It was the second day of Road to Majority, the annual symposium organized by Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition, and this year’s headliners were doing more wailing and gnashing of teeth than usual. Donald Trump was the show-stealer, naturally, vilifying his former vice president, Mike Pence, and egging on the crowd to boo their longtime Christian comrade for his refusal to subvert the Constitution eighteen months earlier. The dozens of other politicians and evangelical leaders who stepped to Reed’s podium were only slightly less unhinged: warning that it was open season on Christians, denouncing the satanic agenda of the Democratic Party, urging attendees to vote Republican in the upcoming 2022 midterms and end the reign of those godless, child-grooming, America-hating liberals.
When it was his turn, Jordan, the collegiate wrestling champion turned Ohio congressman, hit all the same notes. He slammed “the lefties” who “don’t like freedom” and “have disdain for the folks in flyover country.” He observed that, “Next to Jesus, the best thing that ever happened to this world is the United States of America.” It felt like the teleprompter had been stuck on the same page for hours. I stood up to leave the ballroom.
“I love the comment that Cal Thomas made one time,” Jordan told the audience.
Jordan continued, “Cal Thomas had a great line. He said, ‘Every morning, I read the Bible and the New York Times, so I can see what each side is up to.’ ”
This was close enough to the quote Thomas had famously given during a 1994 C-SPAN interview promoting his book The Things That Matter Most. A witty and wily observer of American life, Thomas was at one time among the most-read journalists in the country, with a syndicated column that appeared in more than five hundred newspapers nationwide. That particular quip about the Bible and the Times, delivered with a playful smirk, was a nod to his past. Thomas had spent five years working as Jerry Falwell Sr.’s spokesman at the Moral Majority. He was an evangelical Christian and a political conservative—and, once upon a time, he had used those labels interchangeably.
What Jordan didn’t mention is that five years after giving that C-SPAN interview, Thomas wrote another book. It was a contrition-laden confessional called Blinded by Might, coauthored by Pastor Ed Dobson, the onetime Liberty University dean and Falwell confidant who had been present at the founding of the Moral Majority. The authors provided a damning window into the rise of the religious right: Given how the Scopes Trial had humiliated fundamentalists in the 1920s, and how progressives had hijacked both Church and culture in the 1960s, Thomas and Dobson recalled believing that Ronald Reagan’s presidency represented “the greatest moment of opportunity for conservative Christians” since the dawn of the twentieth century. “We were on our way to changing America,” the authors wrote. “We had the power to right every wrong and cure every ill.”
But they didn’t change America—at least, not in the manner they had hoped.
Thomas and Dobson acknowledged, in the pages of their book, that they had not ushered in the sort of kingdom-on-earth spiritual utopia about which they and so many American evangelicals fantasized. In fact, there was evidence to suggest that the country was angrier, more antagonistic, more fearful, more divided—less Christlike—because of the Moral Majority. If Jesus was known for hating sin and loving sinners, American evangelicals were known for hating both. The movement’s short-term electoral gains had come at a steep cost. Not only had the culture moved further away from them; the Church had sacrificed its distinctiveness in the process. “We think it is time to admit that because we are using the wrong weapons, we are losing the battle,” Thomas and Dobson wrote.
What they called for was radical: “unilateral disarmament” by the religious right. Christians need not be “political quietists or separatists,” they wrote, but a wholesale reestablishing of boundaries and priorities was in order. The Moral Majority’s use of shameless scare tactics had tempted the masses of American churchgoers to put their faith in princes and mortal men. This “seduction by power,” the authors wrote, was sabotaging the message of Christ. Winning campaigns had become more important than winning converts; scolding the culture had become more important than sanctifying the Church. Mustering some fire and brimstone of their own, Thomas and Dobson warned their old boss Falwell—and his many descendants, biological and otherwise—to stop confusing “spiritual authority for political authority.”
The book’s publication in 1999 caused a furor inside American evangelicalism. Christianity Today, the venerated magazine founded by Billy Graham in 1956, devoted an entire issue to a debate of Blinded by Might. (The cover asked: “Is the Religious Right Finished?”) Defending its thesis were former Reagan aide Don Eberly; Paul Weyrich, who had coined the term “Moral Majority” during that fateful meeting two decades earlier; and Thomas himself. Prosecuting the case against the book were Falwell Sr.; Focus on the Family chieftain James Dobson; and Reed, whose Christian Coalition had grown to become the nation’s largest, wealthiest, and most influential evangelical-political organization.
Reed’s piece was especially telling. Its headline: “We Can’t Stop Now.” Listing their many victories in recent years, Reed boasted of how he and his allies had defeated pro-gambling initiatives in numerous states. It would be another six years before Reed was exposed for taking millions of dollars in laundered payments from Indian tribes who enlisted him to mobilize Christian voters against rival gambling initiatives in nearby states. This was but one part of the sweeping scandal that took down and imprisoned Reed’s close friend, lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Although Reed had technically broken no laws (if duplicity were criminal, he’d be serving a life sentence) the revelations confirmed many a suspicion about the man and his movement.
Hence my surprise to hear Cal Thomas’s name mentioned at Ralph Reed’s event. I couldn’t think of anyone who would be more repulsed by this right-wing revival than Thomas.
A few months later, I met him for breakfast in Washington. The U.S. Capitol Building—its post–January 6 protective fencing having been removed—was visible a couple of blocks away. As we sipped coffee, Thomas, tall and slender and sharp as ever approaching his eightieth birthday, asked what I’d been up to. I told him about attending Reed’s event. He put his coffee down.
“When Trump mentioned Pence and the evangelical audience booed their brother in Christ, I said to myself, this is the final compromise,” Thomas told me. “Here is your brother. Here is a man who worships the Lord that you claim to worship. Here is a man who goes to church every Sunday. Here is a man who has had only one wife and never been accused of being unfaithful. And you’re booing him? As opposed to a serial adulterer? A man who uses the worst language you can think of and does every other thing you oppose? Explain that to me from a biblical perspective. Please.” (...)
“I got a letter the other day when I wrote something critical of Trump. The guy accused me of not even being a Christian,” Thomas said. “You can’t have a legitimate conversation with these people who are all in on Trump. Because if you find any flaw in him, even flaws that are demonstrable, they either excuse it or attack you.”
What’s interesting, Thomas added, is that nobody went all in on Trump quite like Pence did. Once a respected arbiter of ethical matters, the former vice president forfeited his reputation—not to mention some longtime friends and admirers—by subjugating himself so thoroughly to his boss. But even that wasn’t enough to satisfy the MAGA mob. The moment Pence thought for himself, choosing the rule of law over the ego of a president, Trump’s minions turned on him. Thomas found himself pitying the former VP.
I did not. Pence, I reminded Thomas, described himself as “a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican—in that order.” To lead with that identifier—to profess publicly, time and again, that you’re a follower of Jesus before anything else—is to invite and deserve perpetual scrutiny. Unlike all the craven, self-indulgent schemers who had surrounded Trump, the vice president knew the difference between right and wrong. He deserved to be held to a higher standard. Pence did the courageous and honorable thing on January 6, but he was the one who’d spent four years ignoring and excusing all the abuses of power and violent rhetoric and authoritarian impulses that set January 6 into motion.
Thomas wore a stoic expression. Then he began to nod. (...)
All those years ago, as a new Christian, Thomas faced a similar choice. He was involved with something corrupt, unethical, rotten to its core. Rather than stick around in the interest of reformation, he chose to walk away. Eventually he went even further, blowing the whistle while publicly atoning for his own offenses. In doing this, Thomas told me, he hoped to find peace. And yet today, as he surveys the wreckage of American Christianity and reflects on the unraveling of the religious right, all he can think about is what more he might have done. (...)
It would prove a halting journey. Like so many D.C. contemporaries, secular and Christian alike, Thomas was a political addict. He saw no issue with fusing the zeal of his Christianity with the convictions of his conservatism. This was how he came to fall in with the Moral Majority. Falwell Sr. needed an ambassador to the Washington press corps, someone reporters knew and liked and trusted. Thomas, with his deep connections to the city’s social and political scenes, fit the bill; he was that rare firebrand who regularly dined with his ideological counterparts and considered them close friends. Thomas, adrift since getting axed by NBC, joined the Moral Majority in 1980 and rose to become the organization’s vice president. At long last, he felt fulfilled.
Until he didn’t. There was no Road to Damascus moment, Thomas says, that made him question his work with Falwell Sr. Rather it was a steady accumulation of doubt, a growing sense of guilt about how the furiousness of their messaging—on any given subject—did not reflect the realities of the matter at hand, never mind the example of Christ Himself. Thomas was all for trying to win elections. But invoking the wrath of God to collect twenty dollars from a retiree in Tulsa started to feel less like a strategy and more like a scam.
“I would go to these fundraising meetings. They would start in prayer and end in manipulation,” Thomas recalled. “We had this one fundraiser who was working both sides of the street, like a cheap hooker. His wife was a member of NOW”—the National Organization for Women, a feminist pro-choice group—“and he was raising money for her while also raising money for Falwell. He’d hit his goals, we’d go off to the bar and have a drink, and he would celebrate the stupidity of these people giving to him.”
Almost forty years later, Thomas still felt ashamed. This practice of preying on unwitting believers was central to the business model of the Moral Majority and its successor groups.
“You get these letters: ‘Dear Patriot, We’re near collapse. We’re about to be taken over by the secular humanists, the evil pro-abortionists, the transgender advocates, blah, blah, blah,’” Thomas said. “They’re always the same. ‘If you donate, we’ll do a double-matched gift!’”
Little has changed. There were emails in my inbox at that very moment—from Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition, from Chad Connelly’s Faith Wins—that deployed similar language.
“There’s always a threat. Look at Tucker Carlson every single night: ‘They’re out to get you.’ And it works,” Thomas said. “One time, I actually asked one of our fundraisers, ‘Why don’t you ever send out a positive letter about what you’re doing with people’s donations?’ And he looked at me with this cynical look. He said, ‘You can’t raise money on a positive. If the goal is bringing in money, you have to scare them.’”(...)
“When you ask the average person, what do you think it means to be a Christian? They’ll say, pro-Trump, Republican, right-wing, anti-abortion, don’t like gays. They’ll go down the list,” Thomas told me. “Well, why would they say that? Because that’s what we’re modeling before the world. Those are our public priorities—not these other things, which get so little attention from man but all the attention from God.”
by Tim Alberta, Vanity Fair | Read more:
Image:Khoa Tran
[ed. Too little too late (as always). I loathe the term "if only I'd/we'd known back then". A non-mea culpa mea culpa. Weaponized religion, Iraq, climate change denial, pick any major issue... Anyone paying attention knows what's what. It doesn't matter, because... Winning. Money. Power.]
