Thou shalt not take evangelicals for granted
By HARRY JACKSON and TONY PERKINS
For the last several months, political pundits and thinkers have been forecasting the crackup of the religious right, gleefully predicting its waning influence and no consensus choice in the 2008 primaries.
In the coming weeks as the parties finalize their nominees, the two major candidates may indeed be surprised by values voters and an altered view of their role in politics that is not necessarily attached to the Republican Party.
May 2006 signaled a turning point in the relationship of evangelicals to the Republican Party. By that time, the religious right was restless. The president and Congress had failed to follow through on the values voters’ agenda except to veto stem-cell research.
Priority gap
The administration seemed to be backing away from its commitment to pass a constitutional amendment that defined marriage as a union between only a man and a woman. President Bush’s priorities during the previous 18 months had not included any of the evangelical community’s major concerns. In fact, we had been told repeatedly that the president would get around to addressing the issue of marriage as soon as he won the battle for Social Security reform. That victory never came.
As the president’s credibility slipped, so, it seems, did his commitment to the moral agenda of the evangelical Christian community.
What was accomplished was not insignificant, with two solid Supreme Court justices in place. And Bush had held the line against congressional efforts to expend taxpayer-funded research on human embryos. Congress passed and the president signed the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, a partial-birth abortion ban, and the Born Alive Infant Protection Act, but much more was promised and needed.
Karl Rove, the president’s chief political strategist, addressed a gathering of pro-family leaders via phone and described the dynamics of the 2004 presidential victory in a way that left many of us shaking our heads in disbelief.
According to Rove, grass-roots evangelical activism in Ohio generated by the state marriage amendment, which also had been placed on the ballot, was not a decisive factor in the presidential election in the state and therefore the nation. That stance was either convenient amnesia or an attempt to rewrite history.
Moreover, Rove’s cavalier manner convinced these leaders that the Christian moral values agenda would no longer be an administration priority.
Harry Jackson, a registered Democrat and black pastor, spoke up, suggesting that the Republican Party seemed to be taking Christians for granted, just as the Democrats had taken blacks for granted.
That angered Rove, who tried to dismiss our concerns as trivial and naive. He opined that the Bush administration had done everything it could to protect marriage.
We clearly had been written out of the agenda. Our movement had failed to push the president and his party to action. We lost a strategic battle because we had not leveraged our influence for fear of losing what stature we had in the party.
For many evangelical leaders, this led to a painful self-examination about the close alliance between the right and the Republican Party. What had been accomplished in this 30-year courtship?
The main goals
The three most visible goals during the last three decades were to pass the Human Life Amendment, a school prayer amendment in the early 1980s and, most recently, to pass the Federal Marriage Amendment in 2006.
None succeeded. One might argue that our Republican-only alliance has not advanced our agenda. In hindsight, we can easily acknowledge our need to influence both political parties.
The church is not called to be a mouthpiece for a political party. Rather, it is to be a moral voice to the nation, and the public role of Christians is to be a sort of moral conscience to society.
Evangelical Christian voters should become a force that impacts both the heart and soul of America. Neither Democrats nor Republicans should claim to own us exclusively. In the future, we will work to ensure that those who want our support earn it.
X Bishop Harry Jackson is chairman of the High Impact Leadership Coalition and senior pastor of Hope Christian Church in Beltsville, Md. Tony Perkins is president of the Family Research Council. They are the authors of the forthcoming book “Personal Faith, Public Policy.” They wrote this for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.