“Born Again”
During an interview with the press in 1976, Jimmy Carter was asked by one of his supporters if he was “born again.” Carter readily said he was. Everyone he knew around his hometown of Plains, Georgia (pop. 653) was born again, and not just fellow Southern Baptists. It’s what got you saved.
That was news to reporters who followed Carter on the campaign trail and it soon became a campaign issue. Few of them from outside the South knew the pertinent Bible verses Christians like Carter use when talking about their conversion experience. Some political reporters thought Carter, a pious Sunday school teacher, belonged to a religious cult. Gallup did a survey and found that half of all Protestants and a third of all adult Americans (nearly 50 million) claimed to have had a born-again experience. To most members of the national media, those numbers had the force of revelation.
But rather than harm Carter’s chances of winning the presidency, his born-again identity turned out to be a boon. Beginning in 1960, no Democratic candidate for president had won a majority of the white Evangelical vote. But Carter, simply by describing himself as born again, sent a linguistic signal to Southern Baptists in particular and Evangelicals in general that he was one of them.
President Gerald Ford, Carter’s Republican opponent, took note. An Episcopalian and a northerner, Ford insisted that he, too, was an Evangelical Christian. Although he stopped short of calling himself born again—the term was foreign to Episcopal church-speak—he said he read the Bible daily in the Oval Office and that (like George W. Bush in the 2000 election) his life had been transformed by Jesus Christ. That sufficed for Rev. Wallie Amos Criswell, patriarch of Southern Baptist Fundamentalists, who endorsed Ford as the two of them stood on the steps of Criswell’s Dallas megachurch. Carter had offended Criswell by giving an interview to Robert Sheer for Playboy magazine. Like other reporters, Sheer was mystified by born-again religion, and Carter, in an earnest effort to show that his secured salvation was no prophylactic against temptation—after all, he was a Navy veteran—admitted in the interview that he had committed “adultery in my heart many times.” But although he condemned himself for “lusting in the heart,” Carter wanted Sheer to know he was a regular guy: “That does not mean I condemn someone who not only looks on a woman with lust but leaves his wife and shacks up with somebody out of wedlock.”1 That was the quote that really stoked Crisswell’s ire: it sounded like the candidate approved of adultery. But most Southern Baptists—indeed, a slight majority of Evangelicals—swung round to support one of their own.
Two weeks before the election I wrote a cover story for Newsweek with an emphatic “Born Again!” emblazoned on the cover and another boldface headline inside proclaiming 1976 “The Year of The Evangelicals.” The purpose was to explore and explain what the editors took to be a new cultural wave with political consequences. Chuck Colson had just published his autobiography, Born Again, which was heading toward sales of a million copies, and celebrities from onetime Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver to former stripper Candy Barr were trumpeting their born-again bona fides. Whatever was going on went well beyond the entrepreneurial thrusts of Billy Graham and Bill Bright.
What the story showed, I thought, was that Evangelicals were indeed an overlooked gathering force. But I also portrayed them as a divided, fractious bunch, with various groups fighting over the “inerrancy” of the Bible and what being “born again” is or ought to mean. The leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), in particular, wanted the world to know that they didn’t need other Evangelicals—they were bigger than the rest. “A world that had thought we were an ignorant, barefooted, one-gallused lot was jarred out of its seat,” said the SBC president, “when it found out that…our voluntary gifts in a year are approximately $1.5 billion, and that on an average Sunday our churches baptize about three times as many people as were baptized at Pentecost.”
But that is not how a lot of Evangelical readers understood the story, nor how the story has been treated in subsequent history books. Evangelicals like Colson saw it as a media milestone: for the first time, Evangelical Americans were recognized as a distinct and numerous movement in American religion, right up there with Catholics and mainline Protestants. Indeed, to judge by the hundreds of letters to the editor, the mere appearance of the story was invested with all sorts of unintended symbolism. Some respondents saw it as a divinely inspired rejoinder to Time’s “Is God Dead?” cover story published ten years earlier. Others traced a longer historical arc. Nineteen seventy-six was the nation’s bicentennial and with that very much in mind, the Newsweek cover was deemed almost providential—a return, at last, to what many Evangelicals believed was the nation’s Christian—that is, true Protestant—roots.
The Newsweek story barely limned the outlines of a new parallel culture, as wide as, but a good deal less cohesive than, the Catholic culture I’d experienced growing up. Evangelicals operated not only their own colleges and Bible seminaries but also their own Christian academies and elementary schools. This was a sharp reversal from the days when they criticized Catholics for creating their own parochial schools. But in the South especially, Supreme Court decisions banning prayer and even the posting of the Ten Commandments in public classrooms—not to mention white flight—convinced conservative Protestants that the public schools were now in the hands of secularists. So, many felt, were the federal government and the Supreme Court. One answer was to circle the wagons. In cities as different as Portland, Oregon, and Miami, Florida, Evangelicals published the Christian Yellow Pages: A Telephone Directory of Born Again Christian Businesses and Professionals. The idea, explained a directory salesman in Atlanta, “is more or less to keep the money within the kingdom.”
Given Evangelicalism’s entrepreneurial thrust, it was inevitable that God’s kingdom would become a marketplace mirroring the very world that Fundamentalist and conservative Evangelicals once scorned. By the late Seventies, they had their own radio and television programs; their own association of “Christian” broadcasters; their own list of Christian celebrities and entertainers, newscasters, and pundits; their own publishers, bookstores, and bestseller lists; their own “Christian” music; and, soon to come, their own “Christian” rock bands. To the two-fingered V signaling “peace” there was now the Evangelicals’ raised index finger countersignaling Christ as the one (and only) way to salvation.
As both a market and a parallel culture, Evangelicals had also become a political constituency to be courted. From Billy Graham to the local preacher they were mostly conservative in politics as well as in religion. But it was a pair of Catholics and a Jew who figured out how best to exploit this opportunity for the Republican Party. And what better way to arouse an oral/aural culture than through a preacher with an established broadcast audience?
The Making of the “Moral Majority”
About the time Newsweek’s “Born Again” cover appeared, Richard Viguerie, a direct-mail wiz servicing conservative political causes, recognized the Evangelical subculture as ripe for political plucking. Together with Paul Weyrich of the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress and Howard Phillips of the Conservative Caucus, Viguerie held a series of meetings with Fundamentalist preachers in an effort to move them from bystander status to full-blown political operatives. Big-time evangelists could not afford overtly partisan politics but a Fundamentalist with the right credentials could. The preacher who had the most to offer was the Reverend Jerry Falwell.
As a religious entrepreneur, Falwell possessed an impressive resume. In sixteen years he had built from scratch a congregation of 12,000 members, nearly a fourth of the entire population of Lynchburg, Virginia; an auditorium-style church that seated 10,000 worshippers; a private Christian Academy for 612 students K through 12; a fledgling college with 1,000 students; and a fleet of 89 buses that swept a 65-mile radius to transport worshippers to Sunday services. His ministry also included a perk that even Billy Graham lacked: a 27-passenger Convair turboprop. Falwell’s success was so impressive that I wrote a profile of him in 1972 at the urging of and with reporting from Newsweek’s Atlanta bureau. What most impressed Viguerie, however, was Falwell’s broadcast ministry, The Old-Time Gospel Hour, which was beamed to four hundred television stations, carried on several hundred more radio stations, and—the pearl in this oyster—owned a coveted computerized mailing list of tens of thousands of “faith partners.”
Falwell, then forty-seven years old, also carried some baggage. He had a history as a segregationist who had supported the apartheid regime in South Africa and opposed Martin Luther King Jr. and his “non–civil rights movement,” as he called it. That wasn’t much of a hindrance to Weyrich, who had taken over leadership of the American Independent Party from segregationist George Wallace. The problem was that Falwell, a flamethrowing Fundamentalist, had long opposed mixing religion and politics. But Viguerie and Weyrich, both Catholics, and Phillips, a Jew, shared Falwell’s conviction that “secular humanists” were taking over the country. Abortion, evolution, and sex education in public schools, gay rights, the Equal Rights Amendment—these and other issues, they argued, would persuade reluctant Fundamentalists and other conservative Evangelicals to become politically active. Weyrich even found the perfect name for the movement they hoped to birth: the “Moral Majority.” Falwell did not need much persuasion.
Actually, I’d always felt a certain sympathy for Fundamentalist Protestants. Like them, we Catholics have always had problems with any form of humanism that sought to sequester religious faith from public thought and practice. The core Fundamentalist doctrine—that the Bible is literally true and without error—functioned, I’ve always thought, much like the infallibility of the pope has: as an anchor of authority that in practice adds nothing to the content of Christian faith. The difference is that papal infallibility has been formally invoked only once, and then after wide consultation with his fellow bishops,2 while with each sermon Fundamentalist preachers invoke a Bible presumed to be inerrant.
The 1980 Presidential Election
As a Fundamentalist, Falwell had a lot to learn about politics, and as the public face of the Moral Majority he sometimes left food on his chin. For example, at a rally in Alaska, where the Moral Majority controlled the 1980 GOP state delegation, Falwell trumpeted a story about how, at a White House meeting with selected clergy, he had sharply questioned President Carter concerning “the known practicing homosexuals” on his staff. But a transcript released by the White House showed that no such conversation took place. Falwell insisted he had not lied, though he had. Nor did he apologize until I asked him on NBC’s Meet the Press if he had done so. “I’m doing it right now,” he said. It was the first of numerous retractions and apologies Falwell would be forced to make.
In the 1980 presidential race, all three contenders—incumbent Carter, Republican nominee Ronald Reagan, and independent candidate John Anderson—described themselves as born-again Christians. Of the three, the clear favorite of the new Christian Right was Reagan. He was also the only one whose born-again faith was, at best, a recently acquired taste. Reagan rarely saw the inside of a church but when it came to religion talk, the former actor could mimic the choked-up hush of the truly pious and deliver evangelistic chestnuts like “America’s hunger for spiritual renewal” as if Billy Graham had never existed. Early on, the Reagan campaign signed up the Moral Majority’s executive director, Robert Billings, to serve as a liaison to the party’s newly acquired constituency. The pact with the Religious Right was sealed in Dallas just five weeks before the Republican National Convention. Addressing a rally of seventeen thousand Evangelicals sponsored by the right-wing Religious Roundtable, Reagan famously declared, “I know you cannot endorse me, but I want you to know that I endorse you.” At the convention, the impact of the Republicans’ newest constituency was manifest in a party platform that stiffened the GOP’s opposition to abortion on demand and reversed its previous stand in support of the Equal Rights Amendment, much to the displeasure of George H. W. Bush, the vice presidential nominee. As historian Steven P. Miller has written, “on social issues, at least, the pew trumped the country club.”3
After Reagan’s thumping of Carter in the 1980 election, Falwell and other leaders of the new Christian Right claimed to be the difference makers by delivering a majority of the white Evangelical voters. In fact, Reagan won majorities in virtually every social and religious category. But there was no doubt that the newly active born-again bloc of Fundamentalists and conservative Evangelicals had shown itself to be a force in American politics. What was novel was how they went about it.
Fundamentalism and Free Enterprise
Unlike mainline Protestants, born-again Christians in the 1970s did not hold places at either party’s leadership table. Unlike the Catholics, they had never exerted their influence through mediating institutions like labor unions and big-city political machines. The only organization they had to work with, really, was the church. Willing pastors were trained—not always well—by groups like the Moral Majority in how to preach about politics without violating IRS rules, mostly by letting their listeners know whom they personally were voting for and why. They were also supplied with bundles of voter guides and urged to use their bus ministries to transport the faithful to Religious Right rallies and to the voting booth on Election Day.
Theirs was a church-based populism that was new to twentieth-century American politics. Conservative Protestants had watched on the political sidelines as blacks, feminists, and gays pressed their own agendas. They had witnessed the weakening of traditional institutions like marriage and the family, the collapse of public education as they had known it, the rise of drugs and violence, and a general thumbing of noses at traditional moral values. Secular humanists were responsible for this rending of the social fabric, they believed. And so, bumbling but biblically self-assured, they entered the once-forbidden arena of politics with cleats on. Liberals who valued participatory democracy were quite unprepared for the advancing horde of newly engaged church folk. By sheer force of numbers, that horde redrew the lines separating religion and politics and altered the language of political discourse.
None of this would have happened, though, without the power of religious broadcasters. If evangelism is essentially entrepreneurial, as I have argued, that trait is best seen in its hard-won dominance of religious programming. In the 1950s and ’60s, the Federal Communications Commission required local stations to provide free airtime to religious broadcasters. In Omaha I had observed firsthand that those religious groups that got access were determined by local stations in cooperation with local Catholics, Jews, and mainline Protestants. Fundamentalists and other conservative Evangelicals were frozen out. So they were forced to buy airtime, create programming, and learn how to solicit funds on air. When the FCC changed its rules in the 1970s and local stations were no longer required to provide free airtime for religious programming, the born-again bloc was well positioned to button up the available paid-time program slots in radio and on television. For an essentially preached religion, the rules change seemed heaven-sent. Thus was born “the electronic church.”
For Falwell, as for Oral Roberts and numerous lesser-known television preachers, broadcasting was the engine that fed their entrepreneurial ambitions. It was how they kept the money coming in, how they marketed their wares, and how they financed their building projects. Falwell, for example, was able to charge students at Liberty Baptist College (now Liberty University) half the average cost for tuition, room, and board through subsidies from his broadcasting operation.
In other words, Fundamentalists were not only free-enterprisers in religion; as broadcasters they were also wed to free enterprise in economics as well. One by one they had bought their way into radio and now television broadcasting. It wasn’t only moral issues that made them natural allies of conservative, free-enterprising Republicans like Ronald Reagan.
But even for preachers, free enterprise is governed by rules and regulations. Shortly before the 1980 election, one of Falwell’s financial advisors called and asked me to come to Lynchburg. There was a delicate matter he wanted to discuss but not over the phone and not in public. We would meet at his estate. Since he was being so cautious, I thought it best to stay at the home of a Notre Dame classmate in Lynchburg until we had a chance to talk. The advisor said he was concerned because Falwell was lending money from his $1-million-a-week broadcast ministry at no interest—and with no payback schedule—to help keep the Moral Majority afloat. The advisor thought this was morally wrong, economically risky, and probably illegal: tax-exempt organizations like Falwell’s ministries cannot fund political action groups. Falwell was already under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for floating $56 million in unsecured bonds, and this advisor was worried about the financial impact on Liberty College. He showed me supporting documents and promised to mail a full set to me. Before I left Lynchburg I met with Falwell, who said that any money he raised was his to spend as he saw fit. There was, he showed me, a phrase in fine print in all his promotional literature that allowed him to do that.
Back at Newsweek, I found that the Nation section was preparing a cover story on Falwell just before the election. I could do a sidebar page but there would be no investigation into his finances. I was angry, of course, but until the promised documents arrived I couldn’t make my case. They never did. Instead, I received a phone call informing me that the financial advisor had died in a mysterious accident: he was hacked to pieces, apparently after falling into the blades of his own thrasher.
Following the 1980 election, President Reagan awarded three posts in his administration to members of the Religious Right. James Watt, a conservative Pentecostal, was appointed secretary of the interior; anti-abortion physician C. Everett Koop became surgeon general; and James Billings, the former Moral Majority operative, was given a high-level position in the Department of Education. But that was it. On legislative and cultural issues dear to the Religious Right, the Reagan administration kept the movement standing tippy-toed and puckered for a serious kiss.
There were sound political reasons for this strategy. Although Reagan and House Speaker Tip O’Neill enjoyed an Irishmen’s camaraderie, the Democratic-controlled lower chamber was not about to pass any laws favoring school prayer or abortion limits. Moreover, Reagan recognized that whatever the importance of the born-again vote to the party’s success, the Religious Right was not endorsed by the vast majority of American citizens. Polls showed that among the 40 percent of Americans who were even aware of the Moral Majority, actual support for it and for Falwell was in single digits.
The Overreach of Jerry Falwell
Nonetheless, for the ten years of its existence, the Moral Majority, with Jerry Falwell as the face of the broader Religious Right, commanded outsize media attention. Jerry himself appeared on the cover of both Newsweek and Time and was a frequent guest on ABC’s Nightline and other talk shows in part because he typically boosted viewership, especially among those who feared and loathed him. Brusque, pugnacious, and often outrageous in his opinions, Falwell seemed to revel in his ability to make enemies.
The key to his personality, I always thought, was his determination to make good as well as make waves. In terms of Lynchburg society, which included several first families of Virginia, the Falwells were local Snopeses from the wrong side of the tracks. His father had been a small-time businessman and sometime bootlegger who shot and killed his brother in an argument. After his born-again experience as a college sophomore, Jerry left town for a small hard-core Bible college in Springfield, Missouri. There he found not only a new identity but also a career path in the ministry that would in time make him Lynchburg’s largest employer, best-known citizen, and biggest entrepreneur. The first time we met, Jerry took me to a low mountain above the town to show me the future site of an expanded Liberty University: it would be to Fundamentalists what he imagined Notre Dame to be to Catholics. His political seduction, however, nearly shattered his dream.
The burden of leading the Moral Majority made Falwell’s fundraising efforts ever more desperate. In 1981, for instance, he was caught publishing a photo of a Lynchburg bank (with the name of the bank blacked out) and passing it off as the business school of his college, and a photo of a picturesque college chapel as if it were a building on his campus. In fact, the chapel was fifty miles away on the campus of Washington and Lee University, the alma mater of fellow broadcaster Pat Robertson. A few years later, a photographer tipped me off to the fact that on his Sunday television broadcasts Falwell was soliciting funds (again, with small print saying all donations would go for this and other projects) to help the boat people fleeing Vietnam, more than a year after the last of them had been rescued from the waters. The real story of Jerry Falwell, I began to see, was not his politics but his reckless drive to succeed.
In the spring of 1982, Falwell’s ambition peaked. He had recently published a book, The Fundamentalist Phenomenon, ghosted by two of his aides, which pictured the larger Evangelical establishment as a “jumbo jet” that, thanks to Falwell and the Moral Majority, had been “suddenly highjacked by Fundamentalist pilots.” Fundamentalists were the only truly orthodox Christians, Falwell contended, and he appealed to Graham-style Evangelicals to “re-acknowledge your Fundamentalist roots.”
It was Jerry’s naked bid to replace Billy as the lodestar of American Evangelicalism. And for a time his candidacy was taken seriously. Seeing that Graham’s main interest was evangelizing overseas, a dozen Evangelical leaders, including two of Graham’s own appointees as editors of Christianity Today, invited Falwell to a secret meeting in Washington, D.C., early in 1982. It was the closest thing in Evangelical circles to a search committee and a key moment for American Evangelicalism. Falwell made his case, arguing that Evangelicals had abandoned belief in an inerrant Bible, Fundamentalism’s key tenet, and that he was the man to lead them back to truth. But his listeners rejected him and his retrograde agenda. When I learned of the meeting I asked Graham about Falwell’s bid to replace him. His answer, in effect, was “Jerry who?” “I’ve met Mr. Falwell once, for a minute at a prayer breakfast,” he calculated, “and I’ve talked to him only once, I think, by phone.” Graham’s own opinion was that the Moral Majority represented no more than 10 percent of Evangelicals in America—and he turned out to be right. Far from taking over, Falwell eventually declared that he, too, was an Evangelical.
In the run-up to the 1984 election, Reagan blew a few symbolic kisses in the direction of the Religious Right. He declared 1983 the “Year of the Bible,” which produced a flood of television programs and magazine articles on the Good Book, including a Newsweek cover story I wrote on the historical impact of the Bible, titled “The Bible in America.” Under Reagan’s name, the Republicans published a campaign book called In God I Trust. The president also chose the annual meeting of the National Association of Evangelicals as the occasion to deliver the most memorable speech of his first term, an address on foreign policy in which he famously assailed the Soviet Union as “an evil empire.” But if Reagan again embraced the Religious Right, it was even more the case that the Religious Right had come to embrace what the party called the “Reagan Revolution.”
Religion hung like kudzu from the stage of the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas. Fiery Texas evangelist James Robison offered the opening prayer and Falwell closed the convention with a benediction that proclaimed Reagan and Vice President George H. W. Bush “God’s instruments in rebuilding America.” In between, televangelist Pat Robertson, who would run for the GOP nomination himself four years hence, and lesser worthies of the Religious Right shared the stage.
This riotous display of pious partisanship was further proof to Democrats and their secular supporters that the Republicans were recklessly violating the hallowed tradition of separation of church and state. The emergence and temporary triumph of the Religious Right had already produced a countermobilization of organizations such as television writer and producer Norman Lear’s newly formed People for the American Way; Americans United, which (as Protestants and Others United for the Separation of Church and State) had previously targeted Catholics in politics; and the American Civil Liberties Union, which abandoned its tradition of defending social pariahs by opposing the Moral Majoritarians of the right. As it turned out, however, Reagan’s landslide victory in 1984 marked the high point for the right’s political preachers. And the first to feel the wages of political ambition was the overreaching Jerry Falwell.
Falwell’s final entrepreneurial misadventure occurred in 1986, when he took control of the PTL (for “Praise The Lord” and later, “People That Love”) television network from disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker. With it came Heritage USA, Bakker’s gaudy theme park in South Carolina that was second only to the two Disney parks in the number of tourists it attracted. At the time, Bakker’s annual take from his ventures was $129 million, half as much as Falwell’s broadcasts produced. Bakker and his cohost/wife, Tammy Faye Bakker, were Pentecostal Christians who promised material prosperity to their donors. Most of their supporters were lower-middle-class Pentecostals who saw in the Bakkers a religious couple of their own kind who had made good. Tammy Faye’s thickly mascaraed eyelids and heavily made-up face represented liberation to millions of Pentecostal women who were taught as children to abjure cosmetics and other profane adornments. A vacation at Heritage USA was, in effect, their chance to jump through the television tube and join the freed-up Jim and Tammy Faye at play in a Pentecostal version of Las Vegas. Falwell immediately invested $20 million in a water slide at the park and, descending on his back in his black three-piece minister’s suit, gamely launched the slide himself. No matter. Pentecostals knew that the park’s new owner was a Fundamentalist who had routinely disparaged Pentecostal practices like speaking in tongues. Very quickly, Falwell lost his customers and his shirt.
The following year, Falwell resigned from the Moral Majority, saying he was through being “a politician or a businessman” and was going “back to the pulpit, back to preaching, back to winning souls.” In fact, he bowed out because of continuing financial crises at the university that needed his full attention. Indeed, it took an infusion of funds from wealthy friends, including—improbably—Dr. Moon of the Unification Church, to bail the school out.
The last time I saw Jerry Falwell was in 1988 at a Los Angeles hotel where the Religious Roundtable was holding its annual conference. As one evangelist pointed to a chart correlating the decline of American morals with the banning of prayer in public schools, I read deep unease in the face of the event’s honored guest, Republican nominee George H. W. Bush, an old-school Yalie who looked as if he had been suddenly enrolled in a Texas Bible college. But Falwell looked even worse: weary, almost broken, like a boxer on his stool who knows he’s already lost the fight. I myself felt like I was meeting an old adversary I’d gone too many rounds with to dislike. We even exchanged a clumsy hug, as pugilists do. Jerry was open about his problems with the university but still insistent that it would become Fundamentalism’s Notre Dame. Already, he said, the university had a first-rate team in baseball, his abiding love. “But Jerry,” I said, “you need a football program. That’s the sport that gave Notre Dame its national identity.” We were talking his second language, sports, and it was the only time we ever shared a laugh.4
A year later, the Moral Majority was disbanded and eight years after that Jerry Falwell, always overweight, suffered a fatal heart attack.
Channeling the Holy Spirit
In the world of entrepreneurial religion, the Eighties turned out to be a period of recurring scandals and crises. The major victims were Pentecostals, especially those who specialized in on-air miracles and healings, often amid profuse shedding of tears. Jim Bakker was caught in an adulterous affair with a church secretary, Jessica Hahn, then found guilty of twenty-four counts of fraud and conspiracy and sent to prison. Jimmy Swaggart, a shaman-like evangelist whose television trademark was his almost orgasmic reenactments of the born-again experience, was shamed off the air after revelations that he regularly paid prostitutes to disrobe and strut in front of him. His sobbing “I have sinned” admission was prime-time television news. Faith healer Oral Roberts, whose motto was “Expect a Miracle,” fell from grace after he went on-air saying God would call him home unless he raised $8 million for a medical school at the university that bears his name. High-living prosperity preacher Robert Tilton (not a Pentecostal) lost his audience after ABC’s Prime Time revealed that he never read, much less prayed over, the “prayer requests” that millions of viewers sent him along with their donations for his intercession.
“Gospelgate,” as the string of scandals came to be known, was a made-for-television drama that played out nightly on programs like Larry King Live and Ted Koppel’s Nightline. It was on Nightline that I most often encountered these fallen angels. In 1984, Richard Smith took over as editor in chief of Newsweek. Rick showed limited interest in religion and under him the annual number of religion stories declined by half. But at Nightline I found a new outlet for my reporting. Fortunately, the immensely gifted Marshall Frady, son of a Baptist preacher, had moved from Newsweek to Nightline as an on-air reporter. We agreed to share what we were learning about the unfolding scandals and if Newsweek wasn’t interested I had an outlet at Nightline as a commentator.
Prophecy and Politics
The only religious broadcaster who avoided scandal in the 1980s was another Pentecostal, Myron “Pat” Robertson, though he, too, lost an estimated $28 million in contributions because of Gospelgate. Robertson was by far religious broadcasting’s best-educated and shrewdest entrepreneur. The son of a veteran Democratic senator from Virginia and a graduate of Yale Law School, Robertson had gone into business in the Fifties with his law school roommate, another student of Frank O’Malley at Notre Dame, and also served as chairman of Adlai Stevenson’s presidential campaign on Staten Island. But after meeting a Lutheran minister who had undergone a Pentecostal “baptism of the Holy Spirit,” Robertson enrolled in New York Bible Seminary, where he fervently sought and eventually experienced the same baptism with all its powers of revelation and prophecy. The experience forever changed the man and his politics.
Pentecostalism itself is a late bloom of American revivalism and its most ecstatic flowering. The first Pentecostal irruption to gain public notice occurred in 1906 at the Azusa Street Church in Los Angeles. Like other made-in-America religious movements, its adherents sought to recapture Christianity as its earliest disciples experienced it—specifically at Pentecost, when they began to speak “in other languages” as the sign that they had received the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Here again, the experience of divine presence is wholly verbal, though as practiced by most Pentecostals the language of “tongues”—a form of involuntary motor behavior—is incomprehensible to ordinary ears. To many in the first generation of Pentecostals, though, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit also signaled the beginning of the end-times, giving Pentecostalism an apocalyptic edge.
For the Apostle Paul, speaking in tongues was one of many gifts of the Holy Spirit, along with prophecy, healing, and miracle-working. But unlike Paul, who saw these powers as spiritual gifts for building up the church, Robertson used them to build a career as a religious broadcaster, beginning in 1960. On his daily 700 Club program, Robertson’s signature sequence was (and remains) a segment in which, head bent and eyes closed, he discerned ulcers healing, bent limbs straightening, hemorrhoids shrinking—all the ills humankind is prone to miraculously disappearing while Robertson prayed. Whether Robertson thought he was directing that power himself was never clear, though in 1985 he boasted that he had diverted Hurricane Gloria away from Virginia Beach, Virginia, where he had built his headquarters, to the sodden householders on the southern shores of Long Island, New York. But on his broadcasts Robinson never named those who were being healed while he spoke, nor did he claim healing powers for himself, as Oral Roberts and other Pentecostal preachers did. What he did claim on television was the power to discern what Jesus was up to here and now. These séance-like interludes on the 700 Club were mixed in later years with sophisticated news reports, interviews with Christian celebrities, and his own conservative commentary on what soon became the satellite-beamed Christian Broadcasting Network on cable.
Although he was ordained as a Southern Baptist minister, Robertson was never a member of the Billy Graham circle. As a functioning Pentecostal, he inscribed an orbit of his own. Eventually, his ambition turned to politics. In 1978, Robertson established his own political action organization, the Freedom Council, using mailing lists from his 700 Club and relying mainly on Pentecostal churches to organize local chapters of his Freedom Council in political precincts across the country. A decade later, these local councils became the grassroots organization behind his own campaign for the Republican nomination for president. Robertson surprised the party’s elders by taking second place in the 1988 Iowa caucus—ahead of future president George H. W. Bush. But his bid ended amid serious charges that he had not seen combat as a marine in the Korean War, as his campaign literature claimed, plus revelations that (like Falwell) he had been using funds from his broadcasts to support the Freedom Council. Robertson was further embarrassed when the press discovered that his eldest child had been born months before he and his wife married. After the election, the Freedom Council was transformed into the Christian Coalition, which allowed Robertson to maintain degrees of political influence for yet another decade.
“I have always been an entrepreneur,” Robertson once told me, and as a businessman he prospered mightily from CBN, buying television stations and taking his network global. Beginning in 1977, he founded a series of professional schools (thereby avoiding the financial risks of expensive undergraduate and doctoral education) that have since become Regent University, which he prophesied would endure until the Second Coming, when Christ would need well-educated Christians to help Him rule the world. Statements like that are what made Robertson’s voice unique within entrepreneurial religion, bizarre but wonderful to quote. Whether offering advice to the World Bank or predicting the end of the world in 1982, or merely handicapping market futures, Robertson invoked a gnosis that only he could grasp. One never knew whether his calculations were based on empirical data or the powers he’d acquired from the Holy Spirit. I questioned him several times on television and I’m not sure he ever knew himself.
My longest personal exposure to Robertson came at a public conference on southern religion at the University of North Carolina in the Eighties. Robertson and I were the only nonacademics on the stage. In the audience was a group of Robertson student devotees who regarded him as a modern prophet. Instead of addressing our assigned topic, Robertson took the occasion to witness to his own spiritual powers. He was just back from China, he said, and among other marvels that befell him was one that occurred on the quay in Shanghai. As Robertson told it, he went out and spoke to a multilingual group of strollers who gathered round him. And, as at the first Pentecost in Jerusalem, each heard him in his or her native tongue.
I challenged that. As it happened, I had strolled out at night on the very same quay in Shanghai the previous year. As a rare American in Communist China, I also drew a crowd. I, too, spoke to them in English and I also saw them smile and nod as if they understood. “The Chinese are polite like that,” I said.
“Are you calling me a liar?” Robertson demanded, though as always he never stopped smiling.
“No,” I said. “I’m just saying you misunderstood what was happening.”
I was calling his special powers into question and he wasn’t pleased. He said he’d never speak to me again, and he never did. But it hardly mattered. Robertson was usually cagey and often cautious in an interview. On the other hand, he was never so quotable as when he was talking freely on his television show, channeling the Holy Spirit.
The 2000 Campaign: Questioning the Candidates
The Clinton presidency was a time of transition for the Religious Right. The Southern Baptist from Hope, Arkansas, who had studied at the Jesuits’ Georgetown University proved that a Bible-quoting Democrat from the South could win back Reagan Democrats, including Roman Catholics, by stressing economic issues, but not the Evangelicals, who remained solidly behind Bush. During the eight Clinton years, leadership of the Religious Right passed from the old televangelists like Falwell and Robertson to the pastors of Evangelical megachurches, mostly in the South and West, and presidential candidates adjusted their weathervanes accordingly. In the Nineties, Billy Graham himself passed a symbolic baton (in the form of the hat he always wore to presidential inaugurations) to The Purpose-Driven Life author Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback Church, a multi-themed worship center in Southern California, while Franklin Graham inherited his father’s evangelistic association and began pushing it off his father’s moderate path toward the angry far right.
Of much greater significance was the maturation of Evangelical politicos like Ralph Reed, who moved from directing the Christian Coalition to Republican Party operative. What didn’t change was the quadrennial political ritual in which presidential candidates from both parties were expected to declare their religious bona fides.
No one who wants to be president nowadays would dare wave off requests for information about his or her religious convictions the way that Franklin Delano Roosevelt did when he entered the race in 1932: “I am a Christian and a Democrat and that is all they need to know,” he told his aides. And so, early in the primary season leading up to the millennial election of the year 2000, Newsweek dispatched me to New Hampshire to probe the four major candidates about their personal religious beliefs and practices.
They were not a particularly pious bunch. Vice President Al Gore allowed that he was “a Christian, a Protestant, and a Baptist” in that order but added a distinctly Evangelical credential, saying that “none of these labels are as important as my own personal experience.” Former Democratic senator Bill Bradley recalled testifying publicly for Christ as a member of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes but said that he eventually realized this fervor was inauthentic. Republican senator John McCain, a Baptist, said he attended church most Sundays. Right away he corrected himself, as if he’d just remembered that the bus we were sitting in was called “The Straight Talk Express.” “Make that more like once a month,” he said.
Oddly enough, the most religiously demonstrative candidate that year, Texas governor George W. Bush, was also the only one who refused my requests for an interview. The reason, I came to believe, was that he had already made his Evangelical witness a month earlier on television during a Republican candidates’ debate in Iowa. When it was his turn to name his favorite philosopher and explain why, Bush immediately responded: “Jesus, because he changed my heart.” Never mind that Jesus spoke as a prophet, not a philosopher. With those five words Bush signaled the party’s religious base that if he were elected president God would have an Evangelical witness in the White House.
The study of religion and politics would be a lot more relevant if scholars could demonstrate a relationship between any president’s policies and his religious beliefs and practices. Denominational ties, in particular, are useless in predicting how a president will govern. This was especially true of George W. Bush. A baptized Episcopalian and sometime Presbyterian, Bush eventually joined the church of his wife’s choice and became a Methodist, even though the United Methodist Church’s official positions on public policy were the obverse of his own conservative politics. In fact, the candidate who said his heart had been changed by Jesus was not the product of any church. Rather, his piety was shaped by “the small group movement,” sociologist Robert Wuthnow’s term for the vast network of support groups ranging from Bible study circles to twelve-step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous to hobbyists and book discussion clubs. In 1994, Wuthnow estimated that four out of ten Americans belonged to the movement, which he saw as filling a populist need for community and attracting people with an aversion to large organizations—including religious denominations.5 Habitat for Humanity, which was founded by Millard Fuller, a pious Christian, was and remains a conspicuous example.
Like many others, Bush’s small group experience was essentially therapeutic. In the 1980s, he joined a nondenominational Bible study group to help him overcome a dependence on alcohol that was wounding his marriage, and he came away with a view of religion that was personal, therapeutic, and focused on the efficacy of small, voluntary circles of caring. Why is this important? Because as I have emphasized throughout this book, how a person gets religion can powerfully influence the understanding of the religion he got. But it is also important if we are to understand the one policy of the Bush presidency that could be said to be motivated by his personal experience of religion.
Bush’s Faith-Based Bust
Decisions a chief executive makes during the first week in office are often intended as symbols of a presidential change in direction. For example, four days into his presidency Bill Clinton celebrated the twentieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade by holding a televised session in the Oval Office where he issued a series of executive orders rescinding certain restrictions the Reagan and Bush administrations had placed on federal funding of national and international abortion providers. It was a pledge he had made to his feminist constituency and was reinforced at home by Hillary. George W. Bush’s first act in office was a pair of executive orders establishing the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, with desks in the various branches of the federal government. The purpose was to provide federal funds to faith-based and other local community organizations on the premise that they are better placed than government bureaucracies to assess and provide social services. This, too, was the fulfillment of a campaign promise.
Politically, the faith-based initiative was meant to put flesh on the bones of “compassionate conservatism,” Bush’s campaign theme.6 But it was also an application of the kind of small-group, self-help religion that had turned his own life around. Inevitably, the program generated opposition. Attorney General John Ashcroft, a devout Pentecostal, was sent out to convince those Evangelicals who feared government money would lead to government control of the services they rendered in the name of Jesus. Secular critics feared the government would wind up mixing the gin of religious proselytizing with the tonic of faith-based social services. The issue of where to draw the line was dicey since there was impressive empirical evidence, from recidivism rates for paroled prisoners, to countering gang-based violence in the inner city, that religious faith was a powerful factor in turning individuals away from the path of crime.
And yet it could be argued—indeed, was argued in a brief but adroit piece in The New Republic—that Bush’s compassionate conservatism owed more to Catholic social thought than to any other source.7 The new president’s experience of Evangelical Christianity, with its emphasis on personal salvation, offered no principles for building a just society. But Bush’s chief speechwriter, Michael Gerson, a Wheaton College graduate, had studied Catholic social teachings and he introduced his boss to several Catholics who tutored candidate Bush on the meaning of that doctrine’s major concepts, like “solidarity,” “subsidiarity,” and “the common good.” Among them was University of Pennsylvania political scientist and criminologist John Dilulio, who had directed a number of faith-based projects in Philadelphia’s inner city. “The last institutions to abandon the slums,” he liked to remind politicians, “are the liquor stores and the churches.”
Bush chose Dilulio to direct his faith-based program, thus making him the only Catholic and only Democrat among his White House advisors. The president’s plan was to provide up to $8 billion in funding, but the budget never came close to that figure and eight months into the Bush administration, Dilulio became its first member to resign, later citing White House staff’s indifference and focus on the politics of the program as his main reasons. Like his father, though, George W. Bush lacked what the elder Bush had dismissed as “the vision thing.” Had it been otherwise, he might have brought to the Republican Party a view of civil society in which a wide range of institutions and associational organizations enrich the gap between government and the individual citizen. It was a missed opportunity.
Throughout his eight years in office, George W. Bush wore his religion openly, like Russians do their medals. As the 2004 election approached, Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report, as well as The New Republic, Commonweal, America, and numerous other opinion journals, analyzed what Time called “the faith factor” in American politics. One study that attempted to quantify presidential “God talk” since the rise of the Religious Right declared George W. Bush the winner over Ronald Reagan, Bush the elder, and Bill Clinton—though not by much. No one, however, found a way to measure how any of this talk influenced the governance of the country. Never mind that Bush’s reelection prompted a rash of feverish articles warning of an incipient “theocracy” conceived by political “theocons.”8 The latter, it turned out, were either fringy Evangelical thinkers or Bush’s Catholic advisors, who never did influence his thinking.
By the close of the second George W. Bush administration, it was obvious that Evangelical Christians owned more than their share of seats at the table. As the largest and most reliable voting bloc in the Republican Party they had a major say in how that particular party’s table was set, and who said grace over the meal. The party’s air of acquired righteousness probably put off as many voters as it attracted. But as the Democratic Party demonstrated, in politics there is more than one way to be religious, and in religion there is more than one way to be righteous.