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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
Bush's mastermind Karl Rove is going all-out to mobilize an army of Christian soldiers to carry the president to the Promised Land in November. But will mainstream churches rebel?
Jul 6, 2004 | Winning the souls, or at least the votes, of conservative evangelical Christians is central to the Republican Party strategy under President Bush. But when Republican congressional leaders last month tried to push through the House Ways and Means Committee a top priority for evangelical Christians -- an easing of Internal Revenue Service rules barring preachers from using their tax-exempt pulpits to endorse political candidates -- it suffered a surprising setback. Although House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., and other prominent Republicans backed the tax law change, there was one problem: The committee chairman wasn't on board.
Rep. Bill Thomas, the cantankerous California Republican who chairs the tax-writing panel, stunned the House leadership by derailing its attempt to attach the controversial change in the tax law to an unrelated bill, the Hill newspaper reported. It's not clear whether Thomas objected to the substance of the provision, which opponents have decried as a violation of church-state separation, or whether he was just being ornery. His spokeswoman said she didn't know the details, and Thomas could not be reached for comment. But for White House political chief Karl Rove, who has staked victory in President Bush's campaign on turning out evangelical voters in November, the incident underscored the precarious nature of his strategy.
With Democrats revved up to defeat Bush, independents leaning toward Democrat John Kerry, moderate Republicans turning away from the party and many gay Republicans having left it altogether, it's now more important than ever for the White House to get its conservative evangelical voter base to the polls. And if Republicans can't change the law preventing churches from devoting tax-exempt resources to partisan politics, the Bush-Cheney reelection effort appears ready to stretch the rules as far as possible. The campaign recently asked religious volunteers across the country to hand over their churches' directories for the Bush-Cheney database and to distribute pro-Bush "voter guides," prompting an outcry from religious leaders. Even Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's ethics and religious liberty commission and a prominent Bush supporter, recoiled at the idea of churches becoming directly involved in a political campaign. "I am appalled," Land said in a statement. "I suspect that this will rub a lot of pastors' fur the wrong way ... It's one thing for a church member motivated by exhortations to exercise his Christian citizenship to go out and decide to work on the Bush campaign or the Kerry campaign. It's another, and totally inappropriate for a political campaign, to ask workers who may be church members to provide church member information through ... directories."
The Rev. Welton Gaddy, president of the liberal Interfaith Alliance, also condemned the Bush campaign's blurring of religion and politics. "I understand the strategy. Given the closeness of the divide in the nation, each campaign is looking for every advantage possible. And there really is no more powerful motivator than that of religious passion," he said. "So if you can capture the passion of a religious community and channel that into allegiance for your candidate, you've made great inroads on getting new voters.
"But there's a difference in what's best for a campaign and what's best for religion in this nation," Gaddy added. "I'm frankly concerned that an administration that has talked so eloquently about the importance of houses of worship would be willing to intrude on the sanctity of houses of worship and compromise them by seeking to turn them into political organizations."
After the 2000 election, Rove lamented in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington that only 15 million evangelical voters had gone to the polls -- 4 million fewer than expected. This disappointing turnout helped explain the close election, Rove said. Looking ahead, he vowed to pursue policies that would motivate evangelicals in 2004 -- specifically, the white conservative Protestants who overwhelmingly support Bush.
Yet it's unclear whether those mythical 4 million stay-at-home evangelical voters from 2000 -- assuming they can be motivated to go to the polls in sufficient numbers in November -- will make the difference that Rove believes. University of Akron political scientist John Green, an expert on the religious right, says it's possible those people didn't vote in 2000 because they lived in states like Texas and Mississippi, where pro-Bush outcomes were never in doubt. Rove's challenge now, Green says, is to find the right set of issues to get evangelicals in battleground states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia and Florida to the polls. "The White House is relying more and more on evangelicals because the election is looking really close," Green said. "But finding and motivating evangelical voters is not as easy as you might expect."
Other efforts outside the campaign are targeting young evangelicals. Voter-turnout programs such as Vote Loud and Redeem the Vote hope to do for the Republican Party what the MTV-sponsored Rock the Vote project did for Democrats in 1992. According to an account in the Guardian, Bush received an indirect endorsement last month at a Christian rock festival from actor Stephen Baldwin, the younger brother of Alec. "I don't care if I ever shoot a movie again," Baldwin said from the stage of the Creation Festival in western Pennsylvania, "because the day I accepted Jesus into my life I was blessed." Baldwin, the festival's keynote speaker, continued: "Now, I don't want to tell you who you should vote for in November. But make sure it's for the one who has the most faith. Now, more than ever, we need someone in the White House who is being led by God."
The White House's strategy for winning the votes of evangelicals has several components. It includes the faith-based initiative to spread public money to religious charities. And it includes controversial moves such as the recess judicial appointment of a fundamentalist Roman Catholic, William Pryor, to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals after Democrats had blocked his nomination. Pryor is the former Alabama attorney general and strongly antiabortion. (This conflict generated the bizarre spectacle of conservative Protestant Republicans attacking liberal Catholic Democrats on the Judiciary Committee for somehow discriminating against Pryor because he's Catholic.) But the centerpiece of the Republican strategy is the proposed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.
