THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 28, 1996 TAG: 9604260609
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book review
SOURCE: BY COLE C. CAMPBELL, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 81 lines
``Second Coming'' should appeal to any Virginian captivated by - or concerned about - the rise of the Christian Right, from the flowering and fading of the Moral Majority in the 1980s to the continuous blossoming of the Christian Coalition in the '90s.
The authors are long-time scholars of American politics. Mark J. Rozell, a political scientist, works at the University of Virginia's White Burkett Miller Center, which is devoted to study of the American presidency. Clyde Wilcox is an associate professor of government at Georgetown University and the author of ``God's Warriors: The Christian Right in Twentieth Century America.''
``Second Coming'' recounts 20 years of Virginia politics. It begins not with the Republicans but with the Democrats, with Pat Robertson encouraging G. Conoly Phillips to run for Norfolk City Council in 1976 and the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate in 1978.
The first wave of the Christian Right focused on national politics, loose organizations and ideological purity, culminating in Robertson's unsuccessful bid for the GOP presidential nomination in 1988. Soon thereafter, the movement disintegrated as Robertson's Freedom Council dissolved, Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority closed and the Christian Voice - supported by Robertson in Virginia - grew quiet.
The second wave - the Second Coming of the book's title - has focused on state and local politics, better organization and more pragmatic politics. Its engines include the Christian Coalition, headquartered in Chesapeake. Its most prominent nominees in Virginia have been Michael Farris, a former Moral Majority state chapter head who won the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor in 1993, and Oliver North, who won the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in 1994.
The heart of the book focuses on these two election campaigns, when both stalwarts lost despite GOP sweeps each year.
The soul of the book is about tensions - between Republicans and the Christian Right, between religious conservatives and economic conservatives, between purists and pragmatists.
The book suggests that Gov. George F. Allen has managed to straddle most of these tensions, never being seen as the captive of the Christian Right, yet signaling his support of much of its agenda and benefiting from voters brought to the party standard by Farris:
``In contrast (to Democrat Mary Sue Terry), Allen ran a smart campaign, focusing on parental notification and not on abortion restrictions, and emphasizing primarily welfare reform, tax cuts, and abolishing parole, not Christian Right social issues . . . Allen won in part by actually obscuring his ties with the Christian Right, while Farris and North lost by making their connections explicit.''
The authors argue that the Christian Right's future depends on how fast it transforms itself from a social movement into a stable party faction, because the social movement consistently has favored candidates who ``almost always lost.''
``Although Virginia is a conservative state, a substantial majority of its citizens oppose limiting access to abortion for adult women and oppose the Christian Right agenda for public school curricula. Thus, if Christian Right leaders and activists use their position in the Republican party to assure the nomination of candidates, they are likely to lose.''
The 1993 Allen-Farris ticket might represent the best option for balancing the tensions within the GOP, the authors suggest.
``If Christian Right activists nominate one of their own for an office farther down on the ticket and support a more mainstream conservative for governor or for the U.S. Senate, both factions will win. How frequently that will happen, however, is not yet clear.'' MEMO: Cole Campbell, editor of The Virginian-Pilot, first wrote about the
Christian Right in 1979 as the religion reporter for The News & Observer
in Raleigh.
by CNB