Back to school again: at Dickinson college with 'generation next.' (an alumni of Carlisle, Pennsylvania's Dickinson College relates his speaking engagement concerning the Religious Right at the school's 1998 religious forum)

Author Thomas Wolfe is famous for observing, "You can't go home again." Maybe not, but you can go back to college - at least for a visit. I know because I just did.

Since graduating from Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., in 1970, I have had only sporadic contact with that institution. Several months ago, though, one of the organizers of Dickinson's annual Public Affairs Symposium called to check my availability to participate in this year's forum titled, "Religion In Society: Roots of Conflict, Seeds of Change." Specifically, they wanted someone to address the interface of religion and politics.

In the late 1960s Dickinson was viewed as an extremely progressive liberal arts college, but lately it has developed a reputation (reported in most of those "how to pick a college" books for high school students) as a very conservative place. Having spent hours with those books when my daughter Christina was choosing a college - she's at the University of California, Berkeley now - I was never quite sure how accurate these characterizations were. But I must admit that part of me leafed a politically disconnected audience or, worse, a nest of Pat Robertson supporters-in-waiting among the oaks and ivy of my alma mater. It turns out I had nothing to fear.

I remember the Public Affairs Symposium during my student days as a high point of each academic year at Dickinson. It was there that I first heard people like Ralph Nader and ABC's Peter Jennings (persons I have had the opportunity to work with during my various jobs in Washington). What I garnered from their presentations and others that were offered was a sense that life after college could be purposeful, that you didn't have to abandon your commitment to active pursuit of the truth or activism when leaving the relative sanctuary of those walls.

The single most exciting thing about my return was that after my presentation, dozens of students wanted to talk to me about how they could make a career out of, as one woman put it, "doing something good."

My official lecture was an examination of the Religious Right. It warned against equating the followers of specific radical groups like the Christian Coalition and Focus on the Family with all "evangelical Christians" or all "conservative Republicans." It also took a look at the agenda and tactics of the Religious Right as articulated publicly and privately by its leaders.

The audience seemed genuinely shocked by the Religious Right's long-term objectives, including the elimination of public schools, reversing the constitutional right to obtain birth control and ending equality for all religious believers under the law. Robertson's nasty characterizations of Muslims as "slavers," Hindus as "devil worshipers," Catholics as having an understanding of Communion like "cannibalism," and Presbyterians and Methodists as reflecting the "spirit of the Antichrist" came as a sobering surprise to them.

I reminded them that bizarre as some of his utterances might be, Robertson is far better known than, say, the head of the World Council of Churches or the president of any Protestant denomination in the United States. This gives him tremendous clout and authority.

The Religious Right is not going away, recent magazine and newspaper pundits' obituaries for some of the movement's leading organizations notwithstanding.

The Christian Coalition didn't just take a "straw poll" of its state leaders' presidential preferences as an icebreaker for their winter meeting. It was designed to point the way to the early contenders, and warn the others to shape up.

Religious broadcaster James Dobson did not tell the far right's Council for National Policy in early February that he might abandon the Republican Party "failures" and form or support a new party just to be provocative. Although acknowledging that he doesn't yet influence the whole world, he warned, "If I go, I will do everything I can to take as many people with me as possible."

These are wealthy, powerful (and power-hungry) leaders. However, we've demonstrated time and time again that if we engage them we can defeat them on the merits of the issues. If the Dickinson College students took only one thing from my presentation, I hope it was my concluding remark: "The only way we are certain to fail is if we leave the playing field."

I'm one who believes that young adults today often get a bad rap, especially in the popular media. As the father of two teenagers, I know that many are not the rootless, restless "slackers" they are usually made out to be. The young people I met at Dickinson struck me as bright, articulate and completely engaged with the world around them.

As I drove back through the fogshrouded mountains of central Pennsylvania and northern Maryland, I felt a lot more confident about that slice of the "next generation" I had been with than I had the night before. A lot of them at age 20 seem to be a lot like the American United activists of 40, 50 or 60 I meet around the country. They aren't planning to go quietly into a future orchestrated by extremists who Jove power more than providence and who think morality is the result of fiat instead of critical ethical thinking.

Barry W. Lynn is executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.