THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, August 13, 1996 TAG: 9608130276
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A11 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY CODY LOWE, LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: LYNCHBURG LENGTH: 96 lines
It has been 20 years since the man some would consider the ``godfather of the religious right'' decided to renounce what had been a tenet of his Christian faith - the commandment against mixing religion and politics.
The Rev. Jerry Falwell said he'd been taught in college that theology and politics didn't mix. U.S. Supreme Court decisions outlawing teacher-led prayer in public schools and legalizing abortion prompted him to examine those assumptions after he ``became convinced that if pastors and religious conservatives did not get involved, that the country was in a moral tailspin out of which we would not recover.''
``I had to go back to the Scriptures and look for biblical support for this so-called separation of church and state,'' Falwell said. ``I began to search the documents of early American history to look for constitutional support for it, and I found none in either place.
``I realized that we had been duped.''
His job, he said, was convincing other pastors and lay church leaders of that conclusion, then moving them into activism.
By 1979, Falwell had gotten the support of a group of influential conservative evangelical pastors and some conservative politicians in a bid to energize the what he was to call the ``Moral Majority.''
Falwell was not a household name at the time, though he was already a pastor in with a television ministry that reached far beyond the doors of Lynchburg's Thomas Road Baptist Church. And he was attempting to grow his Liberty University into the ``Notre Dame University of evangelical Christianity.''
He committed himself to five years as president of the Moral Majority.
A year later, a newly important voting bloc - the ``religious right,'' led by the Moral Majority - was widely credited with putting Ronald Reagan in the White House.
Within five years, the Moral Majority had a mailing list of 7 million and would eventually claim to have registered 8.5 million conservative Christians to vote.
Filling voting booths with like-minded religious conservatives was always the goal - Republican or Democratic, Falwell said.
``Most of our churches are a typical cross-section of the populace - half Democrats, half Republicans. So, obviously, we could not become sectarian,'' he said.
``The religious right movement could just as easily be a Democratic advantage today as it is a Republican one. . . .
``But as time went on, the state Democratic party began to follow the leadership of the national Democratic party . . . They began to embrace all the radical extremist groups in the country - the feminists, the homosexuals, abortionists, the left-wingers, you name it.''
By 1988, as Ronald Reagan was finishing his second term, the Moral Majority was disbanded.
``We felt we had accomplished what we had set out to do,'' Falwell said. And he was facing a major crisis back home in Lynchburg. Thomas Road church and Liberty University ``were languishing,'' even before the televangelist scandals of Jim and Tammy Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart led to a dramatic $25 million a year drop in contributions to Falwell's ministries.
While Falwell was preoccupied with keeping his church and his university afloat, other groups emerged out of the Moral Majority, including the Chesapeake-based Christian Coalition.
``We didn't sit down and organize Christian Coalition,'' Falwell said, but its executive director, Ralph Reed, learned some of his lessons at Falwell's knee. While a college student organizing conservatives on campus in the mid-1980s, Reed was tutored by speakers like Jerry Falwell and Jesse Helms.
Reed was hired by Pat Robertson as the first staff member of the fledgling Christian Coalition in 1989, after Robertson's presidential campaign had failed and the Moral Majority had folded.
The Christian Coalition and other such groups have ``taken it to a higher level,'' Falwell said. ``Or perhaps to a lower level in terms of grassroots participation. Both higher and lower. It is far more sophisticated.''
In his latest book, ``Active Faith,'' Reed said that the grassroots approach is the key to the religious right's increasing influence in its second decade.
Though Reed compliments Falwell's drive and acknowledges his role in the mobilization of the religious right to elect Ronald Reagan, he also criticizes the Moral Majority's direct-mail strategy, instead of grassroots organization.
In addition, Reed writes, ``The fact that they believed they possessed God's Truth caused them to ignore the pressing need to be civil - and professional.''
Falwell defends the movement's strategy, saying ``Ronald Reagan's policies brought the family values to the front burner. Abortion became a front-burner item under Ronald Reagan and still is today.''
Reagan, Falwell said,``is the greatest president of the 20th century.'' Falwell equates Reagan's bringing ``an end to Soviet communism'' with Abraham Lincoln's writing of the Emancipation Proclamation freeing American slaves.
Likewise, Falwell compares his role in the formation of the religious right with Martin Luther King Jr.'s work advancing the cause of civil rights for blacks.
King ``was pretty well out there by himself,'' Falwell said. ``And we were sort of the five-star generals of the two movements. Neither needs a five-star general now and neither has one.''
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