Chapter 5

SLAVES AND SOLDIERS

AS EVANGELICALS BEGAN TO MOBILIZE AS A partisan political force, they did so by rallying to defend “family values.” But family values politics was never about protecting the well-being of families generally. Fundamentally, evangelical “family values” entailed the reassertion of patriarchal authority. At its most basic level, family values politics was about sex and power.

Inspired by men like James Dobson and Bill Gothard, evangelicals propped up patriarchal authority in ways that were both personal and political. In the home, fathers disciplined children and husbands exercised authority over wives; in the case of husbands and wives, this authority could be administered in the most intimate of ways. Beyond the home, the power of the patriarch ensured the security of the nation. In the aftermath of Vietnam, this required a renewed commitment to militarism. Family values politics, then, involved the enforcement of women’s sexual and social subordination in the domestic realm and the promotion of American militarism on the national stage.

Phyllis Schlafly had helped piece together this interlocking set of priorities, but by the 1970s, evangelicals themselves came to play a critical role in defining family values politics. By the early 1980s, Tim LaHaye, Beverly LaHaye, and Jerry Falwell had established themselves as architects of the Religious Right. Together, they ensured that the enforcement of patriarchal authority, in all its facets, would occupy the heart of evangelical politics for decades to come.

TIM LAHAYE IS BEST KNOWN today as the coauthor of the Left Behind books, a fictional series based on the rapture, a premillennialist end-times scenario in which believers are taken up into heaven before an apocalyptic series of events unfolds on earth. LaHaye’s novels are rife with paragons of rugged masculinity and redemptive violence. The hero is a man by the name of Rayford Steele, husband to faithful wife Irene, whose work for Richard DeVos’s Amway testifies to her charitable character. But Rayford’s libido draws him to a “drop-dead gorgeous” flight attendant; when his wife is raptured, he and the flight attendant are not. The series ends in a violent bloodbath ushered in by Christ himself. The conquering Christ brings peace through the sword, slaying tens of thousands of opposition soldiers who fall dead, “splayed and filleted,” blood bursting “from skin and veins,” entrails gushing to the ground. In acts of unprecedented violence, Christ’s enemies get what they had coming. LaHaye’s Left Behind books have sold more than sixty-five million copies; one survey estimates that one in five Americans has read at least one of the books. It was, however, a rapture of a different sort that inspired LaHaye’s earlier writing.¹

In 1968, LaHaye published a guide to marriage with the curious but telling title How to Be Happy Though Married. The book promoted “male headship,” the notion based on New Testament teachings that the husband was “the head of the wife,” that he had authority over her and was responsible for her; for LaHaye, this was particularly relevant in matters of finances. In addition to other more mundane topics, LaHaye included a chapter on “Physical Joys” that contained a helpful glossary of terms (“clitoris,” “vulva area,” “glans penis,” “areas of sexual sensitivity”) and two detailed charts of male and female sexual anatomy. This book was published by the evangelical Tyndale House Publishers two years before the feminist classic Our Bodies, Ourselves, and by 1973 it was already in its sixteenth printing, with more than 300,000 copies in print.²

LaHaye’s marital sex guide came at a time when evangelicals were increasingly concerned about sex in general. In 1960, the FDA approved the first birth control pill. In 1962, Helen Gurley Brown published Sex and the Single Girl, and two years later Newsweek heralded a “new morality” that required only a “meaningful relationship” to legitimate sexual intimacy. To conservative evangelicals, there was nothing remotely moral about this new morality, and as the morality gap grew, so, too, did evangelicals’ worry over what was being taught about sex in public schools. With no more consensus over moral values, which values would be conveyed to their children?³

This was not a question to take lightly, and Billy James Hargis—the fundamentalist pastor who helped spearhead Christian anticommunism in the 1950s and 1960s—took it upon himself to safeguard the sexual purity of America’s children. When Hargis turned his attention to sex in the mid-1960s, he didn’t do so at the expense of his anticommunism. Like Graham, Hargis considered sexual morality critical to the nation’s defense against communism. Others soon joined his new crusade. With none-too-subtle pamphlets like Is the School House the Proper Place to Teach Raw Sex? conservative Christian leaders sounded the alarm, and battles over sex ed soon broke out in nearly half of all school districts across the nation. Many of the citizens who waged this battle were the same ones who were fighting against gun control and unsettled by the prospects of interracial dating at desegregated schools. Organizations like the John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan teamed up with Hargis. Hargis’s career would be cut short in 1976, when Time magazine published an exposé of the crusader’s sexual improprieties. The allegations came to light after a student at Hargis’s college revealed to his bride on their honeymoon that he’d had sex with Hargis, only to discover that she had, too. But others took up Hargis’s crusade where he left off.⁴

The year of Hargis’s downfall, LaHaye and his wife Beverly coauthored a more detailed Christian sex manual, The Act of Marriage. The LaHayes were also deeply concerned about changing sexual mores, but like Marabel Morgan, they were not anti-sex. Instead, they offered a different model of sexual liberation—the liberation of heterosexual couples to freely enjoy sex within the confines of patriarchal marriage. Inspired in part by Morgan’s The Total Woman, the LaHayes also advised women to “clean up, paint up, fix up” before “hubby” returned from work, as the sight of a “bedraggled wife” rarely inspired love.⁵ But the LaHayes took Morgan’s advice a step further by situating sex more fully within the framework of patriarchal authority. “God designed man to be the aggressor, provider, and leader of his family,” they explained, and these roles were directly tied to a man’s sex drive. You couldn’t have a man’s “aggressive leadership” without his aggressive sex drive, and women who resented the latter had better come to terms with this fact. In satisfying their husbands sexually, wives played a critical role in propping up men’s egos, which in turn bolstered them for leadership. If a husband lacked confidence, his wife should “make aggressive love to him . . . dress provocatively and use her feminine charm to seduce him” to help him “bounce back.” A woman’s failure in the bedroom, the LaHayes made clear, had consequences: “Few men accept bedroom failure without being carnal, nasty, and insulting.” In other words, if a man didn’t enjoy his wife’s lovemaking, he would find ways to make his disapproval known. This was simply the way things worked.⁶

The problem was that many Christian wives were failures in the bedroom. And here the LaHayes confronted a conundrum. What happens when you believe that men have voracious sexual appetites, that their very ability to lead their families and their nation is linked to the satisfaction of those appetites, but wives have been taught from childhood that their sexuality must be restrained, controlled, suppressed? What happens when good Christian wives have little sexual knowledge and little apparent desire? When they are filled with guilt and an overbearing sense of modesty? Obviously, this led to conflict in the bedroom, and the LaHayes offered a solution.

They worked to convince modest Christian women that it was not sinful to let their husbands see them naked, that they should learn to talk about sex without embarrassment and educate themselves about how to have sex in a way they and their husbands enjoyed. In The Act of Marriage they offered a vastly expanded treatise on sex. The book was a nearly 300-page how-to guide that answered virtually every imaginable question, often in graphic detail: How can a man delay orgasm long enough for his wife to get aroused? What about oral manipulation of breasts? Is a woman’s clitoris always the spot she desires her husband to touch to arouse her sexual tensions? Are some women born frigid? Is it right for a Christian woman to have silicone injected into her breasts? Can a homosexual or lesbian ever be cured? Is it right for Christians to practice birth control? Charting a course between an unhealthy repression of sexuality on the one hand, and the excesses of the sexual revolution on the other, the LaHayes offered a vision of sexuality securely confined within the structures of patriarchal authority. Men could have unrestrained libidos—they simply needed to satisfy themselves within marriage. Women needed to restrain themselves until marriage, at which point it was their duty to satisfy their husbands’ demands.⁷

For the LaHayes, women’s subordination was theological, social, and sexual: “The very nature of the act of marriage involves feminine surrender.” In language that would resurface in countless subsequent books on evangelical masculinity, the LaHayes assured men that women desired their heroic masculine leadership, in the bedroom and beyond: “Lurking in the heart of every girl (even when she is grown up) is the image of prince charming on his white horse coming to wake up the beautiful princess with her first kiss of love.”⁸

Beverly and Tim would each play strategic roles in the emerging Christian Right. The two had met as students at Bob Jones University in the 1940s, a school that would be at the center of debates over segregation and private Christian education throughout the 1970s and 1980s. (BJU did not admit African American students until 1971, and then only with strict rules against interracial dating and marriage that remained on the books until 2000.) Tim had served as a machine gunner on a bomber in the Second World War, and after college he earned a doctorate in literature from Liberty University. In the 1950s, the LaHayes joined in the evangelical migration to southern California, and there they would knit together the new set of issues that would come to define modern American evangelicalism.

Deeply influenced by Phyllis Schlafly, Beverly emerged as an influential leader in her own right. In 1976 she published The Spirit-Controlled Woman, a book that would sell over 800,000 copies, and in 1979 she founded Concerned Women for America (CWA), an evangelical organization devoted to carrying forward the pro-family, anti-feminist cause. Within only a few years, CWA surpassed Schlafly’s Eagle Forum in terms of membership and influence within American evangelicalism. Even more than Dobson, Beverly LaHaye motivated her followers to engage with politics; 98 percent of CWA members voted in the 1988 presidential election, 93 percent had signed or circulated a petition, 77 percent had boycotted a company or product, 74 percent had contacted a public official, and nearly half had written a letter to the editor.⁹

Tim LaHaye was a pastor and speaker (including for the John Birch Society in the 1960s and 1970s), and the author of more than 85 books. A sampling of his nonfiction titles reveals the contours of his worldview: The Unhappy Gays: What Everyone Should Know about Homosexuality (1978), The Battle for the Mind (1980), The Battle for the Family (1981), The Battle for the Public Schools (1982), Faith in Our Founding Fathers (1987), and Raising Sexually Pure Kids (1993). In these writings LaHaye denounced “abortion-on-demand, legalization of homosexual rights . . . the size and power of big government, elimination of capital punishment, national disarmament, increased taxes, women in combat, passage of ERA, unnecessary busing.” For LaHaye, these were all facets of the same project.¹⁰

LaHaye strove to arouse Christians’ sense of embattlement. He warned of the “liberal, humanist” media corrupting the nation, evident in “the pornographic indoctrination now masquerading as TV entertainment”—in “anti-moral” programs like Three’s Company, Dallas, and Saturday Night Live—but also in television and print news. Most pointedly, he blamed American news stations for their biased coverage of the Vietnam War, for constantly “twisting” news reports “to make America appear the aggressor,” causing a generation to become disillusioned with their own country. Time and Newsweek were also not to be trusted; he recommended magazines like Human Events and Conservative Digest as alternatives. But what was really needed was a fourth television news network “committed to rendering a conservative view of the news,” along with a conservative wire service and a chain of newspapers, news sources that would defend “traditional moral values, the church of Jesus Christ, a strong national defense,” and other conservative values.¹¹

Like many other leaders in the Religious Right, LaHaye was inspired by Christian Reconstructionism. Citing Rushdoony and those influenced by Rushdoony, he argued that America was founded as a Christian nation, and he advocated for biblical authority in the realm of family, church, and government. Yet LaHaye’s embrace of Christian Reconstructionism is in some ways curious. Like most fundamentalists, LaHaye was a premillennialist. Premillennialists tended to see America, like any other nation, as doomed to destruction. Reconstructionists, on the other hand, were postmillennialists who believed Christians needed to establish the Kingdom of God on earth by bringing all things under the authority or dominion of Christ before Christ returned. LaHaye’s embrace of Reconstructionism demonstrates how theological contradictions could be smoothed over in practice. In adopting Reconstructionist teachings piecemeal, premillennialists patched over a long-standing division within conservative Protestantism. Such quibbles apparently paled in comparison to what they held in common—a desire to reclaim the culture for Christ by reasserting patriarchal authority and waging battle against encroaching secular humanism, in all its guises.¹²

In addition to helping construct the philosophy of the Religious Right, LaHaye was also instrumental in building its organizational scaffolding. In 1981, LaHaye founded the Council for National Policy, an influential and secretive organization that served as a conservative policy incubator and helped nudge the Republican Party to the Right, and he would have a hand in creating a number of other conservative organizations in the 1980s as well. By generating ideas and networks, LaHaye established himself as one of the most influential evangelicals of the late twentieth century, a status he shared with another key player in the rise of the Christian Right, the Reverend Jerry Falwell.¹³

JERRY FALWELL ECHOED and amplified themes articulated by Schlafly, Dobson, and the LaHayes. These leaders had connected Christian manhood to a strong national defense and championed a return to “macho” masculinity, but it was Falwell who most clearly represented the shift toward a more brazen militancy—and militarism.

Like Dobson, Falwell had a troubled relationship with his own father, an alcoholic who succumbed to cirrhosis of the liver when Falwell was a teenager. Falwell grew up in Lynchburg, Virginia, a town that had never recovered from the economic challenges that beset the region in the wake of the Civil War. His mother sought to raise him as a proper Baptist, taking him to church and having him listen to Charles Fuller’s Old Fashioned Revival Hour each week on the radio. (A purveyor of modern evangelicalism, Fuller was neither old-fashioned nor Baptist.) Falwell was a standout athlete, the captain of his high school football team, but he was also a math whiz and class valedictorian. After “getting saved” in high school, he decided to attend a Baptist Bible college to train for the ministry. Upon returning to Lynchburg in 1956, he started his own fundamentalist Baptist church. By that time, thanks to the nascent military-industrial complex, new factories were springing up in the region. Falwell had already imbibed anticommunism in his fundamentalist Baptist circles, but now the business interests of his town—and his new church—were directly linked to Cold War capitalism.

Among the people streaming into Falwell’s Thomas Road Baptist Church were large numbers of Appalachian transplants. Having left rural America for new opportunities, these blue-collar migrants were searching for new forms of community and identity. They brought with them a culture of militarism (and perhaps also a suspicion of “outsiders”) that some historians trace back to the rough-and-tumble Scotch-Irish borderlands from which their families originally hailed. Falwell fashioned a Christianity that was well suited to this local context—one that was anticommunist, pro-segregationist, and infused throughout with a militant masculinity. Building a religious empire in Lynchburg, Falwell then exported this politicized faith across the nation through his radio and television ministries.¹⁴

In 1979, at the nudging of Goldwater campaign veterans Howard Phillips, Paul Weyrich, and Richard Viguerie, Falwell launched the Moral Majority, a political organization with the purpose of training, mobilizing, and “electrifying” the Religious Right, but he had been championing Christian nationalism throughout the 1970s. In 1976, the year of America’s bicentennial, he had organized a series of “I Love America” rallies, elaborately choreographed performances staged on the steps of state capitals across the nation. The next year he supported Anita Bryant and Phyllis Schlafly in their “pro-family” campaigns, and then he initiated his own “Clean Up America” campaign. At the end of the decade he returned to his “I Love America” rallies, possibly because he had leftover Bicentennial Bibles to dispense with. Falwell loved patriotic pageantry. One of his musical groups, the Sounds of Liberty, was composed of women wearing “Charlie’s Angels hairdos” who seemed “to snuggle up against their virile-looking male counterparts.”¹⁵

In 1980, Falwell published Listen, America!, a primer on the politics of the Religious Right. His audience was the sixty million people Gallup had recently identified as “born-again Christians,” in addition to another sixty million “religious promoralists”—all told, his “Moral Majority.” With numbers on their side, the time had come to reclaim the country from “a vocal minority of ungodly men and women” who had brought America to “the brink of death.” However, the first pages of Listen, America! aren’t about America at all. Instead, Falwell opened with graphic details of atrocities committed by the Russia-backed “Vietnamese Communists” and the “Red China”–backed Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Such slaughter would soon be upon America, he warned, if they didn’t hold communism at bay and fight the “moral decay” destroying American freedoms. Signs of this decay abounded: “welfarism,” “income-transfer programs,” divorce, abortion, homosexuality, “secular humanism” in public schools, federally funded day care, and the Domestic Violence Prevention and Treatment Act. The Domestic Violence Act was especially insidious, for it would do away with “physical punishment as a mode of child-rearing” and “eliminate the husband as ‘head of the family.’” Another bill pending in the Senate (S. 1722) at that time would enable women to sue husbands for rape, he claimed. The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare was a particular target of conservative ire. Created in 1953, the department oversaw school integration, public-school curriculum revision, and welfare expenditures, money that conservatives felt could better be spent on national defense.¹⁶

Falwell offered solutions to the grim situation the country found itself in: free enterprise (as “clearly outlined in the Book of Proverbs”), patriotism, turning to God instead of government, and taking a firm stand against the ERA, feminism, and “the homosexual revolution.” Defending the family was the linchpin of Falwell’s ideology. God had created families for a purpose: families were central to procreation, and, properly structured around patriarchal authority, families were also God’s mechanism for controlling and “containing” the earth. But the family was in peril. Protecting the family required moral revival, but even more importantly, a revitalized military. As Falwell explained, “the most notable example of government malfeasance in its family obligations is in the area of defense.” Due to the government’s “unilateral disarmament, mutually assured destruction, and the acceptance of Soviet military superiority,” America was failing to protect its families.¹⁷

Christian citizens must rectify this situation. Lest Americans be misled by traditions of Christian pacifism, Falwell insisted that Christianity sanctioned military aggression. The Book of Romans stated plainly that God granted government officials “the right to bear the sword.” Moreover, “a political leader, as a minister of God, is a revenger to execute wrath upon those who do evil.” The US government, then, had every right “to use its armaments to bring wrath upon those who would do evil by hurting other people.” Good citizens submit to their governments and honor those in authority over them; in turn, government officials—“ministers of God”—ensure the safety of their citizens by “being a terror to evildoers within and without the nation.” Ultimately, American security depended on its men: “We need in America today powerful, dynamic, and godly leadership.”¹⁸

Falwell’s overt political activism in the 1970s and 1980s marked a dramatic personal reversal. In the 1960s, he had preached against Christian political engagement. Christians had only one task: to preach God’s word of salvation through Christ. “We are not told to wage war against bootleggers, liquor stores, gamblers, murderers, prostitutes, racketeers, prejudiced persons or institutions, or any other existing evil as such,” he had argued. Christian ministry was one of transformation, not reformation: “The gospel does not clean up the outside but rather regenerates the inside.” A Christian’s civic duty was to pay taxes, vote, and obey the laws of the land. Any political activity beyond this would distract Christians from their sole purpose, “to know Christ and to make Him known.”¹⁹

If this apolitical rhetoric seems odd coming from the founder of the Moral Majority, consider that Falwell addressed his earlier denouncement of Christian political activism to “Ministers and Marchers”—in other words, to Christian pastors active in the civil rights movement. A child of the South, Falwell was a segregationist. Rather than fearing that American racism would discredit the country globally, Falwell insisted that civil rights agitation was inspired by communist sympathizers. He saw Marxism at the root of the movement, not a Christian social justice tradition. Falwell helped lead local efforts to resist school integration, even when that meant defying the Eisenhower administration, both national parties, and Lynchburg’s own business leaders. He opened his own private Christian academy in 1967, the same year his state mandated the immediate desegregation of public schools. Falwell only changed his tune on political engagement when he deemed it necessary to preserve the rights of segregationists and fend off a secularist assault. By 1980, Falwell had repudiated his earlier teaching as “false prophecy.” In fact, by that time he was advocating civil disobedience—were Congress to begin drafting women into military service.²⁰

As Falwell battled for the rights of (white) families and in defense of the nation, he employed explicitly militaristic language. In 1981, journalist Frances FitzGerald introduced Falwell to the American public in a lengthy New Yorker profile. Falwell was “fighting a holy war,” a war to resist feminism, abortion on demand, government intervention in the family, the abandonment of Taiwan, IRS interference in Christian schools, children’s rights, and “rampant homosexuality”—the very things that had corrupted the nation’s morals and blunted its ability to resist communism. According to Falwell, this war was between those who loved Jesus and those who hated him, and those who loved Jesus should expect to be reviled by others.²¹

Military metaphors structured Falwell’s understanding of Christianity. The church was an “army equipped for battle,” Sunday school an “attacking squad,” Christian radio “the artillery.” Christians, “like slaves and soldiers,” ask no questions. As an occupation force, they needed to advance “with bayonet in hand” to bring the enemy under submission to the gospel of Christ. The enemy here was a human one, according to FitzGerald: anyone who didn’t subscribe to Falwell’s brand of fundamentalism. Falwell’s militarism gave shape to the gospel he preached, and to the savior at the heart of that gospel. Falwell couldn’t stomach “effeminate” depictions of Christ as a delicate man with “long hair and flowing robes.” Jesus “was a man with muscles. . . . Christ was a he-man!”²²

Falwell’s rhetoric was reminiscent of earlier fundamentalist militancy, but he combined it with Cold War militarism and a rigid reassertion of patriarchal gender roles; for Falwell, each would define and reinforce the other. Falwell’s rhetoric resonated with members of his congregation. The region surrounding Lynchburg had a strong military heritage, and at Thomas Road Baptist Church, military service was “probably the rule rather than the exception.” For members who had relocated from Appalachia, Falwell’s militaristic brand of Christianity dovetailed nicely with long-held traditions of masculine honor and violence. Falwell’s militancy promised protection, from enemies within and without. In this way, Falwell’s authority depended on maintaining a sense of vulnerability among his followers. This was achieved through the continual fabrication of new enemies. Danger, discrimination, and disparagement lurked around every corner. Malevolent forces aligned against true believers. Outsiders were likely to be enemies. Threats of a spiritual and cultural nature required a militant Christianity; threats to the nation required unrestrained militarism.²³

IN THE SUMMER OF 1980, a pivotal event brought together Falwell, the LaHayes, and other architects of the Religious Right in dramatic fashion. Conservatives, it turns out, hadn’t been the only ones concerned with the fate of American families. Feminists, liberals, progressive churches, African American and Chicana activists, doctors, teachers, academics and professionals—even the National Gay Task Force—were all invested in strengthening and protecting families in the 1970s. Thinking that conservatives and liberals might come together in a common cause, President Carter organized a White House Conference on Families. Things didn’t go as planned.

Well before the conference, the fault lines were impossible to ignore. Who got to define “family”? Conservatives championed the “traditional” model: an archetypal family headed by a white, heterosexual male breadwinner. Liberals proposed a more adaptive family model, one that allowed for single parents and gay men and women. Liberals looked to government to support families. Conservatives opposed government “interference” and sought instead to protect families from moral erosion.²⁴

When it came to marshaling grassroots forces, conservatives had the upper hand. They’d been building networks and refining policy positions for over a decade, and they knew what they were up against. Nationally funded childcare, the ERA, Roe v. Wade, the Domestic Violence Prevention and Treatment Act, feminism, and gay rights—each of these flashpoints had mobilized a “pro-family” movement and fine-tuned conservative Christian talking points. But grassroots activism had its limits; after organizers had selected participants—more than 100,000 citizens engaged in various stages of the process—conservatives began to complain that they were not properly represented. Despite his later protestations that Focus on the Family was not a political organization, Dobson’s overt political engagement can be traced to his urging listeners to write to the White House to request his inclusion in the conference. They didn’t disappoint; 80,000 letters were delivered to the White House. Even then, Dobson only received an invitation to address a preconference event.²⁵

Frustrated, conservatives denounced what they saw as a liberal scheme to hijack the conversation. Fuming that conference organizers had excluded conservatives’ issues—including banning abortion, defending school prayer, and opposing gay rights—from their final recommendations, conservative delegates walked out of the official conference in protest. The next month, they organized their own counter-conference in Long Beach, California, an event that united the forces of the pro-family Religious Right. Dobson, Schlafly, Falwell, and the LaHayes all spoke, rallying the troops. The timing was strategic. With the 1980 election weeks away, they were united in their efforts to unseat Carter.

To evangelicals, Carter had been a disappointment on all counts. They denounced the Carter administration for siding with feminists and for “wooing the homosexual vote.” To make matters worse, Carter had overseen what conservatives perceived to be the stunning decline of American strength. On his first day in office he had pardoned draft evaders. He agreed to hand over the Panama Canal and signed a nuclear arms control agreement. He’d allowed the Sandinistas to gain control of Nicaragua and enabled the overthrow of the Shah of Iran. The kidnapping of 52 American hostages at the US embassy in Tehran was an especially humiliating blow. Meanwhile, the president was mired in a “crisis of confidence,” and seemed unable to lead America out of the mess he’d made. On top of all this, he wore cardigans and he smiled too much. Even the national media proclaimed Carter a “wimp,” and the label stuck.²⁶

For American evangelicals who had placed patriarchal power at the heart of their cultural and political identity, Carter’s wimp factor was particularly infuriating, and their sense of betrayal acute. After all, Carter was supposed to be one of them—he was a born-again evangelical, a southerner, a Sunday school teacher—and they had helped elect him in order to restore the nation’s firm moral footing in the aftermath of Watergate. He had even served a stint as a naval submariner. Yet it was clear that he was not one of them on the issues that mattered most. For the strong, masculine leadership the country so urgently required, they would need to look elsewhere.