The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America (13 page)

Vidal expands his platform. The ruling classes fear the gays because they aren't as easily dominated by the hen-pecked, ball-broken straights with their nagging wives and grasping children. Everyone — oh, happy day — is potentially bisexual. This is a terrific plus because 'we have more babies than we know what to do with'. Finally, and clinchingly, 'the family is an economic, not a biological, unit'. Actually, of course, the family is both: how could a parent-child relationship
not
be biological? But what the family mainly is is a unit, willy-nilly. To disapprove of this fact is as futile as disapproving of oxygen or bipedalism.

Besides, the whole line sounds rather — American, does it not, tending to reduce argument to a babble of interested personalities, an exchange of stricture and veto, with money as the bottom line? Well, if Vidal sounds unusually shrill, 'there is a good deal to be shrill about'. He sees his freedoms as being under particular threat, and maybe he is right. More likely, the stand just happens to suit his antic pessimism. 'Real stupidity does excite me,' he once said. America is the perfect rumpus-room for this witty invigilator. Meanwhile it should be stressed that the new book is a peach. It will give everyone many hours of nervous pleasure.

Sunday Telegraph
1977 and
Observer
I982

'I call it Mickey Mouse mentality,' proclaimed Judge Braswell Deen, referring to the theories of Charles Darwin: 'monkey mythology methodology monopoly, mysterious musings and mundane dreams of all this monkey business!' The audience of 15,000 — most of them Baptists, Methodists, charismatics, fundamentalists, pentecostalists and journalists — applauded and whooped.

Elsewhere in the Reunion Arena, Dallas, Texas, a frowning Ronald Reagan told a press conference that he had 'a great many questions about evolution'. 'I believe schools should be even-handed on the issue,' he added. This was a nervous moment for gaffe-dreading Ronnie, in the week of Taiwan. And, sure enough, here was another howler jumping out of his mouth. But who cared? Perhaps this particular gaffe would win him 50 million votes.

Meanwhile, wearing a press badge that identified me as 'Marty Amis', I strolled the Reunion Arena concourses, sampling the pro-family propaganda on offer there. New in Dallas, I returned to the hotel restaurant and ate The American Way (hamburger and cottage cheese), plus an Elite Pastry. Beside my plate lay a stack of pamphlets. What was going on around here?

Some of the leaflets were simply illiterate hate-sheets; others were glossy and well produced.
Why A Bankrupt America?
explains how the Trilateral Commission is helping 'Russia Enslave the World!'
When You Were Formed In Secret
tells of the miracle of birth and the 'homicide of abortion'.
The Family Issues Voting Index
helps you to sort 'the good guys from the bad guys' ('The bad guys need our prayers. The good guys need our votes').
Is Humanism
Molesting Your Child?
urges you to 'examine your child's library for immoral, anti-family, and anti-American contents'.
Your Five
Duties As A Christian Citizen
are as follows: Pray, Register, Become Informed, Help Elect Godly People, and Vote... Then I found the pamphlet I was looking for.

Today the evolution controversy seems as remote as the Homeric era to inteHectuals in the East,' wrote the historian Richard Hofstad-ter in
i?6z.
But elsewhere there are still many Americans who, in the words of William Bryan, prosecutor at the Scopes trial of
192.5,
are 'more interested in the Rock of Ages than the age of rocks'.

Are Evolutionary Scientists Like Three Blind Mice? is
the pamphlet's title. And, yes, apparently they are. Because evolution is 'a vicious lie!' There follows a sarcastic resume of the atheist argument, with the clincher:
'question: if god had to do all the work
ANYWAY WHY DID HE STRETCH IT OUT OVER MILLIONS OF YEARS? SURELY THEY DON'T THINK GOD WAS TOO WEAK TO CREATE EVERYTHING
in
6
days!'
The last page carries special offers of anti-evolution T-shirts ($6.95) and creationist bumper-stickers (40 cents). I finished my meal and returned to the National Affairs Briefing at the Reunion Arena to hear Reagan — Reagan, and his new champions, the electronic ministers of the air.

This is a good deal more serious than it may at first sound. The mobilisation of the Evangelical Right could influence the outcome of the 1980 presidential election and determine that of 1984 — though many of the new evangelists claim that a free 1984 election will not take place unless their man gets in this time. Their man, naturally, is the Republican nominee: the movement claims to be non-partisan, but it is about as neutral as Nancy Reagan. (Ironically, Nancy is the chief Evangelical reservation about Ronnie, who is a divorcee. According to them, the Reagans have been living in adultery for nearly thirty years.) By informing their congregations about the 'pro-family' issues, by setting up vote-registration booths in their aisles, the Evangelicals have already ousted left-wing incumbents in mid-term elections, have thwarted pro-homosexual and women's-rights legislation in key states, and have played a part in the shaping of the Republican platform. And these are early days.

Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter and John Anderson are all 'born-again' Christians. They are not alone. One in three Americans takes the lesson of Nicodemus in John 3: 'unless one is born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God'. Reaching back to the Great Awakening of the early eighteenth century, the Evangelical faith is the most proletarian and anti-intellectual of the many mansions of American religion. It rests on a personal experience of the Saviour; it is Manichaean and eschatological; for all its hatred and rejection of modernity, it maintains that the Earth is only 6,ooo years old.

The latest surge in Evangelical activism is entirely new. Like so much else in America, it has to do with money, power and, above all, television. There are 36 wholly religious TV stations in America (and 1,300 radio stations). Jerry FalwelFs
Old-Time Gospel Hour
is seen on 374 stations nationwide, outstripping
Dallas.
Pat Robertson's daily devotional chat show has more viewers than Johnny Carson. The TV preachers turn over billions of tax-free dollars every year (Falwell alone raises more than a million dollars a week, $300,000 of which goes on buying more air-time). Their mailing lists are kept on guarded computer tapes. The electronic ministries have a combined congregation of 115 million people attending every week.

The political wing of the movement has developed only in the last fifteen months. Its names are legion: Moral Majority Inc., Religious Roundtable, Christian Voice, Christian Voters' Victory Fund, Campus Crusade for Christ, Christians for Reagan - all loosely grouped under the pro-family banner. American religion has always been popular rather than hieratic in character, concerned not with theology but morality; and it has always, until now, been politically quietist, with low registration and a tendency to vote for the incumbent. The Evangelical message is plain — 'out of the pews and into the polls'. 'Not voting is a sin,' says Falwell: 'Repent of it.’

'And the Lord turned to him and said, "My precious child, I never left you in your hours of trial. When you look back along the pathway of your life and see only one pair of footprints in the sand — why, that was when I carried you.'“

This wasn't the ghost of the Rev. Billy Sunday: it was a close-to-tears Ronald Reagan, winding up his address to the 15,000 Evangelicals (10,000 pastors, 5,000 lay people) at the Reunion Arena in Dallas. Reagan is taking these people seriously all right: he has hired a Moral Majority operative to liaise with the horn-again community. 'Religious America is awakening, perhaps just in time,' said Reagan hopefully. He praised the freedom-fighters of Poland and their leader, the Pope — 'just the son of simple farm folk'. He tied himself up in knots trying to pronounce 'Sollsy Neetsin* and his friend, 'Archie Pelaygo'. He spoke of the dream of all true Americans to attain 'that shining city on the hill'. But this was mild, hammy stuff compared to the kick-'em-down oratory of the electronic preachers.

Reagan was preceded at the podium by Dr James Robison, the good-angel JR of the Dallas—Fort Worth metroplex, whose TV show reaches ten million people (and has twice been taken off the air for its anti-homosexual virulence). Robison is six foot three of US prime, with a sensual, predatory manner and the tumbling unstop-pability of the natural demagogue. He strode onstage to a rock star's welcome — a deafening wall of whistles and wolf-howls. A-men! Ooh-hah! Wah-who! Ee-haw!

Robison brandished his Bible a good deal, and often seemed about to wrestle his lectern to the ground. His language was violent, even scabrous. He spoke, or hollered, about 'the cancerous visible sores' afflicting America, sores which Christians were obliged to 'fight'. Jesus was no sissy, no sir. 'You slap my cheek', said Robison, slapping his own cheek resoundingly, 'and I'll turn it. But you slap my wife or my children, boy, and I'll
put you on the floor?
(Dog-barks, coyote-calls. Why-haw! How-he!) 'Scientists', Robison believes, 'don't know what they're talking about.' The Bible, on the other hand, is 'more relevant than tomorrow's newspaper'. In his wind-up Robison advised 'the perverts to get back in the closet and not parade on Main Street!' Ow-wee! Who-how!

Aaa-
mien
!__Reagan applauded. Back in Washington, Carter must have been wondering about the size of the pervert vote. Perverts for Carter — that's all he needs.

When Reagan's speech was over (and before anyone could get away) Jerry Falwell eased himself up on to the stage. Jerry's job was to complement Robison's brimstone with the other side of the Evangelical hard-sell: the cajoling demand for money. There wasn't much ooh-h awing now, as grim stewards passed out envelopes and plastic buckets to the multitude, which had already paid $25 apiece to get in. Falwell wanted a thousand people to 'pledge' $100 each, to help tab the Dallas experiment; he then coaxed and nagged some smaller contributions out of the audience for various circulars and devotional knick-knacks. 'One hundred dollars! This is a tax-deductible gift... Stand up all those who have pledged one hundred dollars. Or more.’

Money is the two-way traffic of the religious TV industry: money is taken from the viewers in the form of sacramental contributions; money is 'returned' to them in the form of celestial jackpots. The tax-free status of American religions (including the Californian cults) is constantly assailed. But all challenges are repulsed by the First Amendment — and by the age-old analogy between sectarian competition and free enterprise. Furthermore, Americans don't feel the same way about money as we feel about it. They are not embarrassable on the subject. Money is its own vindication; money is its own just cause.

By no means all of the uplift shows are consciously political. Some electronic preachers do nothing more sinister with their millions than aggrandise themselves and their sanctuaries. Oral Roberts (yes,
Oral
Roberts), whose programme is centred on mere semi-hysterical folksiness, is going ahead with a $200-million City of Faith in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Robert Schuller, who has a drive-in ministry one exit past Disneyland in Southern California, is building a twenty-two-acre Shopping Centre for Jesus Christ, featuring an all-glass Crystal Cathedral.

Styles vary. Some preachers tout health instead of money, which in America often means the same thing. Gene Profeta, who looks like Frankie Vaughan at the London Palladium, stands surrounded by the remnants of slum families who have found togetherness again with the Lord. 'Yeah, Gene, since I been praying and everything, I ain't had no seizures.' Gene grabs the mike: 'Oh praise Jesus.' Dr W.V. Grant's televisual pantheon looks like a field hospital at Gettysburg. Grant interrupts a spiritual to solace a crippled negro. 'The name's
Jim,
right?' 'Yeah.' 'You don't know me, do you, Jim?' 'No.' 'Jim, how long you been crippled up like that? Long time?' 'Yeah.' 'Jim, I want you to throw down these crutches and
walk!'
'Okay.' Jim gets lithely to his feet, without looking pleased or grateful or even mildly surprised, and troops morosely up the aisle. 'Oh, hallelujah, praise that Lord!' sings Brother Grant. 'The Lord has healed him!' At this point, you begin to wonder Who crippled him. But Grant does not tarry with points of theodicy; he has his sales pitch to make.

Pat Robertson, chairman of the Christian Broadcasting Network, the great Sanctimoney genius of Portsmouth, Virginia, goes one further: he heals and rewards his flock over the airwaves. In the miracle-facility section of his show, the kneeling Robertson is granted visions of various recoveries, reunions and windfalls throughout the land. Robertson describes the miracles, and people ring in to claim them. His poorer viewers send him their rent cheques and disability allowances — because the gamble works better 'if you give out of your need'. Like all the TV preachers, Robertson also does big business in what the trade calls 'the pretty-pretties': sacred key-rings, beatified pen-clips and whatnot. CBN takes in over $1 million a week.

Robert Schuller's line typifies the logic of the holy sting, and he articulates it with all the unction of sweet reason. Gently waving his arms about and baring his practised false smile, Schuller explains that 'the major decision' in his life was 'tithing' — 'or the giving of 10 per cent of one's income
back
to the Church". This of course means the giving of 10 per cent of one's income
back
to Robert Schuller. 'And it turned me into a very
good
business manager,' he adds, without a blush. 'If you can't live on the 90 per cent, you couldn't live on the 100 per cent. No way — ' And, in return, 'God will give you management skills.’

Schuller's show is entitled, candidly enough,
Hour of Power.
Of course, there is nothing peculiarly American, or peculiarly Western, about the religious emphasis on material reward. Present-day Hinduism, for example, is very largely structured on the principle of worldly success. However, the Midas tradition in Ame'rican worship has little to do with modern laxity. It shocked de Tocqueville in 1831. A century later it effloresced in a host of how-to books on harmonial and self-bettering themes, under a thin shine of gnosticism: Dale Carnegie's
How to Win Friends and Influence People,
Norman Vincent Peale's
Power of Positive Thinking,
Billy Graham's
Peace with God.
What could be more American, in its way, than a version of Christ as the eternal miracle-worker and faith-healer — bringer of salubrity and cash, here and now?