DAVID NYHAN

Can Rev. Pat read the tides? Can he ride them?

By David Nyhan, Globe Staff, March 14, 1999

The Lord works in mysterious ways, as does the Rev. Pat Robertson, so who's to say the wealthy preacher-politician-plutocrat is not doing God's work?

We have learned from campaigns past that the Deity is strongly in favor of voting Republican, lowering the capital gains tax, laying off the oil lobby, and staying the dead hand of government from the leathery necks of our tobacco farmers, those horny-handed sons of the Sun Belt whose votes are highly sensitive to any government linkage of cancer to cigarettes.

But news that pilots from Rev. Robertson's private, tax-exempt air force are ferrying equipment to his diamond mine in the Congo led me to reaffirm my conviction that the Lord does indeed work in mysterious ways.

If Rev. Pat can have a big say in selecting the GOP's presidential nominee, then why can't he cop a little informal taxpayer subsidy for his little old diamond mine in the Congo? Pilots from Robertson's "Operation Blessing" relief outfit apparently said they were ferrying freight for Pat on the side. Can't you see it? The crinkly-eyed Pat, dressed in old miner clothes like Humphrey Bogart in "Treasure of the Sierra Madre," staring into the fierce African sun, eyes fastening on the silvery glint of the supply plane as it touches down with the stuff needed for diamond extraction?

Hey, the guy has his own TV network, and his own political movement, why not a diamond mine? Jesus may have been the unemployed son of a carpenter, but Pat, the son of a US senator, is a real go-getter. His Christian Coalition has more or less supplanted Rev. Jerry Falwell's old political machine, the Moral Majority, as the noisiest of the right-wing religious-political fund-raising and vote-brokering combines.

Tune in to Pat's nightly revival show on cable, and there's the Grand Master himself, squinting soulfully into Camera 3, curing a goiter in Arizona, an overactive-thyroid in Tennessee, or someone with a bad back, constipation, or a severe limp in any hamlet where the cable TV linemen have strung the wire.

Televangelism is his game, but politics is his hobby, and Pat takes on the devil, two falls out of three, every night of the week, with reruns sprinkled in for holidays and weekends. So far, Satan has not made an appearance, but the devil's chief lieutenant is often invoked, in the guise of the incumbent president, who sits in the chair Pat campaigned for himself 11 years ago.

Yessir, Bill Clinton might as well be old Beelzebub hisself to hear Pat talk. And that Al Gore, why, he might as well be Beelzebub's number two. Because the public, via the polls, and the Congress, via the impeachment result, have failed to fulfill God's commandments, as interpreted by Rev. Pat, the bossman of the Christian Coalition, is rallying his flock around the notion of ejecting the Democrats from the White House.

With the $15 million he vows to raise -- it always seems to come down to money, when Rev. Pat gets involved, and the sum is always a large, round, number -- the Christian Coalition will march forward to smite the godless foe, and install a new generation of born-again Christian leaders (Pat seems to downplay the idea of a non-Christian running mate) at the nation's helm.

He's into television, televangelism, telemedicine, teleconomics, and tell-a-voter-what-to-think. The devil can't keep up with him. A pipeline to the Lord is what Pat has, a 1-800-Call-Pat dedicated line to the Almighty, and if the Lord could figure out this Internet thing, Pat would be on that, too.

The great religious-right takeover of the public political process was first proclaimed after the 1978 off-year election, when fundamentalist Christians organized at the pastoral level worked to dump five incumbent Democratic senators. Two years later, they drew a bead on one of their own, born-again Jimmy Carter. Carter was weakened by Ted Kennedy (stubborn, costly primary challenge) and the Ayatollah Khomeini (54 US hostages imprisoned for 444 days), and the Moral Majority crowd had its biggest scalp -- the hair that belonged to James Earl Carter. It was Ronald Reagan's lot to deal with his brawny born-again brethren, which he did the way he dealt with everybody else: winking, blinking, fudging, cajoling, getting by with a smile and a shoeshine.

But the religious-right agenda -- banning abortion, smiting liberalism wherever it raised its head, and cossetting conservative Republicans on economic issues wherever that kind of thing could be done by consenting adults in private, like screwing around with the tax code -- never prospered as much as the congressional Republicans and Reagan-Bush promised it would.

The impeachment crisis brought everything to a head for the religious right. Not only were they not going to get to ban abortion, steer tax money from public schools to religious schools, and re-jig foreign policy to their preferences, but they were not going to sever the Clintonian noggin from the Clintonian neck, and parade said head on a platter down Pennsylvania Ave.

The failure to nail Clinton seems to have exhausted and emasculated the religious right. The movement's sternest political theologian, the redoubtable Paul Weyrich, was so despondent after the impeachment debacle that he suggested like-minded souls turn away from the political process and focus instead on separating from the crass, materialistic, society-at-large and withdraw into their own religious communities.

It may turn out that historians point to the House vote impeaching Clinton as the tidemark of religious fundamentalism in the late 20th century, and the Senate's failure to convict as the beginning of its ebb. America has weathered similar religious storms: the Scopes trial, Prohibition, the McCarthy era. Religious fundamentalists make a certain amount of headway, and then they founder, on factional divisions, personality clashes, or some shift in sentiment sparked in the larger population.

The religious right claims about 15 percent of the electorate, in some academic estimates, and while that number may vary, the Christian fundamentalist vote can be magnified in low-turnout elections, such as primaries, caucuses, or off-year contests. But what Weyrich concedes, and Robertson rejects, may be the gradual, eventual, and predictable ebbing of the tidal surge that was first discernable in the Senate races of 1978. If tides did not reverse, after all, we'd all be under water -- or rowing Noah's Ark.