The Vocal Minority: Saving the Government

"I'm not going to choose the lesser of two evils. I'm going to choose what my conscience tells me to do. The right thing to do. And pray that by the next election others will accept my philosophy and see that the two political systems of today just don't have the answers--they don't have the absolutes that I think we need to rebuild this broken foundation."

The voice of the despairing American. He fears for the peace of the world, the economy of the country, the preservation of the city. But this isn't really his voice, although the words may ring true. The speaker is a member of the Massachusetts Citizens for a Moral Majority, and he fears for none of those things. His is the voice of the despairing Christian, and he is praying for the conservatism of the government, the cohesiveness of the family, and the influence of the church. Most of all, though, he fears for his self-preservation--the rest of the world is going to hell.

Unlike his left-wing counterparts, this pastor won't be casting his minor-party vote alone. Millions of Americans have joined the fundamentalist Moral Majority crusade, which says its mandate is "to give a voice to millions of decent, law-abiding, Godfearing Americans who want to do something about the moral decline of our country." Most of them will cast their votes for Ronald Reagan; if the former California governor is elected tomorrow, they will have a claim on the spoils. The demands will be drastic: a Constitutional amendment against abortion, massive military spending, sending troops to countries like Afghanistan, laws against homosexuality and feminism, dissolution of social welfare programs.

They call the opposite line "godless humanism." It is difficult to see where the appeal lies in this approach--their pamphlets are denegrating, apocalyptic, frightening. So they de-emphasize the verbal, instead concentrating on the visual. Rev. Jerry Falwell, the national leader, guests on Donahue and the late-afternoon talk-show circuit, while his recruits ferret out converts for their congregations. The message comes across differently now--the pastor's eyes are compassionate; he tells you he loves you and he's trying to help you. So if you can't vote for Ben-jamin Bubar, the ultra-conservative candidate of the National Statesman Party [formerly the Prohibition Party], at least cast your ballot for Reagan. Use the Bible as your voter information guide.

In Massachusetts alone, the Moral Majority has reached thousands of voters this way.

Everything about the office smells of Americana. Sedate, sterile, wooden--the white church in the middle of Medford Square conjures up the archetypes of old New England. What isn't dark or neutral is flag-colored, like the fife-and-drum wallpaper that peels at its yellowed seams. A red telephone, the locus, sits ominously on the pastor's oaken desk. When it rings, the sound is shrill, urgent, like the Oval Office hot line or the Batphone. But to Pastor Tom Michael, the caller on the other end transcends Zbigniew Brzezinski or Commissioner Gordon. For when the enemy is sin, each call concerns not law and order, but eternal life and perpetual damnation.

Michael's shirt is bright red, too; it matches the red, white and blue in his tie and his blue sports jacket. And it matches his red Bible, which never strays more than a half a foot or so away from his right hand. "I am a citizen first, a pastor second," Michael says. Above all, he is a Christian; but he distinguishes his strain of Baptism from the "gray nebulous" of Christian sects, using a string of adjectives that pop up over and over again: fundamentalist, Bible-believing, born-again, saved. As a citizen, he has always kept up on the issues, voted, written to his congressmen. As a Christian, he--along with the other members of the six-month-old Massachusetts Moral Majority executive board--believes he must become more politically active.

"I have become involved as a matter of life and death, so to speak, as a matter of survival. I see the government as a threat to the church. I see it as a threat to the family because of its liberal trends as a result of our liberal politicians, like here in Massachusetts. Kennedy and Tsongas are against 99 per cent of the Biblical principles that I am for. And I am in favor of getting them out of office as soon as possible and replacing them with good, Godly, Bible-believing Christians."

When he speaks of an ideal America, it is with a strange mix of optimism and fear. His eyes shine from behind gold-rimmed glasses as he talks of the spirit and determination of the Pilgrims: "I say we can rebuild this nation into a nation that's great, that's a leader. The Pilgrims built it from nothing--we certainly have a lot more to build on than they had." A minute later, we are speaking about Ninevah and Tyre, Sodom and Gomorrah: "If we do not legislate morality, we are going to end up with worse chaos than we have now. In other words, if we say it's okay to go out in the streets and solicit prostitution or homosexuality--well, that's what we're allowing now. Is it working? Is our society benefitting from it? The answer, of course, is no. Our society is crumbling from within."

The genteel Southern drawl rises to a high pitch because he knows you are going to come back at him with a contradiction, a challenge, a word about reality. Otherwise, though, he remains calm; no more than a second or two passes before he's ready with a lengthy answer. Recognizing his secular inarticulateness, he nonetheless slides over questions about the nuclear arms race, the state of the economy--ultimately, all the issues of the election. And he knows that this new-right pitch has shocked and disgusted even his fellow ministers: "When the majority of the religious people in this city view me as an outcast or as a black sheep, that hurts me. But I can't worry about that. I have a Book here that is my absolute authority. And if I'm to represent this Book, I can't worry about who likes me and who doesn't like me."

The red Bible is worn, but Michael doesn't have to rifle through the creased onion-skin pages to footnote what he's saying because he knows it by heart, and what he can't quote verbatim he'll read tonight and tomorrow night and every night.

Why can't the Moral Majority accept the liberal doctrine of toleration? Didn't Christ preach toleration? He sighs; you have "intellectualized" and "interpreted" the Bible again. "I cannot be tolerant and be a Christian too. Jesus pointed to the religious leaders of his day and said, 'You're a bunch of snakes and a bunch of hypocrites and whited sepulchres.' And that's the kind of religious leaders I have here in Medford. They will not take a position on these things. They're a bunch of crowd-pleasing, pink-laced, lily-livered do-gooders, and they've gotten that example from government."

There is venom in the voice now, and Michael again talks about the threat--the government is out to get him and other Bible-believing right-wingers; it has usurped far too much power (through welfare programs, the post office network, public school systems) and wants to "legislate me out of existence."

Michael's young daughter knocks cautiously on the door. She has come to empty her father's wastebasket; it is a break from school, which she attends downstairs along with 29 other born-again children. Red tie, blue tunic, white shirt. Michael watches her leave and talks about the government's efforts to condemn the Christian dayschool movement on charges of unqualified teachers and unfit teaching facilties. He mentions the 214 fire alarms Medford Public School endured over a one-year period. Earlier, it was eight years; by the end of the conversation, it has become eight months.

But details don't matter. "The function of government is the protection of evildoers and the rewarding of the good people. Two-hundred fourteen fire alarms in an eight-month period is nothing other than a zoo in the name of education, and our people are caught in a web they don't know how to get out of." So what would you do if you were president? "Oh, I'd go back to what we had in the early part of this century, where we were the leader of the world, and any Communist country started to infringe on the rights of the free people this country would step in and say stop, just like we did in World War I and World War II and Korea. I would've stood with Afghanistan to keep the Communist butchers out of there. They've been butchering the innocent in that country--South America, Africa, they've been all over capturing the world! We sit by like a bunch of cowards, a bunch of yellow-striped cowards, not getting involved because we made a fool of ourself in South Vietnam and let them walk all over that country."

He is calm even now; he resembles Father Mulcahy. When you can't respond, he assumes it's because your left-wing liberalism doesn't have the answers, the absolutes, the truth. So you ask him if one can be a Christain without being a right-wing conservative. This one he has to think about because you just told him a minute ago that you were a liberal Christian. Finally, "It's impossible as far as I'm concerned. And I don't think I'm intolerant. I think I'm trying to be truthful, to waken the people up, college students and religious people and the like."

Especially college students, whom Michael considers the next worst thing to self-satisfied heathens. "I would say the students that choose those education institutions [Harvard or Tufts] have pretty much made intellectuals out of their God, and they've closed their minds to anything as old-fashioned as the Bible because their professors have ridiculed them." So it's no wonder, he says, that the Moral Majority doesn't have much of a following at Harvard, considering that the school teaches evolution and toleration. And it admits homosexuals, who might end up in the public school system. And it encourages women to garner personal strength so that they later find it difficult to "submit to a man," as he says the Bible teaches us.

The answers are thought-less. Thinking--what Michael calls "intellectualism"--is the largest obstacle the Moral Majority seeks to overcome. "You represent the biggest problem that the fundamentalist movement has. The person over here on the far left, he knows he's lost, according to the Bible. He knows he's not a Bible-believing Christian and he's headed for hell. But the person in the middle, like you, you're talking out of both sides of your mouth, you're on this side on one issue, on this side of the other, and you don't have any absolutes."

He means this both religiously and politically; like every other principle to which Michael adheres, there is no separating the two. The question of the relationship between church and state is moot, or, more precisely, irrelevant. Without a pause, the transition between politics and religion is as smooth as butter. "Our citizens are ignorant because the pastors, the priests and the rabbis have not been teaching them the Bible.3