Exploring undiscovered territory

Many TV documentaries probe portions of history that have been examined many times before: the Holocaust, the Civil War, the explosion of the Hindenburg, Vietnam. It's rare for a documentary to explore virgin territory, but that's exactly what Calvin Skaggs has done in "With God On Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America."

The six-hour series airs on PBS this month. Recently, I talked with Mr. Skaggs, the executive producer, about his work. It is a massive effort that covers such major issues of the last four decades as Protestant suspicion of John F. Kennedy, a Catholic running for president; the undermining effects of Vietnam and Watergate; the born-again declaration of candidate Jimmy Carter; the rise of the gay rights and feminist movements; the battle over AIDS funding; the controversial tactics of Operation Rescue; and the prominence of such religious leaders as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.

The series also touches briefly on Catholic involvement in the political activism of religious people. "Earlier in this century," Mr. Skaggs noted, "the distance between Catholics and Protestants was vast. The distance now between conservative Protestants and conservative Roman Catholics isn't very broad."

Surprises

During his research for the series, Mr. Skaggs was surprised to find "how consistent the debate has been. The rhetoric of 1996 isn't very different from the rhetoric of 1962 when the prayer in public schools decision was handed down by the Supreme Court. It's just amazing how in the archival footage of that period, people were saying exactly the same thing they are saying in 1996. Certain issues have been crucial to conservative Christians for 40 years, such as prayer in the schools and sex education."

While the Christian right has failed to restore prayer to public schools or to outlaw abortion, two of its major issues, Mr. Skaggs points out how powerful the movement has become.

"The issues that brought them back into active engagement with the culture, like school prayer, take a long time to change. Those issues require an enormous amount of effort," he explained. But the religious right is "not impotent at all. In presidential electoral politics, Bush got 80-some percent of the evangelical vote, and that pushed him into office.

"In 1984, there were eight or nine million Southerners who changed registration from Democrat to Republican. That changed the political alignment in the South. The result is that we have a Republican Congress for the first time in a long time. [The religious right has] ever-increasing power on Congress and the state legislatures."

Own values

As a result of spending three years putting the documentary together, Mr. Skaggs, who is a Southern Baptist, now has what he calls "a more complicated view of the country. I haven't changed my own values religiously or culturally or politically; but they have a broader context. My whole understanding of how this country works is much more complicated than it was."

He also changed his mind about many prominent people in the Christian right. "There are certain people in the religious right that we got to know who I think are demagogic and divisive, and I have negative reactions to them," he admitted. "There are others that I have a great deal more respect for than when I went to interview them. This is especially true of grassroots people. They are not as simple as the press often portrays them. They are interesting and complicated people. I got a new respect for the complexity of the American mind."

Urging people to tune in to "With God On Our Side," Mr. Skaggs said that "if you're a conservative Christian, you're going to see a mirror that you've never seen before. If you're not, you're going to see people that are often caricatured, and it's time you understood them. You better try to find out what motivates the Christian right and what sort of people make up this big, amorphous term."

("With God On Our Side" debuts on WMHT, channel 17, Sept. 27 at 10 p.m.)

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