THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, April 8, 1995 TAG: 9504080010
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A11 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: Frank Rich
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Medium: 75 lines
As they used to say in my family, what's not to like? Clearly stung by embarrassing complaints by Jews, this Jew included, about intolerance at the Christian Coalition, the organization's executive director, Ralph Reed, did an about-face before the Anti-Defamation League Monday night.
In a speech sprinkled with quotes from Irving Howe and William O. Douglas, Reed at last acknowledged that it was not kosher for his followers to talk of creating an exclusionary ``Christian nation.'' He also said he was in favor of the separation of church and state, and he conceded that religious conservatives cannot be absolved of ``all other insensitivity to Jewish concerns'' simply by ritualistically repeating that they are pro-Israel.
However sincere Reed may be, the fact remains that he is not the head of the Christian Coalition. Pat Robertson is the group's president, founder, main draw and moneybags. What counts is not what Reed says to 200 Jewish leaders in a Washington ballroom - or his subsequent spin on ``Charlie Rose'' - but what Robertson says to his own organization's cadres, whom he addresses daily through a vast telecommunications empire and its political and publishing arms. Though Reed never said so in his speech, it is Robertson himself, not just nameless ``religious conservatives,'' who has advanced the notion of America as a ``Christian nation'' and who ridicules the constitutional separation of church and state.
He has done so without apology on the ``700 Club,'' a news-oriented ``Today'' show clone seen by millions each morning on his Christian Broadcasting Network. And it's his words that inspire those who want to roll back rights for Jews, women, homosexuals and even teachers of evolution by imposing sectarian credos on the state, starting in its schools.
How seriously did Robertson take his executive director's change-of-heart speech? The next morning, even as Reed's ``olive branch'' to the ADL made the front page of The Times, the entire event went unmentioned during the lengthy news segments of the ``700 Club,'' co-anchored by Robertson.
Meanwhile, Robertson has yet to repudiate to his followers either the ``insensitive'' views cited by Reed on Monday or the ugly precepts of his own best-selling writings.
As The New York Review of Books details in an article on Robertson's The New World Order, that book directly paraphrases tracts like Nesta Webster's 1924 Secret Societies, which leans on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and has been condemned by the ADL as ``long a standard for professional hate-mongers.''
Yet the Christian Coalition dismissed criticisms of The New World Order as ``baseless;'' Robertson apologized only for its allegedly inadvertent use of code words, not for its resuscitation of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories also finding current favor in Louis Farrakhan's ravings.
If you pick up The Collected Works of Pat Robertson, you can check out not only The New World Order but also the earlier New Millennium. In that tome, Robertson forsakes code words entirely to draw a line between good Jews (those who agree with his politics) and bad Jews (liberals who don't).
He accuses ``liberal Jews'' of having ``actually forsaken Biblical faith in God'' and of trying ``to destroy the Christian position in the world.'' At a time when the ADL reports the highest number of anti-Semitic incidents nationwide in its 16 years of conducting such audits, Robertson's attribution of Godlessness and anti-Christian bigotry to ``liberal Jews'' (78 percent of all Jews in the past election) is no help.
The Christian Coalition is a major political force that expects to dictate GOP policies and have veto power over its '96 ticket in exchange for its support. Reed's speech should not distract anyone from monitoring the far less benign signals Robertson is sending to the troops he will deliver to the next Republican commander in chief. MEMO: Mr. Rich's column is distributed by the New York Times Syndicate, 122 E.
42nd St., New York, N.Y. 10168.
by CNB