The Christian right in politics - 7 April 1995

Somewhere in the ludicrous, funny works of the late and much lamented Stephen Potter, is a section on how to maintain your dignity, when you get caught up in a discussion with experts on a topic which you know absolutely nothing about.

He found himself, he says, in Italy in a northern city, I think possibly Milan, and he's having a very pleasant, not to say absorbing time, with two or three distinguished Italians, one of whom is a priest.

The talk is about some tricky but widespread problem of Italian church politics. Potter, so far, has said nothing, which is fair enough since he knows nothing. But hearing the priest say: "And it's true throughout the entire country," he looks up modestly and says, more as a question than a statement, "But not, I think, in the south." The priest says, "You're absolutely right!" and the company from then on is greatly impressed by this quiet, but evidently perceptive Englishman. And Potter recommends that if you find yourself in a similarly embarrassing condition of ignorance, remember the phrase and work it in at some point, but not I think, in the south. It reminded me this week, of a line of argument, a bogeyman rather, that haunts all discussion of life in America and that I've tended to brush off as a sort of daily household nuisance, a hovering wasp, but is seized on as a sign of shrewdness by people who are only very hazy about American politics.

It's that line about the political power in American society of the extreme Christian right, and how its power is so far-ranging, that two recent presidents, Reagan and Bush, didn't dare to fight its beliefs. Well I think President Reagan could have fought or ignored practically any sect or faction in America and won, though perhaps they have a point in what you might call the jibbing of President Bush before the extreme Christian Right. What do we mean by it? We mean usually the evangelical Protestant Christians, mainly in the South – quite right, mainly in the South – who play a frankly open part in politics, find their best allies among conservative Republicans, annoy great numbers of Americans and outrage more, by constantly saying that this is or ought to be a Christian nation.

This is a most peculiar assertion for any American to maintain. It's an elementary, if tremendous truth, that once the American nation was invented, for the first time in the history of Christendom since the Reformation, you had a croup of civil states, set up to have no state religion. Right there in the Bill of Rights is a prohibition unthinkable in the Europe they'd left, where, because there was always a state church, church membership was a matter of course, maybe a belief, just really almost an automatic part of citizenship. But the American Constitution, whose 18th century language makes it read today as such a stately and polite document, is full of revolutionary ideas and few so revolutionary as that commandment laid down in the fist 10 words of the Bill of Rights: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.

If you were to challenge all the people who resent or fear the power of the Christian evangelicals and ask them, what does that power reside in, I think the answer would be their campaign against abortion. Now as you know, the Supreme Court upheld the general right of a woman to have an abortion, tempered here and there by all sorts of qualifications, but it is a constitutional right, established in the famous case of Roe versus Wade 21 years ago. The debate, the war rather, between the pros and cons, the so-called pro-choicers and the so-called right-to-lifers, had been intensifying for a decade or more and most Americans believed that once the Supreme Court had spoken, it would be settled as the law – no more friction and public brawling. Not so. It has become worse and worse and I don't suppose there's an abortion clinic in the United States whose doctors and nurses don't go every day in fear of their lives. There have been so many, and so many widespread incidents of physical attacks, bombings and actual murder of physicians.

The militancy of the extreme Christian right, the evangelicals, in the matter of abortion is what keeps them, more than anything, so glaringly in the public eye. But the preaching storming evangelicals are nothing new, they're one of the oldest American stories from the 18th century on. Early this century they were far more powerful politically than any third party before or since. The most influential newspaperman of his time, Baltimore's H. L. Mencken, called the whole evangelical South the Bible Belt and wrote devastating denunciations of its primitivism and bigotry.

They, the Baptists mainly, represented a powerful political force, especially when allied with the Ku Klux Klan against all Jews and negroes, as we then said, and Catholics. The Klan was started immediately after the Civil War as a pathetic, but powerful, attempt to reassert the social prestige of the ordinary white Protestant citizens of the South against the radicals from the North who'd come down, when the war was over, and organised new state governments, including – which is forgotten and untaught today – one of two Southern legislators, entirely nominated by newly-enfranchised negroes. The K.K.K. began therefore as a protest army against the blacks. 50 years later, in 1920, two early publicity agents, a man and a woman, decided to revive the Klan as a national group for, and I quote, "native white Protestant supremacy." The early 1920s were a very morally shabby time for the United States. A revulsion against the First War and the emergence of the Soviet Union, panicked the country into an era of extreme conservatism and a Red scare, the like of which has never been matched. Thousand, hundreds of thousands of people were arrested and gaoled on the slimmest evidence of radicalism, under the goad of a dreadful attorney general, who had the blessing of his President, Woodrow Wilson.

The Klan expanded across the whole continent, and crosses were burned outside the houses and offices of negroes, Jews, Catholics, Communists, liberals, anyone who taught Darwin's theory of evolution. There was in Tennessee, the trial of a schoolteacher who taught evolution. He was found guilty. The Klan was so gross and public with its floggings and burnings and shrill propaganda that it eventually overreached itself. Newspapermen and congressional committees woke up and horrified the nation with reports of its dreadful goings on. But before it drastically declined, the Klan and the evangelical preachers of the Bible Belt had together launched America on an era of extreme, almost primitive, conservatism which did not end until the Wall Street crash, until the Great Depression made the country do the swiftest 180 degree political turn in American history.

Throughout the bleak 1930s, the Bible Belt fumed and thundered as ever but had no longer much effect on the voting habits of the many. Hunger and poverty did not encourage philosophical cures, Desperate people and that meant about a quarter of the population, clutched instead at various quick remedies, offered by a variety of eloquent quacks, among whom the most political powerful was an Irish priest in Detroit. Father Coughlin, who had a weekly radio sermon, started in 1926 and 10 years later he had 30 million people listening to him. His message – which was not even a caricature of his faith – was the powerfully negative one of hate and bigotry, devoted to the scary proposition that America was run by Jews, and that in league with godless Bolshevism, they would deliver the United States into the hands of the tyrant of Moscow. Father Coughlin seemed, for a time, as much of a threat to Roosevelt as say, Ross Perot seemed to George Bush, but in the result, all the evangelicals and the Coughlin bigots and the Louisiana and California quick fixers scared up no more than about five million votes. Roosevelt, in 1936, took 27 millions and won every state except two.

So what I'm saying is that the political power today of the preachers of the Bible Belt, the Reverend Pat Robertson and the Christian right is, I believe, greatly exaggerated, chiefly because of their threat to oppose the candidacy of any politician who is in favour of voluntary abortion. The power to bring candidates down on that issue alone, undoubtedly exists, but all the Baptists and other evangelical sects throughout the South and South-west put together amount to about 16 millions, whereas just about one American in four is a Roman Catholic. 60 million Catholics in 260 million people.

And though in some things a large proportion of American Catholics defy the Vatican's ruling – in birth control for instance – Catholics are overwhelmingly against abortion, and this past week the voice they most fear, or respect, spoke out in the most profound and explicit encyclical of his priesthood. The Pope listed certain practices: abortion, mercy killing of the aged or infirm, the use of human embryos for medical research and capital punishment. Abortion is at the head of the list, which symbolise what he calls the culture of death. I think this powerful document alone will guarantee that in this country the public battle between pro-choicers and right-to-lifers will go on and on, and if there is one faction, institution, likely to do continuing damage to the Democratic party, it is not the extreme Christian right, as we define it today, not the protestant Bible Belt, but the votes of very many of those 60 million American Catholics.

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