Introduction

Immediately, crowds gathered at the spot and walked toward the soldiers, led by young men who were willing to sacrifice their lives.
The army began to retreat, the soldiers firing at the ground to keep the people at bay.
The next day, tens of thousands went back onto the streets to protest against these killings. By mid-January, it was all over. Prime Minister Bakhtiar negotiated the shah’s departure, which, to save face, was declared to be only temporary.
The royal family flew to Egypt, where Sadat took them in. Bakhtiar tried to stall the Revolution by ordering the release of political prisoners, dismantling SAVAK, refusing oil to Israel and South Africa, and promising to review all foreign contracts and to make major cuts in military expenditure.
Again, it was too late. The crowds were clamoring for the return of the man they called their Imam, and on February 1, 1979, Bakhtiar was forced to allow Khomeini to return.
Khomeini’s arrival in Tehran was one of those symbolic events, like the storming of the Bastille, which seem to change the world forever. For committed liberal secularists, inside and outside Iran, it was a dark moment, a triumph of superstition over rationality. But for many Muslims, Sunni as well as Shii, who had long feared that Islam was about to be annihilated, it seemed a luminous reversal. For some Iranian Shiis, Khomeini’s return seemed a miracle, and inevitably, it resembled the mythical return of the Hidden Imam. As he drove through the streets of Tehran, the crowds shouted for “Imam Khomeini,” confident that a new age of justice had dawned. Senior mujtahids, such as Ayatollah Shariatmadari, were incensed by this use of the title of Imam, and it was firmly and officially stated that Khomeini was not the Hidden Imam. But whatever the official line, for millions of the Iranian masses, Khomeini was an Imam until the day he died.
His life and career seemed clear evidence that the divine was present and active in history after all. Like the Revolution itself, Khomeini seemed to make an ancient myth an actual reality.
Immediately before Khomeini’s return, Taha Hejazi published a poem that expressed the eager anticipation of many Iranians: “On the Day the Imam Returns” looks forward to universal brotherhood. No one would tell lies any more, there would be no need to lock the door against thieves, everybody would share their food with each other:
The Imam must return ... so that right can sit on his throne, so that evil, treachery, and hatred are eliminated from the face of time.
When the Imam returns, Iran--this broken, wounded mother-will be forever liberated from the shackles of tyranny and ignorance and the chains of plunder, torture and prison. Khomeini liked to quote the hadith in which the Prophet Muhammad, on returning from battle, announces that he is returning from the lesser to the greater jihad, the more difficult, crucial, and exacting struggle was not the physical, political battle, but the conquest of self and the implementation of justice and truly Islamic values in society. When he returned to Tehran, Khomeini must have reflected that the jihad was now over and that the infinitely more arduous greater jihad was about to begin.
the fundamentalist revival in the United States during the late 1970S was far less dramatic. American Protestants did not need to take such extreme action. They were not, as were the Jews, still haunted by memories of Holocaust and genocide, nor were they, like the Muslims, victims of political and economic oppression. They felt alienated from modern secular culture, but their leaders, at least, enjoyed prosperity and success. This would later prove to be one of their problems.
Despite their conviction that they were outsiders, Protestant fundamentalists were very much at home in America. Democracy was firmly established in the United States, and they were able to voice their views freely without fear of reprisal and use democratic institutions to further their cause. Nevertheless, by the late 1970s, as we have seen, fundamentalists were beginning to feel that instead of withdrawing from society as had been their policy for some fifty years, they should become politically active. They believed that they had a chance to make an impact and put America back on the right path. It had become clear that a substantial evangelical constituency could be mobilized on such issues as family values, abortion, and religious education. The old fears remained, but there was new confidence too.
The symbol of this revived fundamentalism was the Moral Majority, created in 1979 under the leadership of Jerry Falwell. The original inspiration for the group, however, came not from the fundamentalists themselves but from three professional right-wing organizers, who had already created a number of political action committees. Richard Vignerie, Howard Phillips, and Paul Weyrich had become frustrated with the Republican party and alienated even from Ronald Reagan, who had chosen the liberal Richard Schweiker as his running mate in his campaign for the presidency. Conservative on such issues as defense and the reduction of government interference in the economy, they wanted to build a new conservative majority to oppose the moral and social liberalism that had entered American public and private life during the 1960s. They noted the strength of the evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants, and saw Jerry Falwell as perfect for their needs. He already had a huge ready-made constituency, based on his congregation, Liberty College, and his television audience. Other fundamentalists who came to be prominent in Moral Majority, such as Tim LaHaye and Greg Dixon, had also founded super churches enjoyed considerable autonomy, and would fear no censure from a denomination. They already had close links with one another: they were nearly all Baptists and members of the Baptist Bible Fellowship.
The Moral Majority did not confine itself to fundamentalists. The leaders wanted to cooperate with other people who shared their views on ethical and political issues, and create a forum for all the conservatives of America. If the new group was to make a significant impact, it needed the support of like-minded Roman Catholics, Pentecostalists, Mormons, Jews, and secularists, since only 15 to 20 percent of the population of the United States were evangelical Protestants. For the first time, driven by pragmatic considerations, fundamentalists felt compelled to lay aside their separatism, leave their enclaves, and embrace the pluralism of modern life. This was reflected in the leadership. Falwell, LaHaye, Dixon, and Bob Billington were fundamentalists, but Paul Weyrich was Jewish, and Howard Phillips and Richard Vignerie were Catholics. This pluralism cost them some Christian fundamentalist support: Bob Jones II, for example, called Falwell “the most dangerous man in America.” But, in fact, popular support for Moral Majority remained predominantly Protestant. Grassroots sympathy was centered in the South, and the movement had little appeal outside WASP circles. Conservative Catholics could endorse Moral Majority’s position on abortion and homosexual rights, and tax relief for independent schools, but many could not forget the fundamentalists’ traditional hatred of Roman Catholicism. By the same token, Jews, black Baptists, and Pentecostalists would be repelled by the racism of some of the most prominent leaders and patrons of the movement. Senator Jesse Helms, for example, was a committed opponent of the civil rights movement.
The message of Moral Majority was not new. It was declaring war on the liberal establishment and fighting a battle for the future of America.
Members were convinced that the civilization of the United States must be religious, and its policy dictated by the Bible. At present, America was degenerate. After the Second World War, a secularist elite, centered on the East Coast, had dominated political and cultural life. These liberals had become what Jerry Falwell called “an immoral minority.” Conservatives should not see themselves as a reactionary, marginal group. In fact, they represented the majority, and they must fight to preserve traditional values.
“There are millions of us--and only a handful of them,” claimed Tim LaHaye.
“We have together with the Protestants and Catholics enough votes to run this country,” Pat Robertson told an audience.
“And when the people say, “We’ve had enough,” we are going to take over.”
During the late 1970s and early i98os, some fundamentalists were beginning to modify the old premillennial pessimism. The world as a whole was doomed, but Christians had an obligation to evangelize the world, spread the Gospel, and try to ensure that it reached as many people as possible. If Christians took action, America could be reprieved before the Rapture.
“Is there hope for our country?” Falwell asked on Old Time Gospel Hour in 1980:
I think so. I believe as we trust in God and pray, as we Christians lead the battle to outlaw abortion, which is murder on demand, as we take our stand against pornography, against the drug traffic, as we take our stand against the breakdown of the traditional family in America, the promotion of homosexual marriages, as we stand up for strong national defense so that this country can survive and our children will know the America we’ve known.... I think there is hope that God may one more time bless America.
Fundamentalists in what soon became known as the New Christian Right had gone on the offensive, after fifty years of quietism, but they were against more than they were for. Not all were involved in, or even approved of, the Moral Majority, but these newly militant Christians were antiabortion, anti-gay rights, anti-drugs. They were adamantly opposed to any detente with the Soviet Union, which they had always regarded as a Satanic empire.
For the televangelist James Robison, “Any teaching of peace prior to [Christ’s] return is heresy.... It’s against the word of God; it’s Antichrist.” The agenda of the Moral Majority and the New Christian Right was rejectionist, a crusade against an impending evil that threatened to overwhelm America.
In the light of what came later, the emphasis placed on sexuality was significant.
The New Christian Right was just as concerned about the position of women as the Islamists, but theirs was a far more frightened vision.
The women’s liberation movement filled fundamentalist men and women alike with terror. For Phyllis Schlafly, one of the Roman Catholic leaders of Moral Majority, feminism was a “disease,” the cause of all the world’s ills.
Ever since Eve disobeyed God and sought her own liberation, feminism had brought sin into the world and with it “fear, sickness, pain, anger, hatred, danger, violence and all varieties of ugliness.” The proposed Equal Rights Amendment was a government plot to create higher taxes, Soviet-style nurseries, “and the federalization of all remaining aspects of our life.” For Beveriey LaHaye, feminism was “more than an illness”; based on Marxist and humanist teachings, “it is a philosophy of death.... Radical feminists are self-destructive and are trying to bring about the death of an entire civilization as well.” It was up to Christian women to take active steps to move their husbands back to center stage and reeducate themselves in the ethos of feminine self-sacrifice. It was their duty “to save our society,” bringing “civilization and humanity to the twenty-first century.” The con flation of feminism with the other evils that had long haunted the fundamentalist imagination is evidence of conspiracy fear. They associated the integrity and even the survival of their society with the traditional position of women.
Protestant fundamentalists and Christian conservatives in most of the denominations seem to have felt unmanned by the evil forces of secular humanism. They appeared deeply concerned about male impotence. Modern men were much “less certain of their manhood than formerly,” lamented Tim and Beverley LaHaye in The Act of Marriage: The Beauty of Sexual Love (1976), their best-selling sex manual. Men were impotent, sexually troubled, worried about satisfying their wives, or about how their performance compared with that of other men. The reason for this was the new self-assertion of women; even fundamentalist women were infected by this cultural virus and, as a result, men were becoming “feminized” or even “castrated.” This fear also underlay the fundamentalist hatred of homosexuality, which, like feminism, they regarded as an epidemic, the cause of America’s decline.
“It is a perversion of the highest order,” thundered James Robison, who became famous for the virulence of his attacks on homosexuality in his television program.
“It is against God, against God’s word, against society, against nature. It is almost too repulsive to imagine or describe.”
Fundamentalists were almost unanimous in seeing homosexuality as identical with pederasty. They were also convinced that it was the result of failed homes which had fallen prey to “secular humanism.”
Fundamentalist writers on family values were united in their conviction that America needed real men. But, interestingly, some fundamentalists seemed to have buried worries about what they considered to be an emasculating tendency in Christianity itself, which had become a religion of womanly values: forgiveness, mercy, and tenderness. But Jesus was no sissy, expostulated Edwin Louis Cole: he was “a fearless leader, defeating Satan, casting out demons, commanding nature, rebuking hypocrites. “ He could be ruthless:
Christians must also be aggressive, Tim LaHaye insisted in Battle for the Family. They must become politically active. This desire for a militant, virile Christianity also explains Moral Majority’s hostility to gun-control legislation. This too was part of their campaign to revive upright, potent, and combative manhood.
The activism of the New Christian Right sprang in part from fundamental fear. Fundamentalists felt obscurely castrated and profoundly undermined.
Their ideology had not changed, but they were now determined to make their flocks, whom for years they had commanded to hold aloof from mainstream society, politically active in public life. The Moral Majority network began to work in the same way as other political campaigning movements.
Their main job was to make sure that their members registered for the vote, were taught how to use their vote correctly, and were able to get to the polls. They held rallies to explain the need for activism, and to educate the people in lobbying and the preparation of newsletters;
they also taught them how to influence the media. Christians were exhorted to stand for public office, at however lowly and local a level. Liberals and secularists gradually became aware of a vociferous born-again presence in public life. In the course of the next decade, militant Christians began to colonize mainstream institutions. In 1986, Pat Robertson even made a bid for the presidency.
Christians began to be a thorn in the side of some politicians. For years, public action committees had targeted candidates for office who, in their view, promoted undesirable policies. They had issued “report cards,” making their ideas public property. Now Christian activists began to target candidates who voted the “wrong” way on the gun laws, funding for abortion clinics, or the Equal Rights Amendment. To hold the wrong views on defense, school prayer, or gay rights was to be anti-family, anti-America, and anti-God.
At first, the fundamentalist activists tended to be inept, but gradually they learned to play the modern political game. They were preachers and television presenters and not natural politicians, but they did achieve some success.
Their most notable achievement was probably the blocking of the Equal Rights Amendment. It was necessary that thirty-eight states vote for the amendment in order to procure the necessary two-thirds majority, and by 1973 thirty states had voted for it. But the efforts of Phyllis Schlafly and the campaigning of local Christian Right activists halted the amendment’s momentum: Nebraska, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, and South Dakota would all reverse their previous endorsements. Otherwise, the Moral Majority did not manage to change either federal or state legislation, even on such issues as school prayer and abortion. In Arkansas and Louisiana, however, bills were passed to ensure that the literal teachings of Genesis were given equal time with Darwinian evolution in the school curriculum. This apparent lack of success did not worry Christian activists, however, who pointed out that their long-term objective was to build an ultraconservative majority in both chambers of Congress. Once that had been achieved, the reforms that they wanted would take place as a matter of course.
At this writing, twenty years after the Moral Majority initiated this type of political activism, it is not easy to assess its long-term effectiveness. There is evidence that more committed Christians vote than before, especially in the South, but this type of negative campaigning can sometimes backfire. When Christian Right supporter Linda Chavez called her liberal opponent in the Maryland mid-term elections in 1986 a communist and a child-murdering lesbian, for example, this may have contributed to her defeat. The efforts of fundamentalists and other conservatives in 1998--99 to impeach President Bill Clinton because of his sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky and subsequent alleged perjury also proved counterproductive.
The spectacle of the President having to answer intimate questions about his sexual behavior and the inevitable trivialization of political discourse that this involved caused widespread revulsion, and possibly resulted in a liberal backlash in Clinton’s favor.
Nevertheless, the fact that at the height of the scandal the President felt it necessary to address a breakfast meeting of the religious leaders of the United States and tearfully confess that he had sinned showed that politicians could no longer treat the conservative views of the faithful with secularist disdain. By the end of the twentieth century, religion was a force to be reckoned with in North America. The United States had come a long way since the Founding Fathers had promoted the secular humanism of the Enlightenment. Since the Revolution, the Protestants of America had used religion as a way of protesting against the policies and conduct of the liberal establishment; the fundamentalist campaigning of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and other members of the Christian Right was simply a late twentieth-century manifestation of this tendency. As a result of all these Christian efforts, the sacred plays a far greater role in the political life of the United States than in such countries as Britain and France, where a politician would be damaged by the display of overt and emotional religiosity.
National politics aside, it is also true that some of the greatest victories of the Christian Right in the 1970S and 1980s were at the local level. In 1974, for example, Alice Moore, wife of a fundamentalist minister in Kanawa County, West Virginia, led a campaign against the “secular humanist slant” of school textbooks, which implied that the Bible was a myth, were critical of authority, and presented Christianity as hypocritical and atheism as intelligent and attractive.
Christians withdrew their children from the schools, and picketed them.
Moore displayed the long American Protestant tradition of distrust of the experts. Who should control the schools in Kanawa County: “the people who live here, or the educational specialists, the administrators, the people from other places who have been trying to tell us what is best for our children?”
In January 1982, the local Christians of St. David’s, Arizona, managed to get books by William Golding, John Steinbeck, Joseph Conrad, and Mark Twain banned from their schools. In 1981, Mel and Norma Gabler began a similar campaign to “get God back into the schools” of Texas.
They objected to the present “liberal slant,” which could be seen in:
open-ended questions that require students to draw their own conclusions; statements about religions other than Christianity;
statements that they construe to reflect negatively on the free enterprise system; statements that they construe to reflect positive aspects of socialist or communist countries (e.g.” that the Soviet Union is the largest producer in the world of certain grains); any aspect of sex education other than the promotion of abstinence;
statements which emphasize contributions made by blacks, Native American Indians, Mexican-Americans, or feminists;
statements which are sympathetic to American slaves or are unsympathetic to their masters; and statements in support of the theory of evolution, unless equal space is given to explain the theory of creation.
The courts ruled against the Gablers, but the publishers were so alarmed by the prospect of damage to the big Texas market, where the state chooses textbooks for all the schools, that they amended the books themselves.
The campaigners had revealed all the worries that had long plagued fundamentalists about modern culture: the fear of colonization, of experts, of uncertainty, of foreign influence, of science and sex. They also showed the quintessentially WASP orientation of the New Christian Right. America was to be white and Protestant. Like the Jewish and Muslim activists, the Christians of Moral Majority were fighting to extend the domain of the sacred, to limit the advance of the secularist ethos, and to reinstate the divine.
Their victories might seem small and insignificant, but the Christian Right had learned how to conduct themselves in the political arena;
they had re-enfranchised themselves, and, to an extent, resacralized American politics in a way that never ceases to amaze the more secular countries of Europe.
The liberal organization People for the American Way, which took on the Gablers in the Texas case, pointed out that the conservatives have only won 34 out of 124 similar conflicts. The liberals began to create their own organizations and fight back. Progress was, therefore, slow, and this worried fundamentalists who believed that time was running out, that Rapture was nigh, and that an omnipotent God was active in history, upholding the righteous with his might. Some fundamentalists believed that their leaders were selling out. In 1982, for example, instead of campaigning for the total abolition of abortion, Falwell moved to the more pragmatic objective of limiting its availability. During his presidential campaign, Pat Robertson spoke guardedly but politely about the mainstream denominations, even though fundamentalist orthodoxy demands that the apostate churches be attacked at every available opportunity.
During these early years of the Protestant resurgence, Falwell and Robertson both learned that modern politics demands compromise.
Absolute policies cannot succeed in a democratic context, where the contest for power entails bargaining, and giving some ground to opponents. This is difficult to square with a religious vision which sees certain principles as inviolable, and, therefore, nonnegotiable.
In the world of secular politics, where fundamentalists are forced to contend, whether they like it or not, nothing is sacred in this way. To achieve any measure of success, Falwell and Robertson had to make concessions to enemies whom they regarded as satanic.
There was a tension: by entering the modern political world, fundamentalists found that they not only had to sup with the devil but were tainted by some of the evil influences that they had entered the political lists to fight.
This was just one of their difficulties. During the last two decades of the century, some of the solutions to which fundamentalists felt driven meant a defeat for religion itself. 10. Defeat?
(1979-1999)
The fundamentalist reconquista had shown that religion was anything but a spent force. It was no longer possible to ask, as an exasperated United States government official had demanded after the Iranian Revolution: