One nation under God

By David M. Shribman, Globe Staff, January 10, 1999

Matthew Bass, 16, whose parents started a Christian Coalition chapter in North Sioux City, South Dakota: "Our country was founded on values the patriots held dear. As Christian conservatives, we can help the country turn back to those values."

David R. Fritz, a talk-show host and lobbyist in Tallahassee, Florida: "The Christian Coalition has helped bring democracy back. It's opened up politics. People now feel they can come to the party."

Carol Leake, whose husband is a pastor at Praise Assembly in New Bern, North Carolina: "You don't hear Christians saying anymore: Politics is dirty, stay out of it."

Matthew Bass, David Fritz, and Carol Leake don't look like revolutionaries, and they don't consider themselves revolutionaries, either. They're not insurrectionaries by nature or by inclination. They're not doing anything especially dangerous or subversive or even unusual: They're talking politics, organizing, and voting, unremarkable activities that union members and small-business owners and Catholics and art lovers and gun owners have been doing for decades.

The difference is that religious conservatives have recently fomented, and won, a quiet American revolution. That revolution, a combination of morality and politics, helps explain last month's drive to impeach President Clinton, which began with outrage over the president's personal morality and was fueled by the efforts of religious conservatives, among others, who demanded that their representatives in Congress punish the president.

This is a revolution with a difference. Though religious conservatives have not taken control of the Republican Party, though they suffered prominent setbacks in the midterm elections in November, though they do not hold Hollywood in thrall, and though a well-publicized effort to make inroads among blacks fizzled embarrassingly, they have achieved something far more profound and potentially far more significant than any of those things.

Religious conservatives have changed the American conversation. They have changed who participates in that conversation, they have changed the assumptions brought to bear on that conversation, they have changed the tone of that conversation, and they have changed the content of it. They may even eventually change the conclusion of it.

But for the time being they have changed it so much that, for the first time in 130 years, a president stands impeached; that, last month, dozens of undecided Republican lawmakers decided to vote with the impeachment forces at least in part out of fear of being challenged from the right by religious-conservative candidates in Republican primaries; and that a powerful legislator only days from winning election as House speaker, Robert L. Livingston of Louisiana, was forced because of his own history of adultery to announce his withdrawal from the position, which in this very century was once occupied by one of the most notorious womanizers in Washington history.

In the entire half-century course of postwar America, only three movements can lay claim to changing the American conversation: the civil rights movement, which made the prevailing social order in the South and in the industrial cities of the North seem odious and downright antisocial; the women's movement, which freed half the population from the burdens of tradition and stereotype and in the process changed the lives and expectations of the other half; and the religious-conservative movement, which, like the others, was spawned by a deep sense of ethics, caused tension among clerics, prompted violent debate among commentators and ordinary people, turned the natural order on its head, and then sent even more waves coursing through American politics and American life.

"They've changed everything," says Carole Shields, president of People for the American Way, the most prominent opponents of religious conservatives, adding: "They've changed the rules. What's bad is good, what's good is bad. All of what they have done changes how we think about democracy."

In winning a subtle but real change in the key in which American politics is sung, religious conservatives also have challenged the way historic social movements sweep across the country. The civil rights movement and the women's movement originated from the left, the religious-conservative movement from the right. The first two began in the streets and in the nation's homes before moving into its electoral politics. The Christian right began in the political world and then muscled its way into national life. The first two movements shifted American values, while the Christian right thrust the whole notion of values into the forefront of American life.

"The Christian conservatives put things on the table that were off the table," says Charles S. Bullock, a political scientist at the University of Georgia. "They talked about promoting family values in a way that hadn't been spoken about before, and they suggested that the federal government was supposed to play a role."

Now these issues aren't only on the table of politics; they are the table of politics. Now the word "values" passes the lips not only of conservatives but also of liberals, not only of Republicans but also of Democrats. Now the notion that religion is at the center of national life, not at the periphery, is voiced not only by Republicans but also by Democrats. Now the term "pro-family" is used by liberals and Democrats with conviction, not with a wink and a smirk.

"Democrats now know they have to have a way to address these issues," says Charles Alston, executive director of the Democratic Leadership Council, a group of moderate Democrats that for more than a dozen years has nudged the party toward the center. "State legislators are going up to each other and asking: 'How do you talk about it? What do you say?' " Indeed, Evan Jenkins, a Democratic member of the West Virginia House of Delegates from Huntington, asserts: "These are not issues that only Republicans should talk about. The Democrats cannot afford to ignore these things."

If they do, it's at their peril. Mark Souter, the great-grandson of one of the first Amish settlers in northeast Indiana, defeated a liberal Democrat, Representative Jill Long, for a House seat by stressing these issues in a district that serves as home of the Missouri Synod Lutheran Seminary and is populated by fundamentalist Protestants and conservative Catholics. "There's a general feeling that there's been a moral decline in the country," says Souter, who once owned a general store in the area. "People talk about pornography, the breakdown of marriage, homosexuality, drug abuse. They're concerned about the cultural direction of the country -- and the generation of this sentiment isn't from old ladies in white tennis shoes but from the younger people." In fact, religious conservatives defy easy characterization.

Though some religious conservatives are Jews and Catholics, generally the term is used to speak of fundamentalists, Pentecostals, Baptists, and other evangelical Protestants. What they share is an orthodox view of religion, belief in an anthropomorphic god, and a serious approach to traditional moral teachings, particularly on sexual and family issues.

Though the language of religious conservatives is nonthreatening -- you can think of the soft, sweet talk of faith and values as comfort food for the soul -- it is impossible to overestimate how threatening the movement is to large portions of the American public.

The movement's critics believe religious conservatives want to break down the barriers between church and state, starve the public schools by siphoning off students with education vouchers or giving financial assistance to religious-oriented schools, oppress gays by denying them freedom and opportunities and exposing them to social ostracism, stifle choice by restricting or even outlawing abortion, and stifle freedom of expression by driving daring artistic or literary work out of the marketplace.

So far, religious conservatives and their critics agree that the movement hasn't yet achieved its ultimate goals. But it can claim a number of impressive accomplishments, including the $500-per-child tax credit passed in 1997. Other victories, such as congressional approval of the ban on so-called partial-birth abortions and the establishment of Education Savings Accounts to give tax breaks to parents of private-school students, have been blunted by President Clinton's veto. "Look at our agenda," says Randy Tate, the onetime Washington State congressman who now heads the Christian Coalition, "and you can see how the debate has changed -- and how more and more, we look at how politics affects families."

In an ironic twist of culture, the movement that changed the debate in the United States now is itself the subject of debate. In fact, the debate about the Christian right is now more fevered than the debate over many of the issues supported by the Christian right.

Indeed, the religious conservatives stir unusually strong passions. "Watching religious conservatives is like people in the 18th century going to asylums to watch lunatics chew on their own wrists," says Regina Barecca, a social critic who teaches English at the University of Connecticut. "They are a fringe, and people who take them seriously aren't engaging in some disinterested dialogue. They're looking at a spectacle."

But as much as their opponents try to portray religious conservatives as on the fringe, they have fought their way to the center of American political life. No accounting of American politics at century's end can fail to include them. National Election Studies data show that evangelicals and other religious traditionalists accounted for one-third of the vote in the 1994 midterm elections and two-fifths of the Republican total.

"They have become part of the nomination process," says George C. Edwards, director of the Center for Presidential Studies at Texas A&M University. "No Republican can afford to ignore them. At the very least, candidates have to make symbolic bows to them."

That is because religious conservatives, like union members before them, built their power by understanding the nature of power. "They didn't change American politics; they took advantage of American politics," says Patrick S. Kelley, the blunt managing editor of The Emporia Gazette, the storied Kansas newspaper once edited by William Allen White. "After Vietnam and after Watergate, nobody wanted to work for the old parties, and there was a vacuum for them to fill. All they had to do is to attend meetings and vote themselves into office. Plus, they had all this money. They're doing politics better than almost anybody except for the tobacco companies."

That's why a 70-year-old woman named Ione Dilley is an important power broker in Iowa. She drifted into politics after the Supreme Court, in its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, legalized abortion. Then she became involved in the Rev. Pat Robertson's 1988 presidential campaign, and now she is the Iowa chairwoman of the Christian Coalition. "My goodness, when I first started, our own precinct caucus closed down -- actually adjourned -- the meeting when I brought up prolife language," she says. So, the next year, she lined up support in her precinct and got the language passed. "You don't have to run over me too many times to get me moving," she says. "We knew we had to get everyone we could, and we did. It was a surprise to everybody, including us. A lot of people didn't realize what was going on, but now they do."

The modern classic religious conservative is Marlys Pompa, 42, of Sully, Iowa, who was so uninterested in politics that she didn't even register to vote until she was in her mid-20s. But Pompa found herself pregnant, unmarried, and contemplating abortion. In the end, she couldn't terminate her pregnancy, and after weeks of soul-searching and drift, she joined a group called the Christian Action Council, which talks to young people about alternatives to abortion and working to fight abortion rights. She moved to Iowa Right to Life, where she served for two years as chairman and another four as president. And in 1992, she went to work for Representative Jim Ross Lightfoot's congressional campaign, becoming organization director and getting involved in political action for the first time.

By then Pompa, who lives smack between one town with 400 people and another with 800, was hooked. She worked for Governor Terry Branstad in 1994 as a field representative and coalitions director, served as political director of the Republican Party of Iowa, and became deputy campaign manager for the presidential bid of Senator Phil Gramm of Texas. "I'm really in deeply now," she says. "I think of myself, still, as a mom. I have three children, all at home. I've had this interesting evolution -- an unwed pregnant mom moving through this process and then becoming a part of it. The fact is that if you work hard and have some brain cells and are ingenious and are loyal and committed, you can really make a difference."

That formula found big results in Kansas. Religious conservatism may have a Southern face, but it has a Midwestern soul, and nowhere is the strength of the Christian right greater than in the grain belt. While The Emporia Gazette trumpeted a sound, respectable, traditional brand of Republicanism, religious conservatives in Lyon County noticed when members of the GOP old guard retired or moved or died, and they swiftly filled the vacuum.

"Like they did most everywhere else, they had people running for precinct committeeman, and the rest of us were asleep at the switch," says former state representative James E. Lowther. "We didn't realize how zealous they would be. They would campaign door-to-door for a job that no one had campaigned for before. It was a stealth deal, until it was over."

Once the stealth phase ended, the real battle began. Politics increasingly became a struggle over abortion -- and the notion of how a small group can change a big state's conversation became clear and vivid. "In an ordinary day, 10 years ago, you talked about economic issues 90 percent of the time and some of their kinds of things 10 percent of the time," says Governor Bill Graves of Kansas, a moderate Republican who had to defeat a religious-conservative insurrection to win renomination and a second term in 1998. "Now you're talking about their issues 50 percent of the time and my kind of issues 50 percent of the time."

The more that religious conservatives fought, the more their appetite for the fight grew. "I looked out my kitchen window, and I saw America falling apart," says Vonda Wiedmer, a homemaker and part-time production worker in Madison, Kansas. "What could I do? I was only one person. But I was one person. When my kids were taking naps, I'd write politicians -- just to see if they would lie to me. I just got tired of politicians doing as they darn well pleased and counting on our bad memory to get reelected."

Soon Kansas, where blood had been shed over the moral issue of slavery in the middle of the last century, became a modern political battleground. "You had entirely different subsets of the Republican Party operating," says David Miller, a onetime political director of Kansans for Life. "Most people would agree there was tension. More than that, there was no communication." It got so bad that Miller, who was eventually elected chairman of the Republican Party in Kansas, mounted a costly but unsuccessful challenge to the sitting governor of his own party, Graves, in an August primary.

If the Midwest has been a staging ground for the successes of religious conservatives, it has also been a stage for its defeats. Miller overplayed his hand and was defeated roundly in Kansas. In nearby Nebraska, a gubernatorial candidate with strong support from religious conservatives, Jon Christensen, finished third in a Republican primary as GOP leaders began to worry whether religious conservatism had become too powerful, too prominent, in the state party.

"I wince every time our prayers at Republican gatherings are overtly Christian and exclusionary of Jews, Moslems, Hindus, or the Asian religions that are practiced by our fellow Americans," Representative Doug Bereuter said in a midsummer speech at the Republican State Convention in Grand Island, Nebraska. "What message do we send about their role in our party?"

There is, however, no denying the role of the religious right in the Republican Party -- and that is one of the signal developments of American politics in the last quarter-century.

The religious-conservative movement provided one of the engines behind last month's effort to impeach the president in the House. Many Republican supporters of impeachment were lobbied heavily by the Christian Coalition, which delivered petitions to Capitol Hill, organized telephone campaigns, and reminded Republican lawmakers of the support the Christian Coalition has provided in recent years and of the campaign work it has performed.

Many religious conservatives were drawn into politics not by Republicans but by a Democrat, Jimmy Carter; voter surveys indicate that 51 percent of evangelicals voted Democratic in 1976. But religious conservatives soon grew impatient with his support of legal abortion and drifted easily into the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan. By 1988, they were voting solidly Republican for president; two out of three white evangelicals voted for Bob Dole in 1996.

Big changes swept the political landscape in those two decades, however. The 1980s began with the Moral Majority, led by Jerry Falwell, acting as an ally to Reagan, and ended with Pat Robertson running for president in 1988. "The 1980s were a great disappointment to religious conservatives, because they didn't get what they want," says John Green, director of the Ray Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron in Ohio. "But they learned a lot of valuable lessons."

By the 1990s, Focus on the Family (whose founder and leader, James Dobson, reaches millions on radio), based in Colorado Springs, and the Christian Coalition (with its network of 100,000 churches, satellite links, and computer bulletin boards) had dropped the pretext of bipartisanship, becoming increasingly and vocally Republican -- and far more sophisticated. The GOP victory in 1994, when the Republicans took control of the Congress after four decades in the wilderness, included many elements, but one of the keys was religious conservatives.

This was the time of the Great Lurch, when religious conservatives who had voted for Republicans for president but Democrats farther down the ballot finally voted for GOP congressional candidates in great numbers; 70 percent of white evangelicals voted for GOP congressional candidates, according to the 1994 National Election Study, the highest rate ever in a congressional race. In addition, about two dozen of the newly elected members had close ties to religious conservative groups. For the first time, moreover, evangelicals replaced mainline Protestants as the biggest element of the Republican coalition.

By this time, there were 48 state units of the Christian Coalition, with 1,400 local chapters and 1.5 million members. The numbers are daunting: 17,000 neighborhood coordinators, 30,000 local workers, contacts in 60,000 churches. The group was able to distribute 57 million pieces of literature, mail more than a million postcards, and make more than a half-million get-out-the-vote calls -- and still not reach its full political potential.

"The ground to be tilled is huge," says Tate, who succeeded Ralph Reed at the head of the Christian Coalition in June 1997. "Look at your average pew of 10 people. Six of them won't vote." That's untapped potential that is apparent every Sunday morning.

Reed, who began as an adviser to Robertson and then eventually became the central player in Christian politics, recognized and then harnessed this power. He was pragmatic and sophisticated, with an eye toward precinct organization, in dramatic contrast to Falwell and Robertson, who were much more media-oriented and assumed that the vote would follow the message. Reed understood that it didn't.

Falwell and Robertson saw the opening in American politics, and Reed -- one part activist, one part organizer, one part scholar -- saw how to fill it. "We weren't trying to become a pressure group," he says now. "We were trying to reconfigure the American political landscape." He studied the union vote and the black vote, the two touchstones of modern Democratic politics, and he studied the 1928 election, when Governor Al Smith of New York was defeated but when the ethnic voters moved into the Democratic fold, transforming the politics of the country.

"Here are the new people, clamoring . . . and the older people defending their household gods," Walter Lippmann wrote of the 1928 election. "The rise of Al Smith made the conflict plain, and his career has come to involve a major aspect of the destiny of American civilization." The Smith campaign was an earthquake in American politics; with Smith at the head of the ticket, the Democrats won the presidential vote in Massachusetts for the first time ever.

Reed believed that white evangelicals could foment just as significant a revolution. His plan was clear: Take somewhere between 17 and 34 percent of the electorate, people who say they have had a religious-conversion experience and who are moved to display the depth of their feeling, and make them a political bloc. "The size of the group was important," Reed says. "It suggested that if you moved that constituency and nothing more, you could change the face of American politics."

First, though, he had to change the face of the religious-conservative movement. "The only way a movement like this enters the mainstream of American political discourse is if it executes its extremists," Reed says. "It was a critical bar of legitimacy we had to clear. The labor unions ran the communists out. Martin Luther King did the same in the civil rights movement."

Falwell and Robertson didn't want to start a fight within the family. Reed didn't mind doing so. "We needed to mainstream ourselves and to have enemies on the left and the right," he says. "Our enemies on the right were the people who wanted to impose a Christian nation on a late-20th-century democracy. We said no. We said people of a religious nature had a right to be in politics, just as blacks should sit at lunch counters. But we said the drive for a Christian nation was antithetical to our goals."

Reed gave an important 1995 speech to the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, arguing that "Christians active in the political process find themselves caricatured and stereotyped as a danger to tolerance and a threat to pluralistic democracy." Reed said that this notion was a grave threat to his movement. "To be an object of fear rather than an agent of love and healing is contrary to all that we are and all that we aspire to be as a people."

He acknowledged that "religious conservatives have at times been insensitive," vowed that "we will never forget what you have endured as a people, and we will do all in our power to ensure that Jews are never again the target of hatred and discrimination," and asserted that the Christian Coalition "believes in a nation that is not officially Christian, Jewish, or Muslim."

The speech didn't wipe away worries some Robertson critics had over remarks like the televangelist's frequently recycled statement that the Constitution "is a marvelous document for self-government by Christian people," but that it could "destroy the very foundation of our society" if it is put "into the hands of non-Christians and atheistic people." Indeed, Reed's speech left many of those critics unsatisfied. "The way for them to expand is to speak a language that is palatable for others," says Shields of People for the American Way. "I think of it as Dealmaking 101. They need to talk this way to expand."

But Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, was impressed. "He came into the lion's den and went as far as one could have expected in reaching out and being sensitive," he says. Foxman and Reed have met often, discussing their differences, and as a result the two have grown to respect each other. "I believe I have a very honest and constructive relationship with him, and I feel that is a relationship that Ralph has with the Jewish community," Foxman says. "His word is his word."

He adds: "America has to be concerned about any movement that believes that it has the monopoly on the truth and wants its truth to be the major direction and mandate. There are elements in that movement that feel that way and are troubling. Pat Robertson is one of them. He thinks he has the truth. Ralph Reed is not one of them. He thinks he has a truth."

Ironically, Reed thought he had the way to power, but others within his movement have been arguing for more than a year that there is another way.

The most prominent voice of this other way is Gary Bauer, a former Reagan White House adviser, the president of the Family Research Council, and a potential GOP presidential candidate himself. Under Bauer's impetus, and with the help of his group's $13.5 million budget, religious conservatives have moved into foreign policy questions in a big way, pushing Congress and the administration to emphasize human-rights concerns in American relations with nations such as China.

"Morality ought to be at the core of our domestic values, but it should also be at the core of our foreign policy," says Bauer. "American foreign policy historically has only worked when the American people saw a moral core to it, whether it was liberating Europe or our initial involvement in Vietnam. In the end, the most realistic foreign policy ends up being one based on morals rather than on a Henry Kissinger analysis of power politics."

Mostly, however, religious conservatives have been involved in domestic issues, and in the past year, the Christian Coalition stirred deep passions with its newspaper advertisements arguing "that homosexuals can change" and, with the help of "God's healing love," can live heterosexual lives.

The ads caused a firestorm, with Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank, the gay congressman from Newton, remarking that "these people are obsessed."

Tracey Conaty, communications director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, says: "Most gays and lesbians are happy with the way they are, and the only thing that makes gay and lesbian life difficult is the intolerance that these ads promote. They may have the face of a kinder, gentler homophobia, but the intolerance in them is quite insidious."

Many Democrats believe the gay ads, followed by the fall election results, signal an opening in their twin struggles against the Republicans and religious conservatives.

"The mobilization into the Republican Party has changed the internal mix of the Republican Party," says Allen Hertzke, a political scientist at the University of Oklahoma. "As a result, there are deeper disputes between the two parties than there used to be. A generation ago, you would not have seen partisan differences on abortion. Now the gap is wide. And now," Hertzke says, "the Republican Party is more of a conservative party with a religious component, and the Democrats are a party of diverse minorities and a secular component."

A major question Republicans face as the 2000 election approaches is whether religious conservatives have become too dominant in the GOP. "Early in the movement [the Republicans] got the benefit of those troops because nobody knew they were there," says Frank. "But now -- actually since 1992 -- they are paying a price for it."

Indeed, several prominent religious conservatives were defeated this past fall, including Governor Fob James Jr. of Alabama, state Representative Gex Williams, a Reed client who lost a House race in a Republican district in Kentucky, and Senator Lauch Faircloth, Republican of North Carolina. Democrats are making hay -- and raising money -- by raising the specter of the religious right.

"These people scare me to death," political consultant James Carville proclaims in a Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee mailing sent last year. A People for the American Way mailing spoke of the "burgeoning grass-roots power of mean-spirited and well-organized Religious Right political groups" and warned of "this spreading of ignorance and intolerance."

Many Republicans believe there is danger to being too closely identified with one faction, but few GOP politicians are eager to alienate religious conservatives, and some are courting them diligently. "You can't be in the position of saying that the majority in the party has too much power," says Senator John Ashcroft of Missouri, a presidential candidate who is popular among religious conservatives. "As long as the focus is on public policy, then, no problem. But if these groups were to try to impose their religious views, then we have a problem. It is against my religion to impose my religion on others. If God allows individuals to choose against God, then the party should, too."

And so the debate goes on: How much influence is enough? How much is too much? How close should the worlds of religion and politics be? Can people of faith separate their religious beliefs from their political beliefs? Should they have to? Are religious conservatives a threat to the political system? Or are they the salvation of it?

These questions loom large on the political landscape -- a landscape that already has been altered by religious conservatives. "Part of our belief system is that politics is not one issue or one time," says Tate, the executive director of the Christian Coalition. "Politics is not an event, it is a process." After the tumult of the past dozen years, religious conservatives now are part of that process.

David M. Shribman is the Globe's Washington bureau chief.