Distinguished
for his research, teaching, and writing in the social sciences
primarily at Harvard, Stanford, and George Mason University,
S. M. Lipset is described by colleagues Larry Diamond and
Gary Marks: “No political scientist or sociologist
has contributed more to advancing our thinking about democracy—in
all its dimensions, both comparatively and in the United
States—than Seymour Martin Lipset.“
Earl Raab served for thirty-five years as Executive Director
of the San Francisco Jewish Community Council and then as
Director of the Perlmutter Institute Advocacy at Brandeis
University. In 1995 Harvard University Press published
Jews and the New American Scene
coauthored by Raab and Lipset. In 1970 they coauthored The
Politics of Unreason: Right Wing Extremism in America,
1790 - 1970.
This
article is abridged from Speak Out Against the New Right
edited by Herbert F. Vetter (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1982)
Since
the 1980 presidential campaign many political observers
have expressed deep concern over the growing political power
of orthodox Christian groups in this country. According
to one election scenario, it was the evangelical TV preachers
who played a decisive role in the 1980 election. Not only
did they elect Reagan to the Presidency, but, even more
alarmingly, they also managed to unseat a number of liberal
Senators through a massive, well-financed campaign to brand
their targets as un-Christian political sinners. This campaign
mobilized the fundamentalist constituency which was so decisive
a factor in the conservative tide that swept the nation.
And the worst—so the scenario concludes—is yet
to come.
This version of recent events, while not entirely inaccurate,
contains several crucial flaws. For one thing, it critically
misstates the relation between religious beliefs and political
attitudes among the evangelicals themselves. For another,
it seriously overrates the political strength of organizations
like the Moral Majority. And furthermore, it distorts the
real meaning of the election results by placing much too
narrow and shortsighted a construction on their significance.
Jerry Falwell, the head of Moral Majority says that "What's
happening to America is that the wicked are bearing rule."
Christian Voice, another of the evangelical-political groups,
makes the tie even more explicitly when it proclaims in
its official statement of purpose: "We believe that
America, the last stronghold of faith on this planet, has
come under increasing attack from Satanist forces in recent
years . . . that the standards of Christian morality . .
. are now under the onslaught. . . launched by the 'rulers
of darkness of this world' and insidiously sustained under
the ever more liberal ethic."
What is alarming about these pronouncements is their fanaticism.
If a political opponent is just wrong, or stupid, or misguided,
he can presumably be dealt with in the marketplace of ideas.
But when his political opinions arise from deliberate moral
wickedness, as this kind of rhetoric implies, a case can
be made that he does not deserve to be in the debate at
all.
There is every reason for nerves to jump at such an approach
to politics. Inevitably, it recalls groups like the clergymen
affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s or the Reverend
Gerald Winrod's Defenders of the Christian Faith in the
1930s. Winrod, a fundamentalist preacher whose organization
received wide support up until World War II, dwelt on the
breakdown of morality in America, denouncing both political
parties, though mainly the Democrats, for the country's
moral turpitude. In 1938, he entered the Kansas Republican
senatorial primary, and received 22 percent of the vote.
Much of his animus was directed against the Jews, whom he
called "contaminators in the moral realm as well as
despoilers in the business field," but he was also
strongly anti-black and anti-Catholic.
Today's evangelical groups have made it a point to avoid
this kind of hatemongering. Though there is no denying that
many evangelicals today are still wary of the Catholics,
and have great theological problems with the Jews, and though
one may argue further that the Moral Majority's focus on
"Christian" values undermines the healthy pluralistic
tone of the nation, nevertheless that organization has never
even come close to incorporating in its platform the nativism
and overt bigotry central to earlier groups. For the Reverend
Gerald Winrod to have accepted an award from a national
Jewish conclave, as Jerry Falwell recently did, is unimaginable.
Indeed, so sensitive is the Moral Majority to Jewish fears
that it has requested a "dialogue" with representatives
of every major Jewish organization "to make the Jewish
community aware that we are not an anti-Semitic group and
that we probably are the strongest supporter of Israel in
this country. "
But it is not just in the absence of overt bigotry that
today's evangelical Right has been more moderate than its
predecessors. Though its public agenda calls for action
on a whole range of domestic and international questions—from
socialized medicine to relations with Taiwan and Zimbabwe—its
real goals seem to be more limited. One observer, writing
in the Congressional Quarterly, reports the movement's
most concerted lobbying efforts to date have been the battles
for voluntary school prayer and for an amendment restricting
federal intervention in private, mainly Christian, schools—important
issues, but hardly global in their scope.
If
the right-wing evangelicals are not effective in seriously
influencing their coreligionists on general political issues,
what is the import of their activity? Perhaps they should
be thought of not as evangelical groups but as straight
right-wing political groups which happen to have an evangelical
bent. Perhaps they are best seen organizationally as a part
of the so-called New Right network.
That network includes Richard Viguerie and his famous computer
in Falls Church, Virginia; Paul Weyrich and his Committee
for the Survival of a Free Congress; Terry Dolan and his
National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC);
and E. E. McAteer and Howard Phillips of the Conservative
Caucus. These loosely knit groups had begun to see the usefulness
of the "moral issues" to their cause well before
the evangelical preachers got into the political business.
In an interview in 1976, Viguerie predicted: "The next
major area of growth for conservative ideology and philosophy
is among the evangelicals." In a speech four years
later at the National Press Club, Viguerie described how
he, E. E. McAteer, Robert Billings, and Howard Phillips
had devised and successfully implemented a plan to move
"preachers-into-politics."
In 1978, Warren Billings, former head of the national Christian
Action Coalition, which was then a school lobby, impressed
both the evangelicals and the New Right when he used the
mailing list of the Old Time Gospel Hour (whose minister
was Jerry Falwell) to mobilize a massive letterwriting campaign
opposing efforts of the IRS to remove the tax-exempt status
of Christian schools which were not racially integrated.
Weyrich, an Eastern-rite Catholic, helped form the Christian
Voice with one of his close associates as its legislative
consultant. Billings and Weyrich, along with Howard Phillips,
a Jew, helped to establish the Moral Majority, with Jerry
Falwell at its head. (Billings was at one time both the
executive director of the Moral Majority and Weyrich's deputy
at the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress.
So far as the specific role of the TV preachers goes, that
too seems to have been overestimated. A national Los
Angeles Times survey found that, among the half of the
nation's evangelicals who watch or contribute to TV preachers,
there was about a 3-to-2 majority favoring a constitutional
amendment to ban abortion. Evangelicals who do not watch
or support the TV preachers were evenly split on that question.
In each group—the TV-watching and the nonwatching evangelicals—three
out of five agreed that the ERA was an attack on the American
family. Interestingly enough, on general political issues,
the watching and nonwatching evangelical groups were equally
agreed (3-1 in both cases) that the Vietnam war was not
a noble cause and that the US should maintain its informal
relations with Taiwan instead of upgrading them, as advocated
by candidate Reagan and organizations such as the Christian
Voice and the Moral Majority.
Finally,
a survey taken among "likely voters" by NBC News
and the Associated Press in early October found that when
interviewees were asked whether an election recommendation
by a member of the clergy would "make you more likely
to vote for that candidate, less likely to vote for that
candidate, or wouldn't make a difference," only 3 percent
replied "more likely," 8 percent said "less
likely," and 88 percent answered, "no difference."
Only 3 percent reported having "been asked by a member
of the clergy to vote for a specific candidate in this fall's
election."
The political evangelical groups worked hard at increasing
turnout, an activity which was particularly important in
the South where less educated evangelicals have relatively
low voting records. But the seeming success of such work
did not create the Republican landslide. Rather, it reflected
the country's conservative political swing, which occurred
among all groups—and more among nonevangelicals than
among born-agains.
To fail to acknowledge that the growth of support for the
GOP and conservatism is a consequence of general social
processes is to give groups like the Moral Majority more
credit than they deserve and to run the risk of a self-fulfilling
prophecy. If politicians become convinced that the Moral
Majority is a decisive force in American life, they are
more likely to treat it as such, just to be on the safe
side. A more important danger of overestimating the Moral
Majority's role is that it can serve to blur the meaning
of what has happened. For many liberals, who cannot quite
believe that the American people, blue-collar and all, have
turned conservative of their own free will, it would seem
preferable to believe that some sinister manipulative force
is at work which has turned large segments of the population
into robots. But this is self-delusion—the facts state
otherwise.
The Americans who "turned Right" in the last election
did not by any means agree with the Moral Majority or New
Right programs. These Americans were not supporting specific
political solutions any more than they usually do. They
wanted a government that would more demonstrably reflect
their mood: a more assertive America on the world scene,
and on the domestic front a serious campaign to fight inflation
and refurbish American industry. That is the extent of their
political conservatism.
Contrary to some allegations, they are not now captive to
any political movement, fundamentalist or otherwise, extremist
or otherwise. They are shopping. But the attention of these
Americans will not be regained by liberal political forces
which are more preoccupied with advancing their own conspiratorial
explanation of events than with formulating a compelling
pragmatic solution to genuine moral and political problems.
