Faith And Politics: The New Crusader

FAITH AND POLITICS

“Praise Jesus!” cried the young souvenir sellers around Jerusalem’s holy places. “Hallelujah!” The boy vendors had recognized a familiar figure—portly Evangelist Billy James Hargis, 44, who this month led his 31st pilgrimage to the Holy Land. With him were 23 members of his anti-Communist Christian Crusade, seeking, said Hargis, “a spiritual blessing and reaffirmation of faith.” But there was a bonus. “Our trips to Israel are not only religious,” Hargis reminded his faithful entourage. “I want you anti-Communists to meet anti-Communists in other parts of the world. Israel is a bastion against Communism.”

The ideological message was as familiar as the pilgrim leader himself. Billy James Hargis has been stumping for the anti-Communist cause ever since 1948, when, as a 23-year-old independent Christian Church pastor, he discovered its vast potential. He has been finding auxiliary causes ever since: the godlessness of the United Nations, the injustice of forced desegregation and, most recently, the immorality of public-school sex education (TIME, July 25)—an issue that may well be responsible for most of the 25,000 new contributors who have joined the crusade in the past three months. All told, Billy James commands 200,000 contributing followers. He spends an annual budget of $2,000,000 and broadcasts his theologically fundamentalist, politically conservative message over some 100 radio stations. Ever expanding his horizons, he has just broken ground for his own new American College in Tulsa, Okla., to teach “God, government and Christian action.”

There are those who question the religious character of Hargis’ endeavors. In 1966, the Internal Revenue Service decided that his Christian Echoes Ministry Inc. (the legal name of the Christian Crusade) did too much lobbying to deserve its tax-exempt status as a “religious and educational” organization. Hargis is appealing the ruling, but meanwhile has given his benefactors an alternative avenue of giving by separately incorporating the Church of the Christian Crusade, which has several thousand members and is headquartered in the Crusade’s modern, flat-topped “cathedral” in Tulsa. So that no one will mistake his intent, he repeatedly tells his followers that “we are a church. We are a religious organization.”

Striped-Pants Pansies. Hargis continued to stress the religious theme throughout the Eleventh Annual National Convention of the Christian Crusade in Tulsa earlier this month. He told the delegates that “conservative politics without a real alliance in Christ is in vain,” and preached that “the hope of the Christian is in the Second Coming of Christ and nothing else, not a political victory, not even a military victory.” But the choice of convention speakers left some doubt about the sincerity of such protestations.

For starters, the keynoter was Alabama’s George C. Wallace, who enthusiastically endorsed “the work of the Christian Crusade against subversive elements.” Retired Major General Edwin A. Walker, a Crusader since 1963, took the rostrum to assert that President Nixon had “appointed revolutionists to Cabinet posts,” and was “soft-soaping and even financing revolution” at home while he went “tripping around like a fairy in Asia.” Another nontheological speaker, retired Army Brigadier General Clyde Watts, charged that “more than 100 professors in Cal Berkeley [the University of California at Berkeley] are hard-core working members of the Communist Party, U.S.A.” Peace in Viet Nam, Watts informed the assembly, was “too precious to entrust to those striped-pants pansies in the State Department.”

So whom could the crusaders trust? Hargis turned once again to the Holy Land to pick a surprising hero—one of the leaders of Israel’s socialist Labor Party. “I wish we had Moshe Dayan leading us in Viet Nam,” he said. “We could finish the war in a few days.”