Straight talk goes to Liberty University

By JOHN HALL
MEDIA GENERAL NEWS SERVICE
WASHINGTON -- When Sen. John McCain goes to Lynchburg, Va., to make a commencement address this weekend, it will be an overture not just to the followers of the Rev. Jerry Falwell but to the larger religious superstructure, increasingly Southern-based and fundamentalist, that is growing in influence on the Republican Party.
President Bush's two narrow presidential victories cemented Republican religious ties. While it is conceivable that an independent and popular contender like McCain's "Straight Talk Express" can win the nomination and the general election in a secular campaign, he apparently has decided it would be easier to make a run if he could start with a clean slate on the religious right.
Some of McCain's moderate supporters don't like the move at all. They see it as "kissing the ring" of a sworn political enemy. He had denounced Falwell in the 2000 primaries as one of the "agents of intolerance" who had helped sink his bid for the Republican nomination against Bush. This made him a hero to many for his willingness to stand up to bigotry and intolerance.
Burying the hatchet
McCain's commencement speech Saturday at Liberty University is a new direction for McCain, although the senator is trying to minimize its importance. He contends Falwell came to him seeking to bury the hatchet, and he saw no reason to carry a grudge into the campaign. McCain emphasized that he and Falwell still have many real differences over policy.
Churchgoers, particularly in the fast growing fundamentalist denominations of the South, have been the foot soldiers of the Republican Party for decades.
Kevin Phillips in 1966 included the South's vibrant and growing fundamental religious groups, led by the Southern Baptist Convention, in his "Emerging Republican Majority," the landmark study that prophesied the Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan decades of Republican rule. But now Phillips is looking at the same religious coalition and seeing a potential nightmare.
His new book, "American Theocracy," paints a horror story of where this is now leading with boundary lines being erased by the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2004 between political and clerical activities and increased fringe religious influence on public policy in matters such as the Terry Schiavo case.
The picture Phillips draws is of a largely secular Democratic Party whose members predominantly worry that political leaders rely too much on religion when making decisions. The Republican Party is almost the mirror opposite, its members worrying mostly that politicians don't use religion sufficiently to make decisions and that religious leaders don't have enough influence.
Religious mission
Phillips suggested that Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq as a religious mission. What's more, he devotes an entire section to the question of whether the nation may be on the verge of an established state religion, claiming the Bush administration and Republican partnership with fundamentalist Christianity is as close as the nation has come.
Bush has enmeshed his party in a leadership role with the religious right on human values issues ranging from a patient's right to die to stem cell research.
McCain has straddled the fence on many, particularly those involving gay marriage, by claiming they are states' rights matters.
Now, this Saturday, he presumably will begin smoothing over his differences with Falwell, and by implication Pat Robertson and all the other charismatic figures on the religious right that McCain couldn't stand in his run for the presidency eight years ago.
He didn't hold back against them in 2000, modeling himself after the late Sen. Barry Goldwater, a fellow Arizonan.
Goldwater once was asked to respond to Falwell's remark that "every good Christian should be concerned" about Sandra Day O'Connor's nomination to the Supreme Court.
Goldwater's response: "Every good Christian ought to kick Falwell right in the ass."
Goldwater is gone and McCain is behaving like one of those candidates for all the people.
You may have to look in some other town but Lynchburg for Straight Talkin' this weekend.
John Hall is the senior Washington correspondent of Media General News Service. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.