What the religious right can teach the New Democrats: extremists aside, America's evangelicals have a message we all need to hear.

• Author: Meacham, Jon
• Position: Cover Story

Sneering at the Religious Right of his day--Tennessee Holy Rollers who campaigned to ban the teaching of evolution in the 1920s--H. L. Mencken famously called evangelical Christianity "a childish theology" "rounded upon hate" for "half-wits," "morons," "rustic ignoramuses," and "yokels from the hills." And that was just for starters.

In March, when Michael Frederick Griffin, a prolife activist, murdered a physician behind a Florida abortion clinic--try to reconstruct the logic of that--he could have walked straight out of Mencken's acidic dispatches from the Scopes Trial. A barbaric act, informed by twisted religious fervor: Griffin is the stereotypical Religious Right adherent brought to life. I happened to grow up near the Tennessee hills that Mencken skewered, but I'm neither an evangelical nor a fundamentalist; at best, I'm a desultory Episcopalian. And although I'm quick to roll my eyes at Tammy Faye Bakker and would never vote for Pat Robertson, the evangelicals I knew--Southern Baptists, Presbyterians, a few Roman Catholics--weren't exotic yokels or extremists. They were ordinary people, no different from anybody else except when religion came up.

In those moments, evangelicals would show theft colors and speak quite seriously of how they enjoyed "a personal relationship with Jesus Christ." And if politics came up, they were generally, but not fanatically, Republican. There was nothing crazy about these people, nothing that suggested apocalyptic inclinations or theocratic ambitions. If anything, they were annoyingly nice, not threatening.

But the mainstream has so thoroughly accepted the Menckenite version of conservative Christianity that the Griffms of the world are taken to be the rule, not the exception. It's a caricature that's alive and flourishing even outside the usual liberal oped suspects: After all, it's not news when Anthony Lewis snipes at the Religious Right. These days, the caricature is more widespread than that. In a Washington Post news story about evangelical opposition to President Clinton's lifting the ban on gays in the military, reporter Michael Weisskopf tossed off an unattributed generalization that had none of Mencken's flair but all of his prejudice: He called followers of Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and Co. "poor, uneducated, and easy to command."

When asked about his source, Weisskopf explained that though he had talked with several experts about the Religious Right, "I try not to have to attribute every point in the story if it appears to be universally accepted. You don't have to say, 'It's hot out, according to the weatherman."' The assumption is that you no more need an authority to tell you the Religious Right is witless than you need a weatherman to tell you a hot day is hot. Everyone, Weisskopf implies, knows these folks dwell at the bottom of the social and political food chains.

Such dismissive cultural assumptions, ill-rounded and blithely propagated, are keeping liberals, moderates, and even conservatives from realizing what the millions-strong movement is actually right about. Look past the obsession with homosexuals and abortion-what we might call pelvic sins--and there's a fairly sensible cultural vision and a not unreasonable policy agenda that's as neoliberal as it is fundamentalist.

Take crime, for example. Noting the backbreaking costs of large prisons, the National Association of Evangelicals suggests punishing nonviolent offenders through community service and restitution--an idea rooted in biblical law and neoliberal gospel. Democrats like Clinton and Sam Nunn have been working on this for years. In Georgia, first-time, nonviolent drug offenders are sent to boot camps for structured rehabilitation, an approach Clinton wants to make national. It's hard to argue, believer or atheist, that calisthenics, strict discipline, and stem sermons cloaked in the vocabulary of "self-esteem" wouldn't do malefactors some good.

Where the Religious Right is really fight, however, is on family issues. Discourage teen pregnancy, welfare dependency, and divorce? Force deadbeat dads to pay up? Make schools instill values? Encourage community service? These are Religious Right favorites--old-time moral causes that are now progressive causes.

Clinton and AI Gore, two Southern Baptists, campaigned as traditionalists. William Galston, who is now deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy, defined traditionalism this way in 1991: "We cannot be indifferent to fundamental (and decidable) questions of fight and wrong, and we violate no one's rights by putting public authority in the service of what is fight." So, if the New Democrats have already picked up on these themes, why should anyone care about the Religious Right? Because the Right is far more comfortable with the conversation about families, hard work, and responsibility than the Democrats are. And where the...