‘And the Lord turned to him and said, “My precious child, I never left you in your hours of trial. When you look back along the pathway of your life and see only one pair of footprints in the sand — why, that was when I carried you.’“
This wasn’t the ghost of the Rev. Billy Sunday: it was a close-to-tears Ronald Reagan, winding up his address to the 15,000 Evangelicals (10,000 pastors, 5,000 lay people) at the Reunion Arena in Dallas. Reagan is taking these people seriously all right: he has hired a Moral Majority operative to liaise with the horn-again community. ‘Religious America is awakening, perhaps just in time,’ said Reagan hopefully. He praised the freedom-fighters of Poland and their leader, the Pope — ‘just the son of simple farm folk’. He tied himself up in knots trying to pronounce ‘Sollsy Neetsin* and his friend, ‘Archie Pelaygo’. He spoke of the dream of all true Americans to attain ‘that shining city on the hill’. But this was mild, hammy stuff compared to the kick-’em-down oratory of the electronic preachers.
Reagan was preceded at the podium by Dr James Robison, the good-angel JR of the Dallas—Fort Worth metroplex, whose TV show reaches ten million people (and has twice been taken off the air for its anti-homosexual virulence). Robison is six foot three of US prime, with a sensual, predatory manner and the tumbling unstop-pability of the natural demagogue. He strode onstage to a rock star’s welcome — a deafening wall of whistles and wolf-howls. A-men! Ooh-hah! Wah-who! Ee-haw!
Robison brandished his Bible a good deal, and often seemed about to wrestle his lectern to the ground. His language was violent, even scabrous. He spoke, or hollered, about ‘the cancerous visible sores’ afflicting America, sores which Christians were obliged to ‘fight’. Jesus was no sissy, no sir. ‘You slap my cheek’, said Robison, slapping his own cheek resoundingly, ‘and I’ll turn it. But you slap my wife or my children, boy, and I’ll put you on the floor? (Dog-barks, coyote-calls. Why-haw! How-he!) ‘Scientists’, Robison believes, ‘don’t know what they’re talking about.’ The Bible, on the other hand, is ‘more relevant than tomorrow’s newspaper’. In his wind-up Robison advised ‘the perverts to get back in the closet and not parade on Main Street!’ Ow-wee! Who-how!
Aaa-mien!__Reagan applauded. Back in Washington, Carter must have been wondering about the size of the pervert vote. Perverts for Carter — that’s all he needs.
When Reagan’s speech was over (and before anyone could get away) Jerry Falwell eased himself up on to the stage. Jerry’s job was to complement Robison’s brimstone with the other side of the Evangelical hard-sell: the cajoling demand for money. There wasn’t much ooh-h awing now, as grim stewards passed out envelopes and plastic buckets to the multitude, which had already paid $25 apiece to get in. Falwell wanted a thousand people to ‘pledge’ $100 each, to help tab the Dallas experiment; he then coaxed and nagged some smaller contributions out of the audience for various circulars and devotional knick-knacks. ‘One hundred dollars! This is a tax-deductible gift… Stand up all those who have pledged one hundred dollars. Or more.’
Money is the two-way traffic of the religious TV industry: money is taken from the viewers in the form of sacramental contributions; money is ‘returned’ to them in the form of celestial jackpots. The tax-free status of American religions (including the Californian cults) is constantly assailed. But all challenges are repulsed by the First Amendment — and by the age-old analogy between sectarian competition and free enterprise. Furthermore, Americans don’t feel the same way about money as we feel about it. They are not embarrassable on the subject. Money is its own vindication; money is its own just cause.
By no means all of the uplift shows are consciously political. Some electronic preachers do nothing more sinister with their millions than aggrandise themselves and their sanctuaries. Oral Roberts (yes, Oral Roberts), whose programme is centred on mere semi-hysterical folksiness, is going ahead with a $200-million City of Faith in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Robert Schuller, who has a drive-in ministry one exit past Disneyland in Southern California, is building a twenty-two-acre Shopping Centre for Jesus Christ, featuring an all-glass Crystal Cathedral.