TV plumbs religious right

"Do you want to understand more fully what's going to be operating in this country during your lifetime, what's going to effect who represents you in Washington, what's going to effect everything from what your kids study in school to what taxes you're going to pay to what sexual mores you're going to regard as acceptable? Then you better watch this series."

That's one of Calvin Skaggs' sales pitches to encourage viewers to watch "With God On Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America," an excellent six-hour documentary series he produced for PBS.

The comprehensive series takes an historical look at how Christian conservatives changed from disinterest in -- if not distrust of -- politics to such active involvement that they now wield major influence in the Republican party.

'Smithereens'

During a recent phone conversation, Mr. Skaggs told me that he decided to put the documentary together after "sitting down and looking imaginatively at everything going on in our society, looking at all the pressure points and all the issues. There was a period there when I thought this society was just going to fragment into pieces, just fly apart like some old 'one-hoss shay.' It was incredible the amount of violence in the rhetoric of various interest groups over every issue from art censorship to abortion to gay rights to women's issues to school curricula -- you name it.

"I felt a democracy depends on civil discourse in which people can talk to one another, listen to one another and then come to some sort of compromise that allows all of them to feel they are having an effect on society. These sound like grand cliches, but I believe they are at the root of democracy."

Mr. Skaggs met with a colleague "and we talked for hours about the 'smithereens quality' that was going on in our country. We asked, 'What is at the heart of a lot of these issues and fights?' It was religious values. 'And what group is getting more and more articulate and effective and interested in reshaping this country?' The religious right. It was growing in its sense that its world view and values were not being expressed in this country, and it had to stop that."

Activism studied

So began his research into 40 years of activism on the part of fundamentalists, evangelicals, pentecostals and other Protestants, with occasional help from Catholics. The effort began on the grassroots level with fights over sex education and textbooks in local school districts, but it soon exploded nationwide, first when the Supreme Court outlawed prayer in public school and again when it legalized abortion.

Mr. Skaggs was also led to do the series by a more personal motive. As a Southern Baptist, he knew that "this country is fairly distinctive in the West in being a lot more religiously oriented. Even the atheists in our country are religiously oriented in the sense that we are constantly looking for some ultimate understanding or explanation for why we should do this, that or the other. We're constantly looking for some spiritual basis to our lives, in a way I don't think the people in Britain or France or Germany are. It's distinctively American."

Despite that core to American life, he continued, the media and pundits continue to "analyze decades of politics and changes in our culture without ever talking about this religious rootedness. It's hard to convince [some in the media that] that's the case. You can do a million polls about how many people consider themselves religious or go to church, and it doesn't seem to tell on the media presentation of ourselves to ourselves. And that's what the media do: They present who we are back to ourselves and give us a mirror to look at ourselves in.

"I felt it was time to put a mirror up there to show one group that was religiously rooted and wanted to change things. We have this force -- this religious basis -- that is crucial to how Americans operate. Yet that gets ignored by the media."

(

Next column: More with Calvin Skaggs. "With God On Our Side" debuts on WMHT, channel 17, Sept. 27 at 10 p.m.)

(09-19-96)

[[In-content Ad]]