LETTER FROM WASHINGTON

CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS


The religious right is winning a holy war in the state Republican Parties.
With such leaders as Bob Dole falling in step, how far will their crusade
go? 

By Sydney BLUMENTHAL - The New Yorker, July 18, 1994



Three years ago, Ralph Reed, the executive director of the Christian
Coalition, wished not to be seen. "I want to be invisible," he said. "I do
guerrilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don't know
it's over until you're in a body bag. You don't know until Election
Night." But on June 25th Reed played the expansive host at a luncheon
given by the Coalition, the most influential group on the religious right,
which was attended by hundreds of delegates to the Iowa Republican Party
Convention. They were celebrating their victories in gaining control of
the state Party's central committee, ousting moderate Republicans, and in
dictating a platform that supported the teaching of creationism in the
public schools and opposition to "secular humanism, political correctness,
New Age concepts, the PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals)
philosophy, one world government, situational ethics, and the teaching of
homosexuality as an acceptable style or behavior." Reed told the crowd, 'I
don't think it's the American way to oppose people with religious faith
getting involved." 

Earlier that month, at the Texas Democratic Party Convention, Governor Ann
Richards had assailed the "radical religious right," declaring that her
quarrel wasn't with people who have fervent religious faith but with those
who would force beliefs on others." David Wilhelm, chairman of the
Democratic National Committee, vowed to prevent the right from making God
a wedge issue." Representative Vic Fazio, of California, chairman of the
Democratic Congressional Campaign Congressional Committee, held a news
conference at which he claimed that Republicans are being forced to the
fringes by the aggressive political tactics of the religious right." In
return, on June 23rd, all forty- four Republican senators rushed to the
religious right's defense by sending a letter to President Clinton
demanding that he repudiate "the orchestrated "attack on religious
conservatives" as "bigotry." 

For the religious right, invisibility is no longer possible. From South
Carolina to Oregon, state parties are falling under its sway. The movement
became a truly volatile and defining issue with the Virginia Republican
Convention, held on June 3rd and 4th - the most clarifying political event
to occur since the 1992 Presidential election. By itself, it may have
seemed a sensational singularity, but it was not. Virginia was followed a
week later by the Texas Republican Convention, a week after that by the
one in Minnesota, and a week after that by Iowa. In Texas, the religious
right took control of the state party, enthusiastically electing one of
their own as chairman and voting down a resolution, proposed by a
benighted moderate, that read, "The Republican Party is not a church.... A
Republican should never be put in the position of having to defend or
explain his faith in order to participate in the party process." In
Minnesota, the religious right overwhelmingly dominated the state
Convention, pledging the support for governor to Allen Quist, a
creationist and-abortion activist, who in 1985, after his first wife, who
was six months pregnant, was killed in a car accident, had the fetus
displayed in the open coffin. Quist's opponent at the Convention was the
incumbent Republican governor, Arne Carlson, who is a moderate. Across the
nation, the flag and the cross are becoming one. 

The upsurge of the religious right at the 1992 Republican National
Convention, in Houston, startled many, but the shifts in the G.O.P. that
came into stark public view then are now flaring into open combat
nationwide. In the 1992 Presidential election, Evangelical Protestants
became the single largest constituents within the Republican Party,
without which it would not have had even a minimally credible base within
the electoral college. Consequently, a cultural and religious war is being
waged within the Party between the mainline Protestants, who defined
Republicanism, and of the ascendant Evangelicals, whose claims on Party
structures are depicted by the Old Guard as takeovers. Since 1992, the
conservative movement has steadily folded itself into its one concentrated
point of energy--the religious right. There may be another Republican
Party, but it exists only in the irretrievable past. For now, the G.O.P.
is gathering in a permanent Houston Convention. 

The Richmond Convention was a far less diluted and mediated event than the
one in Houston. Every side of the Richmond Coliseum-east and west, north
and south--was plastered with signs reading "North." Fourteen thousand
delegates to the Virginia Republican Party Convention, the largest
deliberative body in American politics, were packed in from floor to
rafters, coiled in anticipation. Suddenly, the thunderous chords of "Eye
of the Tiger" the theme song from "Rocky III," crashed through the
loudspeakers, stilling the eager humming of the crowd. The hall was thrown
into darkness. On a thirty-foot-tall video screen, which was just behind
the platform and was flanked by statues of trumpeting elephants, a huge
black-and-white picture of Jane Fonda appeared. "Boos!" The fight song
rumbled on, louder and louder. Jessie Jackson's face appeared. "Boo!"
Then, ratcheting up the decibel level and the scale of demonology, came
Dan Rather. "Boo!" After him, Sam Donaldson. "Boo!" Then Mephisto himself,
Bill Clinton. "Booo!" Block letters filled the screen, asking the
delegates, "WHOSE SIDE ARE YOU ON?" 

Then, abruptly, the film began to solicit love for the hero who could save
the delegates from their enemies. In tender tones, his friends and
comrades, his wife and mother testified to his bravery, resolve, and
fidelity. The hero himself, a Cincinnatus in jeans, strode toward the
camera, with his farm as a backdrop, to explain that "family values" has
become his "battle cry" that he must give up the plow for the sword. The
music pumped way up. The hero's name was chanted over and over. Spotlights
sweeping the arena converged in a pinpoint onstage. Oliver North,
Republican candidate for the United States Senate, materialized within it.
"Ollie! Ollie!" 

North's rise from the shame of the Iran-Contra scandal to the
respectability of the podium in Richmond may appear to be a hallucinogenic
turn in a bizarre Virginia reel. But his nomination is neither a flashback
nor a provincial sideshow. The transformation of Ollie North the witness,
facing a phalanx of senators, into Ollie North the candidate for the
Senate has required a drastic political mutation, not so much in him as in
the Republican Party. Ollie has emerged as the most renowned figure of the
most vital and aggressive movement within the national Party: the nominee
as Christian soldier. 

Republican politics nationally, and particularly in Virginia, have
advanced so swiftly toward the right in the past two years that North's
nomination was almost inevitable. His victory is a direct rebuke to
virtually the entire Republican establishment of the Reagan era, including
Ronald Reagan himself, who publicly excoriated North, writing a letter
that was released during the primary campaign saying, " I am getting
pretty steamed about the statements coming from Oliver North." North's
detractors were not only the predictable moderates but also Reagan's
conservatives: Meese and Weinberger and Laxalt and Bork. Senator John
Warner, Virginia's foremost Republican, announced that he would never
endorse a man who had lied to the Senate, and, furthermore, would do all
in his power to defeat him. 

The hope of stopping North rested on James C. Miller III, a libertarian
economist, who was one of the most obscure but most enduring figures of
the Reagan era--he served as chairman of the Federal Trade Commission and
as budget director. Miller's senatorial campaign consisted largely of
gestures seeking to demonstrate that, although he was not Ollie North, he
was acceptable to the right. His stratagem was to prove his bona fides as
an authentic conservative by assembling testimonials from conservative
leaders of the nineteen-eighties. Miller's slogan was "Elect a
Conservative Who Can Win." If he had not been running against North, he
would have been considered a right-wing champion. 

On the day before the voting, I ran into Miller on the floor of the
Coliseum as he was buttonholing delegates. He is tall and bald with the
genial, concerned manner of a sitcom father from the early
nineteen-sixties. He told me, "I've had North people say, 'I really like
Ollie, but I'm beginning to have doubts he can win.' Ollie, bless his
heart, is polarizing in a way no other candidate today is. In Virginia,
there are two people who dislike him for every one who likes him." 

Patrick McSweeney, the state Party chairman, relaxing near the base of the
podium before the main event, reflected on the recent drift of Republican
politics. "A lot of people in politics don't like to confront," he
remarked casually. "Every time we've returned to a conservative position
we've won. Ford muddled it. Bush did too. Reagan returned to it. You have
to have a principled opposition to the Democrats or you're not going to
win. "What's going on in this state is the states'-rights arguments
without the racial tinge." In the fifties, Virginia was the leader of
"massive resistance" in the South against integration. Now, McSweeney
suggested, its conservatism is all-American neo-Confederate. 

The corridors of the Coliseum and the Richmond Centre, another convention
hall, across the street, were lined with venders' booths--a bazaar of
ideological objects. There was several sections promoting North. One booth
sold North's books, "Under Fire: An American Story" and "One More Mission:
Ollie North Returns to Vietnam." Another was manned by the Law Enforcement
Coalition for Oliver North, whose director, James Jones, told me, "We
expect eighty thousand members. I've never seen a person be so endorsed by
a group. We even got people from the C.I.A. and the Capitol Hill
police.... No doubt in my mind what happened in Iran-Contra. The man put
himself out as a sacrificial lamb." A third booth sought recruits to the
Ollie North prayer network," a group that prays for him daily and includes
everyone from nuns in Texas to Ollie himself according to an instruction
sheet handed out to potential "Prayer Warriors." The sheet also stated
that "prayer and submission to the Father's will and His guidance are the
key to victory for Ollie" and includes a "program" that involves reading
from Psalm 84: "O God, behold our shield, and look upon the face of Your
anointed." 

Other conservative groups were also hawking their wares at every turn.
Citizens United, specializing in Whitewater conspiracy stories, sold tapes
of Gennifer Flowers and Paula Corbin Jones. Accuracy in Media sold
T-shirts featuring a still from an old Western of Ronald Reagan with a
rope around his neck and the slogan "Stop the Liberal/Media Lynch Mob-Tell
the Truth About the Reagan Legacy." The Christian Coalition, from its
stand, handed out free copies of its newspaper, Christian American, and
recruited for its activist training school. "Think Like Jesus. Lead Like
Moses. Fight Like David. Run Like Lincoln," read the cover of the
recruiting brochure. Inside, it asked, "Can You Spare 12 Hours to Save
Christians from Destruction?" A seminar promises to teach "how to elect
candidates with Christian values," and aspirants are told, "Believe it or
not, the Lord may even want you to run for office. Your availability is
more critical than your lack of political ability." 

Most booths did a brisk business in buttons, which expressed just a few
simple themes: "There Are Americans And There Are Liberals"; "AIDS
Abortion Euthanasia--Don't Liberals Just Kill Ya"; "Sodom and Gomorrah Had
Gays in the Military"; "Clinton Doesn't Inhale--He Sucks"; "Real Men Are
Not Called Hillary"; "If the Clintons Divorce, Who Gets the House?";
"President Clinton: `You Can Play with the Dog, but Leave My Pussy Alone!"
and "Where Is Lee Harvey Oswald When America Really Needs Him?" One booth
displayed a T-shirt reading "Justice for Clinton." It featured a picture
of an aborted fetus. 

William Bennett, who under Reagan was a director of the National Endowment
for the Humanities and then the Secretary of Education, addressed a
fund-raising dinner during the Convention. In the post-Bush period,
Bennett has become the toast-master of the religious right. He is the
G.O.P.'s favorite preacher on morals- an Eastern intellectual urging
alignment with the Christian Coalition. Bennett's latest ventures as an
authority on values are his editorship, in 1993, of a best-selling volume
of uplifting stories and poems, "The Book of Virtues," and his compilation
of a pamphlet, "The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators," which was
originally published by the Heritage Foundation, and which quantifies the
fall of virtue in America. 

Bennett's big theme at the dinner was, as always, that traditional values
are being undermined by liberalism. He spoke of giving a speech at
Stanford University "to defend Western civilization," because there was no
one on the faculty who would do it." Social rot, he warned, was spreading.
"Welfare is bad for people, whether they're poor, middle class, or
wealthy," he said. Moral fibre was weakening. He gave many illustrations
of anti-social behavior caused by liberalism. The last best hope, he
concluded, was "the party of Lincoln." After his speech, he joined Ralph
Reed at a Coalition reception. When he entered, there were excited cries
of Bennett in '96! Bennett in '96!" 

The next day the day of the balloting--Mike Farris, a prominent new-style
Virginia Republican, stepped up to in to introduce the keynote speaker.
Farris's eminence comes from his martyrdom: last year, everyone else on
the Republican ticket was elected to statewide offices in a sweep; only
Farris, the candidate for lieutenant governor, was defeated. (He carried
forty-six percent of the vote.) A number of Republican leaders refused to
support him because he represents the religious right. Farris, who is
forty-two and comes from Washington State, drifted across the country and
through a host of organizations before winding up as one of the movement's
tribunes in Virginia. In the early nineteen- eighties, he founded the
Moral Majority chapter in Washington State, and a few years later he went
on to found the Home School Legal Defense Association. He has argued that
public schools are unconstitutional, objected to the idea of separation of
church and state, approved of discrimination against gays, and enjoined
women not to work outside the home. His backers believed that his loss was
attributable to betrayal by the Old Guard. 

The keynoter was Richard Cheney, who was Ford's White House chief of
staff, the House Minority Whip during the Reagan Administration, and
Bush's Secretary of Defense, and is now an unannounced candidate for
President. His self-designated task at the Convention was to act as a
unifier--in effect, to consolidate support for North and, incidentally,
score points for his own candidacy. Cheney used the failure of some
Republicans to support Farris as an object lesson in what Republicans must
avoid. "I want to make certain that what happened last year won't be
repeated this year," Cheney declared. "Whoever wins will have my
wholehearted, enthusiastic support." 

Shortly thereafter, North's name was placed in nomination, and, in the
spotlight, he spoke. His eyes glistened; his voice had a tremulous catch.
North summoned the Republicans to a new battlefield: "Fifty years ago at
this very minute, thirty-five hundred Virginians-the Stonewall Brigade of
the 29th Infantry Division--were preparing to spearhead one of the most
audacious operations in history. Their mission: to lead the way across
Omaha Beach at dawn, on D Day.... Now, in this last decade of the
twentieth century, Virginian are again being called upon to lead in
another great test of resolve. This time the beachhead we need to seize is
not on some distant shore. It is across the Potomac--in Washington." 

North's farm, where the video introduction to his speech was shot, may be
the most telling sign of his self-image. The farm is named Narnia, after a
series of children's books by C. S. Lewis. In the first book, "The Lion,
the Witch and the Wardrobe," which is part Christology and part Celtic
myth, four English children enter the kingdom of Narnia through the rear
of a wardrobe and discover a land ruled by the White Witch, an ice queen,
who bewitches one of the children. Out of nowhere comes a lion named
Aslan, who has mysterious powers and offers himself as a sacrifice in
place of the child. He is killed, but is resurrected by his father, the
good Emperor-from-Beyond-the-Sea. In the final battle, Aslan triumphs over
the White Witch. Is Aslan North's secret identity? Is he the lionhearted
Christ figure who is crucified willingly on behalf of others (the "fall
guy"), yet lives again to redeem the kingdom in a holy war? 

War, for North, is an all-consuming metaphor. He is a true Prayer Warrior,
a charismatic Evangelical who has diligently made the rounds of all the
religious-right groups. At a meeting in 1991, he explained, "Government
has replaced God as a place we turn. Government couldn't help me. It
wasn't even able to pay me my retirement. I had to turn to God." Now, for
him, religion is politics, and politics is war. And when the delegates
votes were tallied North easily bested Miller. As the theme from "Rocky"
blasted, the nominee strode to the platform to issue a challenge: "This is
our government. They stole it. And we're coming to take it back!" 

The Senate Minority Leader, Robert Dole, taking a cue from his colleague
Senator Warner, instantly distanced himself from the Virginia candidate,
saying that North's nomination "makes it very difficult for some in the
Party." North might have got the nomination of his state Party, but it
seemed he would not get the endorsement of the leading figure of the
national Party." Then Dole began to dither, and after four days he
announced that he was not only endorsing North, with whom he had met for
an hour that morning, but his PAC was also sending him a
five-thousand-dollar donation. Dole managed to dispose of his attachment
to the institutional sanctity of the Senate, Warner's stand for integrity,
and a certain conception of the Republican Party. (He was probably helped
by his own Presidential ambitions.) In supporting North, Dole is bowing to
the national political reality of which North's candidacy is the most
obvious example. 

In the 1992 Presidential election, conservative Evangelicals were revealed
to be a large part of the Republican Party's irreducible base. Bush held
on in only two voting blocs: those making more than seventy-five thousand
dollars a year and white born-again Protestants. Sixty-two percent of the
latter bloc voted for Bush indeed, twenty-eight per cent of all Bush
voters were Evangelicals. No other group in the Republican column matched
their size. They are more consistently Republican, more consistently
conservative, and more self-motivated than any other group of voters, and
their support for Bush grew through 1992 while the support of others
shrank. Running against an unprecedented Democratic ticket of two Southern
Baptists, Bush nonetheless received a greater percentage of the
Evangelical vote than he did running against Michael Dukakis in 1988. The
base was immovable. According to the Christian Coalition, forty-two
percent of the delegates at the 1992 Republican Convention were
Evangelicals. In the two largest states that went Republican-Florida and
Texas--sixty and seventy-two percent, respectively, of Bush voters were
Evangelicals. The only states that Bush won without them were the most
sparsely populated Western ones. 

The end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Evil Empire created a
vacuum on the right. Ever since the Cold War's s advent, the disparate
elements of the right wing had been tied together by the thread of
anti-Communism. William F. Buckley, Jr.'s expedient use of the term
"fusionism" enabled the isolated and fractured conservative "remnant" to
combine in the nineteen-fifties, not least through Buckley s National
Review, and was a basis for the triumph of Reaganism three decades later.
What had begun with squabbling sects of ideologues became a movement with
national power. In 1992, Bush presided over the implosion of conservatism
as we had known it. But it was not simply his political maladroitness or
an economic downturn that unraveled it. The change occurred at "a more
seismic levels" Ralph Reed told me. "They were united by Communism and now
they're not." In America, as in Europe, the removal of the bipolarity of
the Cold War unleashed ethnic and religious tensions that had been mostly
submerged for nearly half a century. Pat Buchanan's clarion call at the
Houston Convention for cultural warfares was an instance of such post-Cold
War atavism. "The truth is, the ends of wars bring the most divisive
politics recorded in American history," Reed said. "The old dichotomies of
liberal-conservative, internationalist-isolationist, dove-hawk are
breaking apart. There are some ideological categories being formed that
don't have any history in the politics of the Cold War. The ends of wars
don't bring stability. They bring chaos and recriminations. Postwar eras
are periods of an enormous realigning of political lines." 

"There's more than ten years of work here," Morton Blackwell, who was
North's floor leader at the Convention, told me after North's nomination.
In the post-civil-rights era, the enlistment of religion in the cause of
politics began with efforts by Republican operatives to split off Southern
Baptists from their allegiance to the Democratic Party on the basis of
social issues. The intent was to gain a marginal vote. Religion itself was
not part of the equation, except for a residual anti-Catholicism. Indeed,
the roots of the religious right are surprisingly deep, stretching back at
least as far as the Know-Nothing Party of nativists, in the
eighteen-fifties. Reverend Lou Sheldon, the chairman of the Traditional
Values Coalition, expressed the distilled nativist sentiment perfectly in
1993, when he told the San Francisco Chronicle, "We were here first. You
don't take our shared common values and say they are biased and
bigoted....We are the keepers of what is right and what is wrong." 

In 1978, the Internal Revenue Service ruled that Christian academies
(whose origins were as "seg" academies, which enabled whites to escape
school integration) would no longer have tax-exempt status. That ruling
galvanized an element of the clergy connected with the conservative
movement to organize against the Democrats. "It began in the nineteen-
seventies, when conservative-movement activists made a conscious effort to
involve theological leaders in politics," Blackwell said. "Most of the
conservatives ones were of the opinion that public affairs were not part
of their calling. "Jerry Falwell was recruited in this period by
conservative operatives to head an organization they called the Moral
Majority. By 1980, right-wing activists had organized Evangelical
preachers into a group called the Religious Roundtable, and it was
addressed by Ronald Reagan when he was running for the President. "I want
you to know that I endorse you and what you are doing," he told them. 

Reagan supported the religious right rhetorically, but, somehow, divisive
legislation always conveniently managed to get tabled. In the summer of
1984, for the first time, preachers of the religious right such as Falwell
and Pat Robertson appeared on the podium at a Republican National
Convention. It was a decisive moment in the shift of Evangelical voters.
Blackwell said that "in terms of affecting elections at the grass roots,
there was one technique: comparing church membership rolls with votes
rolls. They discovered church members weren't registered and registered
them." In 1984, Blackwell was serving as the liaison between the Reagan
White House and the religious right. It was not his first service to the
right wing of the Party: for the 1972 Republican National Convention, he
had crafted delegate-selection rules that favored conservatives. 

By its very nature, the religious right, rooted in Evangelical
Protestantism, is sectarian and schismatic, tending to fall prey to
controversy over doctrinal issues. Through the late nineteen--eighties,
after the conviction of Jim Bakker for defrauding supporters of a hundred
and sixty million dollars, Jimmy Swaggart's sobbing confession of adultery
with a prostitute, and the electorate's rebuke of Pat Robertson, the
movement suffered numerous fissures and seemed to break up. It was
generally assumed that the Evangelicals had retreated into privatism, just
as they had done after the humiliating Scopes trial, in 1925. Ralph Reed
explained the resurgence of the movement in 1992: "There have been three
significant Presidential campaigns that reoriented the political
landscape: the Goldwater campaign, which transferred control from the
Eastern-establishment wing of the Republican Party to the Southern and
Western grassroots wing; the McGovern campaigns, which transferred the
Democratic Party from the old guard to the New Left, where it remains
today; and, third, the Robertson campaign. It gave activists an advanced
degree in hardball politics. We took a beating, dusted ourselves off, and
got up for another round. The campaign was a midwife. It took a social-
protest movement and made it a savvy movement of political veterans,
enmeshed in the machinery of party politics." 

After Robertson lost, he converted his mailing lest of nearly two million
names and organizational contacts into the Christian Coalition. For its
executive director he hired Reed, who had been the executive director of
the College Republicans and later a campaign staffer for Jack Kemp. The
Christian Coalition was not the obvious campaign tool of a politician; it
does not endorse or make contributions to candidates. "It's issue
centered, not personality centered," Reed told me "Unlike United We Stand,
it's not designed to advance a personality. Whereas when Perot takes a
beating the whole organization suffers, as long as issues are being
advanced, the Christian Coalition advances. Robertson now presides over an
expanding commercial and religious empire in Virginia Beach and plays a
strong role in the work of the Coalition, which is based in Chesapeake,
the next town. He still make frequent political pronouncement. In 1993,
for example, he said about the separation of church and state, "There is
no such thing in the Constitution. It's a lie of the left, and we're not
going to take it anymore." In Georgia, at a Christian Coalition rally on
June 4th addressed by Robertson, House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich
proclaimed deferentially that Robertson "would play a roles in helping the
Republicans win majorities in Congress in the midterm elections. 

The Christian Coalition, unlike the religious-right groups of the
nineteen-eighties, is not devoted mainly to spreading its message through
television and radio shows. Instead, it runs training seminars for
political cadres, at which participants are taught the rudiments of taking
control of local Republican organizations from the bottom up. During the
early nineteen-nineties, the Coalition operated quietly even, as Reed
advised, with "stealth." A draft of the Pennsylvania Christian Coalition
manual, for in-stance, instructed, "You should never mention the name
Christian Coalition in Republican circles." By the Republican Convention
of 1992, it had gained dominance or significant leverage in about twenty
state Parties and in numerous counties. 

In 1993, Dr. Steven Hotze, who favors the death penalty for gays, was
elected chairman of the advisory committee of the Harry County, Texas,
Republican Party with the support of the Christian Coalition. The Oregon
Citizens Alliance, which gained control of the Oregon G.O.P. with
Coalition support, imposed an initiative in 1992 that would have
classified homosexuality as "abnormal, wrong, unnatural, and perverse. "In
Washington State, the Republican Party, under the sway of the religious
right, took an official stand against witchcraft and yoga. "We could not
save George Bush from himself," Reed said after the campaign. 

Bush's defeat was hardly a defeat for the Christian Coalition. Despite the
often exotic causes of some of its local leaders, the strategy from
Chesapeake is to forge alliances wherever it can with Republican
candidates who do not necessarily share the Coalition's entire agenda, in
order to get practical experience for its troops and a share of the
spoils; its object in every campaign is to build an infrastructure to help
promote itself in the long run. Even if a candidate loses, the
organization grows. According to Reed, the Christian Coalition has a
million two hundred thousand supporters, with more than half of them
contributing fifteen dollars a year in dues. "We've organized them into
precinct captains, providing a full menu of activities for them beyond
giving money," he told me. He claims that at the moment there are eight
hundred and seventy-two chapters, with at least one in every state, and
that nineteen states have full-time field staffs who raise their own
salaries. This year, the budget for the national organization is twenty
million dollars. 

The Christian Coalition has emerged as the political powerhouse of a large
alternative culture that includes schools, institutes, newspapers,
magazines, radio and television stations, and thousands of politically
mobilized churches--a culture that religious-right leaders consciously see
as a counterweight to a coherent Liberal establishment and its
institutions, which, Robertson has explained, "are firmly in the hands of
secular humanists who are exerting every effort to debase and eliminate
Bible-based Christianity from our society." For the activists of the
religious right, politics is a post-millennialist battle for ultimate
dominion over America. 

The Coalition and its allies are conducting a long march through the
Republican Party. In 1960, sixty-nine per cent of the nation's mainline
Protestants, constituting about two-fifths of the total population, voted
Republican. In all ways, they were the Republican Party. In 1992, only
thirty- nine per cent of the mainline Protestants, who had declined to
about one-fifth of the population, voted Republican. For the first time in
the history of the G.O.P., they were no longer the Party's largest
plurality--they had been displaced by the Evangelical. "We have a `Field
of Dreams' strategy" Build it and they will come," Reed said. "The
priority has always been to organize, to build a permanent infrastructure.
We're looking twenty years ahead, not two years. If we build our movement
only against Bill Clinton, once Clinton is gone, in either two or six
years, then what will we say?" 

Blackwell told me, you can put together a winning coalition two or three
times in a century. We did it in 1980. We're not going to put together a
different one any time soon." 

Yet each election cycle provides a chance for building. For instance,
besides the victories in Virginia, Texas, Minnesota, and Iowa, a
congressional seat in Kentucky that had been held in seeming perpetuity by
the Democrats was won in a special election by a Republican--Ron Lewis, a
Baptist minister and Christian bookstore owner. The Christian Coalition
was heavily involved and its efforts included distributing more than
ninety thousand pieces of literature in the district. Religious-right
groups and the national Republican Party worked to pump hundreds of
thousands of dollars and numerous operatives into the campaign. In the
midterm elections, the religious right is involved in hundreds of races,
from the state level to the national. In California alone, its activists
are working on dozens of legislative campaigns. (In 1992, a group of
California millionaires associated with the religious right gave more than
three million dollars to local candidates and causes, becoming the most
generous political contributors in the state and exceeding the largesse of
any political-action committee there. More them two-thirds of their
candidates won Republican primaries.)

In the aftermath of the Virginia Convention, all possibility of the
religious right maintaining a "stealth" strategy in any important campaign
is obviously foreclosed. An obstacle for them may be that their religion
will be seen as a form of political partisanship limited to one faction of
one party. For other Republicans, the religious right will pose an
uncomfortable political quandary, by obliging them to define themselves in
relation to the growing movement. In Texas, a small group of moderates has
formed an organization called Take It Back, but almost all Republicans
have followed the accommodating tack of Bob Dole, who has the fear of God
in him. The hope that the Old Guard will reclaim its patrimony seems
distant. The stiffening after the Virginia Convention of the congressional
Republicans already intense rejectionism of Clinton's program, especially
his plans for health care, is partly a reaction to internal dynamics. For
Republicans generally, the central question before them is the identity of
their Party. Nixon is interred, Reagan retired, Bush erased. Who, now, are
they? 

The prospective Presidential candidates of 1996 are early circuit riders.
Dole, by endorsing North, has tried to make a separate peace. William
Bennett, with a heavy schedule of speeches, won a straw poll of Texas
delegates which was conducted by the Christian Coalition. "Cheney's really
been making the rounds. It's easy to see him in the picture," Mike
Russell, the communications director of the Christian Coalition, told me.
And former Vice-President Dan Quayle, whose recently published political
memoir, "Standing Firm," is filled with professions of Evangelical faith,
is also out on the hustings. In January, he spoke at a training conference
of religious-right activists in Fort Lauderdale, whose theme was
"Reclaiming America," and before the event began he stood at attention as
the crowd of more them two thousand rose, faced a flag with a cross on it,
and, with hands on hearts, recited in unison, "I pledge allegiance to the
Christian flag, and to the Savior, for whose Kingdom it stands, one
Savior, crucified, risen, and coming again, with life and liberty for all
who believe." 

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