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With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America
By William Martin
Broadway Books
418 pp.; $27.50, hardcover

In an autocracy, one person has his way; in an aristocracy a few people have their way; in a democracy, no one has his way.

—Celia Green, The Decline and Fall of Science

When Washington Post writer Michael Weisskopf called the followers of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson "largely poor, uneducated and easy to command" (Feb. 1, 1993), he was wrong in every particular, but perhaps right in a fundamental assumption: The followers of Falwell and Robertson (like many other evangelicals) are political and cultural outsiders, marginal to his Beltway universe. They are like hungry children looking in through the picture window on the feasts of the powerful. After Robertson read Weisskopf's statement on the 700 Club, more than 500 of his "followers" called the Post to declare (rightly) that they were not particularly poorer, less educated, nor easier to command than any other identifiable voting population.

At one time, evangelicals were largely working-class Americans who did not seek higher education, except for Bible colleges and seminaries. But the economic boom after World War II, combined with the surge of evangelical institution-building, helped take care of that. Today evangelicals are none of the things Weisskopf suggested. But while there may be minivans in every garage and framed diplomas on the walls of their studies, they still feel shut out of the centers of influence in our society: segregated de facto from the media elite, the universities, and other mavens of liberal culture.

William Martin's fall 1996 book, With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America, can be read as the story of how these outsiders decided they weren't going to stand for exclusion anymore. Martin quotes Guy Rodgers, the Christian Coalition's first national field director: "One of the best ways to understand people in the grassroots of the pro-family movement is to understand their perception of being outsiders, either because they chose to be out of the process or because they wanted to be involved but always met resistance."

If to be a fundamentalist used to mean to be separate from the world, then to be an evangelical meant regarding the world as a fallen sphere of activity that is nevertheless under the lordship of Christ. The result was a kind of oscillation between two poles: kingdom anticipation (God will bring his kingdom; we are to wait in holy faithfulness) and kingdom building (God will bring his kingdom, and we are called to help build it on earth as it is in heaven). This sometimes comic, sometimes tragic oscillation continues among thoughtful evangelicals. But when enough separatist fundamentalists, once committed to cultural and political isolation, now convinced that political activism is their calling, throw their considerable bulk and heft onto the other side of the tippy canoe, you get movements characterized by enthusiasm and enormous energy—and intolerance and unreasonable expectations.

What it took to shift fundamentalists from separatism to activism was an invasion of their privacy: The Stamp Act of the Religious Right was the interference of the federal government in the Christian school movement. Political activist Paul Weyrich, founder (with Coors funding) of what was to become the conservative Heritage Foundation, tried for years, but to no avail, to bring fundamentalists into an active political coalition. Then the Carter administration handed him the issue he needed: a proposal to revoke the irs tax-exempt status of segregated Christian schools. Martin quotes Weyrich:

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April 28 1997, Vol. 41, No. 5