Jerry Falwell spokes at the Southern Baptist convention in Salt Lake City on Wednesday.

BY JOHN HEILPRIN
THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE
   
    Republicans across the nation will be ``major-league losers'' if religious conservatives are shut out of the party, warned the Rev. Jerry Falwell, leader of the now-defunct Moral Majority.
    Falwell, who was in Salt Lake City for the Southern Baptist Convention, also took aim at the tobacco industry. He said the Southern cash crop is addictive and he favors a cigarette-tax increase to pay for health care -- but only if alcohol taxes go up too.
    On the GOP, he was most emphatic.
    ``I see the Republican Party at a crossroads. They will either continue to be a winning party with the religious right heavily involved, or they will drive the religious conservatives right from their ranks and return to their former ranks of major-league losers,'' he said in an interview this week.
    The 64-year-old Falwell, pastor of the Thomas Road Baptist Church in his hometown of Lynchburg, Va., and chancellor of Liberty University, helped launch the Christian right movement in the 1980s.

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    After virtually disappearing from the national stage this decade, he has been attempting a comeback.
    Falwell said there is ``some tension'' between Republicans and religious conservatives, and cited as an example last week's speech by former President Ford.
    In a Washington speech, Ford accused GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich of excessive partisanship and predicted Republicans will not recapture the White House in 2000 unless they free themselves from the embrace of the ``extreme right.''
    ``We should not permit one element to dictate policies within our party,'' Ford said. ``If we do, the extreme right will doom our party to election defeat.''
    But Falwell said Republicans were able to take over Congress in the 1990s only after former GOP President Reagan built up party support from religious conservatives.
    ``Republicans had better give many thoughts to a divorce,'' Falwell said. ``I don't think we're trying to elect a Sunday school teacher . . . [But] the Republican candidate must be a social conservative if he or she wants to win the general election.''
    Charles Dunn, a Clemson University professor specializing in American politics and religion, said Falwell does not understand the dynamics of a two-party system.
    And the friction between Ford, of Michigan, and Gingrich, of Georgia, reflects a ``dramatic shift in gravity in the Republican Party from the Midwest to the South,'' Dunn said.
    ``For a major party to succeed in America, it must have a broad base of appeal. [Falwell] makes a point that the [Republican] party can't afford to drive out the religious conservatives. But on the other hand, the religious conservatives can't afford to control the party,'' Dunn said.
    ``Compromise is the oil of success in American politics, and that's what he's overlooking,'' Dunn added. ``Reagan was able to lubricate the joints between the varieties of conservatives to create a broad base. The problem now is you have groups trying to dominate the party to the exclusion of other groups.''
    On tobacco, Falwell said he ``would like to see concurrently equal heat put on the liquor industry, certainly beginning with a user tax. If tobacco is addictive, and it is, then so is alcohol.''
    President Clinton has been trying to push Sen. John McCain's tobacco bill despite much opposition.
    The Arizona Republican's bill would charge tobacco companies $516 billion over 25 years and raise cigarette taxes by $1.10 a pack. It also would allow the Food and Drug Administration to regulate nicotine.
    ``Unless we're going to come down equally hard on the liquor industry,'' Falwell said, ``we're playing the hypocrite to beat up on the tobacco industry because they're more vulnerable.''
   
   

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