Right Hand of God

The numbers can be interpreted however you see fit. You can believe 42 percent of all Americans consider themselves to be born again, figures cited by one Gallup Poll, or you can believe a majority in this country support a woman's right to choose whether to have an abortion. You can believe the re-election of George W. Bush was because of a swell of God-fearing Christians voting their morality, or you can believe John Kerry lost simply because he was an amorphous bore without a clear message. One thing is certain, however: Not since the birth of the Moral Majority in 1979 and the election of Ronald Reagan a year later has there been so much open talk of Christianity seeping into the government. The headline of a recent Time magazine story sums up the discussion: "What does Bush owe the Religious Right?" As far as they're concerned, everything, which means he had better get to work appointing judges who will outlaw abortions and forever criminalize same-sex marriage. His election, the Religious Right believes, staved off the "attempt to secularize our society," as Shackelford puts it. "But our liberties come from God, and nobody can take them away from us."

Once, a long time ago, Ford felt alone in his beliefs. He was born 61 years ago in El Paso, the son of parents who were leaders in their church, Trinity Methodist. But he did not truly find religion, or it did not find him, till years later, in the mid-1960s, just after Ford graduated from the University of Texas at Austin and moved to Dallas to work in the insurance business. He had been active in Campus Crusade for Christ, founded in 1951 by then-theological student Bill Bright and funded with millions provided by Dallas oilman Nelson Bunker Hunt, but had fallen off the wagon after moving to Dallas in 1966. Just how, Ford doesn't say.

"I had actually grown up thinking the way that you became a Christian was that you worked hard, and if your good deeds outweighed your bad deeds and you believed in Jesus, et cetera, that you were a Christian," he says. "But after I got to Dallas and started a career, I realized that I wasn't such a good guy after all. I just realized, frankly, I didn't think I was living the life I ought to be living, and I was going to get rid of all of it 'cause I didn't want to be a hypocrite...I'm not gonna say that I have lived a perfect life or anywhere near that since then, but I have been trying as an active appreciation to live it."

In 1967 Ford married, and for the next decade he sold insurance and then real estate, but by the mid-1970s, the real estate boom faltered. His source of income dried up, and Ford sought solace in religion. Perhaps bad business was a sign he was meant to do something else--just what, though, he had no idea. So he sought the counsel of Bill Bright, whose Campus Crusade for Christ by then had become a national phenomenon--proof of which came in 1972, when more than 80,000 faithful folks poured into a soggy Cotton Bowl for EXPLO '72, a five-days-and-five-nights music-and-prayer event often referred to as "Religious Woodstock." Ford was in charge of arranging security and cleanup for the event--"and there wasn't anything to clean up, because everybody threw their trash out as they filed out," Ford recalls.

Three years later, with the real estate biz busting all around him, Ford went to Bright's headquarters in California and sought a private meeting. Ford needed guidance; he had his faith, his wife, his kids and enough money stashed away from selling real estate, but he didn't know what he was going to do with his life. Back then, Christians who believed their beloved country was being led astray by heathen Democrats considered themselves in the minority. In the mid-1970s, Ford likes to say, "a dozen Christians getting together was a giant rally."

"I said, 'Dr. Bright, it seems to me the government has a major role to play in this upheaval we're going through,'" Ford recalls. "It sounds like a very elementary statement there, but that's all the mileage I had at the time. I was talking about the economy, because we'd had a boom and then we had a bust, and I realized some of the problems we'd had, as far as inflation and overspending and things, the government plays a major role there, too."