Some of the leaflets were simply illiterate hate-sheets; others were glossy and well produced. Why A Bankrupt America? explains how the Trilateral Commission is helping ‘Russia Enslave the World!’ When You Were Formed In Secret tells of the miracle of birth and the ‘homicide of abortion’. The Family Issues Voting Index helps you to sort ‘the good guys from the bad guys’ (‘The bad guys need our prayers. The good guys need our votes’). Is Humanism Molesting Your Child? urges you to ‘examine your child’s library for immoral, anti-family, and anti-American contents’. Your Five Duties As A Christian Citizen are as follows: Pray, Register, Become Informed, Help Elect Godly People, and Vote… Then I found the pamphlet I was looking for.
Today the evolution controversy seems as remote as the Homeric era to inteHectuals in the East,’ wrote the historian Richard Hofstad-ter in i?6z. But elsewhere there are still many Americans who, in the words of William Bryan, prosecutor at the Scopes trial of 192.5, are ‘more interested in the Rock of Ages than the age of rocks’.
Are Evolutionary Scientists Like Three Blind Mice? is the pamphlet’s title. And, yes, apparently they are. Because evolution is ‘a vicious lie!’ There follows a sarcastic resume of the atheist argument, with the clincher: ‘question: if god had to do all the work ANYWAY WHY DID HE STRETCH IT OUT OVER MILLIONS OF YEARS? SURELY THEY DON’T THINK GOD WAS TOO WEAK TO CREATE EVERYTHING in 6 days!’ The last page carries special offers of anti-evolution T-shirts ($6.95) and creationist bumper-stickers (40 cents). I finished my meal and returned to the National Affairs Briefing at the Reunion Arena to hear Reagan — Reagan, and his new champions, the electronic ministers of the air.
This is a good deal more serious than it may at first sound. The mobilisation of the Evangelical Right could influence the outcome of the 1980 presidential election and determine that of 1984 — though many of the new evangelists claim that a free 1984 election will not take place unless their man gets in this time. Their man, naturally, is the Republican nominee: the movement claims to be non-partisan, but it is about as neutral as Nancy Reagan. (Ironically, Nancy is the chief Evangelical reservation about Ronnie, who is a divorcee. According to them, the Reagans have been living in adultery for nearly thirty years.) By informing their congregations about the ‘pro-family’ issues, by setting up vote-registration booths in their aisles, the Evangelicals have already ousted left-wing incumbents in mid-term elections, have thwarted pro-homosexual and women’s-rights legislation in key states, and have played a part in the shaping of the Republican platform. And these are early days.
Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter and John Anderson are all ‘born-again’ Christians. They are not alone. One in three Americans takes the lesson of Nicodemus in John 3: ‘unless one is born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God’. Reaching back to the Great Awakening of the early eighteenth century, the Evangelical faith is the most proletarian and anti-intellectual of the many mansions of American religion. It rests on a personal experience of the Saviour; it is Manichaean and eschatological; for all its hatred and rejection of modernity, it maintains that the Earth is only 6,ooo years old.
The latest surge in Evangelical activism is entirely new. Like so much else in America, it has to do with money, power and, above all, television. There are 36 wholly religious TV stations in America (and 1,300 radio stations). Jerry FalwelFs Old-Time Gospel Hour is seen on 374 stations nationwide, outstripping Dallas. Pat Robertson’s daily devotional chat show has more viewers than Johnny Carson. The TV preachers turn over billions of tax-free dollars every year (Falwell alone raises more than a million dollars a week, $300,000 of which goes on buying more air-time). Their mailing lists are kept on guarded computer tapes. The electronic ministries have a combined congregation of 115 million people attending every week.
The political wing of the movement has developed only in the last fifteen months. Its names are legion: Moral Majority Inc., Religious Roundtable, Christian Voice, Christian Voters’ Victory Fund, Campus Crusade for Christ, Christians for Reagan – all loosely grouped under the pro-family banner. American religion has always been popular rather than hieratic in character, concerned not with theology but morality; and it has always, until now, been politically quietist, with low registration and a tendency to vote for the incumbent. The Evangelical message is plain — ‘out of the pews and into the polls’. ‘Not voting is a sin,’ says Falwell: ‘Repent of it.’