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With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America

Commonweal, Sept 27, 1996 by Frank McConnell

With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America" is a six-hour documentary series premiering on PBS on September 27, 1996 (check local listings for time and dates). It is one of the most stunning, bound-to-be controversial things ever done by them, and it could not be more timely. Just about as the series ends, Americans will go to the polls and choose the president who will lead this nation into the third millennium. As the series makes clear, that choice will be determined in large part by the tireless, sometimes clandestine but more often blatant activities of the Religious Right - that is, for this show, mainly white, mainly male, mainly Protestant fundamentalist conservatives who believe that America's destiny is to be the shining kingdom of the Lord on earth.

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"With God on Our Side" traces, with original footage and contemporary interviews, the unexpected rise of the Religious Right since the late forties, and especially its intricate, almost balletic, interaction with the direction of the nation-at-large. From Billy Sunday through Billy Graham to Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker and on to Randan Terry, Phyllis Schlafly, and the truly remarkable. Ralph Reed, it documents how winning the presidency, from Eisenhower to the upcoming election, has more and more become a matter of wooing and placating this group.

Now that may be a good thing, if you believe that America really is destined to be God's country - the Christian God's country. If you don't, you may be rather more alarmed. Producers Calvin Skaggs's and David Van Taylor's documentarism is as disinterested (cold?) as the great work of the Maysle Brothers (Salesman, 1969; Gimme Shelter, 1971). They show what was there, they film what is said now about what happened then, and they let the images and utterances resonate in the silence they generate. We hear the voice of the young pastor Jerry Falwell, in the sixties, telling his congregation that Martin Luther King, Jr., is highly suspect in his motives, probably Socialist-connected, and that ministers of the gospel have no business meddling in politics. We see the present-day Falwell staring into the camera and explaining that he was merely speaking as one Baptist minister to another. No editorial comment: none, really, needed.

Well, except one. I must tell you that I am not objective. I find the Religious Right a hybrid of politics and faith that brings out my Voltairean instincts. Many of the people who appear on "With God on Our Side" are good, well-intentioned, admirable folk; but others, and those, some of the most prominent in the history of the movement, are, by any human reckoning, vile. And some of the vile ones, still thriving, are going to have a lot to say about whether Dole or Clinton - both of whom are equally slavish in courting them - will occupy the White House.

It's a problem specific to Christianity. Ever since Constantine, in 313, made it the official religion of the Roman Empire, the church has had trouble deciding whether it's a force in the world, or a force for the world. Augustine distinguished the City of God from the City of Man, but didn't tell us enough about how to keep them apart. Dante, in De Monarchia, said that the pope and the emperor should be like twin and equal suns: great, but who shines on you today? Luther, two centuries later, unleashed the greatest surge of spiritual individualism in Western history - only to react savagely against the Peasants' Revolt that his own vision brought forth.

America only made things worse - or more interesting. John Winthrop, in a great sermon before the landing at Plymouth Rock, told the pilgrims that the new land would be God's land, "a city on a hill." And that vision has informed our culture permanently. But so has the contrary vision of Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson - non-Christians and Deists all - that America would be the first truly rationally constructed society in history. We have been haunted by the ancient warfare of the prophet and the professional.

And the prophets - this is the point of the series - have been winning, at least in presidential politics, for about forty years now. Here's a short, and therefore caricature, summary of the six-hour story. Humiliated by the ridicule they incurred during the Scopes trial in the twenties, fundamentalists retreated altogether from politics until the late forties when communism gave them a bonafide devil to fight. The preacher who emerged as the most charismatic - and most ambitious - was Billy Graham. Truman didn't like Graham; Eisenhower, whose brilliant management skills have still not been appreciated, kept him at a distance; Nixon adored him - for Kennedy and Johnson he was irrelevant - and Nixon kept him as a kind of house pet, a living guarantor of Nixon's own moral stature. Nixon's fall was Billy's eclipse. Forget Ford: history will Carter, surely our greatest ex-president, tried to bring an especially benign evangelism into the White House, and was sacrificed to his own good will. Along comes Reagan, who shamelessly romanced the evangelists, Falwell and the up-and-coming Pat Robertson, smarter and better on camera than Brother Jerry.

With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America

Commonweal, Sept 27, 1996 by Frank McConnell

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