COLUMN LEFT/ NORMAN LEAR : Religious Right Was There All Along : But the media were too busy burying the movement’s leaders to notice the grass-root gurus.

Watching television coverage of the Republican convention reminded me of the importance of something nightly news programs so frequently miss that live coverage seems to provide automatically: context. There on our television screens were all the elements of the Republican Party, not just the President and his key aides.

And what we saw very clearly was that the emergent power of the party is the Religious Right. If television news had provided context over the last several years, it would have been much less a surprise.

After all, it’s not as if the Religious Right’s role in the party has been a guarded secret. Twelve years ago, they came to power on the shoulders of Jerry Falwell and in the service of Ronald Reagan. As a consequence, the 1980 convention saw a sharp turn to the right for the party. That was when equal rights for women were swept out of the platform at the behest of Phyllis Schlafly, and an anti-abortion litmus tests for judges was installed in deference to Falwell.

Since then, the movement has had its ups and downs politically. But what the media focused on was the personal foibles of the movement’s most visible leaders. First, Jim Bakker disgraced himself, and then Jimmy Swaggart, leading the media to the incorrect presumption that the Religious Right was on its last legs. Soon after, Pat Robertson’s presidential campaign washed out, Falwell shut down the Moral Majority and eventually announced that he was retiring from the airwaves. As far as the media were concerned, it was time to close the door and turn out the lights; the Religious Right was dead.

But while the bugler was blowing taps, the movement’s grass-roots gurus began building an impressive network. Their followers have been busy censoring schoolbooks like “Catcher in the Rye” and “The Diary of Anne Frank” from classrooms, electing true believers to school boards and joining national coalitions to denounce the National Endowment for the Arts and the Corp. for Public Broadcasting. They’ve been struggling for control of state and local Republican Party machinery. And they’ve been winning state and local legislative battles on abortion, gay rights, day-care and more.

The fact is that the Religious Right hasn’t been much of a photo opportunity the past few years because some of their biggest stars haven’t been standing in the cameras’ lights. But the media’s failure to get the picture in focus doesn’t mean it’s not there.

In Houston, the cameras couldn’t miss them. So strong was their grip on the convention that even the party’s nominee, a sitting President, was forced to accept platform planks he didn’t particularly want. And with their warm approval, he has embarked on a campaign built on the very “family values” rhetoric that has camouflaged the Religious Right’s divisive agenda for years.

Among Bush’s first stops on the campaign trail: a gathering of Religious Right leaders in Dallas last Saturday evening. He obliged the group’s hunger for red meat by ridiculing Democrats’ religious convictions on the grounds that their party made no specific reference to God in its platform. Thomas Jefferson might have been rolling over in his grave, but this crowd, which included Schlafly, Falwell, Ollie North, W. A. Criswell, Pat Buchanan, Howard Phillips, Don Wildmon, Tim LaHaye, Judy Brown and Paul Weyrich, loved it.

That was to be expected, I imagine, from a gathering that welcomed the suggestion from one speaker that the Federal Reserve be closed, because it runs counter to the Bible’s directions for honest weights and measures. Or that applauded Schlafly’s assertion that the Democratic Party is in the “death grip” of Hillary Clinton.

These folks the President has hooked up with are serious. So remember the images out of Houston. And remember, too, that the Religious Right didn’t really re-emerge suddenly last week; they never went away. For the lack of perceived photo ops, the media missed the big picture.