Robertson and The Reagan Gap

By GARRY WILLS

THE AUTHOR, HENRY R. LUCE PROFESSOR OF AMERICAN CULTURE AND PUBLIC POLICY AT NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, HAS WRITTEN SIX BOOKS ON AMERICAN PRESIDENTS, MOST RECENTLY REAGAN'S AMERICA. THIS IS THE FIRST IN A SERIES OF ANALYSES HE WILL BE WRITING FOR TIME

A moral alarm clock is going off in America, and not many politicians hear it. Pat Robertson does, and so do more of his fellow citizens than we less godly folk have been willing to admit. "The press missed the Reagan Revolution," Robertson told me recently, and it is true that much of what Robertson is saying -- about prayer in schools, abortion, collectivism, the Supreme Court, creationism, drugs and homosexuality -- has been part of the Reagan message at one time or another. Only Robertson means it.

Reagan meant it too, but only intermittently. He was more apt to look to his horoscope on any working day than to scriptural warnings about the last times. Nonetheless, Reagan did have an uncanny ability to address the spiritual discomfort of his followers, their sense that America was ceasing to be what it had always been in its own citizens' eyes: a moral nation. Reagan renewed the sense of an America shaped historically by spiritual hungers. He intuited that whatever the legal arrangements of church and state, belief in America and belief in God have been interrelated in the actual experience of most Americans through most of their history. These were reciprocal sources of strength as recently as in the life of Martin Luther King Jr.

Yet that intertwining of beliefs has raveled out swiftly in our time. Americans see their children growing up in an atmosphere abuzz with libidinous solicitings, sitting transfixed before Technicolor celebrations of greed and lust and violence, lured through many conduits toward experiment with drugs or rebellion. Authority is undermined, they feel, as parents drift apart or desert the home, to be replaced by teachers who are themselves morally adrift as they try to control student bodies bordering on thuggery. Pornography that would not have been admitted to most communities' theaters is now available on home screens by cable or VCR. Divorce, open "living arrangements" by the unmarried, declared homosexuality abrade the nerves of those who were taught that the stable family is the norm of society.

The signs of moral revolt have been there for some time. The Equal Rights Amendment was defeated because its foes could portray it as weakening the family. The Democrats have their moralists of the family, Jesse Jackson making it part of his political program to stop "babies making babies." Edward Kennedy and Gary Hart have been rejected as political leaders because of their failures as family men. The wife of Albert Gore is even crusading against "satanic" lyrics in rock songs. Since Gore's fund raising with Hollywood liberals was hurt by his wife's censoriousness, Gail Sheehy made an attempt at "de-Tippering" Gore in a recent article, pointedly noting that Gore attends raunchy nightclub acts. On Super Tuesday, Gore may find Tipper a more important ally than Norman Lear when it comes to ordinary voters. America has until very recently been a moralist and a moralizing country.

But the most glaring evidence of a moral hunger in today's electorate has been, as Robertson points out, the Reagan popularity. Though Reagan accomplished little on the "social issues," his annual addresses to religious broadcasters and antiabortionists appealed to many Americans beyond the hard core of Pentecostalists or Evangelicals. Most Americans nodded along with Reagan's regular mentions of prayer, his claim that he survived assassination by a special providence of God, his assertion that all the answers to life's problems can be found in the Bible. Though his own marriage has suffered all the disruptions of our hedonistic times and his Administration has been riddled with venality, Reagan somehow retained the air of a model family man, decent and moral. He is the Houdini of politics, who always pulls the old-fashioned values out of a space helmet. He teased up a taste for miracles in his audience, for "just saying no" and making the modern world -- a vaster threat than any hurricane -- go away.

That yearning for moral reassurance is not likely to find satisfaction in the regular Republican candidates this year -- certainly not in the unburning Bush or the mournful Dole. Even Jack Kemp got left in the countinghouse to pine for evanescing gold. The Republican Party is suffering from a Reagan Gap. The lack of a convincing heir to the treasures of affection stored up by Reagan led Pat Buchanan last year to toy with the idea of running for President himself, and no wonder. When believers said over the years, "Let Reagan be Reagan," they often meant, "Let him be Buchanan."

Even Reagan could not be Reagan in his own followers' sense. For one thing, it would be a full-time job. But Robertson can be that kind of Reagan, and then some. Robertson offers Reaganism without the actor's human face. Many will no doubt draw the line at faith healing, but we should treat with some caution the arguments being used to dismiss or diminish the Robertson phenomenon. For instance:

-- That he cannot go beyond his base of Pentecostalists and Evangelicals. Even if that were true, his base is a large one, enough to have important influence on the party. It made up roughly 20% of Reagan's vote in 1984. Besides, the true believers have a large halo of almost believers: in a TIME poll last month, one-third of Americans called themselves born-again. Robertson has the highest negative ratings of any candidate; 56% of likely Republican voters nationwide say their impression of him is unfavorable, compared with only 15% who say that of Dole. Also, more than 70% of the nation agrees that "it is important to maintain a strict separation between church and state." Yet the polls clearly show the source of Robertson's latent strength, especially in caucus states. Hal Quinley of the polling firm Yankelovich Clancy Shulman says there is a core group of about 20% of those eligible to vote that is highly receptive to Robertson's evangelical message and can be mobilized to participate in a caucus. In addition, 57% of the country agrees with the statement that "we are a religious nation and religious values should serve as a guide to what our political leaders do in office."

-- That many of his voters are first-timers who may be one-timers. Robertson is bringing in new voters, but they are people who have been specifically mobilized by a sense of mission, by the feeling that they must "take back" this country for God. The politicizing of the religious right has been going on for decades, as Jeffrey Hadden and Anson Shupe document in their forthcoming book, Televangelism, Power, and Politics. The Robertson voters are first-timers for reasons that make it unlikely that they will be one-timers.

-- That voters with low income and education, like many of Robertson's supporters, are traditionally less active and influential in party politics. Then why are so many candidates using a populist appeal this year, which deliberately seeks a low base in the social scale? Iowa returns showed that half of Robertson's people did not go to college (for Bush that total was 29%), and 41% of them made $30,000 or less a year (compared with 26% of Bush's total).

But the lower incomes of Robertson's followers are due in part to the fact that he got the youngest vote in Iowa, just as President Reagan carried the young in 1984. A 1979 study by the Princeton Religion Research Center found that 54% of Evangelicals are under 50 years of age -- a finding confirmed impressionistically when one travels with Robertson. His crowds are often young parents bringing their children with them. In terms of education, Christian schools, which exact long study hours as well as a strict social code, are opening at the rate of one a day, a movement surpassed earlier only by Roman Catholic parochial schools, which raised poor immigrants to high educational levels. The Christian schools, like the original Catholic ones, are founded to avoid the taint of irreligiosity in public schools.

-- That the kook factor will do Robertson in. President Reagan believes in miracles and carries lucky charms in his pocket at all times. But he never wrestled with a hurricane on television. Even the glossy Jerry Falwell, with all his equivocal gifts, disdains glossolalia. Robertson, on the other hand, despite his prickliness about being called a television evangelist these days, has been captured on video showing all his Pentecostal fervor. The networks last week showed clips of him waving his arms as he spoke of curing hemorrhoids. In an interview with David Frost that aired this Sunday, Robertson defended the time he prayed on his television show to divert the course of Hurricane Gloria, adding of the storm's subsequent shift toward New York, "I think it was divine intervention." Bringing the Holy Ghost in on the cure for hemorrhoids seems, on the face of it, to disqualify the practitioner of such "solutions" from sitting with the National Security Council in judgment of more complicated matters.

But mockers of Pentecostal gifts must tread warily when making fun of miracles. Not only does President Reagan believe in them; most of his fellow citizens share that belief in some measure or other. According to the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Council, 29% of Americans have had visions of some sort, 42% have been in contact with the dead and 67% have experienced extrasensory perception. Obviously, there are a lot of people out there who believe the spirit of God is touching them. Many of them kneel before a television set and, after experiencing spiritual relief, mail off $10 to an evangelist. Some people who disapprove of this may be spending ten times that amount for time with a therapist or counseling group, with results not necessarily more satisfying. Religious people of various kinds may feel insulted if Robertson's belief is ridiculed. There are many products of Christian schools reading sophisticated defenses of their position, books like C.S. Lewis' Miracles: A Preliminary Study.

-- That Robertson's organizing triumph is a secular technique based on his communications empire, with its carefully refined computer lists. Actually, Robertson's secular savvy is overrated. He talks often about Yale law school but not about the bar exam he flunked. He boasts of his business skills, though he was taken in by a con woman who promised him the Hunt family's inheritance. He bred vipers in his bosom called Tammy Faye and Jim. Like John $ Kennedy, he had a phantom experience with a London university that eerily grew in later resumes. His principal books were written "with" professional writers, and he is uneasy and defensive when asked about that.

If the Second Coming, which Robertson has said will be televised worldwide by satellite, had occurred on the night after the Michigan caucuses, his principal organizer, R. Marc Nuttle, would have missed it, because, after carefully adjusting the outsize earphones to his pocket-size television set, he found that the batteries were dead. Craning over Nuttle's shoulder in the staff van was Connie Snapp, the "communications director" of the campaign, who had tried to bring her candidate into Michigan and leave the traveling press behind (a maneuver so foolish that the staff man with the candidate disregarded it). What slickness the campaign has tends to undo itself out of distrust for the rest of the world, as in the duplicate tallying of caucus returns in Iowa, a state noted for its clean politics. What makes Robertson a threat is not the medium but, precisely, the message.

Thus Robertson's foes must be careful about overkill. Calling him an Ayatullah points to a truth not intended -- that religion is a powerful national force, not only in exotic places but also in their own familiar country. Americans need to become more attuned to their country's desires before concluding that today's moral crisis is easily handled with secular expertise. Pat Robertson's practiced intimacy, his instant if shallow friendliness, may frighten some. But it reassures others exactly because he is not theatrical or compelling (as, say, an earlier televangelist, Fulton Sheen, was). That breathy and winking chuckle we heard, debate after debate, did not constitute a last laugh by any means. But we are going to suffer that chuckle's soft abrasions for a long time -- for as long as we remain deaf to the alarm bells it responds to.