Counsel

World News Update

The Religious Right has stalled in its tracks. Its voice now is soft and garbled. Paul Weyrich gives his reasons why this has happened: the agenda of the religious right was in many ways trivial; its leadership, who should know better, acted if they believed that the ultimate solutions were political and as if they wanted a political savior; it never governed, it let its secular allies do it for them; it did not understand the entrenched interests in Washington, D.C.; its leadership gave away its moral high ground by permitting, without strong opposition, the appointment of men like Jim Baker and Howard Baker to the Reagan administration; its leadership continued to give away its credibility by endorsing candidates who did not agree with them and by failing to demand specific standards of performance from those they helped to elect; when tough negotiations were required with the opposition, the religious right lacked the strength to sustain a fight; it abandoned the training of its troops after 1982; it became so Washington-focused that it did too little to recruit and train people for local elections; it lacked internal communications and harmony; it never agreed on objectives for the future. (World, Vol. 2, No. 40, March 28, 1988.) Furthermore, the Religious Right stalled because it was not explicitly nor consistently Biblical/ Christian.