WITH GOD AS THEIR CO-PILOT

under cover of a devastating republican defeat, pat

robertson's operatives hope to hijack the ship of state.

article by Joe Conason

A wide range of Americans celebrated lustily the night the

Republicans lost the White House.  Breaking out the champagne

after 12 years of GOP rule were the old left, the new

Democrats, the pro-choicers, the environmentalists, women,

minorities and gays.  But those corks may have been popped in

vain, or at least prematurely.  The defeat of George Bush may

mark only the true takeoff point for the increasingly

powerful religious right, a movement far more ominous than

any represented by Bush or Ronald Reagan.  It is a movement

whose intolerance and fanaticism have been festering for

years, but which America has glimpsed only in recent months.

Two weeks after Election Day, it reared into view at, of all

places, a Republican governor's meeting in Wisconsin.  Having

gathered to nurse their wounds, the governors held a brief

press conference at the end of their two-day confab.  It

should have been a dull affair.  Mississippi Governor Kirk

Fordice unexpectedly livened it up when he took the

microphone and declared that America is a "Christian

nation."

Such sentiments are anathema to most Republican politicians,

including Carroll Campbell, the conservative governor of

South Carolina, who is one of former Republican National

Committee chairman Lee Atwater's great success stories.

Governor Campbell leapt to the microphone to explain that of

course the nation's values come from our

"Judeo-Christian heritage.  I just wanted to add the

Judeo part."  Fordice glared at his Dixie colleague and

retorted sharply, "If I wanted to do that, I would have

done it."

The following day, as people lined up to denounce his

exclusionary rhetoric, the Mississippi governor's statement

blew up in his face.  He swiftly apologized.  But it seems

reasonable to note--as he himself did at first blush--that

Kirk Fordice meant what he said the first time.  After all,

he was a political novice when he was elected in 1991, and he

gained his high office with the help of the nation's

wealthiest, fastest-growing, most powerful and best organized

grassroots political movement; the resurgent Christian right.

 No group is more important to that movement than the

little-known 300,000-member Christian Coalition, which is led

by televangelist Pat Robertson.

It was one more example of why moderates and even many

conservatives in the Republican Party are running scared.  A

few of them, including former Senator Warren Rudman and

former Representative Tom Campbell, are now organizing to

keep their party from being taken over by Robertson forces.

But so far their Republican Majority Coalition, founded last

December, is little more than a fund-raising letterhead, and

they are scared because they know it may already be too late.

Although most Americans first noticed that a strangely

authoritarian tone had reentered the nation's politics during

the Republican convention in Houston last August, local

Republican politicos in certain key states began to realize

that their party was being taken over as early as the spring

of 1992.

For example, when the upright Republicans of suburban San

Antonio, Texas got together to choose the delegates they

would send to the 1992 Republican National Convention, they

probably expected the usual staid and utterly predictable

proceedings.  They had gone to sleep that beautiful spring

night of the Texas presidential primary confident that all

was well in their neat little world.  And why not?  Their

president, the quintessential country-club Republican George

Bush, had wupped Pat Buchanan badly and that was the end,

wasn't it?

Well, not quite.  At the delegate selection meetings, the

party regulars began to notice a lot of unfamiliar faces.

After that, it took only a few hours for the new activists of

the Christian right to blow away the country-club GOP in that

part of Texas.  With laser-beam precision, they elected new

chairmen and passed resolutions against abortion, sex

education, AIDS education and gay rights, and for the

abolition of the National Endowment for the Arts.

The rich Republicans of San Antonio's Bexar County consider

themselves very conservative.  And they are.  But the

politics of this new crowd gave them a bad scare.  Not long

after the Christian rightists staged their coup, the

president of the Alamo City Republican Women's club just gave

up and quit.

"The so-called Christian activists have finally gained

control," she explained in her resignation letter,

"and the Grand Old Party is more religious cult than

political organization."

Of course, that was Texas, a traditional hotbed of Birchers

and Bible jocks.  Couldn't happen anywhere else, could it?

Next came the Pennsylvania primary, where moderate

Republicans slept soundly after cheering the defeat of an

ultraconservative challenger to their incumbent senator,

Arlen Specter.  For them, the shock came the next day, when

the votes for obscure Republican state committee positions

were tallied.  From nowhere, conservative Christians had

grabbed dozens of seats.  The militant newcomers are now

close to controlling the Republican Party in Pennsylvania,

too.

In June, in the San Diego County towns of Lemon Grove and El

Cajon, a slate of "pro-family" Christian right

activists financed by a group of conservative businessmen

swept the Republican primary for all of the open council

seats, along with a slew of state assembly seats.  On the

same day, several hundred miles to the north in Santa Clara

Country, another slate of "biblically oriented"

candidates--committed to the death penalty for such sins as

homosexuality and abortion--captured 14 of 20 seats on the

Republican county central committee.  The GOP apparatus in

the nation's most populous state is within a few votes of

being absolutely controlled by the Christian right.

These no-so-isolated incidents foreshadow a change taking

place in American politics--a shift that has nothing to do

with bounced checks, smoking bimbos, talk shows, dirty tricks

or any other floating ephemera of campaign 1992.  Across the

nation, in primary after primary, stunned Republican leaders

echoed the lament of one longtime party activist in Texas, a

personal friend of Barbara Bush, who suddenly found herself

ousted by the fundamentalists.  "They organized and we

didn't," she said.  "I didn't think it was going to

be this bad."

A leading Christian right organizer in southern California

put it much more cheerfully when he said, "How do you

eat an elephant?  One bite at a time."

The elephant being eyed so hungrily by the Christian right

seems to be in no position to defend itself.  If the

Republicans were vulnerable to a takeover by Robertson's

forces before November's debacle, they are even more so now.

On Election Day, as the Bush-Quayle ticket sank, taking many

Republican candidates down with it, the Christian Coalition

claimed several key victories, particularly the defeat of

Terry Sanford (the liberal Democratic senator from North

Carolina) and the passage of an antigay referendum in

Colorado.  A few weeks later, when a special runoff election

was held to choose a senator in Georgia, the religious right

muscled incumbent Democrat Wyche Fowler, Jr. out of his seat

in favor of Republican Paul Coverdell.  Bill Clinton had

taken time from his transition chores to campaign for Fowler,

and the senator's loss marked the first political setback for

the president-elect.

*

Like the hapless Republican moderates, you probably thought

you no longer had to worry about the likes of Jim Bakker,

Jimmy Swaggart and Jerry Falwell.  It's true that those three

divines are gone, but the vacuum they left has been more than

filled by Pat Robertson and a host of lesser inquisitors.

And the smiling host of the 700 club--an extremely wealthy

businessman, whose father was a Democratic U.S. senator and

who controls a worldwide communications network--is smarter,

tougher and far more committed than his brethren who fell by

the wayside. Thanks to his 1988 presidential candidacy,

moreover, Robertson is now the acknowledged, preeminent

political leader of right-wing evangelicals in America.  He

has no rivals of any significance.

Even now, only a few Americans are aware of the resurrection

of the Christian right, a political movement pronounced dead

at the end of the Eighties, because it has occurred in places

largely unnoticed by Beltway pundits.  Reporters and

commentators, fascinated by the fleeting phenomena of Ross

Perot and Jerry Brown, ignored Robertson and his troops for

most of the election year, just as they have since the

televangelist's own 1988 campaign ended in failure.

Since the shock of the Republican convention, there has been

a smattering of press attention, chiefly in the major

national dailies.  Reporters occasionally turn to Ralph Reed,

Jr., the baby-faced but aggressive young executive director

of Christian Coalition, for comment, but most political

analysts still have only the vaguest idea of what Robertson

has been up to the past few years.  He and his allies have

been funneling millions of dollars into the Christian

Coalition, which now has more than 550 chapters and hundreds

of thousands of members in all states.  Last year the

coalition spent about &8 million, tax-exempt, on

"voter education" efforts.

Back when Robertson was running for president, he often

complained about the national media’s scornful attitude

toward his conversations with God and his claims of working

miracles.  But these days the skepticism of the press suits

him just fine.  Much as Robertson still loves the sound of

his own voice, the preacher has called no press conferences

to boast about the quiet victories his candidates have

scored.  He still rarely mentions Christian Coalition in the

secular media.

Last May, for instance, when he was trying to buy United

Press International, Robertson appeared on CNN’s Larry King

Live and talked about politics, but not Christian politics.

He understands that political guerrilla warfare is most

effective when nobody’s looking.  “I paint my face and travel

at night” is how Ralph Reed describes Christian Coalition’s

stealthy campaign methods.  “You don’t know it’s over until

you’re in a body bag.  You don’t know until election night.”

As Pat Robertson’s organizers fan out across the countryside

registering churchgoers, canvassing “pro-family” voters,

preparing campaign literature, training precinct captains and

keeping a low profile, he seeks nothing less than control of

the Republican Party by the Christian right.  While it may

sound ambitious, seizing the GOP is only the first step in a

plan that begins at the bottom of the political system and

extends far beyond the current electoral horizon.

“Our next goal is to elect conservative pro-family majorities

in the legislatures of at least thirty-five states.  Then,

when we get that, we’ll go on to fifty,” Robertson told an

audience of 800 Christian activists during a closed meeting

at his Virginia headquarters in November 1991.  “We want to

see a working majority of the Republican Party in the hands

of pro-family Christians by 1996 or sooner.  Of course, we

want to see the White House in pro-family Christian hands, at

least by the year 2000 or sooner, if the Lord permits.”

This patient approach has I no way tempered the fanatic

ideology of Robertson’s theocracy.  As always, he ended his

speech with a prayer while his listeners stood, closed their

eyes and held hands.  “That we will see the standard of

biblical values raised over this land,” he intoned, “and that

those who have mocked You and cursed You and cast out Your

people is as evil will be put down, and that Your people will

be lifted up.  No, God, we pray that You will use us.”

                 *

After spending more than $25 million and a vast reservoir of

his followers’ emotional energy on his 1988 campaign,

Robertson went to the Republican convention with only 120

delegates.  When Bush had defeated him on Super Tuesday

throughout his native South, Robertson’s career in politics,

despite a few promising moments during the primary contests

in Iowa and Michigan, seemed wasted.  Even worse, Robertson’s

grassroots lobbying and political action group, the Freedom

Council, was dissolved in the midst of an Internal Revenue

Service investigation into its alleged use of tax-exempt

status to boost Robertson’s political aspirations.

So as Bush was inaugurated, it appeared that the Virginia

evangelist’s rantings would thereafter be confined to his

growing television empire.  But in the summer of 1989, as

Robertson likes to tell it, re received a call from a

Louisiana man named Billy McCormack, who had served as that

state’s coordinator of his presidential effort.

“Pat,” said McCormack, “you ran for president and you spent a

great deal of money and a great deal of time and personal

suffering.  If you do not get back into this situation, all

your effort will have been for naught.  There are people, by

the hundreds of thousands around this country waiting to

rally to leadership.”

Robertson says he prayed for political guidance and

discovered that Mr. McCormack was right.  God did want him to

get back into the political arena.  This September, the

televangelist called a meeting in Atlanta of about two doz4en

key supporters of his 1988 race to form a new organization.

And they name?  They considered titles such as Society of

Traditional Values or the Pro-Family Agenda League, but

Robertson thundered, “No!  I am a Christian.  I am not

ashamed of Jesus.  And we will call this the Christian

Coalition.  If other people don’t like it, that’s just tough

luck.

The way Robertson talks about the naming of his new

organization offers insights into the mentality behind the

Christian right’s revival.  As with many other groups in

America, evangelicals are nowadays inclined to think of

themselves as victims—an oppressed minority within a secular

humanist society that doesn’t understand them.  This culture

of victimization has been a staple of Robertson’s preaching

for years, and forms an important part of Christian Coalition

ideology.

But the victims of secular humanism are special, as Robertson

always notes, because they have been chosen by God to rule.

“We are going to see a society,” he promises, “where the

people of God once again are where God intended them to be.

We will be the head and the tail.”

Of course, right now the grassroot members of the Christian

Coalition are deeply concerned over the prospect of an

immoral Clinton presidency.  As president-elect, the Arkansan

immediately defied the Christian right by repeating his

campaign promises to protect abortion rights and to permit

homosexuals to join or remain in the military.  While Clinton

maybe less liberal on certain issues than the rest of his

party, he is quite plainly a product of the sexual

revolution.

Clearly, the utopia Robertson has promised his followers will

have to wait until Clinton has vacated the White House.  In

the Christian America to come, says Robertson, “those who

read these filthy books and engage in the filthy practices

and who are out drunk and taking drugs, those people are

going to be the ones who are ashamed of their conduct.

In Robertson’s America, pornography (very loosely defined)

would be outlawed, along with abortion, homosexuality and

extramarital sex.  There would be far more stringent

restrictions on divorce and the sale of alcohol.  The

government would no longer provide public education or social

welfare, both of which would be in the hands of the churches.

 Robertson has said that he looks forward to a time when not

only “the men in the Senate and the House are spirit-filled

and worship Jesus Christ” but the judges in every courthouse

are speaking in tongues.  Robertson’s cohort includes a

faction to the right of Pat himself.  The Christian

re-constructionists cite the Old Testament to urge the death

penalty for gays and for doctors who perform abortions.

Such medieval legislation isn’t exactly imminent.  But in the

meantime, Christian rightists are applying their principles

at the local level—particularly on school boards, where the

Christian Coalition has achieved notable success in recent

elections.  On that level, the Christian right has undertaken

campaigns to censor such sinister humanist texts as Little

Red Ridinghood (in which Grandma drinks a glass of wine) and

to abolish school breakfast programs as a threat to family

values.

Despite the bizarre theocratic notions espoused by the

Christian Coalition’s leaders, the group’s meetings seem more

like seminars than revival meetings.  There are prayers and

usually some discussion of the enemy: feminists, gays, the

media, democrats and demonic Republican moderates.  There’s

always at least one speech denouncing abortion.

Lee Atwater, who died in 1991, was the acknowledged master of

the dirty campaign, and his spirit survives in Christian

Coalition politics.  Atwater is the man cited most often as a

political authority by Robertson, Ralph Reed and other

coalition leaders.

Beginning in the fall of 1991 and continuing for 12 months

thereafter, Christian Coalition organizers distributed costly

“precinct action kits” to their local operatives, helping

them identify “pro-family” voters to be turned out on

Election Day.  For more than a year, coalition members were

on the phones, night after night, dialing their neighbors to

compile computerized lists showing who is registered, who is

a Republican, who opposes abortion and who voted in 1988 for

George Bush.  Those people received the voter guides to help

them decide which candidates were morally fit for public

office, from president on down to dogcatcher.

The president lost, but the dogcatchers won.  And for the

Christian Coalition, that is the place to start building real

power.  Both the coalition and groups opposing it, such as

People for the American Way, estimate that Christian right

candidates won as many as 500 seats in various legislative

and local government races across the country in November.

Those are impressive results for a group that essentially

didn’t exist as a national entity a year earlier.

Nothing displayed Robertson’s new pragmatism more clearly

than his embrace of Bush, a man he surely despised.  He

endorsed the president more than a year before the 1992

election, and the Christian Coalition worked hard for his

doomed campaign.  This was despite the fact that many of the

coalition’s top activists preferred Patrick Buchanan (as did,

according to Robertson’s own phone polls, the vast majority

of his 700 club viewers.)

Actually, the hapless Bush represented the forces in the

Republican Party that Robertson would like to drive out.  In

his 1988 autobiography, Bush boasted of his confrontations in

Houston during the early Sixties with right-wing nut cakes on

the fringes of the GOP—members of the John Birch Society who

suspected that Bush might be a one-world tool of the

communist Wall Street internationalist conspiracy.

Robertson did not like Bush’s new world order, viewing it as

the latest variant of the same old communistic Wall Street

plot.  Except that, having appropriated all of the musty

Bircher mumbo jumbo, the reverend has upped the ante just a

bit.  According to him the entire conspiracy has been

personally orchestrated by the Devil himself.

“Indeed,” warns Robertson, “it may well be that men of

goodwill such as Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter and George

Bush, who sincerely wanted a larger community of nations

living at peace in our world, are in reality unknowingly and

unwittingly carrying out the mission and mouthing the phrases

of a tightly knit cabal whose goal is nothing less than a new

order for the human race under the domination of Lucifer and

his followers.”

Duped by a Satanic conspiracy?  That’s worse than anything

Bill Clinton ever said about Bush.  It must have been even

harder for Robertson to support Bush than it was for most

other Republicans.  But with Bush out of the way, the

question of whom to support in 1996 is a daunting one.  Dan

Quayle was a favorite of the Christian Coalition, but he’s

tainted, too.  Buchanan is well-liked, but there’s a slightly

embarrassing problem with him.  He’s a Catholic, and though

“pro-family Catholics” are welcome to join the coalition,

they aren’t religiously “saved.”  William Bennett, the former

drug czar who is mulling a presidential run, is also

Catholic.

Jack Kemp, currently the most popular Republican, was raised

as a Christian Scientist.  As far as the evangelical right is

concerned, that’s close to Satan worship.  Kemp is also

something of a bleeding-heart conservative, especially in his

attitudes toward government action to revitalize urban

ghettos.  Worst of all, he doesn’t have the family-values

luster the coalition prefers.

All of which leaves Robertson himself.  Does that sound more

ludicrous than ominous?  Maybe, but in 1988 the Virginia

preacher didn’t do much worse than Kemp, who is considered

the Republican front-runner right now.  If President Clinton

falls, if the nations suffers further economic decline or

moral doubt, an electorate that is simultaneously angry and

inattentive may be capable of action that are awesomely

self-destructive.  In 1993 we had a close call with Ross

Perot.

There may not be much chance that a majority of Americans

would willingly vote to overturn the Constitution and to

surrender their freedom to a band of religious zealots.  But

the long-term plan of the Christian right no longer relies on

the so-called moral majority.  Its new strategy depends on a

tiny but disciplined minority that can exploit voter apathy

and ignorance to gain power incrementally—first on school

boards, then in state legislatures and finally in Washington.

Should the Christian right succeed in taking over the

Republican Party, it will inherit an extremely powerful

apparatus.  Such a party, running against the usually

fractious and disorganized Democrats, is a chilling prospect.

The irony is that if it does come to pass, it will happen

because the ordinary couch potatoes did what they usually do:

 nothing.  Most of them won’t know what’s happened until

their favorite TV shows are censored.

Read What Guy Rodgers, the director of organizing for the

Christian Coalition, has said to audiences around the country

for the past year:  “In a presidential election, when more

voters turn out than in any other election, only fifteen

percent of eligible voters actually determine the outcome.

How can that be?  Well, of all the adults eighteen and over

eligible to vote, only about sixty percent are registered to

vote.  It’s less than that in many states.  Of those

registered to vote, in a good turnout, only half go to the

polls.  That means thirty percent of those eligible are

actually voting.  So fifteen percent determines the outcome

in a high-turnout election.  In low­turnout elections—city

council, county commission, state legislature—the percentage

that deter-mines who wins can be as low as six or seven

percent.

“Is this sinking in?  We don’t have to worry about persuading

a majority of Americans to agree with us.  Most of them are

staying home and watching Falcon Crest.  Do you understand?”

Well, do you?