[Mb-civic] The Christian Right's Humble Servant

Mon Nov 15 10:50:23 PST 2004

The Christian Right's Humble Servant

By Max Blumenthal, AlterNet
 Posted on November 15, 2004, Printed on November 15, 2004
 http://www.alternet.org/story/20499/

Only a few days after 9/11, a searching George W. Bush invited a small group
of evangelical leaders to the White House to offer him spiritual counsel.
There, they quietly discussed Scripture and the implications of 9/11 for a
few moments. Then former Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) president James
Merritt turned to the president with a few words of encouragement.

"Mr. President, you and I are fellow believers in Jesus Christ," Merritt
said.

Bush shook his head affirmatively.

"We both believe there is a sovereign God in control of this universe."

Bush nodded again.

"Since God knew that those planes would hit those towers before you and I
were ever born, since God knew that you would be sitting in that chair
before this world was ever created, I can only draw the conclusion that you
are God's man for this hour," Merritt stated.

It was then that Bush lowered his head and cried.

Three years later, the nation was bitterly divided and God's pre-destined
president was plunged in a fight for his political life. With a scant
domestic plank to run on and a staggering record of failure to run from,
Bush's hopes seemed dismal. Yet Bush had an ace up his sleeve: the Christian
right. For the whole of his presidency, Bush had used the bully pulpit as a
megaphone to project his committment to the Christian right's Calvinist
worldview. Keenly aware of their grassroots muscle, Bush granted their
leaders a degree of access few other domestic constituencies have ever
enjoyed. And while he neglected healthcare and underfunded his own signature
education reform program, Bush exhausted his political capital to advance
the Christian right's social agenda. In doing so, he convinced them that he
was, as Merritt said in his account to the Dallas Morning News, God's man in
the White House. They responded by leading the charge for his re-election in
the shadows of the official Bush/Cheney campaign, behind church walls, at
stadium-sized rallies and across radio waves, in places largely away from
the media's gaze. And when they carried Bush to an unlikely but overwhelming
victory on Nov. 2, they consolidated America's majority party as an
instrument of their moral crusade.

"Bush's victory not only establishes the power of the American Christian
right in this candidacy, but in fact established its power to elect the next
Republican president," lamented Arthur Finkelstein in an interview with the
Israeli daily Ma'ariv. Finkelstein, who is an advisor to New York's moderate
Republican governor George Pataki, added that "Republican party became the
Christian right, the most radical in modern history ever."

To be sure, Bush is not a dyed-in-the-wool theocrat. When he kicked alcohol
and became an evangelical Christian, it was the mainstream evangelical icon
Billy Graham who oversaw his rebirth. And though he was involved in
evangelical bible study groups in Midland, Texas in the 1980s, it was not
until he declared a run for the Texas governorship that he was exposed to
the hardline ideology of the Christian right. In 1993, as Bush groped for an
approach to handling poverty that would set him apart from the mold of the
mean-spirited, Gingrichian grinch, his consigliere, Karl Rove invited
self-described "social Calvinist" intellectual Marvin Olasky to join the
campaign as Bush's social welfare guru.

In his influential polemic, "The Tragedy of American Compassion," Olasky put
forth his theory that poverty is a spiritual problem that government policy
has not caused and can not necessarily cure. Thus, Olasky argued, government
should loosen its grip on the social sector and return it to the
biblically-ordained care of the church. Olasky's theories were to a large
extent derived from the teachings of 19th century neo-Calvinist politician
Abraham Kuyper, (Olasky is a Kuyper Institute fellow) who declared, "The
family, the business science, art, and so forth are all social spheres,
which do not owe their existence to the state ... but obey a high authority
within their own bosom; an authority that rules by the grace of God b ...."
Bush took this essentially theocratic idea and with Olasky's help,
repackaged it as "compassionate conservatism," a label that helped cast Bush
as a moderate in the media spotlight.

However, to those among the Christian right who understood the gravity of
Olasky's influence on the Texas governor, Bush's rise was cause for
encouragement. And to Bush's friends in the corporate community, meanwhile,
were soothed by the anti-government, laissez faire ideology undergirding his
"compassionate conservatism." To them, Bush wore his religion on his sleeve
like any other president; his Christian fundamentalist agenda was little
more than free market fundamentalism with a pious patina.

Eight years later, the widely accepted perception of Bush as a "uniter" had
helped smooth his path into the Oval Office. In one of his first acts as
president, with support from centrist Democrats like Sen. Joe Lieberman,
Bush put Olasky's ideas into action by establishing the Office of Faith
Based Initiatives in January, 2001. The office essentially ceded a portion
of government's social welfare responsibilities to religious groups. With
Olasky standing by his side at the signing ceremony, Bush declared,
"compassion is the work of a nation, not just a government," a seemingly
benign statement with theocratic undertones that rang throughout the
fundamentalist community. Indeed, beside transforming the federal government
into an ATM machine for the religious right, establishing the office was a
bold statement of Bush's commitment to the conservative Christian worldview.

Congress' passage of a ban on late-term abortions in November, 2003  again
with centrist Democratic support  presented Bush with yet another
opportunity to burnish his credentials with the religious right. As Bush
signed the bill flanked by Christian right mandarins like Jerry Falwell, Lou
Sheldon and Sen. Rick Santorum  an image seemingly calculated to rankle the
100 Planned Parenthood activists protesting outside the White House  cries
of the ceremony's 400 attendees erupted in cries of "Amen!" Later that day,
Bush celebrated privately with a virtual who's who of the religious right,
including Falwell, radio host Janet Parshall, SBC leader Richard Land and
National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) president Ted Haggard, who leads
a 14,000 member church in Colorado Springs, Colo. Together, they joined
hands and prayed.

"Following the prayer," Falwell wrote in an email to his followers, "I told
President Bush the people in the room represent about 200,000 pastors and 80
million believers nationwide who consider him not only to be our president
but also a man of God."

The meeting underscored the Bush administration's acute sensitivity to its
base. By the time Bush signed the late-term abortion ban, conference calls
with religious right leaders like Haggard, Falwell and Focus on the Family's
James Dobson had become a weekly affair. Leading the calls were veterans of
the religious right like White House public liaison Tim Goeglein (former
spokesman for Gary Bauer) and southeastern regional campaign director Ralph
Reed (former director of the Christian Coalition). "We have direct access,"
Haggard told the Wall Street Journal. "I can call [Goeglein], he'll take my
concern to the president and get back to me within 24 hours."

During a January conference call led by Bush, SBC's Richard Land and Focus
on the Family's James Dobson urged the President to endorse a Constitutional
amendment banning gay marriage in his State of the Union. Though Bush would
not address the issue in his State of the Union, he assured Dobson and Land
that his endorsement would be forthcoming. A month later, just after San
Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom had begun marrying gay couples, Bush made good
on his promise.

The language Bush used to explain his decision to endorse the amendment
sounded remarkably like the language Dobson and others would have used to
demand it: "A few judges and local authorities are presuming to change the
most fundamental institution of civilization," Bush said at a Feb. 24 press
conference. To many homosexuals, Bush's comment came as an insult (did Bush
consider them barbarians?). However, to conservative Christians, the comment
was yet another coded statement of Christian conviction. "Here is a man who
is simply committed to a system of beliefs," Dobson said of Bush to the
Post.

Indeed, from a conservative Christian standpoint, homosexuality is a danger
to civilization because it threatens all social spheres, not just the
family, making it in many ways a more salient issue than abortion. As the
Rev. Ronnie Floyd of First Baptist Church in Springdale, Ark. told the Post,
gay marriage "is different from abortion. It touches every segment of
society, schools, the media, television, government, churches. No one is
left out."

According to Frederick Clarkson, a leading researcher on the religious right
and author of "Eternal Hostility: The Battle Between Theocracy and
Democracy," the conservative Christian notion that gay marriage undermines
civilization is "part of the idea that all homosexuals have a pathological
need to spread their lifestyle. And that homosexuality is a matter of
choosing perversion. It's threatening [to conservative Christians] and they
want to protect their children from it." Hence, the need for the Federal
Marriage Amendment.

Asked in the third presidential debate whether he believed homosexuality is
a choice, Bush ducked the question. "I just don't know," he told the
moderator, Bob Schieffer. He went on to reiterate his call for a
Constitutional amendment barring gay marriage because, "it's very important
that we protect marriage as an institution, between a man and a woman." It
was yet another coded suggestion of the threat homosexuality poses to
civilization. Having garnered Bush's full support for their touchstone
issue, the religious right was happy to endure the parade of pro-choice
RINO's (Republicans In Name Only) speaking at the Republican National
Convention, and was unfazed by the fact that figures like Falwell were
pointedly uninvited. Bush had done more than express the requisite sympathy
for their beliefs as Ronald Reagan often did, he had become totally beholden
to them. As Christian Coalition president Roberta Combs told a reporter
during the convention, "We still own the president."

When the official Bush/Cheney re-election campaign kicked into high gear,
the religious right's shadow campaign had been underway for nearly a year.
The Southern Baptist Convention's Land had created a program to cultivate
"values voters" called IVoteValues, which included a Web site rating
candidates according to issues of concern to conservative Christians. Jay
Sekulow, chief counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice, a legal
arm of the Christian Coalition, sent mailers to 45,000 conservative pastors
explaining how to rally support for Republican candidates without
threatening their church's non-profit status. The Presidential Prayer Team,
a private evangelical group bankrolled by Arizona Diamondbacks owner Jerry
Colangelo ran ads during the summer on 1,200 radio stations urging listeners
to get on their knees and pray for the president.

The shadow campaign had received a much-needed injection of resentful rage
when the Democrats and RINO's in congress flouted Bush and voted down the
Federal Marriage Amendment. In response, Dobson used his popular radio show,
which can be heard on 3,000 stations worldwide, to slam the "anti-family"
liberals in congress. In September, when a new anti-gay marriage amendment
was introduced in the House, Dobson began rallying support for a massive
"Mayday for Marriage" rally on Washington DC for a gay marriage ban. Just
three weeks before the election, around 150,000 conservative Christians
gathered on the Mall to hear firebrand speeches denouncing gay marriage and
of course, Kerry. "Sen. Kerry might be confused as to what marriage is, but
we all know that marriage is between a man and a woman and no one else need
apply!" declared Gary Bauer, whose political action committee, Campaign for
Working Families, was running TV ads in swing states falsely accusing Kerry
of supporting gay marriage.

Rightist evangelicals weren't the only ones determined to re-elect Bush, as
the Catholic right joined the shadow campaign with equal enthusiasm. To the
Catholic right, the former altar boy, John Kerry, was a "cafeteria Catholic"
whose liberal social politics rendered him a heretic. So to ensure none of
their flock strayed to Kerry's side, twelve bishops declared that voting for
Kerry was a "grave, mortal sin." Bishop Michael Sheridan issued a pastoral
letter to the 125,000 Catholics of Colorado Springs, Colorado calling the
presidential election "critical" and stating that anyone who votes for a
pro-choice, pro-gay civil union candidate like Kerry "ipso facto place[s]
themselves outside full communion with the Church and so jeopardize their
salvation." In other words, vote for Kerry, go to hell.

Grassroots right-wing Catholic activists were just as fired up about sinking
Kerry's hopes as their bishops were. Earlier this year, two Northern
Virginia Catholic activists, State Sen. Thomas Cucinelli and Terry Wear,
approached the Republican National Committee's deputy Catholic outreach
director, Martin Gillespie (brother of RNC president, Ed), about sparking a
grassroots effort to increase Catholic turnout for Bush. Gillespie promptly
hired dozens of field workers to canvass swing states for Catholic votes.
Under Cucinelli's direction in Ohio, the RNC's field workers inundated
parking lots outside Catholic churches with pro-Bush fliers the Sunday
before election day. According to the Washington Times, Cucinelli's cadres
unloaded 5 million fliers that day alone.

Though the Catholic shadow campaign was spearheaded by right-wing activists
and Republican party operatives, it targeted so-called "swing" Catholics who
are socially conservative but not necessarily Republican. As the RNC's
outreach chairman told the National Catholic Reporter, "Swing Catholics and
faithful Catholics are often in accord on a number of the 'culture of life'
issues and I suspect that it is this combination of voters which will be
pivotal in deciding who controls the Catholic vote in this election."

Evangelical groups relied on a similar tactic to increase turnout for Bush.
One group, a 527 called the Citizen Leader Coalition, mounted a campaign to
register and mobilize young 280,000 Christian voters in 10 swing states to
vote for Bush. "This is a well-conceived and focused project which can be
achieved by the dedicated efforts of a relative few and a realistic amount
of money and resources, compared to what liberals are spending," the
Coalition told potential donors on its Web site.

Part of the Coalition's campaign included inundating conservative churches
with hundreds of thousands of voter guides contrasting Bush's positions with
Kerry. While Bush appears on the right side of every issue on the voter
guides, Kerry is accused of everything short of Satanism. Kerry "insists on
judges who support the ACLU's radical anti-Christian, anti-God, anti-family
agenda," the guide reads. The guide also falsely claims Kerry "supports gay
marriage" and "participated in the Left's assault on [Mel] Gibson." The
Citizen Leader Coalition was joined by dozens of other groups like the
Traditional Values Coalition in distributing millions of voter guides to
make sure conservative Christians knew the issues, or at least their version
of them.

The voter guide tactic was derived from a brilliantly successful campaign by
the California Pro-Life Council in 1990. In an effort to take over the
California state GOP, Council activists recruited 90 pre-screened "stealth"
candidates to run for local office, none of whom even bothered to run a
campaign. The Sunday before the election, Council activists hit church
parking lots with 250,000 fliers plugging their candidates' Christian
credentials. When the dust cleared, 60 of their 90 candidates were elected.
A stunned local media dubbed the takeover, "The San Diego Surprise."

For the religious right, Bush was like any other stealth candidate. No
matter how unqualified for office he was, no matter how shallow his
understanding of policy might have been and whether or not he was decimated
by Kerry in the debates, they saw him as one of their own. And they would
reward him with their votes in record numbers.

While election-day exit polling relied on vague terms like "moral values" to
produce inconclusive evidence about conservative Christian voters (do only
fundamentalists have moral values?), they did reveal that the rate of voters
who attended church once a week leapt by 2 points from 2000 and that 64
percent of them voted for Bush. Similarly, rates of anti-abortion voters
increased by 3 points; they also voted for Bush almost unanimously. All in
all, 79 percent of evangelicals voted for Bush. In Ohio, where 25 percent of
the population is Catholic, Bush won a whopping 54 percent of the Catholic
vote, a reflection of the Catholic right's intense opposition to Kerry and
the success of the RNC's grassroots Catholic outreach efforts.

Never content to bask in the glow of its success, the Christian right is
demanding its due. They will shape Bush's social policy for the next four
years, and have solidified their status within the Republican Party for a
generation. With over two decades of grinding cultural battles behind them,
the Christian right's collective mood seems to be a mixture of
self-satisfaction and entitlement, as if their date with destiny has finally
arrived. As the Christian right's direct mail wizard Richard Viguerie wrote
in a post-election memo, "Now comes the revolution."