c. 1999 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ It was 20 years ago that fundamentalist pastor Jerry Falwell _ a man who had preached against the evils of politics _ founded the Moral Majority, an organization that helped give the religious right political might.

Soon, government leaders were courting Falwell as two of his top lieutenants _ Ed Dobson and Cal Thomas _ crisscrossed the country speaking to both church groups and the media.”Had we not been Baptists, we would have danced in the streets,”writes Dobson of those heady, early days.

More recently, the religious right has suffered a series of embarrassing setbacks, including worse-than-expected results in the 1998 elections and the failure to impeach President Clinton.

These defeats led Paul Weyrich, president of the Free Congress Foundation and one of the co-founders of the Moral Majority to declare in a controversial February letter that”politics have failed”and that he was”in the process of rethinking what it is that we, who still believe in our traditional, Western, Judeo-Christian culture, can and should do under the circumstances.” Dobson and Thomas have been rethinking things, too. Though they still support the conservative Christian movement’s moral agenda, they criticize its tactics in their new book,”Blinded by Might”(Zondervan).”We failed,”says Thomas, who is now a columnist for the Los Angeles Times Syndicate.”Very little that we set out to do has gotten done. In fact, the moral landscape of America has become worse.” Historian Joel Carpenter says that even when America’s religious conservatives have succeeded in politics, their deeper longing for social transformation hasn’t materialized.”The parallel here is Prohibition,”says Carpenter, provost of Calvin College and author of”Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism”(Oxford University Press).”Even though a constitutional amendment was passed, it was pretty clear that it didn’t work. The lesson is that these political measures don’t bring righteousness to the nation. That takes personal moral transformation and changed hearts.” Dobson, now a pastor, agrees.”I believe that people, myself included, were well-intentioned, and our goals were noble, but we got caught up in the illusion that politicians really cared for us, and that political change would bring moral change.” Although the religious right changed the national debate about morality and inspired a wave of political activism among previously apolitical believers, Dobson and Thomas say the movement’s sins far outweigh its virtues. These sins include pride (claiming God was on their side alone), anger (demonizing ideological opponents), greed (raising money by exploiting people’s fears about homosexuality), and lust (hungering for liberals’ political power).

Even worse, say the authors, Christian activists have turned away from the teachings or example of Jesus, who rebuffed Satan’s temptation to lord over”the kingdoms of the world”and instead lovingly sacrificed his own life to save the lost.”The religious right sold its soul for political power and they still lost,”says Jim Wallis, whose Sojourners and Call to Renewal movements have applied the Christian faith to racial injustice, welfare reform and the death penalty _ issues that rarely appeared on the conservatives’ agenda.”Their approach was too partisan, too hardball, and too political even for their own constituents.” Thomas says that even political victory could have spelled defeat.”The religious right was able to tip a few close elections in favor of the candidates they preferred,”he says.”But society’s greatest problems _ the break-up of families, the growth of prisons and drug abuse _ are totally beyond the reach of government. This is the role of the church, and when the church does its role properly, it inevitably impacts the culture.” Dobson, who has been senior pastor of the non-denominational Calvary Church in Grand Rapids, Mich., since 1987, says”Blinded by Might”was inspired by”an underlying uneasiness that perhaps in our quest for moral change through the political process, we had ultimately either hurt the gospel or gotten away from the gospel.” Growing up in Northern Ireland where his father was a pastor, Dobson says groups like the Moral Majority, which folded in 1989, the Christian Coalition and Focus on the Family sometimes resemble his feuding former countrymen.”When ministers merge religious passion with political zealotry, the net result is hatred,”he said.

Even though he once tried to enlist pastors in the culture war, Dobson now favors an approach that’s closer to Mother Teresa than Machiavelli. He prohibits voter registration or petition drives in his church, but the congregation has given Christmas presents to people with HIV/AIDS for a decade. True transformation, he says, begins with individuals and”bubbles up”through the culture; it doesn’t”trickle down”from government and its leaders.”I believe that as pastor I am called to reach out to Republicans and Democrats, pro-choice and anti-choice, pro-gay and anti-gay,”says Dobson.”The message of Christ transcends all of that.” In a statement, Falwell said he hadn’t read”Blinded by Might,”but charged its authors with advocating”the withdrawal of American churches and people of faith from the cultural conflict of the day.” William Martin, author of”With God on Our Side”(Broadway Books), the companion book to a 1996 PBS documentary on the religious right, says that while politicians have given conservative Christians”little more than photo opportunities,”he hopes believers don’t retreat into personal piety.”Changing law can change people’s minds,”says Martin.”Let’s take racial segregation. Had we waited until all the individual Christians changed their minds, we’d still be segregated.” But Dobson and Thomas aren’t calling for a retreat from society or politics, just a different form of engagement.”This is absolutely not about withdrawal,”says Thomas.”We are calling for a more effective strategy that will produce the ends we sought through the political system but could never be attained there. If the church gets this right, the revival that we have been seeking through the political process will be inevitable. You won’t be able to hold it back.”

DEA END RABEY