An Evangelical Identity Crisis

While Graham was a country boy from North Carolina--even today, he says he's still amazed he's "off the farm"--William F. Buckley Jr. grew up in a very different America, the Eastern milieu of Connecticut wealth and Roman Catholicism. But circumstance put the two on parallel paths in the middle of the American Century. In 1951, just out of Yale, Buckley wrote a book called "God and Man at Yale," in which he railed against the elite faculty for its postwar leftism, secularism and atheism.

Buckley proposed the paradoxical notion that Christian conservatives needed to delve into politics in order to save themselves from it. This idea found adherents in the early 1960s, when the Supreme Court handed down decisions that restricted prayer in schools and limited the ability of states to ban the use of contraceptives. In 1973, after Roe v. Wade, disengagement was no longer an option. For the first time, evangelicals and Catholics--worlds apart doctrinally--became political friends. "You cannot understand the evangelical involvement without understanding that sea change," says Richard Land, leader of the Southern Baptist Convention. "It's more complicated than just abortion, but without abortion there would not have been the emergence of the evangelical movement."

Fast-forward to 1976, the first election after Watergate, when Jimmy Carter--who, incidentally, had participated in Graham's crusade work--ran on a platform of personal integrity and honesty. "I will never lie to you," he said. One afternoon, before a fund-raiser, Carter told a Washington Post reporter that he had been "born again." He had realized, he said, that he "lacked something very precious--a complete commitment to Christ, a presence of the Holy Spirit in my life in a profound and personal way." In subsequent interviews, he said he prayed to God "not continually but many times a day."

In the North, Carter's God talk was seen as an oddity, but in the South it meant something. Tourists and reporters mobbed the little church where he and his wife, Rosalynn, attended services and where he taught Sunday school. Carter decisively won the South that year.

By the time he ran for re-election in 1980, the world had changed, but no one knew it yet. Jerry Rafshoon remembers the story well. He had quit his post as Carter's White House communications director to run the media campaign in the president's bid for re-election. Rafshoon wasn't worried about the South; campaign dollars would be better spent elsewhere. Then one day early in the fall, Rafshoon received a disturbing call. A preacher named Jerry Falwell, with an outfit called the Moral Majority, had spent massive sums on anti-Carter radio ads in the South. They were "saying that Jimmy Carter isn't a Christian, and there are homosexuals in the Oval Office and all kinds of crap," Rafshoon says. "Rosalynn went to church one time and came back in tears--a bunch of women were picketing her, saying your husband is not a Christian. We lost most of the South."

The Moral Majority had been launched in 1979 as a political-action committee, an alliance of Christian conservatives--evangelicals and Cath- olics, Washington types and, of course, Falwell--who wanted to crush Carter and all he stood for. The stated agenda was clear: pro-life, pro-traditional family, pro-Israel and for a strong national defense. It was against gays, drugs, pornography and the Equal Rights Amendment. Ronald Reagan's dubious evangelical credentials--divorced, movie star, sporadic churchgoer--didn't matter. He was deeply and properly conservative.