One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (47 page)

As the campaign began, conservative publishing houses rushed to print new books about Reagan's faith. Many suggested that the president
had been divinely ordained.
Reagan Inside Out,
a book by Christian Broadcasting Network University president Bob Slosser, began with the tale of a “prophecy” made at a 1970 prayer meeting that Reagan attended along with Pat Boone. “If you will walk uprightly before Me,” a California businessman intoned, channeling God's word to Reagan, “you will reside at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.” David R. Shepherd, who compiled a number of Reagan's religious statements and speeches as a paperback titled
Ronald Reagan: In God I Trust,
shared this sentiment. “The King's heart is in the hand of the Lord; he directs it like a watercourse wherever he pleases,” Shepherd noted, citing Proverbs. “How pleased the Lord must be,” he added, “with a leader who does not resist that turning.” Books like these soon filled entire shelves at Christian bookstores across the country, alongside tracts such as
Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation,
whose authorship was attributed to Reagan even though it only included one article by him, and even that had been ghostwritten. In all, hundreds of thousands of copies of these books were sold. Meanwhile, Nickelodeon Records repackaged old recordings the former actor had made the 1950s as brand-new albums titled
President Reagan Reads Stories from the Bible.
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But no one was more effective at promoting Reagan than Reagan himself. On the day he accepted his party's renomination as president, he first made a triumphant return to Reunion Arena in Dallas, the site of the National Affairs Briefing four years before. With a choir of two thousand at his back, the president addressed a capacity crowd of seventeen thousand religious leaders and Republican delegates. “The truth is, politics and morality are inseparable,” he insisted. “And as morality's foundation is religion, religion and politics are necessarily related.” Speaking at length about the Supreme Court's rulings against state-mandated school prayer and programs of Bible reading, he claimed they had represented an important turning point in the nation's history. They set a dangerous precedent, inspiring more lawsuits to remove the words “under God” from the pledge or “In God We Trust” from U.S. currency and promoting secularism. Liberals said they challenged such religious mottos in the spirit of tolerance of all faiths, but the president scoffed at their claims. “Isn't the real truth that they are intolerant of religion?” he asked. “They refuse to tolerate its importance in our lives.” At the close of his speech, Reagan delivered a line that would be cited repeatedly by conservatives in the days
and, indeed, decades to come: “If we ever forget that we're one nation under God, then we'll be a nation gone under.”
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The blending of religion and politics was, of course, a two-way street. That same night, after Reagan and Bush were formally renominated, Jerry Falwell asserted in his closing prayer that the two men were “God's instruments in rebuilding America.” In the same vein, Reverend E. V. Hill, a Baptist minister and longtime ally of Billy Graham, concluded his own address by declaring, “I'm glad I'm a member of the Prayer Party.” Leaders of the religious right once again lined up with the Republicans. Falwell claimed his Moral Majority had registered more than five million conservative Christians since its founding in 1979 and promised to add another million to the rolls before election day. Christian Voice likewise led massive voter registration drives at houses of worship, while broadcasting by satellite seminars explaining the details of party politics to more than two thousand fundamentalist churches across the nation. “1984 is the harvest year,” claimed Ray Allen, chairman of Concerned Christians for Reagan. “We're reaping the rewards of ten years of work.” The president also reaped the rewards that fall, taking in 66 percent of the evangelical vote as well as solid majorities of the Catholic and mainline Protestant vote in another landslide victory.
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T
HOSE WHO SOUGHT TO SUCCEED
Reagan watched closely and tried to follow his example. Vice President George H. W. Bush, an old-school Episcopalian, lacked Reagan's ease with the evangelical base but had something the president did not: a longtime personal friendship with Billy Graham. In April 1986, the preacher opened a crusade in Washington, D.C., for the first time since the Eisenhower era, and granted his old friend the honor of addressing the crowd of twenty-one thousand worshipers. “The strength of our nation is our faith,” Bush assured them. “We do believe that when all is said and done that we are indeed a nation under God.” Meanwhile, other contenders for the nomination endeavored to show that they too could serve as Reagan's successor. “Freedom is a gift from God, not government,” asserted Kansas senator Bob Dole. Representative Jack Kemp of New York insisted that “one of the reasons I'm running for president is because I believe I have an obligation as a
Christian to be involved in politics.” Sincere though they may have been, these claims paled next to the public piety of Pat Robertson. The religious broadcaster made a surprisingly strong showing in early primaries and, in the process, shifted the field further right. Bush secured the nomination, but in so doing he inherited a party that was wedded even more closely to the religious right than ever before.
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At the 1988 Republican National Convention in New Orleans, the new nominee sought to show Americans that he would be an able heir to Reagan. The Democrats had already begun mocking him for his lack of eloquence—the aristocratic Bush, according to Texas governor Ann Richards, had been “born with a silver foot in his mouth”—but the vice president bent the jibes to his benefit. “I may sometimes be a little awkward,” he said in his speech, “but there's nothing self-conscious in my love of country.” While he could never match the oratorical skills of the “Great Communicator,” Bush shrewdly mimicked his predecessor's handling of the important acceptance speech. As he neared the end of his prepared remarks, Bush abruptly departed from the text, just as Reagan had eight years before. Where Reagan had inserted a dramatic call for a silent prayer for the nation, Bush made an even simpler appeal. “It is customary to end an address with a pledge, or saying, that holds special meaning,” he told the delegates. “I've chosen one that we all know by heart, one that we all learned in school. And I ask everyone in this great hall to stand and join me.” At this, the Superdome crowd rose to its feet, waving a sea of American flags, and joined their nominee in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. At the end, the candidate added a quick “God bless you” before the delegates erupted in applause.
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Much as Reagan used school prayer as a partisan issue, Bush used the pledge. His opponent in the general election, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, had vetoed a bill in 1977 that would have fined public school teachers who refused to lead classes in the pledge, after the state's highest court suggested that the bill was unconstitutional. Republican strategists unearthed the story and made it central to the 1988 campaign. “Should public school teachers be required to lead our children in the Pledge of Allegiance?” Bush asked in his acceptance speech. “My opponent says no—but I say yes.” Out on the campaign trail, the Republican nominee repeatedly led crowds in mass recitations of the pledge, sometimes asking surrogates such as actor Charlton Heston to stand in for
him. (The ritual became so central to the Republican campaign that one history of the election was simply titled
Pledging Allegiance.)
Meanwhile, Republicans in the House joined in, introducing a measure to mandate daily recitation of the pledge in the chamber. They admitted off the record that they had done so mainly to drive a wedge between southern Democrats and Dukakis. Democratic Speaker Jim Wright originally objected to the transparent ploy, asserting that “the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag is something meant to unite us, not intended to divide us.” But when House Democrats realized that any opposition would be seen as another sign that their party could not match the GOP's love of God and country, they quickly relented.
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Dukakis was slower to recognize the political power of the pledge. He protested that he had nothing against it and resented the attacks on his patriotism, but his advisors refused to go any further. “If they think they're going to get anywhere with the Pledge issue, they're wrong,” campaign manager Susan Estrich insisted. “We've got the Supreme Court answer.” Convinced their position would hold up in a court of law, Dukakis's staff neglected the court of public opinion. And according to an analyst with the Gallup organization, voters were siding with the Republicans by a three-to-one margin on the matter. John Chubb, a scholar at the Brookings Institution, noted that whatever the legal facts were, the political realities were something else entirely: “Bush is saying, ‘I'm willing to say that the courts are wrong. Public teachers should lead the pledge.' Dukakis is saying, ‘I bow before the courts.'” While legal experts and editorials overwhelmingly agreed that the Democrat's position was wholly correct, the public was not persuaded. “Dukakis made a major mistake,” noted former Democratic Party chairman Bob Strauss. “He captured the hearts of 17 lawyers and lost 3 million voters.” Belatedly comprehending the problem, the Democrat caved and staged a photo op at the Statue of Liberty, dutifully reciting the Pledge of Allegiance for the cameras, in front of a sea of American flags. But the damage was done. Once far behind in the polls, Bush used the pledge and other wedge issues to surge ahead after the conventions. He never looked back.
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Having wrapped himself in the flag during the campaign, Bush continued to make good use of it as president. In June 1989, the Supreme Court struck down the “flag desecration” statutes that had been passed in
forty-eight of the fifty states during the Vietnam War. The case at hand,
Texas v. Johnson,
stemmed from a flag-burning incident that took place in Dallas the day before Reagan and Bush were renominated at the 1984 Republican National Convention. Now, as president, Bush denounced flag burning as “dead wrong” and promised to do something about it. A few days after the court ruling, a
Newsweek
poll showed that 71 percent of Americans favored a constitutional amendment to outlaw flag burning. The president soon announced his own support for such a measure. Standing before the Iwo Jima monument, with its famous sculpture of Marines raising the American flag on Mount Suribachi, Bush declared that “patriotism is not a partisan issue, it is not a political issue.” But only Republican officials had been invited to join him on the platform that day; some, such as Senator Bob Dole, practically dared opponents to make a stand against the amendment. “Democrats,” an op-ed columnist advised, “get that message: Vote against the flag amendment and consider the TV ad your next opponent will put together against you.”
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The call for a constitutional amendment forced the nation to reassess the flag's meaning. Over the preceding decades the flag had become, in the words of anthropologist David Kertzer, “the holy icon of American civil religion.” But as the president moved to end its “desecration,” even some prominent conservatives chafed at his framing of the issue. “‘Desecration' is a word rooted in sacredness,” scolded former Nixon speechwriter William Safire. “Americans do not consecrate—make holy—our political signs and documents, nor can anyone ‘desecrate' them.” For others, the real sin was an emptiness of ideas. Edward Crane, head of the libertarian Cato Institute, mocked Republicans for abandoning their substantive small-government principles and instead “flailing about and breast-beating over opinion-poll-driven issues like burning the flag [and] the Pledge of Allegiance.” But as the initial furor died down, so did the campaign for the amendment. When the vote was taken in October, the measure fell fifteen votes short of the two-thirds majority it needed. A
Chicago Tribune
columnist noted the parallels with a previous controversy that had likewise fired up religious conservatives but then flamed out in Congress: the prayer amendments of the 1960s.
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During the remainder of the Bush era, the Republican Party became increasingly Christianized. Though he had failed to win its presidential
nomination, Pat Robertson worked diligently to take control of the party itself. Speaking to supporters in the Christian Coalition in September 1991, the religious broadcaster set a goal of having “a working majority of the Republican Party in the hands of pro-family Christians by 1996.” This was not idle talk. By the next summer, Christian Coalition members and their allies held more than a third of the seats on the Republican National Committee and a majority in ten state party organizations. Their influence was abundantly clear at the 1992 Republican National Convention, where they succeeded in adding to the party platform references to “our country's Judeo-Christian heritage” and a call for the required recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools “as a reminder of the principles that sustain us as one Nation under God.” The convention itself kicked off with a raucous “God and Country” rally, hosted by Robertson, with appearances by Pat Boone and Vice President Dan Quayle, a favorite of the religious right. They all recited the Pledge of Allegiance together, with the crowd practically shouting when they came to the phrase “one nation under God.” The defining moment of the convention, though, came with the famous “culture war” speech of Pat Buchanan, who had made a strong primary challenge to the president from the right. The election was nothing less than a “religious war,” he warned. “In that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton and Clinton are on one side,” Buchanan charged, “and George Bush is on our side.” His attacks electrified delegates in the Houston Astrodome but played poorly outside it. Liberal columnist Molly Ivins joked that Buchanan's speech “probably sounded better in the original German.”
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