One nation after all: middle America v. the 'pro-moral community.'

Once a month I appear as a guest on a two-hour segment of "Janet Parshall's America," a widely syndicated conservative Christian talk radio show. The format is a debate between myself and Craig Parshall, Janet's husband and former East Coast coordinator for the Rutherford Institute, and the topics for each encounter are whatever seems to be the two hottest religious liberty issues of the day.

Janet used to be the spokeswoman for Concerned Women for America and could not be mistaken for a theological or political liberal. I often tune in when she is interviewing some Religious Right luminary. Dr. James Dobson, head of Focus on the Family, was a recent guest. During the conversation, Dobson claimed to be a representative of what he called "the pro-moral community."

Janet thinks this is a wonderful phrase, of course; I think it is one of the most annoying catch phrases of the Religious Right. It strikes me as offensive as Pat Robertson's christening his political group "The Christian Coalition," which carries the implication that the organization's political opinions are "the" Christian position and any other view is at least "non-Christian" if not downright "anti-Christian."

Dobson's ascribing unique "moral" qualities to his political views is at least as arrogant. Clearly, if you don't buy the Dobson plan for America you are in the "anti-moral community," a virtual outcast from public decency. They have again usurped the word "moral" (remember the Moral Majority?) as a cover for a very extreme, authoritarian worldview.

Gary Bauer, a longtime Dobson associate who is thinking of running for president, recently told The New York Times he is disgusted that the Religious Right has won so few victories in politics. "There is virtually nothing to show for an 18-year commitment," he said. Bauer and Dobson are now pushing their (primarily Republican) friends in Congress to take more hardline positions on "moral" issues.

If you haven't achieved what you want in 18 years, why take even more hardline positions? This is, in Washington jargon, "counterintuitive."

Could all this Religious Right complaining be just the last rush of adrenaline from a boxer backed into the corner? Is it a suicide mission of principle over practicality? How about a little of both?

See, I believe what is troubling the Religious Right these days is not simply that Republican leaders like Newt Gingrich and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott don't always give them what they want. It's that the American people aren't buying their message either -- not on partisan political issues or policy questions. The Rev. Jerry Falwell published some of the earliest demands for the impeachment of President Clinton. Pat Robertson announced on national television that if Clinton takes advantage of a Senate recess to appoint James Hormel, an openly gay man, as ambassador to Luxembourg, that act alone would be grounds for impeachment. Yet Clinton's poll numbers continue to rise.

Turning to policy, the Religious Right -- which has equated morality with their brand of narrow sectarianism -- is also facing some unnerving academic research. Alan Wolfe in his well-publicized new book One Nation After All, polls American suburbanites and finds them remarkably open-minded about many of the core "moral" issues the Religious Right has made doctrinaire measurements of your community's worth. Those who live in this once-wooed heart of America don't much care where their neighbors go to church, and they vigorously oppose giving religion any sort of official role in guiding public morality.

This doesn't mean they are themselves libertines, or that they do not think seriously about ethical dilemmas. It is simply a "live and let live" attitude that immunizes them from the harsh demands of television preachers who want to unduly restrict personal choice in these arenas. In addition, when "middle America" votes against voucher programs or sends their children to public schools without opting them out of evolution or sex education classes, they are also discounting the dire tight-wing warnings that public schools are cesspools unfit for human habitation.

Could this mounting evidence of congressional and societal rejection of central messages of the Religious Right mean that their anticipated moralizing time in the sun will not arrive and that the shadows have lengthened so far that sunset is imminent? Are we at some cusp of American social history where that great wellspring of common sense that America possesses is putting the kibosh on a headlong plunge into a right-wing sea?

Any such unbridled enthusiasm may not yet be justified. Those of us who don't care for the Religious Right's sterile view of a monochromatic theocracy must still be very watchful. Those lengthening shadows could, after all, come merely from passing clouds.

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