Divining God’s Agenda

Onward, born-again soldiers.

They’re forcefully on the march in “With God on Our Side,” a highly reverent but highly worthy PBS documentary series tracing the rise of conservative, Scripture-driven Christians as an influential cultural and political movement in the United States. Its title alone suggests the divine anointment presumed by evangelical Christians pushing their fundamentalist version of God’s agenda on Capitol Hill and in statehouses across the land.

These six hours from executive producer Calvin Skaggs are nowhere near as adversarial as the religious right they depict. If anything, they emerge at times as a too-worshipful Eyes on the Preacher cousin of those admirable “Eyes on the Prize” histories of the African American civil rights movement.

Nonetheless, the roots, rites and intergalactic rivalries chronicled here are often fascinating, well worth anyone’s time and important to examine given the brawn of today’s Christian Coalition and its ideological mentor, religious broadcaster Pat Robertson.

So accustomed are we to linkage of religion and politics in the United States that imagining it otherwise is difficult. Yet here tonight is footage of an early incarnation of the Rev. Jerry Falwell, echoing his own teachers in preaching separation of religion and politics, while also doubting the sincerity of African American clergy involved in incubating the black civil rights struggle.

What a difference a couple of decades make. His refrain-from-politics gospel was “wrong,” a more recent Falwell acknowledges, beginning a section of the documentary about his White House advisor’s role and the Moral Majority’s prominence in the crusade against abortion rights during the Ronald Reagan years.

Falwell’s own consummate loyalty not withstanding, however, even the God-evoking Reagan fell short of the religious right’s expectations. In fact, betrayal--the movement’s disillusionment with presidents whom it initially championed--is a prevailing theme here. It is depicted as triggering Robertson’s own campaign for the GOP nomination in 1988 against then-Vice President George Bush, someone evangelicals distrusted, and the subsequent formation of the Christian Coalition as a way to end their historic “kowtowing” to presidents.

We see, for example, that Richard Nixon’s Watergate revelations were a major jolt, especially to his friend and close ally, the Rev. Billy Graham; that religious conservatives were dismayed by fellow born-again Christian Jimmy Carter’s policies, especially his support of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment; that many evangelical leaders faulted Reagan for the failure of a proposed constitutional amendment allowing voluntary prayer in public schools, and felt that he sold them out in naming Sandra Day O’Connor, someone who turned out to be an abortion rights backer, to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Michael Deaver, Reagan’s former deputy chief of staff, tells an interviewer here that he found lobbyists for Christian conservative causes a “pain” while trying to keep the president focused entirely on the economy. “Unless we got a handle on that, it didn’t make any difference about abortion or prayer in schools or gun control or all the rest of it; it wasn’t going to happen,” he says.

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If one person symbolized the evangelicals’ frustration with federal government in the 1980s, we learn later in the documentary, it was Reagan’s bearish surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, a formerly outspoken Christian fundamentalist whose appointment was initially savaged in the secular community, but whose enlightened views on AIDS and refusal to use his bully pulpit to oppose abortion would earn him the animosity of Christian conservatives who had thought of him as an ally.

“It’s one thing to come to Washington and have firmly held convictions,” he says here, “but it’s another thing to take an oath to uphold the Constitution.”

At one point in this section, we see film of Falwell describing AIDS and all sexually transmitted diseases as “God’s judgment” on sex outside marriage. In fact, so-called sexual promiscuity and homosexuality as perversion are also themes that resurface throughout this documentary.

An early catalyst for Christian political involvement, noted in Part 1, was a bitter war in the late 1960s over a sex education curriculum in Anaheim classrooms that the Sex Information and Education Council of the U.S. saw as fostering sexual health and that many locals saw as promoting sex, both heterosexual and gay. Declares one of those critics tonight: “There was more homosexuals made in that sex education classroom than woulda ever been here today if they hadn’t told ‘em, ‘If ya haven’t tried it, don’t knock it.’ ”

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Just as interesting, a bit down the line, is how Christian conservatives mobilized politically around a schoolbook controversy in Kanawha County, W.Va., in the 1970s, one that exposed raw feelings and sincerely held beliefs about the material children should be exposed to in the classroom. At issue here were readings described by critics as “rotten and filthy,” a sweeping category that appeared to include anything fostering skepticism of institutions and challenging children with concepts that clashed with what they were taught at home.

Unfortunately, the documentary includes no readable examples of the disputed books that would allow viewers to draw their own conclusions about which side wore the halos. Instead, the opinions of one side predominate, as they often do elsewhere in the program.

In fact, lacking throughout the series is a neutral voice (beyond Cliff Robertson’s sparse narration) that provides context for some of the issues here. “With God on Our Side” is strongest when granting a pulpit to opposing sides, weakest when omitting alternative views.

When, for example, arch conservative Phyllis Schlafly declares the proposed Equal Rights Amendment supported by President Carter “basically a fraud,” the definition sticks, for no one rebuts that charge or presents wording from the failed measure that would allow viewers to judge for themselves.

Nor does anyone defend Anita Faye Hill, or detail her charges against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas in his 1991 confirmation hearings, in response to a Christian Coalition official saying, “There was a clear perception that this man was the target of a tremendous smear campaign by the liberal establishment.”

The program depicts the spiritual lapses of TV preachers Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggert as crosses that evangelicals and Robertson’s candidacy had to bear, yet does not concern itself with the agendum that a President Robertson might have followed. And while artfully contrasting the anti-abortion tactics of charismatic Operation Rescue leader Randall Terry and Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed, a silky pragmatist, the program excludes the oft-made charge that Reed is Robertson’s puppet.

There’s something to be said for showing history largely through the prism of its subjects. Yet to paraphrase a famous line of former GOP Sen. Barry Goldwater’s repeated tonight, extremism in defense of balance is no vice.

* “With God on Our Side” can be seen Fridays at 10 p.m. on KCET-TV Channel 28.