Born-again agenda The peak of political power Cover Story 12/23/02
Evangelical Christians have long approached politics with a decidedly conflicted strategy of embrace and retreat. In big-time politics they saw a dirty enterprise that required them to consort with irreligious and sometimes wicked people. But they also believed that their values and way of life were under attack by a larger secular society. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan gave them hope, and in 1988, one of their own, Pat Robertson, made a bid for the White House. Still, when George W. Bush said during the 2000 campaign that his most admired philosopher was Jesus Christ, evangelicals knew that their prayers had been answered in a whole new way.
So, in an election that came down to a mere 537 votes in Florida, 15 million evangelical Christians went to the polls, and more than 80 percent of them voted for Bush. They were crucial to his victory, and the same calculus will apply as the president seeks re-election in 2004.
Beginning with the formation of Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority in 1979, the religious right has been able to claim many victories at the ballot box. After Falwell disbanded the Moral Majority in 1989, Robertson formed the Christian Coalition. Over time, evangelical ambivalence about mixing the sacred and the secular has dissipated, though not disappeared. "Politics is not dirty," says Roberta Combs, president of the Christian Coalition. "Politics is everyday life. It can't be dirty when it comes to laws that affect the family."
Swing vote. The evangelical movement is firmly entrenched in the nation's political life, lobbying and leveraging like any of the hundreds of other pressure groups in Washington out to advance their causes and promote their issues. The Christian Coalition's Web site is a beehive of political advocacy, and not just on traditional issues like abortion and school prayer. Along with a ban on "partial- birth" abortion, Combs says, the confirmation of conservative judges will top her agenda in the next session of Congress. The coalition worked doggedly on behalf of GOP candidates during the last election and might well take credit for swinging the Senate. Democratic losses in Missouri and Georgia were attributed to heavy turnout among evangelicals (though a hard push in the Louisiana runoff this month failed to oust Sen. Mary Landrieu, who favors abortion rights).
Georgia was especially bitter medicine for the Democrats, who lost an incumbent U.S. senator and a sitting governor. And they do not have to look far to see who beat them. The current chairman of the Georgia Republican Party is Ralph Reed, the former executive director of the Christian Coalition, whose central strategy was outreach to evangelicals. "We found . . . that the main issues that were on people's minds were the economy and jobs, national security and winning the war on terrorism, healthcare . . . and, finally, stronger families and values," Reed said after the election.
"The Republican Party can't live without the religious right," says Darryl Hart, a professor of church history at Westminster Theological Seminary in Escondido, Calif., and author of the book That Old-Time Religion in Modern America. "They are to the Republican Party what black voters are to the Democratic Party."
But there remains widespread concern among some evangelicals that politics, with its need for compromise, can't serve those who believe as a moral absolute that abortion must be outlawed and stem-cell research halted.
Sue Hulett, chair of the political science department at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., says that sense of betrayal could come back to haunt the GOP. "Some Christians feel like they have been burned by the political participation," says Hulett, author of Christianity and Modern Politics. "The irony is that having one of their own in office might actually reduce their options. If they don't get what they want from Bush, it's not like they can go to the Democrats and say, 'Do this for us.' " – Terence Samuel
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