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New Right on elections, its continued growth certainly could influence the political balance of the U.S. Houston Pollster Lance Tarrance thinks that the movement has been "whittling away at the lower-class fundamentalist whites who have always voted the way their daddies voted—straight Democratic. If you cut this group out of the Democratic coalition, it will really hurt. The effect of the Moral Majority is not as great as is claimed, but more than its detractors care to admit." Florida's Democratic Senator Lawton Chiles, for one, does not believe that the evangelical tide has stopped rising: he is already preparing for his election fight in 1982.
In the wake of the election, liberals are attacking the religious groups of the New Right for violating the separation of church and state, a position they never took, incidentally, when liberal clerics were engaging in political activity in the 1960s. In an ad in the New York Times that matches the more intemperate rhetoric of the New Right, the American Civil Liberties Union warned that the conservative "agenda is clear and frightening; they mean to capture the power of government and use it to establish a nightmare of religious and political orthodoxy." Last month, Rabbi Alexander Schindler, a New York liberal, called for a coalition to oppose the "chilling power of the radical right." It is "no coincidence," he said, that the "rise of right-wing Christian fundamentalism has been accompanied by the most serious outbreak of anti-Semitism since the outbreak of World War II."
During the campaign, the Rev. Bailey Smith, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, did say that "God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew." But Smith, who took no part in the election, has apologized for the remark and wants to have a meeting with the Anti-Defamation League to clear up the matter. Fundamentalists emphasize the centrality of the Judaeo-Christian tradition and many are fervent admirers of Israel. Last month, Prime Minister Menachem Begin gave an award to the Moral Majority's Jerry Falwell for his public support of Israel. Falwell insists that he hopes to recruit Jews, as well as Mormons, Roman Catholics and blacks, as his organization builds for the future.
In the coming years, as in the past election, overzealous leaders of the New Right may turn out to be their own worst enemies. Scoffs William Sweeney, executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee: "I give them six months before they start attacking Reagan." Indeed, the day after the election, Weyrich publicly warned Vice President-elect George Bush that he had better take a stronger stand against abortion and for prayers in school. Bush responded to New Right pressures: "I am not intimidated by those who suggest I better hew the line. Hell with them."
Though it is full of pride and passion now, the true test of the New Right will be whether it can, without compromising its principles, accommodate itself to the U.S. political system, which has a way of punishing extremists by banishing them into obscurity.
By Edwin Warner. Reported by Anne Constable/Atlanta and Neil MacNeil/Washington