Politics from the Pulpit

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

Fundamentalists take aim at Carter and liberals nationwide

Classes were canceled at Liberty Baptist College in Lynchburg, Va. Students were bused in from Lynchburg Christian Academy to help fill the 8,000 seats. Excitement built as the hour neared for the featured speaker to appear. "Here he comes, ah!" cried one young woman as the hero stepped onto the stage. Billy Graham? Oral Roberts? No, Ronald Reagan.

The Republican candidate's talk at the meeting of the National Religious Broadcasters in Lynchburg was blandly disappointing to many who had been hoping for a fire-and-brimstone sermon. Mindful of the storm he had stirred when he addressed an evangelical Christian audience in August and questioned the theory of evolution, Reagan this time confined himself to platitudes about peace, inflation, separation of church and state --though he did say, when asked about voluntary prayers in public schools, "I don't believe we should ever have expelled God from the classroom."

But the significant fact was that Reagan was there at all. Attending the meeting were the leaders of a new political movement: evangelical-fundamentalist preachers dedicated to herding conservative Christians to the polls in the hope that most of them will vote for Reagan. The strength of that movement is difficult to assess. But in an election expected by both sides to be extremely close, it is one of several factors that just might tip the balance in states like Ohio and IIlinois, and it definitely could have an influence in some scattered local races.

If so, the effect would be a striking triumph for a movement that scarcely existed two years ago. In June 1979, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, Reagan's host in Lynchburg, founded Moral Majority. In just 16 months, that organization claims to have signed up 72,000 ministers and 4 million lay members, establishing chapters in all 50 states. It expects to raise $5 million for political proselytizing this year alone.

From the pulpit, through the mails, in leaflets, at mass rallies and on such TV programs as Falwell's Old-Time Gospel Hour, which appears on 373 stations, members of Moral Majority and allied groups pound home the same message: the U.S. is in a terrifying moral decline, and Christians have a duty to reverse it by registering and voting for candidates who agree with their moral principles. As enunciated by Falwell and other conservative evangelicals, those principles are remarkably similar to the Republican platform--which in fact Moral Majority had a hand in shaping.

For the most part, Falwell and other leaders of the religious right insist that they do not tell their followers for whom to vote. But they leave no doubt which of the three born-again Christians running for President they prefer. Although Carter considers himself to be an evangelical, he is not deemed conservative enough by Falwell and his associates because he has failed to fight for such matters as a ban on abortion or legalizing prayer in schools. Says Randy Stewart, a Baptist minister in Lexington, Ky., and a member of Moral Majority: "I will talk about the issues in my church. I will recommend issues to the congregation, not candidates. But when I get through, they will know who I am voting for: Ronald Reagan."

How many will follow is one of the most intriguing--and imponderable --questions of the election. Clearly the rightist preachers' potential audience is vast. Estimates vary widely, mostly according to differing definitions of who should be considered to be an evangelical. Pollster George Gallup uses a three-part definition: someone who 1) describes himself or herself as "born again"; 2) regards the Bible as the literal word of God; 3) encourages others to believe in Christ. On that basis, Gallup calculates 30 million Americans of voting age, or 19% of all U.S. adults, are members of the group.

Not all such evangelicals are political conservatives, of course. In fact, a summer Gallup poll found evangelical voters choosing Jimmy Carter over Reagan 52% to 31%. But some analysts contend that is no true measure of the rightists' impact. For one thing, the Gallup poll included blacks, whom Falwell and his allies know they have little chance of influencing. Their efforts are directed not so much to converting Carter partisans as to politicizing the huge number of evangelicals--45% by Falwell's estimate--who usually do not vote at all. Falwell claims that in the past year ministers galvanized by Moral Majority have registered 3 million new voters. The Reagan camp puts the figure closer to 2 million, but even that could be significant in a close election.

Reagan clearly believes that the rise of the evangelical right will improve his chances of cracking Carter's hold on the South and winning some key Midwestern states. To help court votes, Reagan has recruited Robert Billings, one of the organizers of Moral Majority, to be a campaign aide and envoy to Christian churchmen. Billings believes that the right-wing evangelical vote could be decisive in six states: Alabama, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Idaho and South Dakota. Says Billings: "We won't win them all, but we won't lose them all either."

Carter, in contrast, contends that the conservative evangelical vote is over-rated and is making no attempt to woo it. Explains his pollster, Pat Caddell: "Americans basically don't like mixing politics and religion, even if it's their own religion." Nonetheless, Caddell somewhat contradictorily concedes that the rise of a militantly political religious right "is an important movement, far more probably than it's purported to be." It worries some of the President's state leaders. Carter won Ohio in 1976 partly because of a heavy evangelical vote, but the rightists are now organizing. Says Jerry Austin, Carter's Ohio coordinator: "They're out there. How many I don't know. They have no track record."

Independent John Anderson has gone out of his way to defy the Christian right. He met last week with a delegation from the National Religious Broadcasters to denounce "the political marriage of the so-called Moral Majority and the New Right" as "a union which seeks to inject unbending rigidity and intolerance into church pew and polling booth alike." Said Anderson: "I don't think it is the province of the church to tell people how they should vote."

Only a few years ago many of his listeners probably would have agreed. Religious pronouncements on American political issues go back to the founding of the colonies. In the 1960s, many clergymen lobbied for civil rights laws and against the Viet Nam War, but they were mainly liberals. With some notable exceptions--Prohibition was the most conspicuous--religious conservatives have shunned politics, believing that the way to create a moral society was to evangelize individuals.

That view was changed by three causes. Such trends as the legalization of abortion, the spread of pornography and agitation for homosexual rights convinced many evangelicals that, in Falwell's words, "a minority of secular humanists and amoralists are running this country and taking it straight to hell." Carter's "failings," in their eyes, deepened their despair. The last straw for many evangelicals was a 1978 attempt by the Internal Revenue Service to take away the tax-exempt status of private schools suspected of practicing racial discrimination.

Fervent evangelicals saw the move as an assault on one of their last bastions: the Bible schools they had established to shield their young from an ungodly environment (most of the schools are predominantly white). Congress forbade the IRS to carry out its plan, but in the eyes of conservative evangelicals the battle lines had been drawn. Says Billings: "The IRS ignited the dynamite that had been lying around for years."

Since then, the evangelical right has not so much risen as erupted. In addition to Moral Majority, two other major organizations have sprung into action. The Religious Roundtable, founded by Ed McAteer, a onetime toothpaste salesman in the Bible Belt, concentrates on holding briefings to teach ministers and lay evangelicals how to get out the conservative vote. Christian Voice, led by the Rev. Richard Zone, campaigns openly for and against specific candidates, which it can do because, unlike the other groups, it does not claim a tax exemption.

All the groups work closely together: their leaders gather every other Thursday over coffee in Washington to plan strategy with such conservative political groups as the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, and the Conservative Caucus. Christian Voice has compiled a list, widely circulated by Moral Majority and Roundtable as well, of how Senators and Congressmen voted in 1979 on 14 key moral issues. It praises votes not only for school prayer but for the Kemp-Roth bill to cut income tax rates 30%; condemns votes favoring not only abortion but the Equal Rights Amendment. The rightists claim to find religious grounds for all these stands. Says Zone: "We can talk about a balanced budget as a moral issue. The Bible says you should not live in debt."

Whatever their impact on the presidential race, the evangelical conservatives already have demonstrated clout in some local contests. In Alaska, members of Moral Majority this summer took over the entire state delegation to the Republican Convention. In Alabama last month, Representative John Buchanan lost his seat in Congress; though he is a Baptist minister, his liberal views on women's rights aroused the wrath of Moral Majority, which turned out a huge Republican primary vote against him. Says Buchanan: "They beat my brains out with Christian love."

Whether such successes can be repeated in the more important state races is in some doubt. In Iowa, state groups allied with Moral Majority and Christian Voice are going all-out to defeat liberal Democratic Senator John Culver. Declares Christian Voice Strategist Colonel Doner: "John Culver is part of the crowd which made legal the killing of babies, made the streets safe for criminals and rapists and kicked God out of our schools."

But polls indicate a backlash gathering against such attacks, and Culver is stimulating it by doing some loud Bible-thumping of his own. He ridicules the Christian Voice list of issues as a warped test of morality, pointing out that Florida Congressman Richard Kelly scored 100%--before being indicted for allegedly taking ABSCAM bribes. The list, thunders Culver, says nothing about such Christian concerns as helping the poor, hungry and sick.

Less partisan critics of the political preachers make similar points. Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum, head of the American Jewish Committee, charges that the conservative evangelicals are trying to impose a "religious test" on public officials, which is forbidden by Article VI of the Constitution. The Catholic Jesuit weekly America claims that the right-wing evangelicals are preaching "moral fascism."

In rebuttal Falwell hotly maintains that "most of our critics are hypocritical. Nobody ever criticized Martin Luther King when he was using the churches for political activity. No one has ever criticized the National Council of Churches and its leaders for 50 years of active political involvement. What bothers our critics is that we don't agree with them."

The argument will not end with this year's elections. Win or lose with Reagan, the evangelicals are mapping plans to expand their movement and make it a permanent and influential part of the political scene. Already some are talking about organizing for the congressional elections of 1982. --By George J. Church.

Reported by Anne Constable/Lynchburg and Simmons Fentress/Washington

With reporting by Anne Constable/Lynchburg, Simmons Fentress/Washington

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