Putting Faith Before
Politics
By DAVID KUO, Op-Ed
Contributor NYTimes on the Web. November 16, 2006
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Anthony Russo/NYTimes |
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Alexandria, Va. -- SINCE 1992, every
national Republican electoral defeat has been accompanied by an obituary for the
religious right. Every one of these obituaries has been premature — after
these losses, the religious right only grew stronger. After the defeat of
President George H. W. Bush in 1992, the conventional wisdom held that Christian
evangelicals would be chastened. As one major magazine put it, Mr. Bush’s
defeat meant that “time had run out on their crusade to create a Christian
America.” Yet in the next two years, the Christian Coalition grew by leaps
and bounds; in 1994, it helped usher in the Gingrich revolution.
In 1996, after Bill Clinton defeated Bob Dole, Margaret Tutwiler, a Republican
strategist, declared that in order for Republicans to win, “We’re going to have
to take on the religious nuts.” Two years later, after Republicans failed
to gain any ground on Democrats — despite Mr. Clinton’s impeachment — John Zogby,
the pollster, concluded that “Christian absolutism” scared voters. Wrong
again. Those same Christian “absolutists” helped sweep George W. Bush into
office in 2000.
Jesus was resurrected only once. The religious right has been resurrected
at least twice in just the past 15 years.
The conventional wisdom about the Democratic thumping of Republicans last week
says something a little different about the religious right — that its members
are beginning to migrate to the Democratic Party. The statistic that is
exciting Democrats the most is that nearly 30 percent of white evangelicals, the
true Republican base, voted Democratic. In addition, the red-blue split of
weekly churchgoers has narrowed. Commentators are atwitter about the
shrinking “God gap.”
Once again, the conventional wisdom is wrong. Yes, it is true that almost
30 percent of white evangelicals voted for the Democrats, up from the 22 percent
Senator John Kerry received in the 2004 presidential race. But that 2004
number was aberrantly low. More typical were exit polls from the 1996
Congressional election, where 25 percent of white evangelicals voted for
Democrats.
So before rearranging their public policy agenda in hopes of attracting
evangelicals, the Democrats would be wise to think twice. There has been a
radical change in the attitudes of evangelicals — it’s just not one that will
automatically be in the Democrats’ favor.
You see, evangelicals aren’t re-examining their political priorities nearly as
much as they are re-examining their spiritual priorities. That could be
bad news for both political parties.
John W. Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute, the conservative Christian
organization that gained notoriety during the 1990s when it represented Paula
Jones in her sexual harassment suit against Bill Clinton, wrote this after the
elections: “Modern Christianity, having lost sight of Christ’s teachings,
has been co-opted by legalism, materialism and politics. Simply put, it
has lost its spirituality.”
He went on, “Whereas Christianity was once synonymous with charity, compassion
and love for one’s neighbor, today it is more often equated with partisan
politics, anti-homosexual rhetoric and affluent mega-churches.”
Mr. Whitehead is hardly alone. Just before the elections, Gordon
MacDonald, an evangelical leader, wrote that he was concerned that some
evangelical personalities had been seduced and used by the White House. He
worried that the movement might “fragment because it is more identified by a
political agenda that seems to be failing and less identified by a commitment to
Jesus and his kingdom.”
Certainly, the White House showed the heartlessness of politics in Ted Haggard’s
fall. Mr. Haggard had once been welcomed at the White House, relied on to
rally other evangelicals and invited to pray with the president.
Yet his downfall provoked only this reaction from a low-level White House
spokesman: “He had been on a couple of calls, but was not a weekly
participant in those calls. I believe he’s been to the White House one or
two times.” To evangelicals who know that this statement was misleading,
and know from the Bible what being kicked to the curb looks like, it was a
revealing moment about the unchristian behavior politics inspires.
Perhaps that’s why a rift appears to be growing in what was once a strong
alliance. Beliefnet.com’s post-election online survey of more than 2,000
people revealed that nearly 40 percent of evangelicals support the idea of a
two-year Christian “fast” from intense political activism. Instead of
directing their energies toward campaigns, evangelicals would spend their time
helping the poor.
Why might such an idea get traction among evangelicals? For practical
reasons as well as spiritual ones. Evangelicals are beginning to see the
effect of their political involvement on those with whom they hope to share
Jesus’ eternal message: non-evangelicals. Tellingly, Beliefnet’s
poll showed that nearly 60 percent of non-evangelicals have a more negative view
of Jesus because of Christian political involvement; almost 40 percent believe
that George W. Bush’s faith has had a negative impact on his presidency.
There is also the matter of the record, which I saw being shaped during my time
in the White House. Conservative Christians (like me) were promised that
having an evangelical like Mr. Bush in office was a dream come true. Well,
it wasn’t. Not by a long shot. The administration accomplished
little that evangelicals really cared about.
Nowhere was this clearer than on the issue of abortion. Despite strong
Republican majorities, and his own pro-life stands, Mr. Bush settled for the
largely symbolic partial-birth abortion restriction rather than pursuing more
substantial change. Then there were the forgotten commitments to give
faith-based charities the resources they needed to care for the poor.
Evangelicals are not likely to fall for such promises in the future.
Don’t expect conservative Christians in politics to start to disappear, of
course. There are those who find the moral force of issues like abortion
and gay marriage equal to that of the abolition of slavery — worth pursuing no
matter what the risks of politics are for the soul. But the advocates
working these special interests may, I think, be far fewer in coming years than
in years past. Gay marriage was a less mobilizing force in 2006 than it
was in 2004. In Arizona the ballot measure to outlaw it was defeated.
The South Dakota abortion ban failed.
We will have to wait until 2008 to see just how deep this evangelical spiritual
re-examination goes, and how seductive politics will continue to be to committed
Christians. Meanwhile, evangelicals aren’t flocking to the Democratic
Party. If anything, they are becoming more truly conservative in their
recognition of the negative spiritual consequences of political obsession and of
the limitations of government power.
C. S. Lewis once warned that any Christian who uses his faith as a means to a
political end would corrupt both his faith and the faith writ large. A lot
of Christians are reading C. S. Lewis these days.
David Kuo, the deputy director of the White House Office of
Faith-Based and Community Initiatives from 2001 to 2003, is the author of
“Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction.”
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