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 | CHURCH AND STATE
JUNE 6, 1996TRANSCRIPT |
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David Gergen, editor-at-large of U.S. News & World Reports, engages Ralph Reed, head of the Christian Coalition, about his new book Active Faith and how the "Religious Right" politic of morality has filled the space once occupied by the '60's Left.
DAVID GERGEN: Do you think we're seeing a new religious revival in this country, what some would call a religious awakening?
Join David Gergen in a dialogue about "the politics of meaning" with Michael Lerner, editor and publisher at "Tikkun" Magazine.
RALPH REED, Christian Coalition: I do. I think that it is on a scale that is almost without precedence. You see it in the recent sort of flowering in the black church after a period of retreat after the civil rights movement, the black church is reasserting itself as, as a base of nurturing, protection, and love in the African-American community and especially in the inner-city. I think you see it in movements of racial reconciliation. I think we see it in the Promise Keepers movement which is filling football stadiums all over this country with men of both races in many states who are being called back to being husbands, fathers first and wage earners second. I think you can see it in the kinds of things that Notre Dame Professor David Ligett was talking about in a paper he wrote after the '92 elections in which he pointed out that the percentage of the electorate that was mainline Protestant, Presbyterian, Methodist, Episcopal, had declined from about 40 percent in 1960 to about 20 percent today, whereas, the percentage of the electorate that was self-identified, evangelical or fundamentalists, had doubled to 25 to 30 percent of the electorate. That's a critical moment in the American history where the evangelical vote becomes more important than the mainline Protestant. It's more energetic, it turns out in larger numbers, and of course the critical hard political fact is that it used to be an overwhelmingly Democratic constituency. And, of course, today it's overwhelmingly Republican.
DAVID GERGEN: You write about the Great Awakenings in America's past--one in the 1740's and the other in the 1830's and again in the 1890's--and what you point out is that in each instance those great awakenings are religious revivals, were joined to movements for social reform. Could you talk about that link and how--what roles they have played in our history, especially on social reform?
RALPH REED: Each case, David, throughout American history, those kinds of big issues have been resolved by religiously inspired social protest movements that were birthed in the cradle of the church and nurtured by the fires of revival. The first great awakening, of course, gave rise to the revolutionary struggle. The second great awakening, led by Charles, Grandis, and Finney, some of the most uproarious revivals that have ever been seen in Western Civilization led to the formation of the American anti-slavery society. Then, of course, the third Great Awakening of the 1890's leading to the social gospel movement and the progressivism of which are Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, and today historian Robert Fogel has argued a fourth Great Awakening has began, he believes, in the late 50's or early 60's with rising church attendance among baby boomers, and this shift to evangelicalism and fundamentalism of which the electronic church was such an important part. Of course, the rise in television after 1960, making it possible to reach millions of people with the gospel, has now given rise to a new political movement.
DAVID GERGEN: As best I understand your argument, there are two stimulants for people coming back into politics who are religious. One is a series of decisions here in Washington, decisions by the Supreme Court on abortion, on school prayer, effort by the IRS to crack down on Christian schools, and you explained, and secondly -- you and Michael Lerner, who was recently on this program who was trying to spark a counter movement to the Christian Coalition coming from the progressive tradition -- both you agree that the left in the 1960s occupied the moral high ground, especially over civil rights, but after the civil rights marches, the left moved away, and almost moved in and said, in effect, religion has no role in our politics, religious values have no role in our politics, and left a vacuum for the religious right to fill and to address the spiritual needs of the American people. Are those basically the two stimulants that you think helped to bring the religious right to such power?
RALPH REED: Yes. And I go further in the book and argue that, really, the heyday of liberalism that stretched from Franklin Delano Roosevelt's elections in 1932 until Lyndon Baines Johnson's collapse in Vietnam and the quagmire of Vietnam in the late 1960s was because it was first and foremost liberalism at its dominant moment, at its apex, was a religious and moral movement. It was not in the end about redistributing wealth. And then what happened, of course, was with Roe vs. Wade and the movement of conservative people -- the left reacted harshly to religious involvement from the right and overreacted, in fact, and suggested and created what I believe to be an historical fallacy which is that religious people shouldn't be involved in politics because it violates the separation of church and state. If that's true, and I don't believe it is, then the entire glory stage of liberalism was built on that same principle.
DAVID GERGEN: Let's talk about the conservative Christian Coalition and how it's moved. Pat Robertson created this back in 1989. It's only such a short time ago, it's grown so rapidly. You became executive director. You changed from what Jerry Falwell was doing, what the electronic churches were doing back in the 70's and 80's. You adopted a very different strategy from what they had. What were the changes?
RALPH REED: Well, I think when Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority, he was literally leading a people out of the wilderness. I mean, they had been in self-imposed cultural isolation for three generations, and he got up and said, let's all get involved in the political process. So he was a trail blazer, and it was, in effect, a media strategy and a direct mail strategy, and a rally strategy where he would fly around the country holding rallies and would pass buckets down the aisle and take up money and of course they had a huge mailing list.
DAVID GERGEN: Right.
RALPH REED: What they did not have was they did not have sophisticated, well-trained lay grassroots leadership. They didn't knew how to raise money and identify voters and conduct voter registrations drives and turn them out to the polls, but I believe every one of the state chairmen in the Moral Majority was a Baptist or a fundamentalist preacher or a conservative evangelical preacher. By contrast, of the 50 state chairmen of the Christian Coalition, only one is an ordained minister. This grassroots politics has been practiced by the left for decades but it's new for conservative--a conservative faith community. I would rather have a thousand school board members than one president and no school board members. I'd rather have people affecting lives at the local level and changing America one neighborhood and one city and one state at a time than trying to make one person and one office the full repository of all of our hopes and aspirations for a better America.
DAVID GERGEN: Michael Lerner argues in the Politics of Meaning that the religious right pays a great deal of attention to personal morality but it does not pay attention to the morality of the marketplace. Do you agree with that assessment?
RALPH REED: Well, I think we do, and that I do agree that corporations are citizens and they have to be responsible citizens and respectful of the rights of others just as anybody else does. And I think you see some of that sentiment in the religious conservative community very different from a Wall Street or Chamber of Commerce style Republican in the Buchanan candidacy of 1996 where he really made an issue out of the treatment of workers and how we had to take care of those who are being left behind. You know, again, you can debate and Republicans do debate whether he is right or wrong on the merits of trade policy and integration policy, but there's no doubt about the fact that the rhetoric and the political style of a Buchanan, who is a religious conservative candidate, is very different from a Wall Street style candidate in the model of say a Tom Dewey or Wendell Wilke of thirty or forty years ago. We, for example, agree that the plight of the poor is something that we as a faith community must address. We're not convinced that a large welfare bureaucracy operating out of Washington is the solution. So it's not a question of a lack of commitment to those issues of equity and fairness and justice. It's a question of what we think the most effective remedy is. Where government can do something, it ought. For example, Dan Quayle recently--and I found this to be fascinating--is something who I think would have been viewed by background and temperament as this fairly typical main street, good for business Republican, came out and issued a fairly controversial call to study the idea of a family wage, the idea that if you're a wage earner who's supporting a wife and children or spouse and children, in the case of a woman, that you have a right to a wage that can support that family. Now the left--the left comes out in favor of a minimum wage but, of course, a minimum wage, 80 percent of the people who earn it don't support a family. What about looking at the possibility of a family wage? I don't know what the outcome of that will be, but I think there's a possibility for some very interesting common ground there.
DAVID GERGEN: I understand. There are moral issues in the marketplace.
RALPH REED: Yes. Of course.
DAVID GERGEN: I wish we could go on. Thank you very much.
RALPH REED: Thank you, David.
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