Fundamentalism in Comparative Perspective (15 page)

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Authors: Lawrence Kaplan

Tags: #Religion, #General, #Fundamentalism, #Comparative Religion, #Philosophy, #test

BOOK: Fundamentalism in Comparative Perspective
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religious) values. That is denominationalism and it is a long way down the road to the point where religion is hardly a factor at all, where religiosity appears only through political attitudes that reflect general class and status interests. The situation becomes one in which the second words in the phrases "conservative Protestant," "conservative Catholic," and "conservative Jew'' become redundant.
Modernity does not challenge religion. Instead it subtly undermines it and corrodes it. Fundamentalists tacitly recognize this when they refuse to be impressed or comforted by the state's willingness to permitto
tolerate
Mormons, Witnesses, Christian Scientists, Rastafarians, Scientologists, Moonies, and any number of more exotic religions. Although few fundamentalists say it openly, some of them recognize that it is better to be persecuted than to be tolerated as (in the language of American forms) a "religion of your preference."
Twenty or so years ago many of the sociologists who endorsed the above picture of modernity supposed that secularizationthe decline of religionwas an irreversible characteristic of modern societies. Recently the sociological orthodoxy seems to have been running in the opposite direction. Although I remain committed to a version of the secularization thesis, I do not expect religion to disappear completely or quickly. And insofar as it is the broad liberal denominations that are losing support fastest, one would expect traditional supernaturalist Protestantism to become relatively more popular and influential. There is thus nothing surprising about the appearance of the new Christian right. So long as there are sizable numbers of conservative Protestants in America, there will be movement organizations that campaign and lobby on their behalf. There will continue to be skirmishes and boundary disputes. Precisely because the conflict is not between two groups of believers, but between the adherents to a coherent belief-system and modernity, it will always be difficult to judge accurately the outcome of any battle. It will depend more on counting the dead on both sides than on watching to see who marches victorious from the field. What this study has done is to consider calmly what is known about the support-base, the actions, and the impact to date of the NCR in order to evaluate the likelihood of it succeeding in its ambitions. The conclusion is that the NCR will failin its present form already has
 
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failedboth to re-Christianize America and to prevent further displacement of the values its supporters hold dear. Andthe point made by fundamentalist critics of the NCRthe very limited successes enjoyed by the movement have been won at the cost of submitting to modernity and abandoning the ethos of orthodox separatism which has been characteristic of fundamentalism.
Afterword
Since the Moral Majority was officially chartered in June 1979, Jerry Falwell has rightly been viewed as the predominant figure in the new Christian right. On 4 November 1987 Falwell announced that he was resigning from the presidency of Moral Majority and the Liberty Federation: "I will not be stumping for candidates again. I will never work for a candidate as I did for Ronald Reagan. I will not be lobbying for legislation personally" (
Independent,
5 November 1987). With the failure of his mission to restore the finances of the Bakkers' PTL gospel television corporation and declining income for his own
Old Time Gospel Hour,
Falwell had good reason to rededicate himself to his gospel ministry. He could take some consolation from Pat Robertson's campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. He could and did take credit for "breaking the psychological barrier that religion and politics don't mix." But no amount of brave face could alter the impression that he was leaving politics a disappointed man. Less than two years earlier, when announcing the renaming of Moral Majority, he had said:
With the Liberty Federation, we will be advancing to another level of involvement. We will also be challenging many of our people to run for office at the local, state, and national levels. . . . We now sincerely believe that it is possible to form a coalition of religious conservatives in this nation, including the Liberty Federation and scores of similar groups, which can bring 20 million voters to the polls nationally by 1988. This is our goal. (1986: 2)
Despite those brave hopes of voter registration, the NCR failed miserably to affect the presidential succession. Though he ran an extremely well-funded and well-organized campaign, Pat Robertson made little impact and the mainstream Republican George Bush
 
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easily defeated his right-wing rivals. Robertson's candidacy was, however, extremely useful to social scientists because it produced extensive poll data which shed some light on the reasons for his defeat.
Robertson was not helped by two scandals. The exposure of the sexual misdemeanors and financial improprieties of televangelist Jim Bakker was followed by the revelation that his fellow Pentecostalist and arch-rival Jimmy Swaggart had had dealings with a Baton Rouge prostitute. At a time when Robertson was doing his best to reconstruct his biography into that of a conservative businessman whose business just happened to be religious television, the media were again able to depict televangelists as charlatans and swindlers. A good deal of the work that Falwell and others had done in persuading the public to take fundamentalists seriously was washed away in a flood of Bakker and Swaggart jokes.
But without the embarrassment of these falls from grace, Robertson would have fared hardly better. What became clear from the polls and the actual voting patterns was that even those constituencies which should have been sympathetic to Robertson were not. A September 1987
Time
poll asked Republican voters and ''leaners" who they "would be proud to have as President" and they chose as follows:
%
George Bush
69
Bob Dole
68
Jack Kemp
58
Pete Du Pont
49
Al Haig
46
Pat Robertson
26
Not surprisingly, Robertson also came in last in questions that asked about political experience or "ability to deal with the Soviet Union"; but when asked "Is someone you can trust?" respondents again put Robertson last, behind four professional politicians and a soldier! Even more significant was the distance between first and last. Bush scored an 80 percent trust rating. Robertson was trusted by only 43 percent of Republicans.
 
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Even in the South, with its concentration of fundamentalists, Robertson was not popular. A Roper poll showed that only 16 percent of adults in twelve southern states said they would consider voting for him. What is even more important as a sign of the hostility he aroused, 69 percent said they felt negatively toward his campaign, which was the worst negative rating of all twenty potential Republican and Democratic candidates. Despite his good start in the early caucuses (where the commitment of supporters can make up for scarcity), he remained polarizing and unpopular. A poll in February 1988 showed that only 15 percent of those asked were likely to support him, whereas 72 percent said they definitely would not vote for him, a worse score than the most liberal Democrat received. The most significant poll finding concerned the intentions of self-identifying evangelical and fundamentalist Republicans. They divided 44 percent for Bush, 30 percent for Dole, and only 14 percent for Robertson. When asked if his former status as a clergyman made them more or less likely to vote for him, even conservative Protestants answered "less likely" in proportion of 42 to 25 percent. In the early days of the NCR, both critics and supporters frequently assumed that most conservative Protestants were potential NCR supporters. Slightly more sophisticated predictions of NCR support counted as actual or potential Falwellites all those who in surveys assented to anti-abortion or anti-secular humanist sentiments. What was rarely considered was the enormous difference between being generally against some phenomenon and being willing to make that issue the central focus of one's political thinking and actions. What Robertson's campaign did was to allow all those who wished to give the NCR agenda primacy over more traditional political considerations an opportunity to stand up and be counted, and the polls suggested that they were few.
The result bore out the polls. In almost every state, including his base of Virginia, Robertson came in a poor third and was beaten easily by Bush in every demographic group, including fundamentalists. What the patterns of support showed was that even most fundamentalists were happy with a division of labor; they did not want televangelists running for political office. What the progress of the cam-
 
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paign showed was that the more exposure Robertson got, the less popular he became.
An important part of that unpopularity was a result of organized liberal campaigning, which has also been an influence in state and local campaigns. One of the strongest suits the NCR possessed was the claim to be a victim of elite discrimination. Frequently the contrast was made between the grass roots support for NCR so-ciomoral positions and the unelected Supreme Court's role in maintaining liberal positions. Curiously, liberals seem to have shared the view that their positions were unpopular and there was widespread concern that changes in the composition of the Court would lead to the NCR's benefiting from the views of an undemocratic judiciary. The appointment by Reagan and Bush of four conservative justices has produced a small but important shift in the Court's position on abortion, but it is interesting that there has been no change in the Court's insistence on a separation of church and state. Furthermore, the weakening of judicial support for abortion has not produced an NCR victory. It has merely returned the issue to the political arena where contending parties have to engage in the normal business of opinion formation, electioneering, and legislative haggling. It is still early, but state and local elections between 1988 and 1991 have shown that being pro-abortion is not the electoral liability that many feared. When liberals have become aware that their positions need to be explained and defended, they have proved extremely persuasive. To put it very simply, we can conclude that the status quo does represent the general balance of view in the American public on most of the things that motivate fundamentalists to political action.
The Reagan presidency provided the NCR with its most fertile environment and it failed to have a major or lasting impact. Since Falwell retired and Robertson was humiliated at the polls, the small proportion of fundamentalists who wish to campaign on sociomoral issues have continued to do what they were doing before Falwell and his liberal critics "hyped" the movement. In those states and counties where fundamentalists are a majority, they have influence. In the rest of America, they count as simply one more small special interest group. In a culturally plural democracy, they could not be anything else.

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