The Moral Majority

Imagine a scene in Albert Hall in which 5,000 Britons waved flags under circling lights and up on the stage Mr Enoch Powell and Miss Vanessa Redgrave held hands to symbolise their united stand in a protest rally!

Well, it could not cause more eye rubbing or a more incredulous audience than attended such a rally in the Los Angeles sports arena last Monday night. The papers carried the unbelievable headline, 'Goldwater and Jane Fonda Lead Civil Liberties Rally'.

Let me say it once for any listeners on the planet Mars, or even for the young on this one that for the past 30 years or so, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona has been almost the most predictable spokesman for the right-wing of the Republican party. In 1964, he was, indeed, the official spokesman, the presidential candidate, of the whole Republican party.

For something less than 20 years, Miss Jane Fonda has been the most conspicuous celebrity spokeswoman for the liberal left in all such fighting causes as women's right, the right to abortion and, most famously, the right to oppose the Vietnam War. At one time, Miss Fonda was watched very warily by the FBI. Nothing ever came of it and 'once', as Senator Akin of Vermont pungently put it, 'once we brought the boys home from Vietnam and announced we'd won, a great many Americans began to have second thoughts, rather late in the day, about the wisdom or the achievement of the Vietnamese War'.

And so, then, the ideological boys and girls got involved in more domestic hassles, like the right to life or the effectiveness of busing black children into white neighbourhoods and white children into black neighbourhoods in order to give them all an opportunity for equal schooling.

I don't know if Senator Goldwater and Miss Fonda have ever met before but the reason for this incredible get-together is not far to seek. About a year ago, we stopped talking about the silent majority, the solid middle class bewildered by such phenomena as permissive sex, drug addiction and the like, and we all became aware of another and a much more recognisable 'Moral Majority', composed of right-wing evangelists and fundamentalist Christians, from the South mostly – what old H. L. Mencken used to call the Bible Belt – who began not only to urge their flocks to get into politics, but made a regular Sunday liturgy of instructing the faithful how to vote on the burning issues of the day and hinting at eternal damnation, certainly at exclusion from the Christian circle if they didn't vote the way their parson told them to.

Of course this form of proselytising has been going on in evangelical communities for decades, indeed, in this country for centuries. In the earliest Puritan settlements in New England, the Congregationalist Churches defined society itself as 'the Congregation'. The godly life was also the only proper citizen's life and the parson laid down how you should live and work and abide by the laws.

Contrary to what most of us learned in school, the Puritans did not come to America to practise religious tolerance. They had not been tolerated in England and when they got here, they saw to it that religious tolerance extended only to the things they tolerated. They were, in fact, harsher on dissenters than their own oppressors had been. They set up, in short, a totalitarian society and you broke its laws at the risk of jail sentences, hanging or expulsion from the colony as legions of poor Quakers, in particular, were to find out.

The charge was always that you had defied God's will and it was the memory of this system of equating religion and patriotism, both in Old England and in New England, that caused the men who set up the American government and wrote the constitution in the 1780s, it was this bitter memory that made them lay down in the first article of the Bill of Rights, in the very first sentence – 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof'. In other words, there was to be no Church of America, no state religion. You could practise anything you chose, including atheism, but your only civic duty as an American was to the secular law of the land.

Now there are people, there are foreigners, including Britons, who know this in their head but are unaware how extensively it applies in American life. Private schools of a particular religious bent can have school prayers if they feel like it, but not public schools, which are maintained by public taxes.

I recall again such a simple but telling story as that of my lawyer who, a few years ago, was staying with me in a London hotel. The telephone rang for him and I heard him say, 'This is Mr Cohen'. Evidently there were other Cohens in the hotel and the operator then put a question to him. He was flabbergasted. 'I beg your pardon?' he said. He cupped his hand over the mouthpiece and he whispered to me, 'She's just asked me the damnedest question. She wants to know my Christian name.' Before I could translate, he dropped his hand and he answered back to her, 'I haven't got one'. And I blurted out, 'Your first name, first name!' 'Oh, oh!' he said to her, 'Irving.' The call was not for him. In America, you have only first names.

Well, as I say, powerful preachers, evangelists especially, have always in America and I don't doubt in other countries too, spent a good deal of their sermonising telling people how to be saved, but until the past few years, they've not been so bold in coming out and saying that their church's way of living, behaving and voting, was the only true American way. Fairly or unfairly, most people have taken one Reverend Jerry Falwell to be the national leader of the Moral Majority and in the last presidential campaign, he and others like him, did more than hint that as a Christian and a true American, there was only one way to stand on many of the issues that the campaign was about.

A few months ago, to the delight of many more Americans than his old liberal opponents, Senator Goldwater, hearing the Reverend Falwell thunder out some prescription for true Americanism, the senator – who has the rare and happy habit for a politician of talking guttily in words of one syllable – said, 'Nobody's going to tell me what's the only American way to think. I'll think and act any way I damn choose and if I ever come up against Jerry Falwell, I'll...' and he offered to kick him in the you know what.

Now there is in Hollywood a television producer, a very successful television producer, the man, in fact, who adapted the British series 'Till Death Us Do Part' to an American setting, called it 'All in the Family' and produced a character, a comic bigot, who became as famous here as Alf Garnett was in Britain.

The producer's name is Norman Lear. He not only despised the Moral Majority, he was alarmed enough to do something about it. With his own money, he bought television time – which is very expensive indeed – and he put on 30-second, what looked like television commercials, little scenes showing all sorts of citizens reacting to some injustice in their neighbourhood, arguing in a bar, but always ending with the implication, never the preachment, that people had a right to their own opinions and convictions and votes. And that, the conclusion was, is, the American way.

Mr Lear went further. He formed a national society and called it People for the American Way and he now claims a membership of 70,000 subscribers. You might think that such a society is a very odd idea. If all is well in America, there ought to be no need of such a society. People for the American Way ought to comprise 220 million members, but Mr Lear feels strongly that too many Americans have been seduced by the Moral Majority into believing that the Reverend Falwell and a clutch of other evangelical parsons have a monopoly on patriotism.

The big rally in Los Angeles was Mr Lear's doing. It was a three-hour show, ostensibly to celebrate George Washington's birthday, actually to bring together the widest possible range of public figures, with a tidy showing of movie stars, and sing and dance and recite and in an entertaining form proclaim the theme of the show, which was called 'I Love Liberty'. Nobody, certainly not Mr Lear, mentioned the Reverend Falwell or even the Moral Majority. Burt Lancaster was up there and Walter Matthau, Jane Fonda recited and spoke about the First Amendment, which not only forbids setting up a state church, but also says that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press or the right of the people peaceably to assemble.

And, to an enormous ovation, Senator Barry Goldwater limped on – he's had a hip operation – and said, 'What's wrong with a little flag waving?' He was restrained from repeating his offer to deliver that swift kick to the Reverend Falwell who, need I say, was not present. But if the main target of this rally went unmentioned, everybody knew what and who it was. And I should guess that it has done powerful damage to the national prestige among simple people of the Moral Majority. And, mainly, I should say, because of the presence of Barry Goldwater.

If you've forgotten what he looks like, imagine the profile of Thomas Jefferson on the American nickel. Strengthen the features a little, add a pair of horn-rimmed glasses and you have him to the life! If the senator had not been there, the whole show could have been dismissed in a couple of thousand papers as a political liberal shindig. Goldwater's presence was worth its weight in gold to Mr Lear and its heavyweight in common sense to the bewildered millions – there are said to be about 35 millions of them – who subscribe to the preachings of the radical religious right.

This is not the first time the senator has stood in for the national conscience. In the terrible turbulent week before President Nixon resigned, it was theoretically his own man, a conservative Republican, Goldwater, who said out loud, 'He has lied to the people and he has to go to bring some sense and decency back to the government.' He went to the White House and he told the president so. And he went.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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