One is Bill Clinton. When he was a 28-year-old law professor, Reed says, Clinton ran for Congress from that very part of Arkansas. He lost. But he had the patience and drive to work nearly 20 years for victory. Christian conservatives must do the same. “This isn’t a sprint,” says Reed. “It’s a marathon.” For inspiration, he points to another young man from Hope: Mike Huckabee, a Republican and Baptist preacher, elected lieutenant governor of Arkansas earlier this year. “Years from now we’ll be hugging each other on our night of the big victory,” Reed says. Someone, perhaps even Huckabee, will lead America back to Biblical values. Reed pauses dramatically. “Do you believe it?” he asks. His students, crowded into the building, respond with a chorus of yeses–and a scattering of amens.
Americans went to the polls this week to elect two governors, scores of mayors and hundreds of local officials. Republicans were poised to do well in a number of contests with the help of votes from the religious right. For Christian activists themselves, the results were likely to be a reminder that “the big victory” remains far off. One of their own, Republican Mike Farris of Virginia, was given little chance to win his race for lieutenant governor–in part because he was pilloried by Democrats as a tool of his coreligionists. And in California, a Christian-right pet project–a school-voucher initiative–seemed headed for defeat.
But the recent training session in Rogers represents something more significant than this week’s scattered election results. Across the country, NEWSWEEK and ABC’s “Nightline” found in a joint survey, a new generation of religious conservatives is building from the ground up,, seeking acceptance in the mainstream. Their brethren have been burned by the spotlight before: first the televangelist scandals of 1987, then the Republicans’ disastrous 1992 Houston convention, for which the members of the religious right were blamed. Though their votes helped elect Ronald Reagan and George Bush, pundits wrote them off–and moderate Republicans wished them away.
They are largely forgotten, but not gone. Rather than turn their backs on electoral politics, theologically conservative Christians–evangelical Protestants, traditionalist Roman Catholics–are determined to master the fundamentals. With methodical intensity, they have cultivated the grass roots in a new push for power. In the process they may boost the Republican Party back to power or divide it in the political equivalent of a holy war. “They’re mainstreaming themselves and learning to compromise,” says Haley Barbour, the GOP’s national chairman. Others have their doubts. “It’s their judgmentalism that worries me,” says Republican Sen. Mark Hatfield, an evangelical–but a social liberal. “They think: if you disagree, you’re not following the Gospel.”
Increasingly, the religious right’s power is an issue, as the Virginia race reveals. Robertson’s allies dominated the GOP convention that chose the party’s candidates. One of them was Farris, 42, the first major candidate in any state to have spent his entire career within the religious-right movement. A lawyer, he worked in Jerry Falwell’s now defunct Moral Majority, and did legal work for a committee that wanted to draft Robertson for president in 1987. Farris is legal adviser to a national network of parents who educate their children at home–and once called public schools “a godless monstrosity.”
The Virginia race shows how an evangelical in the race unsettles both parties. Many moderate Republicans, including Sen. John Warner, refused to endorse Farris. The Democrats, of course, were delighted with his candidacy. They spent much of their TV money caricaturing the GOP slate, and Farris in particular, as slavish, glassy-eyed minions of New Testament intolerance. At times the tone was Hortonesque. In one ad, Farris was wrongly accused of favoring the removal of the “Wizard of Oz” from a public-school curriculum. The ad drew widespread editorial rebuke. Some shrewd Republicans in Washington, seeking chits, came to Farris’s defense. Dick Cheney staged a last-minute fund-raiser last week, and Bill Bennett cut a radio spot, written by Bill Kristol, former chief of staff to Dan Quayle.
Ross Perot’s political army has gotten more headlines than that of the religious right, but it is a hollow fighting force: too diverse, distrustful of institutions and dependent on the whims of its erratic maximum leader. The Christian Army is potentially larger (there are about 50 million evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics) and already more sharply focused on strategy and goals.
For one, they have a readymade route to power. Unlike Perot’s United We Stand America, the religious right doesn’t need to create a new national structure; the Republican Party will do just fine. Having been invited into the GOP’s “big tent” in the ’80s, it now would like to run the show. In nearly a dozen states, from Alaska to South Carolina, evangelicals have become powers on GOP state committees. They don’t hate politics; indeed, they profess a fresh, almost naive faith in its worth, and are eagerly seeking seats on hundreds of school boards (box), municipal councils and other lowlevel points in politics.
They have the strength that comes from an agreed-upon, coherent agenda: an expanding cluster of “pro-family” causes that include opposition to abortion, gay rights, feminism, public-school bureaucrats and income-tax and welfare policies that penalize “intact” families. The Southern Baptist Convention, with 15 million members, is controlled by conservatives–and eager to play its own role in public life.
Meanwhile, secular society may be becoming more tolerant of parts of their agenda–or at least the visible presence of avowed “people of faith.” The hero-cop on “NYPD Blue” is seen at confession; the new lawyer on “L.A. Law” is a born-again Christian. From producer Norman Lear to the president, leading figures are bemoaning the lack of spirituality in public life.
Though religious conservatives have no Perot, they do have their own empire builder–63-year-old Pat Robertson, the cablecaster and erstwhile presidential candidate whose base is a sprawling, neo-colonial campus in Virginia Beach, Va. Despite the fact that his “700 Club” fund raising was hurt by the televangelist scandals–and his own quixotic run for the presidency in 1988–he has not only survived, but prospered. He diversified his charitable enterprises. He renounced his ordination–allowing him to say that he’s not a preacher, only a “religious broadcaster.” The son of a U.S. senator and recipient of a law degree from Yale, he shrewdly expanded his secular businesses. Now he presides over a multifaceted, synergistic operation worth well over $1 billion (chart).
Cable is the key, and he was there before most. From the early ’60s, when he thought that television shows would be beamed from airplanes, Robertson has looked for on-air innovations. The popular Family Channel, which he founded in 1977 as a squeaky-clean haven from network TV, still carries his “700 Club” twice daily. The channel now reaches 58 million cable homes and is owned by a Robertson-controlled company that is traded on the New York Stock Exchange. (Another major stockholder in the company is John Malone’s TCI.) The same for-profit company recently acquired MTM Enterprises and its valuable library of shows, which includes “Mary Tyler Moore” and “Hill Street Blues.”
Meanwhile, Robertson has created a set of institutions to battle what he regards as a godless liberal establishment. His Regent University trains born-again broadcasters, educators and lawyers, as well as ministers. It has an endowment of Robertson’s corporate stock worth $200 million. Regent lawyers run his American Center for Law and justice (ACLJ), designed to be the religious right’s answer to the ACLU. Under the Christian Broadcasting Network umbrella, Robertson is moving into news dissemination, offering wire services to radio and TV stations. After his run for the GOP nomination, he created the Christian Coalition, a political lobbying group that now claims 850 chapters and more than 450,000 duespaying members–the fastest-growing organization of its kind on the right.
Robertson’s obsession these days is with what Barbour calls “mainstreaming”–on the justifiable theory that being an openly identified evangelical in politics can be a handicap. Though the Christian Coalition is headed by Robertson and bears a sectarian name, Reed and Robertson search for any high-profile common cause they can make with Catholics and even Orthodox Jews (box). In New York City’s school-board races last spring, their group distributed thousands of “voter education” pamphlets in Catholic churches, an unprecedented, on-the-ground alliance it is trying to duplicate elsewhere.
Evangelicals are trying to demonstrate political maturity by supporting “half a loaf” GOP candidates, as they did in two recent Senate races. And they want to show an interest in issues that have a secular ring. Though he shipped about $250,000 to the voucher fight in California, the Christian Coalition’s Reed would rather tout the $100,000 spent earlier this year trying to defeat the Clinton tax-and-budget bill. For the faithful, there was a Biblical rationale: the tax provisions, Reed argued, discriminated against married couples and families. But to the secular world, it looked like just another mainstream conservative group lining up against taxes.
Sitting for an interview in his mahogany paneled office last week, Robertson was the soul of moderation. He portrayed himself as a man who could shuttle between Go and Caesar, having learned the dictates o each. “I have told the people in no uncertain terms,” he said, “that a political party is not a church.” As a “teacher of the Bible,” he said, he would counsel against abortion “It’s something else, though, in the politic arena to go out on a quixotic crusade when you know that you will be beaten continuously. So I say, let’s do what’s possible.”
But Robertson continues to blur the lines between politics and religion. In deed, he switches his many hats–political leader, minister, broadcaster–with the confusing dexterity of a circus juggler, The Christian Coalition never endorsed Farris, but Robertson wrote a personal fund-raising appeal for him, noting, approvingly, that his “good friend” had “been employed by Christian ministries for more than a decade.” Though Robertson is no longer ordained, he insists that he will “always be a minister,” and he has never stopped practicing faith healing through prayer on the “700 Club.” Even his business and political careers overlap. Unlike many religious conservatives, including Pat Buchanan, Robertson supports NAFTA. One reason: he likes the treaty’s provision protecting intellectual property–including the television shows and movie syndicates.
Behind the crinkly smile and avuncular manner is an angry, hardball player. Speaking to his own audiences, he can still use religion as a sword. Such language tends to come in the apocalyptic final chapters of his books. The newest is “The Turning Tide: The Fall of Liberalism and the Rise of Common Sense.” Bill and Hillary Clinton, Robertson writes, “are clearly committed to a radical, unbiblical agenda.” Not far beneath the genial surface is a man who will never stop believing that his foes are not just misguided, but are tools of evil.
Though he is focused on the grass roots for now, Robertson and his flock haven’t forgotten presidential politics. With no clear candidate for 1996, the GOP’s nascent race hasn’t been this open for a generation–making the Christian right’s support that much more pivotal. Nearly every would–be contender showed up to speak at a recent Christian Coalition gathering in Washington. Robertson himself maintains chummy phone relationships with a number of them, including Dan Quayle, Jack Kemp, Bill Bennett and Bob Dole. As for Robertson himself, he denies he will run in 1996. Beyond that, he won’t say. “We might be in some horrible catastrophe come 1999,” he says. That close to the millennium, he couldn’t rule out answering the call.
Founded on televangelism, Robertson’s empire has pushed into news, entertainment and politics, spinning off into for-profit and nonprofit concerns.
Founder and chairman
58 million households subscribe; “The 700 Club” runs twice daily
Film production: television-syndication library (“Mary Tyler Moore”)
Founder and chairman
Seven million viewers weekly
Christian programming distributed in 75 countries
Part of Va. Beach “campus'
Founder
Humanitarian aid
Founder and president
Counter to ACLU argues Supreme Court cases; budget of $9 million
Founder and president
Political lobbying organization; 850 chapters, 450,000 members
Founder and president
1,400 graduate students; $200 million + endowment, most of it IFE stock
Chairman
Chairman
Radio news network; 272 stations under contract
Fax news service to 315 broadcasting stations
Chairman
Producer and distributor of TV, video and films for family audiences
