Jerry Falwell's Crusade
By Richard N. Ostling
In the unique ministry of the Rev. Jerry Falwell, a press conference is as comfortable a setting as a church service. There he was last week at New York City's Kennedy Airport, smiling out at television crews and slightly incredulous reporters. His mission: to offer optimistic words of moral assurance about South Africa's embattled white regime, whose leaders he had just met during a whirlwind five-day visit. He urged the good Christian folk of America to buy up gold Krugerrands and push U.S. "reinvestment" in South Africa.
The words provoked a nationwide furor, but Falwell persevered at a follow-up press conference in Washington and then on a series of TV shows. Through it all, the trademark Falwell manner was on public display: the presentation of disputatious and highly debatable assertions in tones of sweet reason, congeniality in the face of bitter attacks, an almost eerie confidence that he possessed insights his countrymen needed to hear about.
Falwell, 52, did not need to depend only on journalists to transmit his revelations. There would be opportunity later for a few comments on his Old Time Gospel Hour, and for a fuller report on Jerry Falwell Live, which is transmitted to 34 million homes on Ted Turner's WTBS cable-TV system each Sunday night.
Nor was South Africa Falwell's only political concern last week. In an unlikely alliance with Civil Rights Leader Joseph Lowery and other clergy, he joined another press conference in Washington to decry alleged U.S. Government interference in religious freedoms. The group also contended that Cult Leader Sun Myung Moon had been railroaded in his tax-fraud conviction.
There was important work to do as well back home in Lynchburg, Va. Falwell met with the associate pastors who operate the huge Thomas Road Baptist Church during his many absences. He appeared as usual in his church's octagonal sanctuary to preach at the Wednesday-night prayer meeting. His message, | "Live Unto Him," was loosely based upon II Corinthians 5: 14-15. The week concluded with a particularly pleasant chore: mingling amiably with the 3,500 en- tering freshmen at Liberty University, his proudest creation.
In addition to filling his roles at the Thomas Road Church, at the university and on TV, Falwell is the founder of Moral Majority, an organization of conservative Americans who lobby for such causes as school prayer and antiabortion legislation. This national political movement engenders passionate enthusiasm among its followers and a large measure of trepidation among many opponents.
Another aspect of Falwell's crusade has received less attention but is at least as important in its implications. He is mobilizing and altering the consciousness of that once insular component of American religion known as Fundamentalism. Before Falwell, Fundamentalist preachers denounced evil in "the world" in order to compel their flocks into strict isolation from it. Nowadays those same jeremiads are a stern call to social action. "When I was growing up," recalls Fundamentalist Pastor Keith Gephart of Alameda, Calif., "I always heard that churches should stay out of politics. Now it seems almost a sin not to get involved."
From tiny rural chapels where true believers seated on rickety folding chairs profess "born-again" faith, to handsome, stately churches like Falwell's with memberships the size of small towns, Protestant Fundamentalism has become a powerful, confident and important force. Popularly associated with stern opposition to such personal "sins" as drinking, smoking and gambling, Fundamentalism draws upon the entire heritage of American revivalism, with its code of personal piety and insistence upon conscious commitment to Jesus Christ as one's "personal Savior."
But many Americans share that style of religion without really being Fundamentalists. At its heart, the movement is cemented by two things: an unbudgeable belief in the word-for-word accuracy of the entire Bible and a spirit of militant resistance to anything in church or society that is thought to conflict with scriptural commands. The Bible is considered "inerrant" as it was originally written. That means the Good Book is free of error not only in spiritual and moral teaching but in all historical details. According to this view, miracles, whether the Virgin Birth of Jesus or the parting of the Red Sea, occurred precisely as they are described, and Adam and Eve were real people, not symbols.
Preachers of this conservative message have long sought to disseminate it to millions by means of radio and television. About 1,000 of the 9,642 U.S. radio stations have a religious format, and the vast majority of their programming is Evangelical or Fundamentalist in tone. The same is true of television. A 1984 survey estimated that regular viewers of religious TV shows number more than 13 million. When politics comes up on these broadcasts, as it increasingly does, the message is resolutely "pro-family" and conservative. The TV empires greatly increase the public clout of conservative preachers, who have become celebrities, generating huge cash flows through on-the-air fund raising. Doctrinaire Protestantism is bursting beyond church walls into the wider society. Not since the 1920s have political Fundamentalists been as well financed, visible, organized and effective. Deeply committed believers, working long and zealously, get tavern hours trimmed in Anchorage; disrupt school-board meetings in Hillsboro, Mo., as they demand to control curriculum; force doctors to stop performing abortions in Virginia Beach, Va.; march in San Antonio streets to protest sex channels on cable TV. The shelves of religious bookstores are filled with their social protests, in which the buzz words "secular humanism" are used to cover anything and everything the authors disapprove of. The Fundamentalists "have moved into the center of America's cultural stage," says Baptist Pastor William Hull of Shreveport, La., who is unsympathetic to them.
Their reach extends to the highest office in the land: Fundamentalists contributed to both of Ronald Reagan's victories. Reagan, in the estimation of Ed McAteer of the Roundtable, a religious right lobby, "is the real champion of those values and rights that Christian Fundamentalists believe in."
The opinions of the religious right are shared by large numbers of people who do not belong to Fundamentalist churches. "A majority of Protestants are simply dissatisfied with what they regard as a moral breakdown in American society," asserts Sociologist Phillip Hammond of the University of California at Santa Barbara. Conservative Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Mormons, Orthodox Jews and many secularists are understandably concerned about such developments as the more than 16 million abortions performed since 1973, the fourfold increase since 1970 in children raised by unwed mothers, the rise in drug use, the emergence of gay liberation and the glamorization of ! promiscuity.
The new prominence of Fundamentalism has only added to the confusion about just how the movement should be defined. The term is often used to designate fervent belief of any kind, or confused with a more moderate version of biblical conservatism known as Evangelicalism. Indeed, the two movements are intertwined, but also constitute distinct elements in American conservative Protestantism. Essentially, Fundamentalism is the right wing of the broader and larger Evangelical movement, which has grown by millions of adherents in the past two decades.
The similarities and differences of the two movements are rooted in U.S. history. During the early years of the 20th century, the conservative forebears of both movements were largely in control of American Protestantism. But liberal ideas on Scripture and doctrine had begun to infiltrate seminaries, and steadily gained strength in succeeding decades. Eventually an antiliberal movement arose from a loose alliance of orthodox theologians in the mainstream denominations, revivalist preachers, and emerging millenarians, those who saw signs of the imminent Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Between 1910 and 1915 such groups distributed huge numbers of thoughtful pamphlets titled The Fundamentals that defended the conservative reading of the Bible on subjects ranging from the Creation to the Resurrection of Christ. The series was mailed to every Protestant church worker in the country.
As recounted by Historian George Marsden in his definitive 1980 study, Fundamentalism and American Culture, many of the conservatives turned into angry militants during the cultural upheavals following World War I. The term Fundamentalist was coined in this period to identify a battler for orthodoxy. Presbyterian Evangelist Billy Sunday typified the new ornery style of combat. The liberal, Sunday fulminated, was a "hog-jowled, weasel-eyed, sponge- columned, jelly-spined, pussyfooting, four-flushing, charlotte-russed Christian." At the 1925 Scopes trial, in which a Tennessee schoolteacher was convicted of expounding evolutionary theory, Fundamentalists were ridiculed by the press and perceived by the public as antediluvian cranks. By the 1940s, conservatives who were embarrassed by the Fundamentalists' image revived the label of Evangelical for their more moderate brand of orthodoxy.
The years since World War II have brought a boom among both Evangelicals and Fundamentalists in youth ministries, foreign missions, day schools, publishing ^ and broadcasting. Political activism became necessary, as the Fundamentalists saw it, in order to try to counteract numerous unpalatable social trends and policies. Among goads to action: the 1962 and 1963 Supreme Court rulings against school prayer and Bible reading and the 1973 ruling to legalize abortion. The creation of Moral Majority and the "new religious right" resulted partly from the 1978 IRS decision to stop giving automatic tax exemptions to religious day schools and to set racial quotas as the general standard for qualifying. Though some of the schools were begun as segregation academies, many more were nondiscriminatory but found that few blacks wanted to enroll.
Today Fundamentalists and Evangelicals share very similar beliefs and values. But the Evangelicals tolerate a somewhat broader range of Bible interpretation and cultural outlook, and tend to be against doctrinal witch- hunts. The gut difference is a matter more of attitude than of theology. In Historian Marsden's tongue-in-cheek but perceptive definition, "a Fundamentalist is an Evangelical who is angry about something."
Another distinction involves church affiliations. Evangelicals often coexist amicably with liberals within mainline denominations, such as Methodist and Presbyterian groups, that hold membership in the National Council of Churches. These bodies tolerate a variety of beliefs. All true Fundamentalists, strictly speaking, belong to congregations or denominations that root out any hint of liberalism. As many as 10 million members worship in wholeheartedly Fundamentalist churches.* There are several times as many Evangelicals, both inside and outside the mainline groups. The largest Evangelical body, the 14.4 million-member Southern Baptist Convention, is now facing a powerful takeover campaign by its Fundamentalist wing.
The factions and distinctions can also be described in terms of personalities. Falwell is leading a church movement increasingly known as the New Fundamentalism. It seeks to shed the reputation for bigotry and cultural narrowness without giving an inch on the Bible issues. Falwell wants to build spiritual alliances with as many of the moderate Evangelicals as possible. But even without the furor over his foray into South Africa, he faces enormous obstacles in building support among black Protestants. In the 1960s, the ex- segregationist did nothing to advance civil rights. Today his right-wing political agenda does not fit that of most blacks. With a few exceptions, ; black churches are too flexible in theology to qualify as Fundamentalist.
An older, more extreme version of Fundamentalism is still around, symbolized most visibly by South Carolina's Bob Jones University (enrollment: 5,500), which did not admit blacks until 1971 and still forbids interracial dating. Chancellor Bob Jones Jr. of the superstrict institution (supervised dating, no pop music, rigid dress code) almost seems to take pride in what he jokingly calls the school's "lunatic-fringe" reputation.
The Evangelicals, positioned to the left of both the New and the older Fundamentalists, are heavily influenced by their dominant celebrity, the Rev. Billy Graham, 67. Once again, the differences are not essentially doctrinal. Graham believes in biblical "inerrancy" as fervently as Falwell does but works happily with people who have more liberal theologies
and styles himself a tolerant centrist. Although he praises Falwell as "a tremendous spokesman," the two men have talked in person only three times; the most recent meeting was two years ago.
The one figure among the political preachers who comes close to rivaling Falwell in nationwide impact is the Rev. Pat Robertson, 55, of the Virginia Beach-based Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN). Besides his importance as head of the nation's No. 4 cable-TV network, which reaches 30 million homes, and as folksy host of TV's 700 Club, Robertson is the leading figure in yet another subcategory among Protestant conservatives, the Pentecostals. These are Evangelicals distinguished by their practice of such "Holy Spirit gifts" as faith healing, speaking in tongues (ecstatic utterances in unknown languages) and the giving of prophecies thought to come directly from God. There are 7 million members in totally Pentecostal denominations. In addition, millions of others, known as Neo-Pentecostals or Charismatics, are members of traditional Christian denominations but follow Pentecostal practices.
Though he backs the religious-right agenda, Robertson insists that he wants to "build bridges" among all varieties of Christians and that he is no Fundamentalist. Technically, he is right, if only because true Fundamentalists, Falwell included, reject Pentecostal practices, even though the phenomena are mentioned in the New Testament. Fundamentalists believe that God intended such "gifts" only for the special period when the church began.
Robertson's organization, which includes a graduate school that opened in . 1977, received $233 million last year from tuitions, receipts and donations. A Yale Law School graduate and son of the late A. Willis Robertson, Democratic Senator from Virginia, Robertson says he is now "praying about" whether to run for the Republican presidential nomination in 1988.
A professional observer of religion and politics, Albert Menendez of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, believes that as a result of the overwhelming white Evangelical and Fundamentalist vote for Reagan, "Walter Mondale was simply out of the running throughout the South, the border states and parts of the Midwest." One index of the remarkable political change: between 1980 and 1984 the proportion of Southern Baptist pastors who identified with the Republican Party went from 29% to 66%. Falwell's Moral Majority claims that it registered 8 million voters during the past two national elections. Even if the actual number was 2 million, as some outsiders estimate, the feat remains impressive. Another political lobby on the religious right, Christian Voice, sent its controversial "moral-issues report cards" on congressional candidates to 8 million voters last year. More specifically targeted campaigns have been effective as well. Moral Majority's 200,000 registrations in North Carolina last year were crucial in saving the U.S. Senate seat of Pro-Life Leader Jesse Helms.
The results of the religious right's lobbying in Washington have been mixed. Its efforts have helped win fights in Congress on such issues as abortion funding and a law guaranteeing "equal access" to school facilities for voluntary religious and nonreligious student groups. President Reagan supports school prayer, and antiabortion legislation and several of his appointments have gratified the religious right. Among them: William Bennett, a Roman Catholic who backs religious day schools, as Secretary of Education; former Moral Majority Lobbyist Robert Billings as Assistant Secretary of Education; Pro-Life Presbyterian C. Everett Koop as Surgeon General.
One of the shrillest of the Fundamentalist ideologues in Washington is the Rev. Tim LaHaye, 59, who moved to the capital from San Diego last year. He runs the new American Coalition for Traditional Values (ACTV, pronounced active), which has been praised by Reagan and is endorsed by Falwell. A Baptist, LaHaye is lobbying in the capital and also building a network of clergy activists in more than 300 cities. He speaks of Reagan's presidency as , nothing less than God-ordained ("the Heavenly Father looked down and saw our plight") and says a second Carter Administration "might have plunged us into another French Revolution, only this time on American soil." LaHaye advocates a quota of 25% of federal jobs for Christian conservatives and, at the same time, insists that "no humanist is qualified to hold any governmental office."
A growing number of political moderates are deeply worried by LaHaye-style threats and by the specter of schoolbook censorship, legislation of private morality, and the packing of courts with doctrinaire "pro-family" judges. Some of the most thoughtful objections come from the Evangelical movement. The "packaging of the Gospel with politics" is unfortunate for the faith, says Chattanooga's Ben Haden, a conservative Presbyterian pastor and TV preacher. He compares the Fundamentalists who are venturing into politics to the church liberals who stressed social action over the Gospel in the 1960s. Charles Colson, the Nixon aide who served seven months in federal prison for his role in the Watergate scandal, is a born-again Christian and evangelist who firmly upholds the Bible's inerrancy. He argues that believers "need to understand that the real problems of our society are at their root moral and spiritual. Institutions and politicians are limited in what they can do."
Politically liberal Evangelicals accuse the Fundamentalists of avoiding such issues as economic change to combat poverty in the U.S. and worldwide. Falwellians respond that churches and synagogues can achieve more than government programs.
The vitality of the conservatives' social and political movement stems from the strength of Fundamentalist and Evangelical groups, which offer a clearly defined presentation of Christianity that is persuasive to an increasing number of Americans. The prosperity of these churches is striking at a time when mainline Protestant groups are eroding. Major denominations that take a more flexible approach to the interpretation of Scripture have suffered a net decline of 4.6 million members since 1965. In the same years the Southern Baptists alone increased by 3.4 million. Among the causes of mainline shrinkage: the low birthrate of members, the shift of population to Sunbelt states where mainline denominations are weak, and the liberal churches' difficulty in holding the allegiance of their teenagers and young adults.
The reasons are simpler for people like Chandler Robinson of Fort Worth, a retired engineer, who with Wife Julie forsook his lifelong Episcopal affiliation to join a conservative Baptist church. Says he: "The more we found ourselves maturing in Christianity the more disappointed we became with the spiritual food we were receiving. We were looking for someone to teach us out of the Bible." The Rev. W.A. Criswell of Dallas, 76, the leonine patriarch of the Southern Baptists' insurgent Fundamentalist wing and pastor of their largest congregation, charges that liberal theology "empties the churches. Wherever liberalism places its leprous hand, there is death."
Believers usually explain that they are attracted to old-time Bible faith by the certainty of its answers to religious questions. They profess its power to make life meaningful and wholesome, to provide clear moral guidance and to offer a sense of spiritual redemption through Jesus Christ. "People are hungering for truth," says Contractor Calvin Beeler, who worships at a small Berean Baptist church near Charlottesville, Va. Baptist Susan Baker of Del City, Okla., who was widowed this year at age 25, testifies that faith pulls her through her grief: "I never do feel like I'm alone. It's like all the pieces have been put together."
Personal spiritual force often leads to political action at citadels like the Los Gatos, Calif., Christian Church. Pastor Marvin Rickard founded the congregation a quarter-century ago with 83 followers and an unshakable belief in inerrancy. Today a huge redwood-finished church sits on a trimly tailored 28-acre property, and 6,500 worshipers pack the three Sunday services. From this solid base, Pastor Rickard organized a referendum campaign that in 1980 helped repeal a Santa Clara County ordinance forbidding discrimination on the basis of sexual preference.
One of Rickard's parishioners, Lu Ryden, was elected to the San Jose city council in 1980 and last year successfully sponsored a law that required sex magazines to be placed behind opaque shields on newsstands. Says she: "We as Christians have stood aside and let other people make the rules. It got so out of hand, we said enough is enough." Another Los Gatos member, Police Lieutenant Richard Couser, 34, won a seat on the regional school board.
Activism like that at the Los Gatos church is occurring in communities across the nation. The conservative churches' commitment is rooted in basic issues involving family, church and school, but the broadening agenda reaches into complex international issues. The principal concerns:
ABORTION. The Supreme Court's 1973 legalization of this procedure is perhaps the single most important cause now energizing conservative churches. Fundamentalists and large numbers of Evangelicals base their opposition on millenniums of Jewish and Christian teaching, according to which life in the womb is to be protected, except for severe threats to the mother. (Religious traditions differ on precisely what justifies abortion.) The issue is highly divisive. According to a Gallup poll last October, 50% of Americans think abortion should be outlawed with exceptions only for rape, incest or danger to the mother's life, a view that Falwell is willing to accept.
In some areas antiabortionists have taken their fight to the streets. Women arriving at clinics in many cities face a formidable line of protesters, or "sidewalk counselors," who try to talk them out of getting abortions. Threatened with a boycott of their lucrative annual cookie sale by right-to- lifers, Detroit's Girl Scouts in 1984 deleted mention of abortion and birth control from a proposed training program for adults. In Arizona and North Carolina, Fundamentalists are seeking to prevent public funding for Planned Parenthood, the organization dedicated to providing family planning, including abortion.
Fundamentalists also advocate alternatives to abortion by offering care to pregnant unmarried women and encouraging adoption. Some churches offer free pregnancy tests and help women evaluate the options they have. Falwell's group has organized a national network of Save-a-Baby centers to house unwed pregnant women.
HOMOSEXUALITY. "Is homosexuality a disease? No! It is a sin," insists Preacher Joe Chambers of Paw Creek, N.C. His judgment is based on such Bible references as Leviticus 18: 22 ("You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination") and Romans 1: 27 ("men committing shameless acts with men"). Traditionalists thus believe that government should do nothing to recognize or encourage homosexual activity. In communities across the nation, Fundamentalists and other religionists are lobbying against homosexual-rights bills. They are alarmed by a federal court ruling applying the District of Columbia gay-rights law. The judges rejected Georgetown University's constitutional claim of freedom to practice Catholic teaching and said the Jesuit school should be forced to recognize and fund a gay student group. A rehearing is pending.
< Moral Majority repeatedly uses the gay-rights issue in its direct-mail fund- raising campaigns. At the moment, Falwell is asking his troops to demand a federal task force to consider quarantine or imprisonment for homosexuals who continue sexual activity after they are diagnosed as having AIDS.
PORNOGRAPHY. In Fundamentalist eyes, the press, the movies, and especially TV shows that feature sex and violence are waging a war against religion and traditional family values. The initiator of many of these complaints is Donald Wildmon, 47, of Tupelo, Miss., a clergyman in the liberal United Methodist Church who nonetheless exudes a Fundamentalist spirit in running the National Federation for Decency. In 1982, the group boycotted, with mixed success, television advertisers who sponsored offensive shows. Wildmon also organizes believers in many cities to get the Playboy channel off local cable. Sex on television, says Wildmon, "threatens the very continued existence of a society based on the Judeo-Christian perspective of man."
Wildmon has backed picketing in many towns to get Playboy and Penthouse magazines off the counters of neighborhood stores. Says Topeka Pastor Carl Bush about the local 7-Eleven outlets: "All we're asking is that they put them behind the counter so kids can't get them. But they won't even do that." Next Monday, Falwell and several thousand marchers are expected to participate in a Labor Day protest at the Dallas headquarters of Southland Corp., which owns 7-Eleven.
PUBLIC AND CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. Fundamentalists over the past generation have come to believe that public schools are a major force in establishing secular humanism. The religious right leads in agitating to restore prayer to the classroom (a cause favored by 69% of Americans, according to Gallup) and in seeking to censor school libraries and textbooks. Discussion of abortion in a high school text is the cause of protest in towns like Oak Hills, Ohio. Under attack in Madison, W. Va., and Peoria, Ill., are books of sexual counsel, including Changing Bodies, Changing Lives and A Way of Love, A Way of Life, as well as such popular Judy Blume novels for teenagers as Forever and Deenie. In Buffalo, the Protestant right is allied with conservative Catholics in opposing the so-called Epic program in area grade schools. This parent-and- teacher guidance course is aimed at stemming alcoholism, child abuse and teen pregnancy, but foes say it probes too deeply into the privacy of children and teaches youngsters that there are no absolute rights and wrongs. In one Buffalo suburb, Epic has already been dropped.
In the public view, opposition to the theory of evolution has characterized Fundamentalism since its birth. Today's activists do not ask for a ban on the teaching of evolution, as they did at the Scopes trial, but for "balance." That means equal school time for creationism, which follows a particularly literal reading of Genesis. Not only were Adam and Eve the first two humans, creationists contend, but Bible chronology means the earth was created by God a mere 10,000 to 20,000 years ago. (Most scientists, Evangelicals included, estimate that the earth came into being 4.5 billion years ago.) Balancing laws to require inclusion of these ideas in Arkansas and Louisiana schoolrooms have been thrown out by the courts.
Alarm over the availability of sex education, the spread of drugs, the lack of discipline and the prevalence of classroom violence, as well as a yearning for school prayer and an interest in creationist dogma, has resulted in a proliferation of Protestant or Christian day schools over the past two decades. The large majority of these estimated 10,000 schools are run by Fundamentalists. One school founder, Baptist Pastor Everett Sileven, became a Fundamentalist folk hero for spending 155 days in jail rather than allowing the state of Nebraska to license teachers in his religious day school. The dispute was ended last year when the state permitted church schools to hire teachers without state certification.
FEMINISM. To Fundamentalists, statements by St. Paul like "the husband is the head of the wife" (Ephesians 5: 23) are eternal truths, not timebound opinions, and a woman's central task is child rearing. Hyles-Anderson College, a Fundamentalist establishment near Hammond, Ind., is introducing a bachelor's degree in marriage and motherhood. Inevitably this outlook pits the religious right against the feminist movement and the Equal Rights Amendment. Says Bill Palmer, director of a small Christian academy outside Charlottesville, Va., who moved his family into a mobile home so that his wife could quit outside work: "I am not against equality or equal pay, but God did mean for the woman to be mother and keeper of the home. That doesn't mean she can't be the head of a corporation, but that does make it very difficult."
Tim LaHaye's wife Beverly, 56, operates Concerned Women for America. This group has replaced the 50,000-member Eagle Forum, run by Illinois Roman Catholic Phyllis Schlafly, at the top of the counterfeminist women's movement. Begun in 1979, Concerned Women now boasts 500,000 members, more than the combined following of the National Organization for Women, the National Women's Political Caucus and the League of Women Voters. Its local leaders run prayer cells and bombard legislators with letters on abortion, school prayer and gay rights.
FOREIGN POLICY. In addition to domestic issues, Fundamentalists are preoccupied with foreign affairs. Much of their interest stems from a particular brand of theology known as dispensationalism. This school, which takes its name from analysis of the various eras ("dispensations") in sacred history, is distinct for its highly literal interpretation of certain prophetic and apocalyptic passages in the Bible. To dispensationalists, specific events cited in the Bible presage the Second Coming of Christ.
The clearest example of such thinking involves the Middle East. Early in the 19th century, dispensationalists began proclaiming that a dramatic sign of an imminent Second Coming would occur when the Jews returned to re-establish Israel. Since 1948, Fundamentalists have backed Israeli government policy virtually without question. Fundamentalists also fervently support Israel's sovereignty over the West Bank, because they consider God's granting of the Holy Land to the biblical patriarchs (Genesis 15: 18-20) to be irrevocable. Falwell strongly opposes anti-Semitism, a prejudice that once warped some U.S. Fundamentalists. In his denunciations of the P.L.O., he repeatedly quotes God's covenant with Abraham: "I will bless those who bless you, and him who curses you I will curse" (Genesis 12: 3).
It is not clear, as critics have claimed, that this sort of theology is tied to other Fundamentalist ideas on geopolitics. However, the Fundamentalists are fiercely anti-Communist and, for that reason, support a strong military and favor U.S. involvement in the affairs of other nations if it can be justified as opposition to Communist encroachment. Fear of pro-Soviet radicals is the basic reason Falwell would risk opprobrium to support South Africa's present regime. Unlike many other American religious groups, Fundamentalists typically favor an extensive U.S. nuclear arsenal.
What are the prospects for the religious right? Historian Martin Marty judges that it has established itself as a permanent interest group, firmly rooted in American culture, but that it remains only one faction among many. On the other hand, Dallas Theological Seminary's Norman Geisler thinks the conservative Protestant effort has barely begun, and foresees growing bonds between the Fundamentalists and the larger Evangelical movement: "As soon as the Evangelicals and Fundamentalists learn how the system works, and they are learning now, they will be a very, very powerful force--if they maintain their coalition."
Such a coalition depends upon whether the Evangelicals are prodded toward Fundamentalism, which could become a major ground for Protestant conflict. By far the biggest prize would be ideological leadership of the huge Southern Baptist Convention. The S.B.C. Fundamentalists last June scored their seventh and perhaps pivotal annual win in balloting on the denomination's president, re-electing Atlanta's Charles Stanley. Through presidential appointments, the well-organized right wing intends to take control of seminaries and other agencies away from moderate conservatives. Such a shift would greatly influence U.S. Protestantism.
The conservative movement, despite successes within the S.B.C. and its large numbers and ample cash flow elsewhere, is still fractionalized, contentious, inherently anti-institutional and dependent upon dynamic leaders who come and go. Conservative Protestant agencies often have considerable difficulty planning anything beyond tomorrow's telecast or next month's budget. The movement is thin on cultural awareness, scholarship and intellectual staying power.
Nonetheless, this single-minded force is waging its campaign for social retrenchment at what may be a propitious time. Fundamentalists detect a widespread feeling in America of spiritual bafflement and dissatisfaction. Many commentators outside the movement agree. Sociologist Rodney Stark of the University of Washington, no Fundamentalist himself, thinks that the religious right makes quite accurate assessments. Antireligion and amorality have in fact been spreading in the public schools, he asserts, and "a majority of Americans are scandalized" by the apparent flouting of traditional values on television and in the press. Similarly, Michael Novak, the neoconservative Roman Catholic, says that the mass media so neglect the nation's deep-seated religious feelings that believers of all types "feel they live in a hostile culture."
Conservative Protestant spokesmen, captive to their isolationist and even | extremist past, still exhibit far more skill at seizing attention and infuriating outsiders than at winning support from concerned Americans through cogent, reasonable discussion. The Rev. Jerry Falwell shares some of those limitations, and he displayed them last week. But at other times his reliable instincts tell him that a broad appeal is necessary, since Fundamentalists by themselves can never reshape a variegated nation. Only the American people, collectively, can produce a moral majority.
FOOTNOTE: *Including most Churches of Christ and independent Christian churches, the Baptist Bible Fellowship (Falwell's group), other right-wing bodies and numerous unaffiliated congregations.
With reporting by Joseph J. Kane/Atlanta, B. Russell Leavitt/ Dallas and Gregory H. Wierzynski/Washington, with other bureaus