 April 14, 1999
Was Religious Right 'blinded by might'?
___By Steve Rabey
___Religion News Service
___WASHINGTON (RNS)--It was 20 years ago that fundamentalist pastor Jerry Falwell--a man who had preached against the evils of politics--founded the Moral Majority, an organization that helped give the Religious Right political might.
___Soon, government leaders were courting Falwell as two of his top lieutenants--Ed Dobson and Cal Thomas--crisscrossed the country speaking to both church groups and the media. "Had we not been Baptists, we would have danced in the streets," writes Dobson of those heady, early days.
___More recently, the Religious Right has suffered a series of embarrassing setbacks, including worse-than-expected results in the 1998 elections and
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CAL THOMAS
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the failure to impeach President Clinton.
___These defeats led Paul Weyrich, president of the Free Congress Foundation and one of the co-founders of the Moral Majority, to declare in a controversial February letter that "politics have failed" and that he was "in the process of rethinking what it is that we, who still believe in our traditional, Western, Judeo-Christian culture, can and should do under the circumstances."
___Dobson, a pastor, and Thomas, a syndicated columnist, have been rethinking things, too. Thoughthey support the conservative Christian movement's moral agenda, they criticize its tactics in their new book, "Blinded by Might."
___"We failed," says Thomas. "Very little that we set out to do has gotten done. In fact, the moral landscape of America has become worse."
___Historian Joel Carpenter says that even when America's religious conservatives have succeeded in politics, their deeper longing for social transformation hasn't materialized.
___"The parallel here is Prohibition," says Carpenter, provost of Calvin College and author of "Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism." Even though a constitutional amendment was passed to prevent the sale of alcoholic beverages, "it was pretty clear that it didn't work. The lesson is that these political measures don't bring righteousness to the nation. That takes personal moral transformation and changed hearts."
___Dobson agrees.
___"I believe that people, myself included, were well-intentioned, and our goals were noble, but we got caught up in the illusion that politicians really cared for us, and that political change would bring moral change."
___Although the Religious Right changed the national debate about morality and inspired a wave of political activism among previously apolitical believers, Dobson and Thomas say the movement's sins far outweigh its virtues. These sins include pride (claiming God was on their side alone), anger (demonizing ideological opponents), greed (raising money by exploiting people's fears about homosexuality) and lust (hungering for liberals' political power).
___Even worse, say the authors, Christian activists have turned away from the teachings or example of Jesus, who rebuffed Satan's temptation to lord over "the kingdoms of the world" and instead lovingly sacrificed his own life to save the lost.
___"The Religious Right sold its soul for political power, and they still lost," says Jim Wallis, whose Sojourners and Call to Renewal movements have applied the Christian faith to racial injustice, welfare reform and the death penalty--issues that rarely appeared on the conservatives' agenda. "Their approach was too partisan, too hardball and too political even for their own constituents."
___Thomas argues that even political victory could have spelled defeat.
___"The Religious Right was able to tip a few close elections in favor of the candidates they preferred," he says. "But society's greatest problems--the break-up of families, the growth of prisons and drug abuse--are totally beyond the reach of government. This is the role of the church, and when the church does its role properly, it inevitably impacts the culture."
___Dobson, who has been senior pastor of the non-denominational Calvary Church in Grand Rapids, Mich., since 1987, says "Blinded by Might" was inspired by "an underlying uneasiness that perhaps in our quest for moral change through the political process, we had ultimately either hurt the gospel or gotten away from the gospel."
___Growing up in Northern Ireland where his father was a pastor, Dobson says groups like the Moral Majority, which folded in 1989, the Christian Coalition and Focus on the Family sometimes resemble his feuding former countrymen.
___"When ministers merge religious passion with political zealotry, the net result is hatred," he says.
___Even though he once tried to enlist pastors in the culture war, Dobson now favors an approach that's closer to Mother Teresa than Machiavelli. He prohibits voter registration or petition drives in his church, but the congregation has given Christmas presents to people with HIV/AIDS for a decade. True transformation, he says, begins with individuals and "bubbles up" through the culture; it doesn't "trickle down" from government and its leaders.
___In a statement, Falwell said he hadn't read "Blinded by Might," but charged its authors with advocating "the withdrawal of American churches and people of faith from the cultural conflict of the day."
___But Dobson and Thomas say they aren't calling for a retreat, just a different form of engagement.
___"This is absolutely not about withdrawal," says Thomas. "We are calling for a more effective strategy that will produce the ends we sought through the political system but could never be attained there. If the church gets this right, the revival that we have been seeking through the political process will be inevitable. You won't be able to hold it back."
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