Fundamental Problem

LEON WIESELTIER

LEON WIESELTIER on the G.O.P. and the religious right

The Mind's Eye

It hasn't been a good decade for liberal Schadenfreude. The invulnerability of Ronald Reagan to the consequences of many of his actions, and the imbecility of many of the Democrats' criticisms of his actions, has left liberals who are looking to see justice done confounded and confused. Almost the only liberal idea that stands a chance in Washington these days is a liberal idea that the president has stolen. But take heart, fellow dinosaurs. I see Republicans beginning to squirm. There is trouble in their camp, and it isn't coming from our camp. It is coming from Christianity.

Pat Robertson's campaign for president has produced a rather delicious Republican disarray. Delicious, because for the first time in the history of Ronald Reagan's presidency the Republicans have failed to escape themselves. Recall the Reagan campaigns, particularly the president's homilies at the Republican convention in Dallas. Reagan made a deal with Jesus, and now Jesus wants to collect. Those Christian Fundamentalists (at least 20 million voters) who insist that Ronald Reagan owes them something are right. He purchased their support with promises of moral and social policies that would conform to their scriptural vision of America. When he came to Washington, however, he proceeded to act "presidentially."

In Washington, where the presidential campaign is permanent, the Republicans' embarrassment at Robertson is poignant. It is a kind of embarrassment at their own origins. Reaganism triumphed, after all, partly because it was a form of populism. Reagan represented "ordinary" and "traditional" Americans against the country's lily-livered and libertine coasts, the disestablished against the Establishment. It was no time at all, however, before the tribunes of the people were at the Metropolitan Club, chuckling over Miss Manners, lunching with and leaking to the malevolent media, considering Cabernet futures. There arose what Sidney Blumenthal has called "the counter-establishment." And like alrightniks of all ages, the counter-establishment didn't relish the reminders of its recent past.

Pat Robertson is such a reminder. Thus it is that Reaganites rush to dismiss him. George Will hastened last August to reassure himself that Robertson had already broken "the North American record for peaking early." And it isn't hard to imagine what George Bush and his Republicans, who perfectly represent that comer of the cosmos that Mel Brooks calls "Connecticut, Connecticut," think of the polyester Pentecostalists in the hinterlands. Of course Will was right. Robertson will thwart nobody's ambition. American politics remains safely in the hands of the politicians. But the issue is not politics. It is culture—the culture of contemporary conservatism. Instead of sticking Sister Boom Boom to the San Francisco Democrats, let us stick Pat Robertson to the Dallas Republicans. Sister Boom Boom isn't running for president.

Which brings me to the Washington Times, and to the wildest man in Washington. Those beyond the Beltway may not be familiar with the Times. Within the Beltway, however, an allusion to "the Times" refers as often to the paper edited by Amaud de Borchgrave as it does to the paper edited by A. M. Rosenthal. There are two important facts about the Times. First, it is a paper written for conservatives by conservatives—a daily fever chart of "the movement." Second, it is read by almost everybody inside (and around) the government, and by almost nobody else. Thus it gives a useful glimpse of the daily diet of the Reaganite mind.

At this organ of the counter-establishment sits one John Lofton. His column appears several times a week. Lofton is the perfect fulfillment of the liberal fantasy of a Christian conservative. If he didn't exist, we would invent him. (Maybe we did.) His column regularly breaks new ground in crudity. After the Supreme Court's stupid sodomy ruling this past summer, Lofton tittered that "our founders... believed in no... right, fundamental or otherwise, to bugger," and gave his readers the address of the Institute for the Scientific Investigation of Sexuality in Lincoln, Nebraska, which would gladly provide details of the diseases that homosexuals may carry. (Send a stamped, self-addressed envelope, but do not lick the stamp.) Similarly, when Senator Edward Kennedy wondered aloud whether Justice William Rehnquist is "too extreme on women's rights," Lofton leapt into print with this:

"Women's rights," eh? Do you really want to talk about women's rights, senator? I think not.... For example, you do remember Chappaquiddick, don't you? The accident in which a young woman, Mary Jo Kopechne, drowned after you drove the two of you off a bridge? Whatever else Mr. Rehnquist may have done concerning women, he never did anything as extreme as this, did he?

Now, the way a man treats women certainly says something about his feeling for women's rights. But only John Lofton would call Chappaquiddick an act of political extremism.

On most matters Lofton is merely a right-wing buffoon. But on one subject he is perversely interesting: the Christianization of America. He is, to put it mildly, for it. (So much for it, in fact, that he occasionally lapses into oldfashioned theological Christian antiSemitism. Lofton is the only man I have ever met who does not appear to believe that the Christians persecuted the Jews.) He recently prefaced a column with a citation from the Council of Trent: "If anyone says that Jesus Christ was given by God to men as a redeemer in whom to trust, and not also as a legislator whom to obey, let him be anathema." The Council of Trent is an odd authority to bring before a population of Protestants; still, the anathema perfectly captures the spirit of Lofton's Christian single-mindedness. He has one standard for all subjects. Thus, in a column attacking Paul Weyrich, a troll of the New Right who dared to propose that "cultural conservatism" rather than the Gospel "can save our nation," Lofton wrote:

We will not be saved and our brokendown nation will not be healed because any national administration formulates an agenda and attempts to impose it on us from the top down. God forbid that this should even be tried!. . . The problems we face as persons and as a nation are problems caused by our de-Christianization, our turning away from God and specifically our failure to believe in and worship God's only begotten son, Jesus Christ.

And in another column he scolded "Brother Pat" Robertson for compromising his Christian Fundamentalism for the sake of his campaign, and reminded him of "the plan God has for America."

This (brought to the nation's capital, by the way, by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, whose Unification Church controls the paper) is what many of our bureaucrats have with breakfast. One hopes that some of them are anthropologically instructed by it. In pin-striped Washington, the impolite Christian militance of a man like Lofton has a clarifying effect. It is the raw voice of a faraway fact of American life. The faith of the Fundamentalists is not a matter of fun. Nor is their power in parts of the country. Their faith deserves respect. Their power deserves all the fight that liberalism still has left in it.