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BORN AGAIN: THE EVANGELICAL MOVEMENT

Growth

The growth of evangelicalism and fundamentalism in the 1980s was a phenomenon that extended well beyond the religious sphere into the cultural and political. Known by many names (born-again Christians, evangelicals, Pentecostals, The New Religious Right) these Christians, mostly Protestants, grew in numbers like no single Protestant denomination. In the 1980s fundamentalists, or militant evangelicals, shared a disregard for modernity as sinful and insisted on the inerrancy of the Bible, the doctrine of dispensational premillennialism in regard to the Second Coming of Christ (the Rapture), and the separation of their churches from other Christian groups that did not believe as they did. They also actively pursued an entrance into the arena of conservative politics. The premier fundamentalist preachers of the era were the Reverend Jerry Falwell, Rev. Richard Zone, Rev. James Robison, and the Rev. Marion "Pat" Robertson. While Evangelicals, or Protestants actively involved in converting others to their beliefs about Jesus Christ, generally hold conservative beliefs toward religion and issues of morality, they may or may not interpret the Bible literally and are not opposed in principle to inter-acting with other Christian churches. A survey taken in 1986 showed that 31 percent of the American population identified themselves as evangelicals. The major evangelical churches of the decade were the Southern Baptist Convention, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Assemblies of God, Seventh-Day Adventists, and the Church of the Nazarene. Leading evangelical preachers of the era were the Reverend Jimmy Swaggart, Rev. Jim Bakker, Rev. Oral Roberts, and Rev. Robert Schuller. The two factions' explosion into the main-stream of American society came primarily from their diligent recruiting techniques, their use of modern media tools, the backlash against moderate and liberal religious groups, and strategic political involvement.

Entrance into Politics

The evangelical entrance into the politics first occurred in the mid 1970s with the election of Jimmy Carter as president. Americans watched to see what an evangelical really looked liked and how one would function as president of the United States in a changing pluralistic society. In 1979 a Lynchburg, Virginia, television preacher and fundamentalist, Rev. Jerry Falwell, founded the Moral Majority, a religious organization whose goal was to mobilize Christian believers for conservative political purposes. Falwell, who had long preached a firebrand conservative political message over the airwaves on his "Old Time Gospel Hour" syndicated program, felt that the time was ripe to launch directly into the realm of politics. The Moral Majority formed chapters and local affiliates in all fifty states and sought to register conservative voters; influence local, state, and national elections; support conservative candidates; and combat liberal groups whom, it was argued, had come to dominate the nation. Estimates of Moral Majority membership varied, but it was conservatively held to be about four hundred thousand. Joining Falwell on his crusade to correct the morality of American politics was Richard Zone of the Christian Voice, a conservative political lobbying group formed in 1978. The Christian Voice stated plainly that it would help fund national campaigns for conservative, mainly Republican candidates that met their strict criteria. Another religious group that entered the political arena in the early 1980s was the Roundtable founded by Edward McAteer of Memphis, Tennessee. McAteer wanted his group to focus on "pro-God, pro-family, pro-American causes" and created an institute to train leaders to do just that. Conservative Bill Bright's Campus Crusade for Christ and Ronald Sider's Evangelicals for Social Action also intertwined the political realm with fundamentalist Christianity, and together these groups helped form what became known as the New Christian Right or simply the New Right.

Direct Action

The New Right wasted no time in taking their conservative Christian message to the highest authorities—the White House, the U.S. Congress, and the Supreme Court. On 29 April 1980 more than two hundred thousand evangelical Christians gathered in Washington, D.C., for a mammoth "Washington for Jesus" rally. This event was put together as a coming-out party for a group of Christians that had traditionally steered clear of politics and to show government that they were a force to be reckoned with. The elections of 1980 were the first real challenge for the political evangelical machine, and they were well prepared. The presidential candidate of choice for the majority of evangelicals and fundamentalists was Ronald Reagan, who appealed to them with his antigovernment rhetoric and stances on critical moral issues. His 4 November 1980 landslide victory, as well as the victories of several conservative members of Congress, were claimed by the New Right as the result of their own efforts. Falwell boasted that the Moral Majority had registered millions of voters who had contributed heavily in time and money to campaigns. Instead of resting with these victories, the New Right sought in the early 1980s to assert their moral agenda onto the political landscape. Issues such as prayer in the public schools and opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), homosexual rights, abortion, and pornography became top priorities for the New Right. Moral crusades were launched by preachers such as the Rev. Donald E. Wildmon and his Coalition for Better Television against stations and advertisers that they deemed offensive. Jerry Falwell fought hard in 1982 for President Reagan's proposed constitutional amendment legalizing prayer in the public schools. With the 1984 presidential elections evangelicals again gave their support in great numbers (81 percent) to Ronald Reagan. In reality the president had done little in terms of passing any legislation that benefited the New Christian Right directly; yet he was still seen as the best hope to carry out their mission. By 1986 the power and stability of the New Christian Right coalition began to wane. Jerry Falwell, leader of the Moral Majority, reduced his participation in the organization, while he formed a new organization called the Liberty Federation to focus on foreign policy and national defense instead of social issues. Other once-dominating New Right organizations also began to lose ground and change their scope. The Religious Round-table folded in the mid 1980s, while the Christian Voice lost strength and began to back away from the moral absolutism that it held as a litmus test for candidates. The

flame that had stirred these groups to form at the beginning of the decade appeared to have engulfed them by its end. The New Right's influence was still apparent at the close of the decade; it had simply taken a smaller role as it concentrated on community-level races rather than national campaigns.

The Run for the Presidency

The power of the New Christian Right was put to the test in the presidential race of 1988, after Marion "Pat" Robertson, televangelist and head of the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), announced his candidacy. Robertson, who had been pondering and praying over the idea for several months, decided to announce his intentions formally on 1 October 1987, after winning the Iowa Republican caucus. His campaign faced several major drawbacks from its inception because major fundamentalists, such as the Reverend Jerry Falwell and Gary Jarmin of the Christian Voice, had already pledged their support to other prominent Republican candidates. Robertson also faced the question of whether the American public was ready to have a fundamentalist preacher and television host as their president. Robertson's base of support came from his popularity among conservative Christians. CBN and its flagship program The 700 Club had a reported weekly audience of 12 million viewers for the program and 29 million cumulative viewers during the course of an average month, according to the A. C. Nielsen Company. Robertson was labeled an extremist by his opponents for his fundamentalist views of the world and his religious solutions to the cultural problems facing the nation; yet, unlike many fundamentalists, Robertson was a well-educated man (with a law degree from Yale University) and a charismatic speaker who could articulate statements with a secular emphasis. Although Robertson did not win the Republican nomination for president in 1988, his entrance into the race did shift the focus of the political debate and strengthened the conservative forces in the Republican Party.

Battle with the Courts

Evangelical conservatives' greatest political setbacks may have come in their court-room battles. Infuriated by the Roe v. Wade abortion decision of 1973, fundamentalists have consistently denounced it as a moral outrage that legalized a form of murder. A strong antiabortion movement has been led by conservative Christians throughout the nation to revoke this decision. The 1989 Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, which limited women's rights to abortions, was viewed as a major victory for fundamentalists, who felt that with their grassroots campaigns they could muster greater influence in state courts rather than the Supreme Court. Roe v. Wade, however, remained the law of the land. In other battles the issue of "scientific creationism" was revived in 1982, when federal judges in both Arkansas and Louisiana struck down state laws passed in 1981 that allowed for the teaching of creationism in public schools. Both judges cited the importance of separation of church and state in making their decisions. A Supreme Court decision in 1985 ruled that public-school officials in New York City and Grand Rapids, Michigan, should not permit public-school teachers to lead special education classes in parochial schools. Other Supreme Court decisions invalidated a Connecticut law that allowed employees the right to observe the Sabbath and an Alabama law allowing for a moment of silent prayer in public schools. These opinions caused many conservative Christian leaders to claim that the courts had waged war on them. Several New Right groups, such as the American Coalition for Traditional Values (ACTV), declared that the courts were preaching secular humanism and that they would not allow it.

The Rise of Televangelism

The intermingling of religion and mass communication reached new heights in the 1980s with the explosive merger of evangelical preachers and cable television, allowing television preachers to reach a broader congregation than they had ever deemed possible. The premier players in this new televangelism, as it was labeled by the media, were Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Robert Schuller, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Oral Roberts, and Jimmy Swaggart. Each of them represented different segments of the fundamentalist and evangelical movements; yet, they all profited from their ability to tailor their message to a television format, and they became superstars of the new religious circuit of the airwaves. The amount of money generated by televangelists through their radio and television ministries reportedly reached $2 billion a year. Televangelists reached millions of Americans daily as they tuned into such popular Christian programs as The 700 Club, the PTL Club, and the The Hour of Power. Combined, these new "electronic churches" drew weekly audiences of almost 20 million viewers. The astonishing growth of televangelists and their empires in such a short time caught much of the American public by surprise.

Downfall

As televangelism and the electronic church continued to grow year after year, the preachers and their finances began to inspire increasing public scrutiny. One of the first televangelists to receive major public criticism was the Reverend Robert Schuller. A self-described preacher and apostle of Norman Vincent Peale's ideas of positive thinking, Schuller had amassed a gigantic empire in Garden Grove, California, that included the 118 million Crystal Cathedral and a popular Sunday morning television service, The Hour of Power, that reached almost 3 million persons annually. Schuller's empire was first attacked by the California courts, who in 1983 took away the tax-exempt status of the Crystal Cathedral, The state claimed that the cathedral had been used for profit-making concerts and thus the church had forfeited its tax status. By the mid to late 1980s Schuller's church began to lose substantial amounts of money as contributions began to dwindle and church listeners began to be less responsive to his positive message.

Oral Roberts

Rev. Oral Roberts, a prominent Pentecostal preacher and healer for several decades based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, also saw his economic fortunes take a dramatic slide by the late 1980s. Roberts, whose syndicated half-hour program was carried by 210 television stations, reached some 1.1 million people a year, but viewership and contributions had been steadily decreasing since 1978. Realizing the magnitude of his financial situation, Roberts in 1987 faced the fact that he could lose his whole church empire, including his twenty-two-year-old medical school and Oral Roberts University. He made a desperate plea to his viewing audience to donate $8 million by the end of March or "God could call Oral Roberts home." Robert's plea for money shocked both the televangelist community and the general public, as it amounted to a form of biblical blackmail. His credibility suffered greatly; yet, the funds were raised and his ministry saved. By 1989 Roberts's empire and power finally crumbled as he was forced to close his City of Faith Hospital and medical school and then sell his home in order to pay off the enormous debt that Oral Roberts University had accumulated.

PTL Ministries

The fall of the PTL (Praise the Lord or People that Love) empire in 1987 was a scandal that fully exposed the hidden side of a corrupt televangelist empire. Rev. Jim Bakker, the popular "president for life" of the PTL, based in Charlotte, North Carolina, which owned and operated Heritage USA, confessed on 19 March 1987 to having had an adulterous encounter in 1980 with a Long Island church secretary named Jessica Hahn and paying her $265,000 in church funds to keep quiet. He then resigned from his position as head of his $129 million empire, handing it over to fundamentalist Jerry Falwell. As the investigation into the Bakkers' affairs unfolded, it was learned that in the three and a half years before his resignation, Bakker and his wife, Tammy Faye, had taken salaries, bonuses, and retirement benefits of more than $4.76 million. The bulk of PTL revenue was generated from fund-raising schemes presented on the PTL Television Network, which featured programs hosted by the Bakkers. Their programs were among the most popular and entertaining of the televangelist world, reaching 140 television stations daily. An Assemblies of God minister, Bakker had sought to make Pentecostals more secular, and he was not afraid to be materialist in his approach to the world. His Heritage USA (often referred to as a "Biblical Disneyland"), located in Fort Mill, South Carolina, was America's largest gospel theme and amusement park and drew in yearly revenues of more than $6 million. Space in the Heritage Towers Hotel at Heritage Park was sold to 152,903 "Lifetime Partners," who sent __BODY__,000 each between 1984 and early 1987 in return for a promise of four days and three nights accommodations per year for life at the as yet unbuilt hotel. By April 1987, $70 million had been raised for the hotel, yet only $12 million went toward construction. PTL was generating revenues of $4.2 million per month but was spending $3 million more than it raised. When Falwell took over, he announced that the ministry was $72 million in debt. In April 1987 the PTL scandal claimed another victim as Rev. Richard Dortch, second in command at PTL, was dismissed by Falwell for his involvement in the attempted cover-up of the scandal. Both Bakker and Dortch were then stripped of their credentials as ministers by the Assemblies of God, and by June 1987 the PTL corporation had declared bankruptcy. Jerry Falwell abandoned his commitment to help save PTL in October 1987, upon learning that he would not maintain full control of the reorganizing process since the courts had ruled that previous PTL creditors and supporters would have some say in the organization's structure. Bakker, for his part, was investigated by a federal grand jury on fraud charges and in 1989 was sentenced to forty-five years in prison and fined $500,000 for having defrauded his followers of more than $158 million.