Idealists in a Hurry

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Watching the World Go By

Idealists in a Hurry
By Ralph Lynn

[Dr. Ralph Lynn is retired as a History professor at Baylor University and is a regular contributor to Christian Ethics Today.]

My favorite definition of revolutionaries fits the Moral Majority-Christian Coalition-Religious Right perfectly: "idealists in a hurry."

The idealists` hurry leads them to use the methods of the world they condemn. The Religious Right`s efforts have failed for this reason-and one more. They have never understood and accepted the realities of the world they seek to transform.

A new book, Blinded by Might: Can the Religious Right Save America?, by a pair of disillusioned, repentant, nostalgic idealist-revolutionaries, Ed Dobson and the more widely known Cal Thomas, tells their story.

Ed Dobson is not to be confused with Dr. James Dobson, the president of Focus on the Family, an even less responsible organization than any ever launched and supported by Jerry Falwell, for whom both Ed Dobson and Cal Thomas once worked.

Ed Dobson, now the pastor of a church in Grand Rapids, is an immigrant from Northern Ireland where, one would think, he might have learned that dogmatic religion and doctrinaire politics make a most dangerous mixture.

On the religious-political hustings, one of Dobson`s best lines is, "God is neither a Democrat or Republican-and he is sure not a Democrat."

Thomas can be astonishingly frank. He observes that, despite the Religious Right`s best efforts for twenty years, "The moral landscape of America has become worse.

Even more astonishing, he admits that in the earlier days of the Christian Right, "It wasn`t big government itself that was evil. Our primary job objection was that we weren`t running it.

Both Cal Thomas and Ed Dobson indulge in memories of the past. Two sentences illustrate Thomas` stance. "The Reagan-Bush landslide in 1980 was the greatest moment of opportunity for conservative Christians in this century. We had been disgraced at the Scopes (evolution) trial; but we were vindicated."

Ed Dobson is similarly disillusioned, repentant, and nostalgic. He harks back to the failure of conservative Christian movements: "The leaders of the temperance movement expected the government to do the work of the church." (He might have pointed out a practical flaw in the work of theWomen`s Christian Temperance Union; they were less interested in temperance than in outright, total prohibition.)

Dobson is sometimes the master of understatement:

"When religion and politics are one and the same, the situation tends toward intolerance."

All this reveals the past. What do Dobson and Thomas propose now that they have renounced the past?

Not surprisingly, they have difficulty in stating clearly the new strategies and tactics they favor.

Thomas resorts to cryptic rhetoric: they are not quitting the battle but planning to "use better weapons, superior battle plans, and a far better Commander-in-Chief than any candidate for high political office."

Dobson says that "he can do nothing more nor less than to preach the gospel and love the people."

These prescriptions appear to offer little but nostalgia for "the old time religion" which itself had a serious flaw. In hindsight, it seems that even the old time religious leaders should have understood that the "converted" would be unlikely to seek to apply the social teachings of the gospel in worldly affairs unless they were taught to do so, encouraged to do so, and patiently led to do so.

Unfortunately, on the current religious scene, Ed Dobson and Cal Thomas are not alone in being sadly oblivious to this flaw.

God`s word to the prophet Isaiah comes to mind, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?" to fix the flaw..