Politics & religion: conservatives sound retreat.

It's hard to notice historic turnings at the moment they happen. But sometimes the signs of the times appear in bold neon letters. That's the way to look at conservative leader Paul Weyrich's recent declaration that "politics has failed" and that moral conservatives should "separate ourselves from this hostile culture" and engage in "some sort of quarantine."

Weyrich made his position public in an open letter to his supporters last month and elaborated on it in an opinion piece in the Washington Post (March 7). Weyrich is so gloomy about our national culture ("I think we are caught up in a cultural collapse of historic proportions, a collapse so great that it simply overwhelms politics," he writes in his letter) that it may be tempting to write him off as a cranky doom-salesman nearing the end of his political career.

But that would be a mistake because Weyrich's new antipolitical posture has historical precedent. What Weyrich is proposing is the same form of political withdrawal that conservative evangelical Christians engaged in after their defeats in the 1920s. These included the failure of Prohibition and the Scopes trial on the teaching of evolution. During the Scopes battle, fundamentalist ideas were held up to national scorn. "Protestantism is down with a wasting disease," H.L. Mencken, one of the scorners, wrote at the time.

Withdrawing from politics did not mean that the fundamentalists and evangelicals went away. On the contrary, they built their own vibrant counterculture in the churches, on the radio, in books and magazines, and in local communities. When the evangelist Billy Graham brought the old religion to broad public attention again in the 1950s, he did not so much light a fire as reveal the power of a blaze that had long been burning.

But Graham's religion was public without being overtly political. So when Weyrich, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, and their allies led conservative evangelicals back into politics in the 1970s and early 1980s - largely in response to court decisions on issues such as abortion and school prayer - they were breaking with a four-decade-long pattern. What Weyrich suggests now is that cultural conservatives revert to their pre-Moral Majority strategy - "bypassing the institutions that are controlled by the enemy."

If Weyrich's forebears traced their defeat to Prohibition and the Scopes trial, he roots his current disillusionment in the failure to remove President Bill Clinton. "If there really were a moral majority out there," he mourned, "Bill Clinton would have been driven out of office months ago."

In his Washington Post article, Weyrich was careful to insist that he is not proposing a complete disengagement from politics. "What we are changing is what we expect from politics and, therefore, what we put into it," he writes. "The object is to prevent government from taking certain actions, actions designed to destroy freedom and impose ideology."

Here, too, there is a parallel to the post-1920s era: Evangelicals and fundamentalists continued to vote and exert influence, especially locally. But they didn't form political pressure groups such as the Moral Majority or the Christian Coalition. In fact, Weyrich and his allies are misreading the result of the Clinton battle. Most Americans who opposed removing Clinton from office did so not because they approved of his behavior - overwhelmingly, they disapproved - but because they saw the national cost of throwing him out as too high and preferred a lesser punishment.

At the same time, virtually every poll and social indicator shows Americans moving toward moderation if not conservatism on a range of moral issues. Where Weyrich sees cultural collapse and the dominance of "an alien ideology," most Americans continue to hold rather old-fashioned notions of right and wrong, family life and child rearing.

Still, there is much to be said for Weyrich's new approach to politics insofar as it could contribute to a disentangling of religion from partisan political conflict. Religion should have a public voice and religious people should not be marginalized. But to the extent that Weyrich and some of his allies tied faith to the success of one party and one ideological movement, they reduced rather than increased the reach of religion's voice. And they were necessarily disappointed when politicians who claimed to be their allies proved less pure and more accommodating once they were elected. That is the nature of politics in a pluralist democracy.

If Weyrich's new strategy makes religious conservatives less an interest group and more a leaven in our national life, he may discover that the culture is less hostile to their values than he thinks.