alaska and seizing that party's top state offices when Falwell arrived to conduct his "I Love America" campaign. It was in those Alaska rallies that Falwell served notice to the nation he was ready to do battle not with faceless enemies but with public personalities.

"We had breakfast with the President about a month ago," said Falwell, "and we were discussing national defense and all these things and I asked the President, 'Sir, why do you have practicing homosexuals on your senior staff at the White House?'

' "Well, I am President of all the American people and I believe I should represent everyone,' " Falwell then said, apparently quoting President Carter.

Then Falwell said, "I said, 'Why don't you have some murderers and bank robbers and so forth to represent?' "

At that point, Falwell's Alaskan audience went wild with applause. But he did not bother to tell them that the conversation he was quoting had never taken place.

Falwell had, indeed, met with Carter. But a White House transcript of the meeting reveals a totally different transaction from that depicted by the evangelist. The transcript indicates that Falwell asked Carter if he were correct in assuming that two homosexuals living together would not fit Carter's definition of a family. The transcript revealed no response from Carter, who is said to have nodded in agreement with Falwell's statement. And according to the transcript, Falwell then said, "Thank you--thank you very much."

Fabricating an inaccurate account of a meeting with the President of the United States apparently did not bother Falwell. But the fact that he was lying to his Alaskan audience in order to exploit its prejudices against homosexuals exposed Falwell's own contempt for the people who supported him. They could be expected to applaud such statements--and donate money--whether the statements were true or not.

When he was questioned about the incident, Falwell issued the following bizarre explanation: "I have stated as clearly and emphatically as I know how that my recent statement was not intended to be a verbatim report of our conversation with President Carter.

"Instead, my statement was intended to be, and was, an honest portrayal of President Carter's position on gay rights. It was an anecdote, intended to dramatically get the attention of the audience. It was an accurate statement of the President's record and position on gay rights. It was meant to be nothing else."

Falwell's disregard for the facts concerning the meeting with Carter exposed his intentions as those of a demagog, not a sincere Christian evangelist seeking to heal a nation's soul. In fact, in an Anchorage speech, he lashed out not only at Carter but at other public individuals. He enlarged his list of enemies of the United States and its morality by attacking Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan and Bella Abzug for their support of the Equal Rights Amendment. And then, in another Alaska speech, Falwell said, "This nation has gone into a moral tail spin because we have a group of dirty liberals who tell us Christianity and politics don't mix ... the Hugh Hefners and the Jane Fondas, who weave their amoral philosophies into the moral fabric of this country."

With those attacks on the President and public individuals, Falwell exposed the transparencies of his highly polished, "patriotic" extravaganzas. Steinem, Friedan and Abzug were wrong, in his context, not because they supported E.R.A. but because they did not subscribe to the rigid doctrines of Jerry Falwell. But more ominously, "the Hugh Hefners and the Jane Fondas" were wrong not because they spoke out on issues that concerned them but because they had a First Amendment guarantee that allowed them to do so.

The rallies conducted by Falwell were only podiums from which he could enrage his audiences' prejudices, thereby distracting his listeners as he and his supporters sharpened their skills at subverting the Constitution and denying to everyone but themselves the First Amendment guarantees to free speech, in the name of the pro-family movement.

And last May, in the letter Falwell sent to members of Congress on behalf of the Family Protection Act, he loaded both his letter and his 95 theses with the same code words that had brought him thundering ovations on his campaign across the country. He informed Congress that the following were "anti-family": communal living, abortion, homosexuality, polygamy, abusive use of alcohol and drugs, premarital sex, incest, adultery, pornography, no-fault divorce and the Equal Rights Amendment.

Woven through his list of complaints was a blueprint for a sterile, nondiverse society of rigid conformity. While he attacked abortion no fewer than eight times in his theses, some observers from main-line Protestant denominations pointed out for the first time a curious deception in Falwell's fundamentalist opposition to abortion. To him, they said, the issue of abortion seemed to be basically one of sexual morality. His opposition to it was not really based on a feeling that all human life was sacred; instead, it reflected a fundamentalist belief that a woman, living in a theocracy, should be punished for the sin of having sexual intercourse by being forced to deliver unwanted babies.

The society Falwell envisioned for America was further elaborated in the following proclamations from his theses:

•That all able-bodied U.S. male citizens are obligated to fight to the death, if necessary, to defend the flag.

•That the free-enterprise system of profit be encouraged to grow, being unhampered by any socialistic laws or red tape.

•That all ... unproductive governmental financial programs [welfare and social services] be terminated, harmful [sic] programs which in themselves perpetuate poverty and laziness.

•That new laws be introduced providing for the immediate deportation of troublemaking noncitizens in this country.

•That no law be introduced to force private schools to hire individuals solely to achieve minority-group balance.

•That any and all efforts to bring about a central world government be unceasingly opposed.

•That this country help those friendly nations such as Israel, Taiwan, South Korea, South Africa, etc.

•That abortion blunts the national conscience.

•That in the spirit of true education, both prevalent theories of origin be impartially taught in the public school system. These two models are special creation and evolution.

•That the mission of the church is to create a moral climate influencing good government.

•That through the process of a 20th Century moral and spiritual awakening, our nation once again take its rightful and historical place as leader and example to the other countries in the world's community.

•

The passage of the Family Protection Act, and the subsequent restructuring of American society as envisioned by the new moral right would require Senatorial and Congressional votes. If necessary, the storm troops of the right's evangelical constituency could be called into service to wage a national campaign for the legislation.

And if the agenda of the right were to be carried to its completion--in 1982, or 1984, or 1986 or beyond--then the America of the future would become a kind of replica of the Geneva of John Calvin: Diversity would be replaced by rigid conformity, dissent would be silenced with totalitarian swiftness.

But the heartening thing to remember is that such an agenda flies in the face of the reality of an America of more than 200,000,000 individuals. Some of the programs the far right proposes would lead to open strife, to civil war. It is hard to conceive of a political-religious leader who could arrive in San Francisco, New York, Washington, New Orleans, Atlanta, Chicago, or any other metropolitan area and successfully imprison gays without meeting armed resistance.

But that is exactly what the far right wants. The sterile America it would like to create would force a civil war so that--commanding a somehow loyal military--it could extract its revenge on the public that had betrayed it for so many years. A list of its censorship goals would begin with this magazine and move from here to every other publication in the country, to every movie, television show, news broadcast, drama and musical concert. All of those would have to be approved by the new moral right. Daily life in America would be unrecognizable--unless one compared it with the now-familiar scenes of daily life in Iran under the Ayatollah Khomeini.

Despite the success of Falwell, it would appear--if only from the published reports stating his average donation to be $20--that his is a constituency of basically well-meaning, concerned persons of devout faith and not much cash. In other words, these are the same people who have historically turned to evangelists for whatever variety of personal and religious reasons. If told by their leader that America is a nation of divine origin, they will accept it as an absolute verity. And if told as well that the institution of a tax code favorable exclusively to the corporations and the wealthy is somehow part of God's plan, they will conceivably accept that with pious humility.

But they will also have missed the point. They and their leaders will have been taken in by political right-wing ideologues who never trusted them to begin with. And under a political program designed to accommodate a corporate-controlled Government, characterized by hyperprovocative militarism and predictable tax codes penalizing the poor, the evangelical constituency would be left in even worse shape than when it began, its hopes appropriated not by its leaders but by a political faction that had manipulated first its emotions and then its votes to gain the power the American public has always denied it.

"Billings, Potter and the others had gathered to design a new moral society for the U.S."