by Brodie Welch
The Christian Coalition is one of the most influential organizations in American politics in the 1990s. Founded in 1990 by Pat Robertson, the group has played a critical role in hundreds of elections at the local, state, and national levels. The group is dominated by evangelical Christians who blame the lack of a Christian ethic in American culture for the withering of the family and traditional family values. To briefly summarize a few of their views: the Christian Coalition is anti-abortion, anti-pornography, anti-feminist, anti-gay rights, anti-sex education, anti-welfare state, pro-prayer in public schools. By re-emphasizing these moral issues, the Coalition made religion a bigger factor than economics in the 1994 elections. In supporting such candidates as Pat Buchanon and Bob Dornan, the Coalition forced moderate Republicans like Bob Dole and Lamar Alexander further to the right.
The Christian Coalition is a grassroots political organization based in evangelical Christianity. It describes its agenda as pro-family and is currently the leading voice among various groups that constitute the Christian Right movement. Based in Virginia, the Coalition has over 1500 chapters and affiliates in all fifty states. It boasts a 12-million dollar annual budget and 1.7 million members. Pat Robertson’s strong ideology provides both the inspiration and guidance for the organization. Ralph Reed, executive director of the Christian Coalition, supplies shrewd political strategies and deftly handles public relations. He writes in his welcome message on the Christian Coalition home page that the group works "on behalf of families who want to see less government intrusion in their lives and more family-friendly policy." According to critics, this innocuous description in no way fits the divisive, narrow-minded organization bent on imposing its values on the rest of the American public they see as the Christian Coalition. The Anti-Defamation League has denounced the Coalition’s scapegoating and hate-breeding ideology as a "threat to American constitutional democracy."
The Christian Coalition’s attempt to gain support among all different kinds of Christians has been met with hostility among Christians who do not agree with the Christian Coalition’s politics. Because organizations like the Christian Coalition have been so vocal, left-wing Christians often feel as though Christianity has been appropriated by the radical right. The magazine Sojourners provides a mouthpiece for such Christians-the publication is subtitled "An Alternative to the Christian Right." Jim Wallis, a frequent writer for Sojourners, complains that evangelical Christianity has been unfairly "hijacked" by such organizations as the Christian Coalition, as most evangelical Christians are not members of the Christian Right. He cites the Coalition’s support for tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, its opposition to gun control, and its goal to abolish environmental regulations as decidedly un-Christian. Political science professor Clarke Cochran agrees that "a lot of issues that Christians should be supporting, such things as gun control, justice in health care, protecting the vulnerable widows and orphans (to use Biblical language), dignified work for the people, and property for the common good, never appear" in the Christian Coalition’s agenda. Critics argue that such progressive concepts are not endorsed by the Christian Coalition because the Coalition exists solely to promote a conservative agenda and uses Christianity as a means to manipulate people’s views and gain supporters.
For supporters of the Christian Coalition, the most formidable problem facing our country is a decline in "family values." Families have decayed because religion has been increasingly eliminated from the sphere of American public life. For Christian conservatives, this assault on religion by "secular humanists" has resulted in an increase in violent crime, a rise in out-of-wedlock births, and even an the increased use of marijuana. The solutions to eradicating such evils as these from society lies in strengthening the country’s moral backbone and infusing politics with Christianity.
Following the "Republican Revolution"-the 1994 elections that ushered in the first Republican Congress in forty years, the Christian Coalition introduced its "Contract With the American Family" to law makers. The Contract suggests ten new legislative items that further the Coalition’s pro-family agenda. Its first demand is for a constitutional amendment "to protect the religious liberties of Americans in public places." The amendment would do away with the "naked public square" by allowing such religious displays as nativity scenes and menorahs in town centers and government buildings, and would allow prayer in public schools. The second article of the Contract would shift power away from the Department of Education to local school boards to prevent "sex ed that includes contraception rather than abstinence [and] homosexuality as an acceptable alternative lifestyle" as well as textbooks that have an "anti-Western bias." Another item of the contract would eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities on the grounds that the former funds pornographic art and the latter supports queer theory, and the Legal Services Corporation, because it often pays the legal fees for poor people seeking divorce (and is therefore anti-family). Other provisions of the Contract With the American Family include "family-friendly" tax breaks, an abolition of the welfare state in favor of relying on private charities to care for society’s dispossessed, school choice, and eliminating all government funding for abortion.
The latest issue of Christian American, a bi-monthly publication of the Christian Coalition, profiles a typical conservative Christian family. The article is very telling as to the what the Coalition considers "family values." The family’s goal "is to grow the home-based business to the point where Jean [the wife and mother] can work and stay at home." The subtext here is that although economic circumstances may require women to work, women should not be "forced" to abandon their traditional roles as wives and mothers to work outside the home-a view that the Coalition would support with legislation. Indeed, the Coalition’s "Contract With the American Family" contains a provision (the Mother’s and Homemaker’s Rights Act) to make it easier for women to stay home rather than work, but still build a retirement fund through their husbands.
The Christian Coalition supports candidates in non-partisan elections such as school boards, as well as local, state, and national candidates for virtually every office. Their goal is to have a role to play in every district in the country. Though the Coalition will campaign on behalf of Democrats who preach conservative values, the organization is mainly tied to the Republican party. The Coalition will even aid a moderate Republican if s/he faces potential defeat at the hands of liberal Democrat.
The Christian Coalition discovered early on that Democrats cannot fight what they do not know exists. The Coalition owes its early successes to the art of stealth campaigning. Running a stealth campaign is tantamount to "flying below radar." Rather than courting the media and trying to gain as much publicity as possible, a stealth candidate eludes celebrity: s/he does not run television advertisements and does not participate in press conferences nor candidate forums. Instead, the stealth candidate focuses his/her campaign on church members, distributing voter guides, calling on the clergy for endorsement from the pulpit, and conducting "in pew" voter registration. Campaigning outside the church is restricted to such tactics as telephone surveys to identify potential supporters, followed by direct-mailing of voter guides. The voter guides, a crucial element of most Christian Coalition campaigns, though technically nonpartisan (for tax purposes), are heavily biased so as to make it abundantly clear which candidate espouses "pro-family" values and which candidate does not.
The Coalition conducted a stealth campaign in the San Diego school board elections in 1992, winning a majority of the positions. In response to his organization’s victory in San Diego, Reed bragged "I do guerrilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You won’t know it’s over until election night." Two years later, the opposition in San Diego was wise to the Coalition’s stealth tactics. They exposed the candidates’ ties to the Christian Coalition, and regained control of the school board. This example buttresses the claim that "when voters believe a candidate is a member of the Christian Right, counter-mobilization efforts are frequently successful."
In response to critical attacks on stealth campaigning tactics, Reed claims that the Coalition no longer runs stealth campaigns. Yet even in above-ground campaigns, often the candidate will not reveal his/her ties to the Coalition until after s/he is elected. The reason for this is that people may easily dismiss Pat Robertson as an extremist because they are familiar with his politics, but they may not know the politics of a particular Coalition-supported candidate. The Coalition’s training manuals for grassroots organizing suggest that candidates not emphasize religion during campaigns so as not to make people feel threatened.
Whether or not the Coalition still employs stealth tactics, its grassroots political organizing and mobilizing are still going strong. Three out of four self-identified evangelicals voted in 1994, an election where less than half of the general public bothered to go the polls. Reed claims that born-again evangelicals accounted for one-third of all ballots cast in the ’94 elections. The Coalition’s "in pew" voter registration and voter education through churches is largely responsible for the high turnout. The Coalition also conducts weekend training seminars for constituents to learn the art of political organizing. The motto of the Christian Coalition, "Think like Jesus. . . Fight like David. . . Lead like Moses. . . Run Like Lincoln" illustrates how the group merges politics and religion.
Nowhere is the religion-based call to action more evident than in the pages of Christian American magazine. One article poses the question "If we know the Lord’s moral expectations of our government and if we allow civil immorality to continue through our silence at the polls, isn’t that a sin?" Religion is embedded in the conservative politics on the Christian Coalition’s impressive home page (winner of the Best Christian Website award in 1994). The home page allows anyone with a web browser to review any number of speeches by Reed and Robertson, peruse editions of the Coalition’s publications Christian American and Religious Rights Watch, sign up for training seminars in political organizing, or become a member. The Coalition also boasts an impressive grassroots organizing training manual, which has since been adopted by the Virginia Democratic Caucus in an attempt to beat the Christian Coalition at their own game.
In addition to stealth campaigning and grassroots organizing, the Coalition is trying to rally support by building alliances in the Catholic, African-American, and Jewish communities. The relationship between the Coalition and Catholics, however, is ambiguous. In Broward County, Florida, the Christian Coalition worked with Catholic conservatives to defeat an ordinance that would have outlawed discrimination against gays and lesbians. In 1995, the Coalition established a separate Catholic Alliance within its organization. This move has been criticized by Catholic Bishops as an attempt to divert Catholic loyalty away from the Pope and as a degrading measure which implies that Catholics are somehow inferior Christians. Sister Maureen Fiedler, a member of Catholics Speak Out, a Catholic political group, believes that the Alliance is doomed to fail because Catholics and Protestants have different traditionally fallen into different camps on social issues. She states: "Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed think they can lure Catholics into their fold using a pro-life and pro-family label, but it won’t work. Catholics are generally progressive on the social issues touted by the Right. They will be rightfully suspicious of the political motives driving the formation of this so-called Catholic Alliance." Catholics currently make up sixteen percent of the Coalition’s members. Time will tell whether or not the alliance will endure.
For political journalist Clyde Wilcox, the new strategy of trying to broaden its base of support may make the Christian Coalition "a far more formidable organization than earlier incarnations of the Christian Right." Indeed, the Christian Right of the 1980s remained on the fringes of politics and all but disintegrated because of its failure to appeal to mainstream Republicans. The Christian Coalition, under the shrewd political guidance of Ralph Reed, has so far managed to avoid this pitfall. The clergy may be involved with local chapters, but they must not lead them directly. With Reed at the helm of the organization, the Christian Coalition’s rhetoric seems friendly and inviting. Rhetoric such as "A vote for Bill Clinton is a vote for the Devil" (which surfaced in 1992) has been eradicated in favor of promoting "pro-family" legislation and "religious equality." Whether or not the new, more tame lexicon reflects new positions on the actual issues is debatable.
The most striking example of the Coalition’s attempt to moderate its position is its shift on abortion. Rather than demanding a national ban on abortion, Reed now calls for the national government to turn the abortion decision over to the states, which would allow some states to codify and others to ban abortion. The Coalition’s partial retreat on abortion might make mobilizing an ardently religious constituency more difficult. Wilcox argues that it is easier to mobilize religious conservatives on moral and/or social issues than on economic ones, as moral issues strike at the core of Christian faith. Mark Shibley hypothesizes that by retreating from its hard-line positions on abortion and other issues, the Christian Coalition will alienate many of its most ardent supporters. For Shibley, evangelical churches foster obedience to a strong leader, absolutism in belief, conformity, and fanaticism. In such an environment, "the greater the demads, the more those demands will be met by the committed." Thus, the Christian Coalition's attempt to broaden its appeal by taking a less extreme tack on issues such as abortion may in fact estrange its most driven members.
While Ralph Reed’s skillful political leadership may have succeeded in making the organization appear less fanatical to the public, evidence suggests that the rhetoric has remained as caustic as ever within the bounds of the Coalition itself. The keynote speech at the Coalition’s 1995 "Road to Victory" conference was entitled "Why Jesus Shouldn’t Have Fed the 5,000." Letters mailed directly to Coalition members and sympathizers cite organizations such as the National Organization for Women, Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, and the American Civil Liberties Union as "the enemy." In a fundraising letter to Coalition members, Robertson claims that "The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians." So long as such illogical and inflammatory words can be found in the Christian Coalition’s letters and pamphlets, its goal to become the "NAACP of the Christian Right" may be far off.
Nonetheless, the Christian Coalition has scored a number of impressive victories and has managed to influence policy-making in important ways. According to the liberal lobbying group People for the American Way, the Christian Coalition won forty percent of the 500 races it entered in 1992. Among these triumphs was the election of convicted felon Oliver North, who the Coalition carried to victory in 1994. The Coalition dominated Iowa in the 1992 elections. It won two US Congressional seats, as well as six of twelve contests for the state legislature. Without the Christian Coalition, Iowa’s referendum to pass an Equal Rights Amendment would have succeeded; with the Coalition’s assistance, the ERA was defeated fifty-two percent to forty-eight percent.
In South Carolina, Republican Bob Inglis beat the popular incumbent liberal Democrat Liz Patterson for a seat in the US House of Representatives in 1992. Inglis’s success exemplifies the surprising power of stealth campaign tactics. He describes his campaign as "rooted in secrecy, an occasional ruse, short on confrontation, long on shoe leather, and an alliance with increasingly politicized Christian conservatives. While the Christian Coalition did not directly endorse Inglis, the organization made its heavily slanted voter guides available to 840,000 people via church bulletins.
Twenty-one of the 107 delegates who drafted the Republican party platform at the 1992 Convention were members of the Christian Coalition. These Coalition members claim responsibility for the anti-gay rights, pro-life, anti-pornography, anti-condom distribution in schools, and support of school prayer planks of the Republican platform. They did not stop there. In 1994, the Christian Coalition spent over 1 million dollars during the first hundred days of the new Republican-controlled Congress.
The 1994 elections of Paul Coverdale in Georgia and Kay Bailey Hutchison in Texas illustrate the Coalition’s new pragmatism. Though the Coalition challenged both Hutchinson and Coverdale’s nominations because of their pro-choice stances, it funneled money into their campaigns against liberal Democrats. Here, the candidates clearly did not toe the Christian Coalition’s line, but because they were more sympathetic to the Coalition’s aims than their opposition, they received the Coalition’s support.
The Christian Coalition merges conservative Christian ideology with political shrewdness and savvy. It attempts to harness support from Catholics and across different denominations of Protestants-in this sense it seems to be a true coalition. This strategy of trying to appeal to those outside their core base of supporters, especially black evangelicals and Catholics, has resulted in many electoral victories. Yet upon closer examination, the policies the Coalition endorses appear to contradict the values of many members of these same groups. Economic issues divide black evangelicals from white. A study comparing the views of black and white evangelicals indicates that black evangelicals tend be sympathetic to government spending on welfare, health care, homeless people, and generally favor government action to promote socio-economic equality for blacks; most white evangelicals oppose government intervention in these areas. The Christian Coalition favors a virtual obliteration of the welfare state-a notion abhorrent to many black religious conservatives.
Catholics, too, tend to favor social spending, and thus oppose the Balanced Budget Amendment, which the Christian Coalition supports. Some of the measures the Coalition supports are fundamentally at odds with the teachings of the Catholic church. For example, the Christian Coalition endorses capital punishment, which the Catholic church condemned at the Vatican II conference. Catholics and liberal Christians alike question how opposition to gun control and support for tax cuts for the wealthy are in any way Christian. To point out the hypocrisy in the Coalition’s economic views, Clyde Wilcox quips: "Interestingly, the Bible does not contain any passage that says ‘blessed are the rich, for only they shall receive health care.’" Even other conservative Christians such as George Weigel note that the Coalition’s attempt to push political goals that have nothing to do with Christianity discredits the organization as authentically Christian-based. He contends that "to suggest that everything from voting rights for the delegate from Guam to Roe v. Wade is part of a Christian agenda demeans the whole agenda and takes away from the urgency of the really front-burner issues."
In response to charges that it breeds intolerance, sexism, homophobia, and classism, the Coalition claims that it is a defensive, not offensive, movement trying to protect Christians in a society that is prejudiced against them. Reed claims he does not intend for anyone in his organization to force their beliefs on others, he only wants "a seat at the table" where policy decisions are made. What, after all, is wrong with citizens putting their values into action by exercising their right to vote? Plus, many of the Coalition’s proposals involve turning power back to the state and local level, which would let states and communities decide for themselves how to deal with abortion and sex education-a seemingly benign proposal. Yet one must question Reed’s sincerity in merely wanting a seat at the table and not really wanting to overturn it entirely. In light of the Oregon bill the Coalition backed which would mandate that all schools teach that homosexuality is "abnormal, wrong, unnatural, and perverse," the Coalition seems dedicated to letting local school boards make their own decisions only when it suits the Coalition’s own interests.
The Oregon bill is just one example of the Christian Coalition’s actions contradicting its rhetoric. While the Coalition reaches out to black evangelicals and Catholics, it supports policies that clearly go against the interests of these groups. At the same time as the Coalition is trying to appeal to moderate Republicans, its in-house mailings attempt to scare supporters into action by demonizing women, gays and lesbians, and those who value the welfare state above the Weberian Protestant ethic. The Coalition boasts both a charismatic leader, Pat Robertson, and an expert political strategist and speaker, Ralph Reed. The two serve as symbols for the Coalition’s synthesis of ideological purism and political pragmatism. With upwards of a million followers, it seems as though the Christian Coalition has pulled off this merger successfully. Unless the gap between the Coalition’s rhetoric and its actions grows wide enough for its followers to begin falling off, the Coalition will continue to serve as the voice for conservative Christians in contemporary American politics.