(Kepel, 1994: 107). A poll in 1969 revealed that there were some 1,300 evangelical
Christian radio and television stations, with an audience of about 130 million.
Between 1965 and 1983 enrolment in evangelical schools increased sixfold, and
about 100,000 fundamentalist children were taught at home. The enemy were
‘secular humanists’ who, fundamentalists alleged, sought to reduce the world to
slavery (Armstrong, 2001: 267, 269, 272).
In Kepel’s view, Reagan was elected in 1980 largely because he captured the
votes of most of the evangelical and fundamentalist (using the term somewhat
narrowly) electors who followed the advice of politico-religious bodies like the
Moral Majority. Just like the Islamic militants, the young American fundamentalists
have had higher education (usually studying the applied sciences), and they have
come from the large cities in the northern and southern states (Kepel, 1994: 8, 137).
Boston argues in his critique of Pat Robertson that Robertson’s political unit,
the Christian Coalition (launched in 1989), has a budget of $25 million with 1.7
million members and 1,600 local affiliates in all 50 states (Boston, 1996: 16).
Robertson owns the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) and, in his view, only
Christians and Jews are qualified to run government. Not surprisingly, he and his
movement deny the separation of church and state. His support for Israel is premised
on the assumption that he believes that Zionism in Israel will unwittingly contribute
to the conversion of Jews to Christianity. In the 1980s he was a champion of South
Africa’s system of apartheid. The wealth of CBN can be seen from the fact that the
CBN can clear between $75 and $97 million tax-free profit, and the political impact
of his Christian Coalition is evident in Boston’s contention that it holds the country’s
majority party, that is the Republicans, in a headlock (Boston, 1996: 132, 166, 183,
238).
Predictably, the Christian Coalition, like the Moral Majority before it, is also
virulently anti-feminist in character (Wilcox, 1996: 9), and Coalition supporters
follow the historic pattern of religious fundamentalists of keeping themselves apart
from an impure world and (in their case) doctrinally impure Christians. Wilcox
estimates that about 10–15 per cent of the public support the religious right and
there may be as many as four million members of the Christian Right and possibly
200,000 activists in politics (1996: 36, 71). The movement has always used the best
technology available. In general, the Christian Right opposes any notion of
compromise, and they tend to be intolerant of those they disagree with. They do
not accept the civil liberties of liberals, although it is true that the more members
of the religious right participate in conventional politics, the more reconciled to
democracy they become (Wilcox, 1996: 107–8, 111). For many, imposing
Christianity on non-believers increases the odds that the souls of these hapless
infidels will spend eternity in heaven. Fringe elements (in an interesting counterpart
to Muslims who believe in a punitive version of the shariah) favour Mosiac law
that would involve stoning sinners (Wilcox, 1996: 125).
Some fundamentalists showed their contempt for US law by blockading abortion
clinics and, in the words of Randall Terry, they saw themselves as working for a
nation ‘not floating in an uncertain sea of humanism, but a country whose unmoving
bedrock is Higher laws’ (Armstrong, 2001: 360). Like fundamentalism elsewhere,
there is a reaction against modernism, which Christian fundamentalists fear will
inevitably erode traditional values. As Wilcox points out, there is a small but390 Part 3 Contemporary ideologies