THE MORAL MINORITY: Thomas Was
Among the Right. Now They Find Him in
the Wrong.
By Hanna Rosin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 18, 1999; Page C01
For 15 years, Cal Thomas's hard right commentaries have been sneered at
by liberals, mostly to his great delight. But gone are the days of swagger --
after Reagan and before impeachment -- when a lefty's taunts were like a
tonic.
Now Thomas finds himself in a shaky new landscape of insecurity and
regret. Thomas and pastor Ed Dobson, friends from their days at the
Moral Majority, have just published "Blinded by Might." The book
magnifies a debate stirred up by Paul Weyrich's now infamous open letter
of last month arguing that the religious right has been singed by its
involvement in politics and should go back to cleansing the culture from the
bottom up.
After following Christian conservatives from political obscurity to the front
row, Thomas and Dobson find themselves wondering if they and their
movement paid too much for the tickets -- if the compromises were worth
it, if their true Christian mission hasn't been lost along the way. All they
want is to start a healthy debate on the future, get a few round tables going,
the authors earnestly insist. But the intended audience, already depressed,
is in no mood to talk.
One after another, their former allies in the Christian right are turning their
backs. The Rev. D. James Kennedy, the pastor of Coral Ridge Ministries,
saw a news release touting the book and promptly withdrew Thomas's
invitation to speak at the Reclaiming America for Christ conference last
month in Fort Lauderdale. Their former boss and mentor Jerry Falwell
issued a curt news release saying he wouldn't discuss the book in any
forum ever. Religious broadcaster James Dobson scrawled a note saying,
effectively, don't ever call me again.
Thomas, 56, is not an emotional guy. In his teasing, gruff way he deflects
any discussion of what it feels like to be shunned by your friends. His
columns, which run in almost 500 papers ("Catching up to George Will,"
he says proudly), are less eye-popping rage than a cold hard stare, blunt
assessments of the corrupted modern culture packaged in no-frills prose.
But these days, even he sometimes finds himself talking about his
"emotions" being "tied up" by this project, half-joking about encounter
group-like sessions with Dobson where they read chapters of the book
aloud to each other to soothe their fears, nervous and nearly paranoid
about counterattacks from the right, swearing to anyone who will listen that
they are not disgruntled employees, that they only want to debate.
"Look, it wasn't easy to write this book," admits Thomas, who lives in
Alexandria and grew up in the District. "You don't want people you've
known and admired for years to criticize you. We don't want to be driven
into exile. We get enough of that kind of treatment from liberals. But I'm
nobody's lackey. I'm not afraid to take on people on my side when I think
they're wrong."
If they were more blunt with themselves, though, they would admit that the
exile was self-imposed, and long in coming. Both started the '80s in a "rush
of excitement" as Jerry Falwell's top advisers, seduced by his zeal to set
America back on a biblical track. Both rode the movement through its
remarkable explosion. Intrigued by a charismatic figure they barely knew,
both resettled their wives and children to a place neither had ever been
called Lynchburg, Va.
After a few years of bustling away in a media dark zone, nipping away at
the edges of culture, they one day found themselves in a room with Falwell
poring over vote counts for Ronald Reagan. The results were too dizzying
to grasp immediately. There it was in black and white in the morning paper.
The liberal media knew their names, were awed by their success.
Overnight, they became direct dial for all the best talk shows and papers,
America's new kingmakers.
But that political victory and the attention it brought had a corrosive side.
Somehow the talk shows and the papers and later the fund-raising and all
the attention became the main point, as they now tell it. At some point, they
became uneasy. The men they had so admired deflated in Thomas and
Dobson's eyes, and they peeled away from their zeal.
Thomas's disaffection happened more quickly. He had been a broadcast
journalist for NBC before working for Falwell, so skepticism came
naturally to him. During his five years with the Moral Majority, he was
"blunt" with Falwell about his criticism, he says, but got no satisfying
answers. He asked, for example, why fund-raising letters were always so
negative, harping on the enemy of the moment instead of telling the good
news. Because the negative letters brought in more money, he was told.
Thomas is careful not to be too critical of his old boss in the book, but the
little he says makes it clear Falwell's charisma had an irritating side. He
recalls Falwell's dark pranks -- rolling firecrackers down the aisle of his
private jet or ordering the pilots to take a steep dive to terrify the
passengers. Sometimes, Falwell knocked on random hotel doors and then
ran away to hide and giggle as confused guests scanned the hallway. He
concludes that Falwell was like an overgrown boy, "hiding feelings of
inadequacy and fear of failure," much like the hated President Clinton.
Dobson, 49, seems a more sensitive soul. His slow process of alienation
came after a year of praying in solitude, punctured by a few well-timed
words from a friendly prophet who told him to stop wasting his time on the
talk shows. "Constant exposure to the press can be deceiving," he writes.
"It makes you feel more important than you really are, and it can lead you
to believe that you are really making a difference."
His epiphany came at a mundane moment. He had just returned from a
particularly satisfying appearance on the Phil Donahue show, high on the
crowd's boos. Whisked by limo to the Newark airport, he strode through
the terminal wondering how many of these people recognized him from
TV. He bragged about it the whole way home to his wife, who listened
quietly and said finally, "Would you take the garbage to the dump?"
At that moment, he remembered his lost humility: "Real life is not lived in
the glare of the television camera," he told himself at the time. "Real life is
taking the garbage to the dump."
The next day he ran into Harold Wilmington, dean of Lynchburg's local
Bible Institute. Wilmington was the well-timed prophet. "You're casting
your pearls before swine," he told him. "You are a preacher and a pastor
and you are wasting your time and your gifts doing television shows and
pursuing politics."
Every day for the next year he prayed on those words alone at lunchtime.
Finally in 1988, it came time to decide. Falwell invited him to help rescue
PTL ministries, which he had just taken over from the disgraced Jim
Bakker. "If you go to PTL, by tomorrow everyone in America will know
who you are," someone told him, holding up his hands in the form of a TV
screen.
That night he read Matthew 4 over and over: "Again, the devil took him to
a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and
their splendor. 'All this I will give you,' he said, 'if you will bow down and
worship me.' "
The next morning Dobson, who was ordained as a Baptist minister, turned
Falwell down, and accepted an invitation from Calvary Chapel in Grand
Rapids, Mich., to become its new pastor. In 11 years, he has never held a
political debate, organized a rally, appeared on TV or distributed a voter
guide from the church, much to the dismay of local religious activists.
In Thomas's dramatic retelling, the book was hatched in that very church,
after one of Dobson's infectious Saturday night services where hundreds of
people dressed in jeans sing and sway. The two men realized their own
crisis of conscience was the same as the movement's, and it was time to
come to terms with it. At that moment they sealed their fate.
After the success of Ronald Reagan and later the Republican Congress,
religious right leaders were seduced by the "aphrodisiac of political
power," they write in the book, addicted to TV appearances and limos and
bodyguards and money.
They began to use God to baptize a specific political agenda. "To be a real
Christian you must be a Republican," explains Dobson in one chapter.
Because God was on their side, anyone who disagreed politically was a
"God-hating, Christ-denying hypocrite," an abortionist, pornographer,
atheist, in short, a liberal.
As the movement leaders' heads swelled, their line hardened into tones
distinctly un-Christian, the book argues. In many church circles, Bill and
Hillary Clinton became the "embodiment of the Antichrist." Once Thomas
was quoted in the monthly Christianity Today saying something favorable
about a meeting with Clinton, and Falwell sent him the clip scrawled with a
note: "Unforgivable compromise. Don't ever call me again."
They raised money by playing "on people's fears and insecurities," recalls
Thomas. Fund-raising letters screeched about the enemy of the moment --
Norman Lear, an abortion doctor, a homosexual activist. The authors even
support a favorite liberal critique -- that the hateful rhetoric made violence
against these chosen enemies more likely.
After two decades of a dirty political war, the average person came to
associate the Christian right with "criticism, condemnation and holier than
thou attitude," they write. Because they forgot the messy business of
helping the poor and visiting the sick, because they fought the gay rights
lobby without ministering to AIDS patients, the religious right leadership
failed what Dobson calls the Mother Teresa test. "When Mother Teresa
speaks about abortion, people listen to her respectfully, because she backs
it up with a life of sacrifice and love and compassion."
By forgetting the Gospel, the Moral Majority failed, they argue. "It's like
we used to say to the left about the war on poverty," says Thomas. "How
many more years do we have to wait and how much more money do we
have to spend before families stop breaking apart, before our kids are no
longer hooked on drugs, before pornography is not widely available? We
are rearranging the deck chairs when there's a huge hole in the ship."
The argument hits a sore spot with conservative Republicans, who are now
going through their own identity crisis. In their years of prominence,
conservatives have had their share of spats between those who believe
economic or social issues should be preeminent. But never since Reagan
have they been unsure that their basic worldview was the dominant one.
Now they find themselves stung by impeachment, defined in the country's
mind as dour crusading zealots, and looking for a way to resonate again.
Yet the moral wing of the party is not quite ready to retreat to its
post-Scopes Trial, 1920s incarnation, when it operated beneath the radar
screen through churches and schools. While admitting a few failures,
religious right leaders find the Thomas/Dobson corrective overheated and
exaggerated, a recipe for disaster.
In one of the Q & A's published at the end of the book, Pat Robertson
reminds the authors that his political involvement is merely a defensive
strategy, a reaction against a corrupted culture impinging on his freedom.
The image of the Christian right trying to "jam religion down people's
throats" is one he admits he perpetuated with overblown rhetoric, but the
phenomenon is basically a media myth. "It's a misnomer to think the
Christian Coalition is saying we're the only Christians and anybody that's
not part of us isn't Christian."
Both he and Falwell admit they got scorched sometimes in their
involvement with politics, by endorsing Sandra Day O'Connor for the
Supreme Court, who turned out not to be an antiabortion purist, or
condoning Reagan's budget explosion. Falwell says that from his own
experience he can tell James Dobson, head of Focus on the Family and a
relative newcomer to politics, is headed for a bruising, "beating his head"
against a wall.
But in important ways, the moral majority changed the country, they say.
The political landscape is filled with committed Christian conservatives,
governors and Congress members. Divorce and abortions are down,
worldwide evangelism is up. "America is now experiencing a great spiritual
revival," Robertson says.
For the moment, political retreat is not on the table. Last week, the
Christian Coalition unveiled what they called the largest fund-raising drive
"in the history of modern grass-roots politics."
Kennedy says the mood at his Reclaiming America for Christ conference
last month was "the most excited, the most optimistic we've ever heard,"
with attendance booming at 1,700. "Battle for America's Soul Not Over,"
says the concluding announcement in big bold print. "The war is over? We
ought to give up? Not on your life."
"I'm fighting for God and for truth and for morality and for decency," he
says, quoting Winston Churchill. "When we quit doing these things we
might as well lay down and die."
Kennedy still defends the decision to withdraw Thomas's invitation. "We
are having a conference encouraging Christians to be involved and we
certainly can't have Christians discouraging them," he says. "This is the very
thing that led to a totally secularized, anti-moral, anti-spiritual culture we
have today -- It's a resurrection of something that horribly failed, so why
should we resurrect it again?"
In a phone conversation, Cal Thomas used every tactic to get organizers to
change their minds. First he tried rational explanation. "I'm not arguing we
should send everyone back to the catacombs," he said. He promised he
wouldn't say anything more radical than he said last time he spoke at the
conference. "I was brought up not to embarrass my host," he said.
Then he appealed to their brotherly sentiments. "Can't we afford to be
friends and have slight disagreements?" he asked, playing the gentleman.
"Because we disagree doesn't mean we have to dislike each other."
Finally he gave up, and unleashed a tirade. "This is just amazing," he said.
"This is my first experience with censorship and it's not with the left. Pretty
soon the wagons will be circling. There will be just you and your wife left
and you'll be looking funny at her."
Click.
Now Thomas has just resigned himself to take-out food and videos.
"If we don't get invited out much that won't bother me," he says. "I have
my cat and my wife and 93 Loretta Young movies."
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