The recently concluded four-day Harvest Crusade in Anaheim accomplished its religious purposes, according to its organizers. It also attracted significant, favorable press coverage. But unnoticed by both participants and observers are some important political consequences that flow from this annual gathering of evangelical Christians.

Overwhelmingly, the crusade draws and produces conservative evangelicals--that is, the "religious right," in the parlance of today's political acrimony. The political profile of such religious believers is well-known. They are almost uniformly pro-life, disapproving of homosexuality, supportive of school voucher programs and prayer in public schools, creationist and suspicious of big activist government.

Thus, in effect, the evangelical Harvest Crusade quite directly yields recruits for the Culture War, people whose religious beliefs incline them decisively to the right on many of the most contentious issues in American society. And it does so in substantial numbers. The gathering in Anaheim attracted 164,000 people over four days, a better turnout than the California Angels had in the entire month of June.

But perhaps more important than the sheer number of people inadvertently drafted for the American \o7 Kulturkampf \f7 as a result of their participation in the crusade is that Christians of this stripe bring an unusual fervor and depth of commitment to their political opinions. For them, conservative political beliefs are a subset of conservative theological beliefs. Political values are derived from religious values.

This is not always the case with liberals. It may be with the religious left, but their political power is small compared with religious conservatives'. The religious left is a largely gentrified and intellectual body, hard pressed to compete with the younger, more numerous and more grass-roots evangelicals typified by the Harvest Crusades. Moreover, the secular left, which is the dominant component of contemporary liberalism, is not energized with the religious themes that animate politically conservative evangelicals. These themes include: a moral absolutism; a missionary impulse that aggressively seeks to persuade and convert others to one's own worldview, and a visceral alarm at what is seen as the nation's apocalyptic decline into social debauchery.