Ex-Aides Cast Doubt on Moral Majority

Two leading figures in the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority during the 1980s now say that the organization was a misguided idea and that politics are not the way to boost spiritual values in America.

In a book due out next week, they endorse religious conservative views but contend that American society should be improved mainly by changing individuals.

The authors of “Blinded by Might” are syndicated columnist Cal Thomas, who was the Moral Majority’s much-quoted spokesman, and the Rev. Ed Dobson, a former Falwell aide who is now a pastor in Grand Rapids, Mich.

The book appears weeks after one of the Moral Majority’s three founders, Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation, sent colleagues a letter suggesting that social conservatives should admit defeat and drop out of the political fray.

Thomas and Dobson agree that religious conservatives do not command a majority of the population. They think November’s elections “demonstrated the problematic, even declining, power of the religious right.”

But they go further, arguing that churches and individual believers should influence society through persuasion and spiritual conversion. Politics, they say, is usually a temptation that diverts Christians from a higher calling.

“Religious conservatives, no matter how well organized, can’t save America. Only God can,” they write.