"The New York Times"
December 9, 2001
The Right Still Has Religion
By MICHAEL LIND

WASHINGTONâ After Pat Robertson's resignation last week as president of the 
Christian Coalition, much of the commentary focused on the declining 
importance of the man and his movement.

Critics note that the Christian Coalition has been losing members and 
financial support for years, and that Mr. Robertson lost credibility when, 
on his television show, "The 700 Club," he agreed with his fellow 
conservative religious leader Jerry Falwell that the terrorist attacks of 
Sept. 11 were God's punishment on America for tolerating feminists, gays 
and lesbians, libertarians and certain federal judges. But the fact remains 
that Pat Robertson has been the most influential figure in American 
politics in the past decade.

George W. Bush is president today because the religious right vetoed the 
nomination of John McCain â and John Ashcroft is attorney general because 
Mr. Bush needed to reward his supporters on the religious right. His 
bioethics commission is headed by the religious right's favorite 
intellectual, Leon Kass.

The constant references by the presidential candidates to their religious 
faith during the 2000 campaign also demonstrate the cultural influence of 
Christian conservatives. Under pressure from the religious right, the House 
has passed, and the Senate is considering, legislation that would make it a 
crime, punishable by imprisonment or fines, for ailing Americans to import 
medicines derived from the cloning of stem cells.

The religious right has transformed American politics â and credit for that 
goes to Pat Robertson. Under the inept leadership of Jerry Falwell in the 
1980's, Christian conservatives formed merely one of half a dozen groups in 
the broad Reagan coalition. In the 1990's, Mr. Robertson's genius as a 
political organizer permitted religious conservatives to gain enough clout 
within the Republican Party to veto the nomination of political candidates 
they deemed unacceptable.

Thanks to Pat Robertson, the religious right also captured â and killed â 
the conservative intellectual movement. By the mid-1990's, as the Christian 
Coalition consolidated its control over the Republican Party, any 
intellectual to the right of center who dared to criticize the television 
preacher was purged.

By 2000, all the other factions in the earlier Reagan coalition â 
neoconservatives, New Right populists, even libertarian conservatives like 
Barry Goldwater (who famously declared that conservatives should "boot 
Falwell right in the ass") â were relegated to the sidelines. The 
obsessions of Christian fundamentalists, like abortion, homosexuality, 
pornography and evolution, still define today's Robertsonized Right. And 
conservative intellectual journals like Commentary, National Review and The 
Weekly Standard now join Kansas and Tennessee fundamentalists in attacking 
Darwinian biology.

Far from being inevitable, this outcome was unlikely. By inflating the 
numbers of his followers and taking credit for the Republican capture of 
Congress in 1994, Mr. Robertson convinced opportunistic Republicans and 
frightened Democrats that the religious right was a growing force that had 
to be co-opted or appeased. Polls show, however, that the number of 
conservative Christians in the United States is stable or shrinking. Most 
Americans are religious in theory but secular in practice. With each 
generation, social attitudes become more liberal on questions like abortion 
and gay rights â a fact that has led Paul Weyrich and other right-wing 
activists to declare that conservatives have already lost "the culture war."

The genuine swing voters in American politics in the past decade have been 
not Protestant fundamentalists, but blue-collar "Reagan Democrats," many of 
them Midwestern Catholics who turned against George W. Bush when he 
pandered to the Vatican- baiting fundamentalists of Bob Jones University. 
Although these voters are not liberal, they are more concerned about health 
benefits and wages than about refuting Darwin. Only a bipartisan political 
elite unfamiliar with the working-class majority could have been fooled by 
Pat Robertson into thinking that the mainstream swing voter resembles Ben 
Jonson's Puritan, Zeal-of-the-land Busy, more than Norman Lear's Archie 
Bunker.

Pat Robertson enjoyed a remarkable winning streak, despite playing an 
extremely weak hand. By exploiting the ambition, fear and ignorance of 
America's out-of-touch political class, this spokesman for a marginal 
subculture reshaped American politics and became a kingmaker in one of the 
two major parties.

Michael Lind, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, is co-author, 
with Ted Halstead, of ``The Radical Center: The Future of American Politics.''

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