A Fight For Souls, Votes (c)

A Fight For Souls, Votes ©
By Eileen E. Flynn, Religion Reporter
Austin-American Statesman, Austin, TX

Note: This report written from the Southern Baptist Convention was published in the July 25, 2004, Austin-American Statesman and is printed with their permission.

Like a staccato drumbeat, the images flashed on a giant screen before a convention hall filled with 8,000 ardent Baptists.

"We are at war" exclaimed one burst of text interspersed between photos of Osama bin Laden, Tim McVeigh, Bill Clinton wagging his finger and George W. Bush praying. "Evil will be great on the earth," the messages continued. "We are at war for the souls of men, and they are counting on us."

The promotional video, shown at last month`s meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, was meant to inspire support for missionary work. But its political subtext was unmistakable in this presidential election year.

There is a war raging, for souls and for votes. By convention`s end, the Southern Baptists were dispatched with a mission as much political as religious: Rally the faithful, seek converts and turn out the vote for candidates who oppose gay marriage, abortion and embryonic stem cell research.

Candidates, in other words, such as Bush.

Not since John F. Kennedy`s Catholicism came under attack during his 1960 race against Richard Nixon have religion and politics fused so tightly in an election year. America`s faithful are divided, its secular feel under siege, and theological battles have crossed into the political arena.

Major denominations are cleaving over issues such as gay marriage and the war in Iraq, and fault lines between Democrats and Republicans-churchgoers or not-are as much about policy as spirituality.

Candidates, in turn, are scouting for opportunity and advantage in the schisms.

So blurry has the line between church and politics become that last month the Internal Revenue Service felt compelled to send the major political parties a letter reminding them to heed the legal boundary between partisanship and the pulpit.

Values are often rooted in faith, and appealing to them is a political strategy that the right is particularly eager to push, said Michael Goldman, a former Democratic consultant who lectures on media and politics at Tufts University near Boston.

Candidates are telling voters, "What you should be voting for is the guy whose values you most care about, and that`s me," Goldman said. "This is not a bad strategy."

That strategy, and the eagerness of some religious factions to embrace it, has spawned America`s new holy war. The presidency is its grail.

For churches, the wages of partisanship are taxes, as the IRS reminded the Democratic and Republican parties in an unprecedented letter sent June 10 warning them not to entice tax-exempt religious organizations into raising money for campaigns or endorsing candidates.

Driven by faith

Wooing voters with blends of faith and politics is time-honored in American politics, and the line between church and state has been closely trod before.

The religious right gained influence in the 1980s with organizations such as the Christian Coalition, which generated grass-roots activism on issues championed by the Republican Party. Many of its activists moved on to positions within the GOP, said John Green, director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron.

Now, former Christian Coalition head Ralph Reed is the Southeast region director for the Bush campaign. And with Bush, quoted as saying God wanted him in the Oval Office, conservative evangelicals have a Republican in the White House reflecting their beliefs.

Faith, Bush says, infuses almost everything he does. A United Methodist by denomination, he fashions himself spiritually and politically as a born-again evangelical, a marked distinction from the high church reserve of his Episcopalian father.

Democrat John Kerry is a Roman Catholic, less vocal about faith, whose support of abortion rights prompted calls by some bishops to turn him away from the communion line. In this election, both candidates recognize that there is little distinction between their political and theological brethren.

An oft-quoted statistic that the faithful vote for Republicans and the secular back Democrats is misleading, said Green, whose study of voting patterns in the 2000 presidential election shows that the political chasm is more nuanced, running not between the religious and the nonreligious but between traditional and progressive church-goers.

The split holds true with Jewish voters, where Bush fares well among conservative Jews who share his views on abortion and marriage but where Green`s research shows that 75.8 percent of likely Jewish voters plan to vote for Kerry.

Eager to capitalize on the intensity of the new religious right-whose numbers might well determine the election-Bush`s campaign is aggressively recruiting conservative evangelicals, a growing cadre of conservative Catholics and the traditionally Democratic black churches where Bush`s stance opposing gay marriage resonates.

In June, the Washington-based religious liberty group Interfaith Alliance discovered that the Bush campaign had identified 1,600 "friendly congregations" in Pennsylvania to mobilize. The campaign also sought church directories to suss out potential supporters, a move that alarmed even some of Bush`s most loyal constituents.

"I`m appalled that the Bush-Cheney campaign would intrude on a local congregation in this way," said the Rev. Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention`s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. "I suspect that this will rub a lot of pastors` fur the wrong way. Many pastors may consider this a totally inappropriate intrusion by a partisan campaign into the nonpartisan voter education and voter registration ministries of local churches."

The Bush camp defended its actions, saying the effort adhered to IRS rules.

Cries of partisan Christianity also rang out when Bush was endorsed by the Rev. Jerry Falwell, a Southern Baptist preacher who formed the Moral Majority that twice helped elect President Reagan. Falwell said he made the endorsement on a Web site not affiliated with his church.

The Republican National Committee includes Catholics as a target for outreach, recruiting Catholic "team leaders" to rally people in their communities across the country and pitching Bush`s platform as "in sync" with church doctrine. During a Vatican visit last month, Bush petitioned Pope John Paul II to rally more American bishops against gay marriage, according to the National Catholic Reporter.

Though Kerry`s immersion into the religious waters has been slow, mostly quoting Scripture at black churches on the campaign trail, he is beginning to answer criticism that he is not religious enough by targeting progressive congregations.

Kerry has hired Mara Vanderslice, a liberal Christian who previously worked for primary rival Howard Dean, to lead the campaign`s religious outreach. Recently, the campaign launched a People of Faith for Kerry Web site, which exhorts voters to "support the man who shares your values."

The Kerry camp may be taking a cue from the Bush strategy, Green said, noting "there are lot of people in the Democratic Party and the Kerry campaign who have been arguing that the Democrats need to find a way to reach out to congregations that are friendly to them."

United by morals

Though, by law, congregations cannot engage in partisan politics, some conservative church leaders have made their political preferences clear by decreeing certain issues-gay marriage, abortion, embryonic stem cell research-as non-negotiable.

For instance, the Catholic bishops who questioned the fitness of Catholic lawmakers who support abortion rights to receive communion did not speak out against officials who part ways with the church on other key teachings, such as the death penalty or war in Iraq.

"I think it ends up being endorsing a candidate, and I think that`s the purpose of it," said the Rev. Frank Ruff, a Kentucky priest who works as a liaison between the U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference and the Southern Baptist Convention. "And I think what happens is that some people just get so wrapped up in an issue that they lose sight of the broader Catholic teaching."

Those non-negotiable issues, as opposed to theology, have helped create a new religious right: an emerging political convergence of evangelicals and Catholics.

The most insistent evangelicals believe Catholics are going to hell and the pope is the Antichrist. Some Catholics have tended to regard evangelicals as born-again, Bible-beating zealots. But for the moment, politics has united them.

"There`s always been an uneasy relationship between evangelicals and Catholics," said James Penning, a political science professor at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich., who has written about evangelical participation in politics. "There`s an element of mistrust there. It`s a marriage of convenience."

Abortion and other moral issues unite conservative Catholics and evangelicals, Penning said, but theological chasms remain.

But Land argues that Catholics and Baptists have forged stronger spiritual ties in recent decades, their political agreement springing from shared morals. "I`ve got more in common with Pope John Paul II than I do with Jimmy Carter," Land said.

The new Christian right is also finding inroads in traditionally Democratic black churches by espousing the moral corruption of liberalism, particularly gay rights. Recently, the Traditional Values Coalition, a conservative Christian association of some 43,000 congregations, held a news conference with black pastors.

"They`re the ones who are going to win (the election)," said coalition president the Rev. Lou Sheldon. "If we win this issue, it`s because African Americans step up to the plate."

Some African American pastors resent arguments that gay rights battles are a philosophical twin to the civil rights struggle.

"I was a part of the civil rights movement, and I marched, I protested," said the Rev. William Sheals, who leads the 18,000-member Hopewell Missionary Baptist Church in Norcross, Ga. "It is not a sin to be born black. It is not a choice to be born black. I believe it`s a sin to be a homosexual because the Bible says so. And I believe it is a choice."

Critics say religious leaders such as Land, Sheals and Sheldon are GOP mouthpieces. But they have a ready retort: They are neither Republican nor Democrat. As Sheldon says, "We are on the word of God."

Voting for values

Churches have a long history of involvement in politics. Ministers and preachers played a large role in the civil rights movement, for example. "You can`t accuse the white evangelicals of introducing religion into politics," said Martin Marty, University of Chicago Christian scholar. "Nobody can be elected mayor of Detroit or Chicago or Philadelphia if he didn`t show up in the black churches."

This election year, the political fire is flaring mostly on the right, among conservative Christians who feel a sense of urgency. It`s crucial, they say, to motivate voters, especially the estimated 4 million evangelicals who did not vote in 2000.

A key Southern Baptist Convention leader has launched a national voter registration drive called I Vote Values. "Southern Baptists are as motivated and as activated . . . than I`ve ever seen them," Land said. "I can tell you why: same-sex marriage. I`ve never seen an issue which has energized Southern Baptists more, even the abortion issue."

At the Indianapolis meeting, Bush addressed messengers via satellite. The Indiana Convention Center shook with thunderous applause when the president promised to push for a constitutional ban on gay marriage and so-called partial-birth abortion.

Moments before Bush`s speech, the Rev. Paige Patterson, president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, delivered a prayer characterizing Bush as more of a religious leader, like the biblical King Solomon, than a secular one.

"Through (Bush) and through those who preach your word, may our nation turn back to God. May we see the sweeping revival that we so desire," Patterson prayed. The Baptists passed a resolution calling for political participation, both by voting and running for office, and using biblical principles to guide both pursuits.

Standing before a giant screen that showed the words "One Nation Under God" superimposed on the U.S. Capitol, the Rev. Steve Gaines, an Alabama pastor, bemoaned the country`s loss of Christian values. "Our spiritual walls in America have crumbled because as a whole we have turned our backs on the Lord Jesus Christ," Gaines told messengers.

The left is scrambling to respond. Liberal religious organizations are fending off moral issue attacks from the right by identifying moral concerns of their own.

Faithful America, a Web site for "progressive people of faith" run by the National Council of Churches, recently ran an ad in the Arab news outlet Al-Jazeera in which American clergy decried U.S. military abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

The American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization, is one of many liberal groups organizing people to vote while pushing anti-war and pro-gay rights positions.

The election promises to be close, based on virtually all recent polls. The closer it is, fears the Rev. Welton Gaddy, the greater the risk that individual churches and whole denominations might be weakened by polarization. "Religion and religious institutions at their best are advocates for reconciliation," said Gaddy, president of the Interfaith Alliance. "If religious organizations are as politicized as the rest of the institutions of society, then religion is a loser and the nation is a loser."

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