Religion: Jerry Falwell's Crusade

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PORNOGRAPHY. In Fundamentalist eyes, the press, the movies, and especially TV shows that feature sex and violence are waging a war against religion and traditional family values. The initiator of many of these complaints is Donald Wildmon, 47, of Tupelo, Miss., a clergyman in the liberal United Methodist Church who nonetheless exudes a Fundamentalist spirit in running the National Federation for Decency. In 1982, the group boycotted, with mixed success, television advertisers who sponsored offensive shows. Wildmon also organizes believers in many cities to get the Playboy channel off local cable. Sex on television, says Wildmon, "threatens the very continued existence of a society based on the Judeo-Christian perspective of man."

Wildmon has backed picketing in many towns to get Playboy and Penthouse magazines off the counters of neighborhood stores. Says Topeka Pastor Carl Bush about the local 7-Eleven outlets: "All we're asking is that they put them behind the counter so kids can't get them. But they won't even do that." Next Monday, Falwell and several thousand marchers are expected to participate in a Labor Day protest at the Dallas headquarters of Southland Corp., which owns 7-Eleven.

PUBLIC AND CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. Fundamentalists over the past generation have come to believe that public schools are a major force in establishing secular humanism. The religious right leads in agitating to restore prayer to the classroom (a cause favored by 69% of Americans, according to Gallup) and in seeking to censor school libraries and textbooks. Discussion of abortion in a high school text is the cause of protest in towns like Oak Hills, Ohio. Under attack in Madison, W. Va., and Peoria, Ill., are books of sexual counsel, including Changing Bodies, Changing Lives and A Way of Love, A Way of Life, as well as such popular Judy Blume novels for teenagers as Forever and Deenie. In Buffalo, the Protestant right is allied with conservative Catholics in opposing the so-called Epic program in area grade schools. This parent-and- teacher guidance course is aimed at stemming alcoholism, child abuse and teen pregnancy, but foes say it probes too deeply into the privacy of children and teaches youngsters that there are no absolute rights and wrongs. In one Buffalo suburb, Epic has already been dropped.

In the public view, opposition to the theory of evolution has characterized Fundamentalism since its birth. Today's activists do not ask for a ban on the teaching of evolution, as they did at the Scopes trial, but for "balance." That means equal school time for creationism, which follows a particularly literal reading of Genesis. Not only were Adam and Eve the first two humans, creationists contend, but Bible chronology means the earth was created by God a mere 10,000 to 20,000 years ago. (Most scientists, Evangelicals included, estimate that the earth came into being 4.5 billion years ago.) Balancing laws to require inclusion of these ideas in Arkansas and Louisiana schoolrooms have been thrown out by the courts.