ESSAY: The Christian Right and Its Demonizers.

WHO'S afraid of the religious Right? Not I. And yet, as a "New York intellectual," I am precisely the type of person who is supposed to be trembling with apprehension at the baneful influence conservative Christians have gained within the Republican party and, through it, on the nation as a whole.

Of course, though to the manner born, I am not a typical New York intellectual. Most members of my breed are situated somewhere left of center, and I have long since migrated to a position on the other side of the political divide. Yet even the tiny handful of my former fellows who so much as barely tolerate my apostasy, at least in certain of its aspects, still taunt me with a classic piece of black humor: "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?"

The "that" in the case of this "Mrs. Lincoln" refers to the alleged extremism and bigotry for which John McCain recently attacked Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. That speech may have destroyed McCain's chances of beating George W. Bush in the presidential primaries. And yet he was only saying out loud what is believed by vast numbers of the non- Republicans-independents and crossover Democrats-on whom he had been counting to carry him to the nomination.

Why then did the speech do him damage? The answer is that any gains he may have made with these voters could not compensate for the losses he sustained among others who, whether religious or not, are not strict secularists. In fact, even many Catholics seem to have resented McCain's assault on Robertson and Falwell, since they took it as an attack on the role of religion in general in our politics. On this point, the old sectarian animosities were trumped by a growing tendency among Catholics and Protestants to view seriousness about "traditional values" as more important than the specific theological etiology of that seriousness.

But not, I would be willing to bet, among Jews. Now, like many New York intellectuals (though not quite so many as is often imagined), I am Jewish. This makes my attitude doubly untypical. Indeed, a good guess would be that an even higher percentage of American Jews in general than of New York intellectuals (Jewish or not) are afraid of the Christian Right.

As Jews, my coreligionists are responding in part to inherited-and well- grounded-ancestral anxieties over the prevalence of anti-Semitism in conservative Christian circles. Never mind that, in the justly celebrated quip of Irving Kristol (a New York Jewish intellectual who preceded me in the political migration from left to right), Christians in America today are less interested in persecuting Jews than in marrying their sons and daughters. This undoubtedly poses a threat to what has come to be known as "Jewish continuity." But it is surely a benign one compared with the experience of the past, when Christian hostility toward Jews more often took forms ranging from discrimination to forced conversion, expulsion, and murder.

Never mind, too, that the charges of anti-Semitism which have been made against Pat Robertson are unsustainable. True, he has written a few off- the-wall things about an alleged conspiracy between Freemasons and Jewish bankers to take over the world in the 18th century. It is also true that he has sharply criticized "Jewish intellectuals and media activists" of today for playing a part in "the assault on Christianity."

Yet unlike the crackpot theory about the 18th century, his charge against the intellectuals and media activists of Jewish origin cannot so easily be dismissed. (It is important to recognize, however, that these particular persons tend to be the ones who have been described as "non- Jewish Jews.")

Furthermore, with regard to the concerns of present-day "Jewish Jews," Robertson has been a staunch friend. He has supported Israel through thick and thin; and when the Soviet Union still existed, he contributed large sums of money to help Jews emigrate. Would that all Christians were so anti-Semitic.

Irving Kristol has a brother-in-law, a scholar named Milton Himmelfarb, who is the author of an even more famous quip, for which he is much too rarely given credit: "American Jews live like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans." Himmelfarb's great witticism was born out of his analysis of Jewish political habits. In studying the statistics, he found that members of every other religio-ethnic group invariably shifted from the Democratic to the Republican ranks as they became more prosperous. Jews, by contrast, stubbornly remained as liberal as they had been when living in poverty even after they climbed up what Benjamin Disraeli-born Jewish but later to become a Christian and a conservative-called the "greasy pole" of success.

The explanation for this anomaly is very complex, but a major component is undoubtedly the conviction among Jews that the less influence Christians exert over American public life, the more secure the Jewish position will be. In liberalism, which has as one of its principal dogmas the most rigid possible separation of church and state, lies the best protection against efforts to "Christianize" the United States and thereby to turn them into "second-class citizens." Or so Jews have persuaded themselves.

Thus, let anyone call America a Christian country or, worse yet, express the hope that it should become one again as in days of yore, and all the atavistic fears of the Jewish community rise volcanically to the surface. Again, never mind that both Robertson and Falwell, not to mention countless other Christian leaders, have disavowed any such intention. Many (most?) American Jews are still convinced that the occasional maverick preacher or oddball politician who gives vent to the intention is affording us a peep at what lies deep in the heart of the entire community of evangelical and fundamentalist Christians.

But if most Jews are liberals, most liberals, obviously, are not Jews. And, making another bet, I would say that these Gentile liberals are secularists, even if they go to church once in a while or tell Dr. Gallup that they believe in God, while some indeterminate number are positively hostile to religion.

When these latter, whether self-proclaimed atheists or agnostics, think of religion, what comes into their minds is the very fanaticism and intolerance that Senator McCain sees in Robertson and Falwell. Not only that, but they also attribute these unlovely qualities to irrationality and superstition, and associate them with intellectual and cultural backwardness. So far as they are concerned, nothing has really changed since their great hero Clarence Darrow and the buffoon William Jennings Bryan crossed swords at the Scopes trial in the 1920s over the teaching of evolution in the schools.

In fact, many of them are not so secretly sure that the forces of benightedness, after a brief setback, have grown stronger since then. Only a few liberals are reckless enough to say this explicitly in print, though plenty of them came close in their denunciations of Kenneth Starr. But as I can testify from eavesdropping and/or being yelled at during numerous dinner parties, in private there is virtually no limit to the paranoia aroused by the Christian Right among liberals.

When Barry Goldwater ran for president in 1964, the all-but-open liberal fear was that he would bring fascism to the United States. Today, the old talk of fascism has been replaced by the conviction-the sincere conviction-that if the Christian Right ever got into power behind a Republican candidate, we would face an updated version of the Salem witch trials.

One might think that such liberals would have been reassured by the presidency of Ronald Reagan. After all, despite Reagan's expressed sympathy with the religious Right, its influence on American life and culture was no more discernible than it had been under Jimmy Carter (himself a born-again Christian). But no. Liberals remain unimpressed. They still expect that if a Republican like George W. Bush were elected with a debt to the Christian Right, all hell (as liberals envisage hell) would break loose. Sex outside marriage would practically be outlawed even among consenting heterosexual adults, let alone homosexuals; the sacred right to abortion would be taken away; artists writing about and depicting erotic acts would be censored; and children would be forced to intone the Lord's Prayer in school every morning instead of being taught how to use condoms properly.

In short, no one would be permitted to have any fun anymore.

In this mindset, we can find a clue as to how Bill Clinton survived the campaign to impeach him. Liberals might well have felt betrayed by Clinton's policies on welfare, crime, and gays in the military, just as, conversely, conservatives had by Richard Nixon's embrace of wage and price controls and detente. Yet when Nixon faced impeachment, he was deserted in droves by conservatives, whereas liberals rallied around Clinton to a man-and, more bizarrely, given his egregious violations of feminist standards of conduct, to a woman. In my opinion, the reason not a one opposed him was mainly that they all looked upon Clinton as the only force standing between them and the Puritanical jackboots waiting menacingly in the wings.

Speaking first as a Jew, even if I shared to some degree in the paranoid interpretation of the Christian Right's agenda, I would still not be afraid of it. For quite apart from the sharp decline of anti-Semitism among Christians, there seems to me not the remotest chance that any Supreme Court-not even one composed of five Antonin Scalias and four Clarence Thomases-would read the First Amendment's prohibition of "an establishment of religion" as sanctioning this country to be declared officially Christian.

Moreover, the paranoid interpretation in this instance has no more basis in reality than paranoia does in any other situation. Evangelical and fundamentalist Christians were once content to render unto Caesar what was Caesar's and to concentrate on saving their own souls. What drew them into politics, first behind Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority and then Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition, was not any wish to impose their own views and mores on the rest of us. On the contrary: Far from being an aggressive move, it was a defensive one. They were trying to protect their own communities from the aggressions the liberal culture was committing against them, with the aid of the courts, the federal bureaucracies, and the ubiquitous media.

In this the Christian Right failed-so dismally that some of the people who persuaded them that political activism was the only way to defend themselves are now counseling an abandonment of that particular field and a retreat into the old insularity.

But now let me put on my intellectual's hat and explain why in that capacity I do not fear the Christian Right either. Take, to begin with, the cultural backwardness-in shorthand, the William Jennings Bryan anti- intellectual streak-that repels so many of my fellow intellectuals. Where an issue like the teaching of creationism is concerned, one does not need to be an uncritical Darwinist to think the intellectuals have a point-and the recent poll showing overwhelming support for including creationism in the curriculum makes that point stronger. But what the intellectuals ignore is that there has been a reversal of roles between the Bryan and Darrow traditions. Nowadays a far greater threat to scientific progress and cultural freedom comes from the secular Left than from the religious Right-as witness the promulgation of speech codes on the campus, and the attempts there to proscribe any deviation from the officially approved line on subjects as diverse as IQ, homosexuality, and affirmative action.

But it would be dishonest of me to suggest that my attitude toward the religious Right is merely characterized by an absence of fear. For I must confess that I think this movement has certain positive virtues.

For one thing, the conservative Christian communities have served as a reminder of the religious foundations on which this country was established and on whose capital its democratic system still draws. And for another, the religious Right has acted as an often lonely source of resistance to the complete triumph of relativism in our culture and libertinism in our behavior.

On this latter issue, I have long suspected that there is a parallel between the attitudes of many liberals today and the way the French took shelter under the American nuclear umbrella during the Cold War while simultaneously gratifying themselves with luxuriant outbursts of contempt against us. Such liberals, I think, are not quite so unhappy as they profess to be that there is a force in this country whose very existence helps set limits to libertine tendencies that they themselves worry about, especially when they have children, but that they do not know how to restrain and would lack the courage to fight even if they were in command of the necessary arguments. And so they rely on the "nuclear umbrella" of the Christian Right, while denouncing it all the more loudly as they quietly benefit from its protection.