[NYTr] Religious Right Meltdown? More Fiction than Fact

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Media Transparency - Dec 11, 2007
http://www.mediatransparency.com/story.php?storyID=222

Religious right meltdown? More fiction than fact

by Bill Berkowitz

Despite rumblings in the traditional press about a religious right
'crackup,' key conservative Christian organizations are bringing in
'more money than ever' says Americans United for Separation of Church
and State

Over the past two-plus decades it has become fashionable for the
traditional press to periodically pen the Religious Right's obituary.
Or, if not an outright death notice, articles will appear that detail
real, or perceived, rifts within the Religious Right -- Pat Robertson's
endorsement of Rudy Giuliani for example -- plus periodic
contentiousness between the Religious Right and other elements of the
Republican Party. The traditional media often conclude that the
Religious Right's days are numbered.

While there are certainly differences within the leadership of the
Religious Right over which candidate to support, it would be foolhardy
to consider these differences irreconcilable.

Commenting on the rift within the Religious Right, NewsMax's Tom
Squitieri recently wrote that Robertson's endorsement "created a schism
among evangelical Republicans -- one that may cost the GOP the White
House next year." Squitieri pointed out that a major backlash has been
under way in the evangelical community over the endorsement."

People for the America Way's RightWingWatch recently picked up on the
in-fighting within the Party as a whole theme, pointing to a piece
"suggesting that moderate Republicans are growing increasingly weary of
the stranglehold the Religious Right has had on the Republican Party
for the last several years and that efforts by presidential candidates
to pander to the likes of James Dobson, Tony Perkins, and Pat Robertson
are only alienating them further."

Scott Reed, who managed Republican Bob Dole's 1996 presidential
campaign, told the Wall Street Journal's John Harwood that there's "a
sense that the leadership of the Republican Party is too beholden to a
small group of self-appointed social conservative leaders."

As crunch time approaches for the GOP's presidential candidates, the
jury is still out on which candidate the majority of so-called values
voters will support. Some political observers have argued that since
the leadership of the Religious Right had been at first reticent about
supporting any of the candidates and more recently have been all over
the map with their endorsements, the conservative evangelical vote will
be divided and diluted, which could lead to a large number of
disillusioned stay-at-homes come November of next year.

In a recent interview with The Denver Post's PoliticsWest, Tom Minnery,
the senior vice president of government and public policy for Focus on
the Family and Focus on the Family Action, the organization's political
arm, disputed this notion and maintained that it was ridiculous to be
talking about any kind of so-called crackup within the Religious Right.

Minnery told PoliticsWest that such articles as David Kirkpatrick's
"The Evangelical Crackup," which appeared in the October 28 edition of
the New York Times Magazine was "typical of what we see during election
cycles."

Minnery pointed out that after Pat Robertson failed in his bid for the
Republican Party's presidential nomination in 1988, "There were wide
predictions of a crackup; of the Moral Majority back then, of
evangelicals. Then, of course, the Christian Coalition immediately rose
up and became very strong. When that organization faded, there were
another spate of stories about the crackup of evangelical Christians as
an influence in the public square."

"What did we see then? Well, as recently as 2004, we saw 11 out of 11
states that had state marriage amendments on the ballot, passed them
all by landslide proportions, except for liberal Oregon, which passed
it with a 57 percent majority. And the exit polls in the 2004 election
astonished a number of reporters when the single issue that brought
most of them to the polls - as elucidated in the exit polls - was
social, moral issues, such as marriage, such as the decline of our
culture. And that astonished reporters."

"So, obviously, there was a big stick swung by social conservatives in
the 2004 election. The fact that George Bush won in Ohio, that very key
state, because a lot of people turned out for the marriage amendment in
that particular state, was deemed to be significant. Now, we're into
another cycle and the normal predictions of the crackup of
evangelicalism is occurring. One of the phenomenon that gives rise to
that, of course, is the fact that there is no single conservative
candidate who has enough marbles for everybody in the conservative
movement to want to play with. Everybody's lacking in something.
Partially, this is just the way it is. People will have to figure it
out, who to support. So there's some unsettledness. But I'd hardly call
that a crack-up."

Over the past several weeks, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani
received the endorsement of Pat Robertson, while other candidates have
received significant support from other evangelical leaders. Former
Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, seen by some as the one fundamentalist
Christian in the field that also has a streak of economic populism, has
received endorsements from such evangelical leaders as Janet Folger,
president of Faith2Action (website), Rick Scarborough, founder and
president of Vision America (website), the Rev. Don Wildmon, founder of
the American Family Association, and Tim and Beverly LaHaye, longtime
influential conservative activists: He is the co-author of the wildly
popular "Left Behind" series of apocalyptic novels, and she is the
founder of Concerned Women of America.

At the same time Huckabee was stitching together support from Christian
leaders, a Robert Novak column entitled "The False Conservative,"
maintained that while "Huckabee is campaigning as a conservative ...
serious Republicans know that he is a high-tax, protectionist,
big-government advocate of a strong hand in the Oval Office directing
the lives of Americans."

Despite the fact that Dr. James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the
Family, has stated unequivocally that he would not support a Giuliani
candidacy, Tom Minnery doesn't see the Constitution Party, a far-right
entity, as being capable of siphoning off a significant number of
evangelical votes. Minnery believes that should Giuliani become the
nominee, "a lot of people on our side would probably swallow hard and
vote for the more conservative of the two major party candidates."

Religious Right funding increases, says watchdog group

One measure of the health of the Religious Right is the amount of money
flowing into their coffers. A mid-October press release from Americans
United for Separation of Church and State pointed out that several
major organizations are raising "more money than ever."

An analysis of IRS filings by Americans United found that:

    * James Dobson's Focus on the Family took in $142.2 million in
2006, a $4.4 million increase over the previous year. (In addition,
Dobson's Focus on the Family Action took in $14.6 million in 2006.)
    * Tony Perkins' Family Research Council took in $10.3 million in
2006, an increase of over $900,000 over the previous year. (FRC Action,
an affiliated group, took in $1.1 million in 2006.)
    * Don Wildmon's American Family Association took in $16.9 million
in 2006.
    * Alan Sears' Alliance Defense Fund took in $26.1 million in 2006,
an increase of $4.1 million over last year.
    * TV preacher Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network took
in $236.3 million in 2005, a $49.8 million increase over the previous
year.

According to the Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans
United, "The top Religious Right groups are taking in huge amounts of
money. They are also quietly organizing churches into a partisan
political machine. Now they just have to find a presidential candidate
who will carry out their agenda."

"They know they are on the verge of full control over the Supreme
Court," Lynn added, "and one more appointment could lead to a high
court reversal on church-state separation, reproductive rights and gay
rights."

Is the religious right moving 'beyond mere identity politics' and
toward 'political compromise'?

Writing in the November 27 edition of the Los Angeles Times, Dan
Gilgoff, editor of Beliefnet's God-o-meter and the author of "The Jesus
Machine: How James Dobson, Focus on the Family, and Evangelical America
Are Winning the Culture War," suggested that Robertson's endorsement
and the subsequent dustup is "a sure sign that many evangelical leaders
have moved beyond mere identity politics and toward an overdue openness
to compromise in a political system that's built on it."

One of the most troubling tendencies of the Christian right has been
its habit of translating the black-and-white literalism of its theology
to the political realm. Under this model, Democrats and moderate
Republicans are God's sworn enemies and must be opposed at every turn.
Rather than compromise, the Christian right has attempted to stage a
conservative Republican "takeover" of Washington, with considerable
electoral success during the Bush years but with poisonous consequences
for politics and policy.

The willingness of a powerful figure such as Robertson to work with a
former enemy such as Giuliani, by contrast, is evidence of the
Christian right's ideological demilitarization. Add it to other recent
evangelical partnerships -- with feminists, for instance, on the issue
of sex trafficking, and environmentalists on the issue of global
warming -- and a trend emerges.

Where Gilgoff sees maturity, Michael Cromartie, director of the
Evangelicals and Civic Life Program at the Ethics and Public Policy
Center, sees betrayal. Cromartie characterized the Robertson
endorsement as being "past Mr. Robertson being the pragmatic
politician."

Cromartie told NewsMax: "He is not taken seriously. For the religious
conservative movement, it has moved on. Mr. Robertson is important only
as a curiosity to the mainstream media. I don't know anybody in the
evangelical [movement] who is sitting around saying 'I am going to wait
for what Pat does.'"

In October, Mike Huckabee told the crowd at the Value Voters Summit in
Washington that "... it's important that people sing from their hearts
and don't merely lip-sync the lyrics to our songs," referring to the
presidential contenders. "I think it's important that the language of
Zion is a mother tongue and not a recently acquired second language."

Some pundits are speculating that a Giuliani/Huckabee combo could be
the dream GOP ticket and an instant rift healer.

For that to happen, however, Huckabee would have to go back on what he
has been touting as one of his major virtues -- loyalty to principles
rather than politics. Huckabee has often maintained that Christian
right leaders "are more intoxicated with power than principle."

Undoubtedly, a Giuliani/Huckabee embrace in Minneapolis next summer
would make quite a sight.

There have always been splits and differences within Republican Party
ranks, a longtime GOP operative recently told me. The current split
"caused by the presidential race is best defined by who people are
against rather than who they are for. Ultimately, it will not hurt the
values voter movement. They will lead against the Democratic nominee no
matter who the Republican candidate is. But a Republican candidate who
is not trusted by the grassroots will not win against a solid Democrat
ticket, no matter what Christian movement leaders say or do."