Religion: Jerry Falwell's Crusade

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Alarm over the availability of sex education, the spread of drugs, the lack of discipline and the prevalence of classroom violence, as well as a yearning for school prayer and an interest in creationist dogma, has resulted in a proliferation of Protestant or Christian day schools over the past two decades. The large majority of these estimated 10,000 schools are run by Fundamentalists. One school founder, Baptist Pastor Everett Sileven, became a Fundamentalist folk hero for spending 155 days in jail rather than allowing the state of Nebraska to license teachers in his religious day school. The dispute was ended last year when the state permitted church schools to hire teachers without state certification.

FEMINISM. To Fundamentalists, statements by St. Paul like "the husband is the head of the wife" (Ephesians 5: 23) are eternal truths, not timebound opinions, and a woman's central task is child rearing. Hyles-Anderson College, a Fundamentalist establishment near Hammond, Ind., is introducing a bachelor's degree in marriage and motherhood. Inevitably this outlook pits the religious right against the feminist movement and the Equal Rights Amendment. Says Bill Palmer, director of a small Christian academy outside Charlottesville, Va., who moved his family into a mobile home so that his wife could quit outside work: "I am not against equality or equal pay, but God did mean for the woman to be mother and keeper of the home. That doesn't mean she can't be the head of a corporation, but that does make it very difficult."

Tim LaHaye's wife Beverly, 56, operates Concerned Women for America. This group has replaced the 50,000-member Eagle Forum, run by Illinois Roman Catholic Phyllis Schlafly, at the top of the counterfeminist women's movement. Begun in 1979, Concerned Women now boasts 500,000 members, more than the combined following of the National Organization for Women, the National Women's Political Caucus and the League of Women Voters. Its local leaders run prayer cells and bombard legislators with letters on abortion, school prayer and gay rights.

FOREIGN POLICY. In addition to domestic issues, Fundamentalists are preoccupied with foreign affairs. Much of their interest stems from a particular brand of theology known as dispensationalism. This school, which takes its name from analysis of the various eras ("dispensations") in sacred history, is distinct for its highly literal interpretation of certain prophetic and apocalyptic passages in the Bible. To dispensationalists, specific events cited in the Bible presage the Second Coming of Christ.

The clearest example of such thinking involves the Middle East. Early in the 19th century, dispensationalists began proclaiming that a dramatic sign of an imminent Second Coming would occur when the Jews returned to re-establish Israel. Since 1948, Fundamentalists have backed Israeli government policy virtually without question. Fundamentalists also fervently support Israel's sovereignty over the West Bank, because they consider God's granting of the Holy Land to the biblical patriarchs (Genesis 15: 18-20) to be irrevocable. Falwell strongly opposes anti-Semitism, a prejudice that once warped some U.S. Fundamentalists. In his denunciations of the P.L.O., he repeatedly quotes God's covenant with Abraham: "I will bless those who bless you, and him who curses you I will curse" (Genesis 12: 3).