Right to Life

Many who have identified themselves with the new right hold passionately to a belief that abortion, even in the first trimester of pregnancy (when the fetus cannot survive outside of the womb), is tantamount to murder. The so-called Right to Life movement has spawned a fanatic fringe, whose members have bombed abortion clinics and have intimidated, assaulted, and even murdered physicians who perform abortions. However, the mainstream of the movement has relied on legal means to effect social change, with the ultimate object of obtaining a constitutional amendment barring abortion. The Right to Life movement became so powerful a political lobby that the Republican party adopted a stance against abortion as part of its 1992 platform.

Regardless of one’s attitude toward abortion—whether pro life or pro choice—many Americans are alarmed by a trend among particular political candidates and even entire political parties to become identified with single issues—such as abortion, gun control, prayer in schools, gay rights—rather than with an array of issues, let alone a philosophy of government.

Christian Right

The First Amendment to the Constitution specifies that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” Church and state are explicitly separated in the United States; but the government freely invokes the name of God in most of its enterprises. Our currency bears the motto “In God We Trust,” both houses of Congress employ full-time chaplains, and (despite occasional protests) the Pledge of Allegiance most of us grew up reciting at the start of each school day describes the United States as “one nation, under God. “ While many Americans shake their heads over their perception that religious worship has somehow gone out of fashion in America, most opinion polls agree that approximately 96 percent of the population believes in God. A 1993 survey was able to turn up fewer than one million Americans willing to identify themselves as atheists-out of a total U.S. population, according to the 1990 census, of 248,709,873.

The rise of the so-called Christian Right—religiously motivated conservatism-should surprise no one, though it has worried many, who see in overt unions of religious faith and politics a threat to First Amendment freedoms. At present, the most significant political manifestation of the Christian Right is the powerful lobbying group called the Christian Coalition, which was spun off of the unsuccessful 1988 presidential campaign of religious broadcaster Pat Robertson (b. 1930). Based in Washington, D.C., the coalition boasts a membership of 1.6 million and has claimed responsibility for the Republican sweep of the Congress during the midterm elections of 1994. In 1995, the organization spent more than a million dollars mobilizing its “born-again” evangelicals behind the conservative “Contract with America” promulgated by Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. While some people have welcomed what they see as a return of morality to American political life, others see the Christian Right as narrow, coercive, and intolerant.

The Age of Rage

In turn, the Christian Right has viewed liberal America as too tolerant of lifestyles and beliefs that seem alien or offensive to certain religious principles, or that apparently threaten the moral fiber of the nation.

This is hardly a new dialogue. Right and left have been taffy-pulling national life since well before the Revolution. Indeed, Americans may be too accustomed to thinking in terms of right versus left; for another body of belief appears to want little to do with either side. In its mildest form, this group has expressed itself in a third political party, the Libertarians, founded in 1971. Libertarians oppose laws that limit personal behavior (including laws against prostitution, gambling, sexual preference), advocate a free market economy without government regulation or assistance, and support an isolationist foreign policy (including U.S. withdrawal from the United Nations).

But look around and listen. It’s not Libertarian dialogue that you hear. It’s rage. Most of the time, it”s part of the background, the Muzak that marks the tempo of our times: angry slogans on bumper stickers, the endless, staccato of sound bites reeling out from the television tube, the jagged litany that issues from talk-radio DJs, and the remarkable volume of violence that plays across movie screens. Sometimes the rage explodes, front and center.

Waco and Oklahoma City

April 19, 1993, saw the fiery culmination of a long standoff between members of a fundamentalist religious cult called the Branch Davidians and federal officers. Followers of David Koresh (his real name was Vernon Howell) holed up in a fortified compound outside of Waco, Texas, and resisted the intrusion of agents from the U.S. Treasury Department’s Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Unit (ATF). The agents were investigating reports of a stockpile of illegal arms as well as rumors of child abuse in the compound. When ATF officers moved in on the compound on February 28, the cultists opened fire, killing four ATF agents. Koresh was wounded in the exchange, and at least two of his followers were killed. For the next 51 days, the FBI laid siege to the Branch Davidians, until April 19, when the agents commenced an assault with tear gas volleys. The Branch Davidians responded by setting fire to their own compound, a blaze that killed more than 80 cultists, including 24 children. Millions witnessed both the February 28 shoot-out and the April 19 inferno on television.

Millions also saw the bloody aftermath of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Office Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, which resulted in the deaths of 169 persons. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were the two young men indicted in connection with the bombing. The men were associated with the “militia movement,” a phrase describing militant groups organized in several states after the raid in Waco and a 1992 government assault on Randy Weaver, a white supremacist, and his family in Ruby Ridge, Idaho.

The incidents at Waco and Ruby Ridge, together with passage of relatively mild federal gun-control legislation, inspired the formation of these armed cadres. The groups were opposed not only to what they deemed excessive government control of everyday life, but also to what they saw as a United Nations plot to take over the United States in a drive toward “One World Government.” Few Americans could understand how bombing a federal office building—which contained no military installations, no CIA secret headquarters, but only such ordinary offices as the local Social Security unit-could be deemed a blow against tyranny. Among those killed and injured were a number of children at play in the building’s daycare center.