01-22-2000

POLITICS: Where's the Flock?

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa-Beneath the basketball hoop, in the scuffed-up
gymnasium at the Isaac Newton Christian Academy on the outskirts of this
unpretentious city of 100,000-plus souls, a hand-painted sign declares in
red, white, and blue: "Welcome Gov. Bush."


"Our father in heaven," begins Dave Miller, the pastor at
Northbrook Baptist Church, "we thank you for this man, and for the
testimony he's given of his faith in you, and pray that your blessing be
on him and on this campaign and on his family. We ask all this in Jesus'
name. Amen."


The Republicans' presidential front-runner, Texas Gov. George W. Bush,
fresh from a breakfast with social conservatives at a downtown hotel,
stood poised, on the balls of his feet, visibly ready-for what? The gym
was ringed with seated schoolchildren and clusters of parents, with a line
of television cameras across the back, and Bush stepped forward with a
sparkly charm and told a story about the stray six-toed kitten found in
the yard of the Governor's Mansion in Austin. He spoke not a word about
Christ, and only once did he mention a higher authority, in promising-if
elected President-to "uphold the honor and integrity of the office,
so help me God." Yet, in his replies to questions from eight
children, Bush talked loftily of values, expounding on right and wrong,
telling the truth, and his opposition to abortion-"starting with a
ban on partial-birth abortion," he said to applause and whistles.
After he finished, he was given a Bible, similar to the one he says he
reads every day.


It was typical Bush, aides said. Karen P. Hughes, Bush's communications
director, said afterward: "He is cautious about mixing his personal
faith and politics."


But, truth be told, only at times. In the current campaign, an
unprecedented number of presidential candidates, including the Democratic
front-runner and most of the Republican hopefuls, have been startlingly
explicit about their religious faith. "I have never heard so much
talk about God and Christ," says Marlys Popma, a veteran
anti-abortion activist and political operative who is running social
conservative Gary Bauer's campaign in Iowa's kickoff presidential caucuses
on Jan. 24.


And Bush, in this regard, "probably is as out-front" as any of
his rivals, judges James L. Guth, a political scientist at Furman
University in Greenville, S.C., who is an expert on religious
conservatives. It was Bush, at a Dec. 13 GOP debate in Des Moines, who
touched off a public tumult on the combustible mixture of religion and
politics with his reply-"Christ, because he changed my heart"-to
a query about the philosopher-thinker he identifies with most. He also
accelerated what Elliott Abrams, a former Reagan Administration official
who's the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a
religious-oriented think tank in Washington, describes as "a bidding
war."


It isn't surprising that the ancient tension between God and Caesar should
emerge here in Iowa, where religion is a serious business-and Christian
conservatives control the GOP's central committee. "In most places,
there's no downside"-among Republicans, at least-for candidates who
divulge the sorts of spiritual details that politicians used to keep to
themselves, Guth says.


Something is odd, though, about the timing of these politicians' godly
testimonials: They come at a perhaps historically pivotal moment, when in
most places the political influence of religious conservatives seems to be
waning. Not everywhere, to be sure. In South Carolina and Alabama, for
instance, hotly debated proposals over creating state lotteries drew many
Christian conservatives into the fray, and they've remained politically
active in the fight over the presidency. But possibly more typical is the
experience of Benny Phillips, the senior pastor at Fairfax Covenant
Church, an evangelical church in the Virginia suburbs of the capital, who
guesses that three-fourths of his parishioners are disgusted with national
politics, compared with half of them just five years ago and a third of
them five years before that. "And with that disgust comes
fragmentation," he says, "so it has been harder to rally the
troops."


In Iowa, too, it isn't that evangelical Christians are declining in
numbers, but that fewer of them are active in politics, according to
Arthur H. Miller, a University of Iowa political scientist who runs the
12-year-old Heartland Poll. His recent surveys have found that religious
conservatives in Iowa account for just 30 percent of likely Republican
voters, down from 35 percent in 1996 and 40 percent in 1994. And as of
last month, their support was spread among competing candidates to an
unprecedented degree-38 percent for Bush, 30 percent for Bauer, 27 percent
for Steve Forbes, and 5 percent for everyone else. This time around, just
a seventh of Iowa's evangelical churches have hosted a political activity,
Miller has found, compared with nearly a third in 1996. "Ministers
have been much more reluctant to do this stuff through the church,"
he says.


"There is a disillusionment with the political process," says J.
Paul Nyquist, the senior pastor at the First Federated Church, the second
largest evangelical church in Des Moines. "Nobody's been talking
about the caucuses."


This disillusionment may be precisely why so many candidates feel such a
need to wear their faith on their sleeve: Religious conservatives in Iowa
are up for grabs. And what better way, after all, to persuade recalcitrant
voters to trudge through the cold for a long, tedious evening of democracy
than to convince them that the candidate in question is truly a soul mate,
if not heaven-sent?


Backpedaling From Politics


"We're not electing a pastor, but I want a man who will talk openly
and clearly about his relationship with the Lord, or the lack
thereof," says Dick Hardy, a pastor at First Assembly of God in Des
Moines, which draws more worshipers each Sunday than any other church in
Iowa, and who's also the chairman of Iowa Families for Bush. This
election, he says, is "not all about the stock market, and the
electorate knows that."


It isn't unusual for prosperity to produce hand-wringing over higher-type
things, in part because the scarier, grubbier issues-it's the economy,
stupid-will have tended to fade. "In times of economic growth, moral
issues often come to the fore," says Jeffrey Bell, a senior adviser
to Bauer's national campaign. He cites the 1850s, when abolition of
slavery emerged as the issue of the day, and the 1960s, with its turmoil
over civil rights and over the scope of cultural restrictions. The
prosperous times of the 1990s saw declining standards of conduct by people
and politicians, a rampantly sexual culture, mass killings in schools and
workplaces, the impeachment of a President over lying about sexual
indiscretions-and public support for his continuing in office. Across the
political spectrum, many people speak of a crisis in values and seem to
hunger for answers that are religious in nature or, in any event,
something more than temporal.


Polls suggest that Americans, always more religious than Europeans, are
becoming ever more so. A survey conducted by the Gallup Organization Inc.
for CNN and USA Today last month found that 68 percent of American
adults-the highest number in more than a quarter-century-said that
religion provides an answer to most of today's problems. Nearly as many
people called themselves "evangelical" or "born-again"
as said they weren't (46 percent vs. 48 percent); twice as many registered
voters (52 percent vs. 25 percent) said they would be drawn to a candidate
who talked about a personal relationship with Christ, compared with those
who would be repelled. For decades, experts have been predicting that
membership in mainline Protestant denominations would soon stop shrinking,
while growth among the ranks of adherents to the theologically demanding
evangelical churches would stop; so far, these prognosticators have been
wrong.


Even so, the political passions of evangelical Christians in Iowa have, by
many accounts, dimmed. Part of the impetus may have come from above-from
the movement's national leaders. "While I'm not suggesting that we
all become Amish or move to Idaho, I do think that we have to look at what
we can do to separate ourselves from this hostile culture," such as
resorting to home schooling or leaving televisions unplugged, counseled
Paul M. Weyrich, the longtime activist, in a letter last February to
conservative leaders. "Politics has failed," he wrote, because
it's no match for "the MTV culture." Syndicated columnist Cal
Thomas and pastor Ed Dobson of Grand Rapids, Mich., gained considerable
attention among religious conservatives by arguing (in a book, Blinded by
Might: Can the Religious Right Save America?) that conservatives'
political successes hadn't kept the nation's culture from continuing to
fall apart. "After 20 years of political activism and millions of
dollars spent on various religious-political movements," they wrote,
"how much longer are they willing to pursue their strategy and agenda
before they realize it not only has not worked, but cannot work?
Pragmatically, the numbers aren't there."


This pessimism about politics is hard to avoid. Dave Miller, the pastor
who introduced Bush here in Cedar Rapids, confided after the candidate
left that he agrees with the authors of Blinded by Might that a natural
tension exists between truth and power. "Politics has a place,"
he said, but "so many Christians came to the point of believing that
politics would do the job of evangelizing. ...Nations change when the
hearts of people change."


"Political answers will be severely limited," says Craig Foote,
who teaches government and history at Cedar Valley Christian School here
and brought a class of juniors and seniors to the Bush breakfast.
"The only way to change the culture is neighborhood by neighborhood,
block by block. That's the opinion of a lot of people I've talked
to." Accordingly, he says, "I don't see the same energy, the
same numbers" among religious conservatives active in politics that
he saw four or eight years ago.


"I don't see a lot of people worked up about the election,"
echoes Glenn Reynolds, the senior pastor at Christian Life Assembly, a
small evangelical church in Des Moines. Part of the problem is simply
fatigue. Popma notes: "They're tired. You fight a battle for so
long-and lose too many."


But it was winning, even more than losing, that caused many religious
conservatives to lose their faith in Caesar's ways. The GOP's 1994
takeover of Congress, which they helped to produce, brought with it the
curse of high expectations. Hopes for a ban on late-term abortions and
limits on the years a member of Congress can serve, among other political
objectives, never panned out, even before two of the Republicans'
congressional notables-Newt Gingrich of Georgia and his putative successor
as House Speaker, Bob Livingston of Louisiana-were found to have conducted
extramarital affairs. "Christian conservatives are
disenchanted," Popma says, having "worked their butts off in the
`94 congressional cycle."


In the meantime, the potency of religious conservatives' most prominent
organization, the Christian Coalition of America, has sagged financially
and organizationally, while much of the activists' political fervor has
shifted to the local level-to struggles over public schools and city
council seats. "Politics is local," says Hardy, the Bush-backing
pastor, who spent nine years on a suburban school board.


Judgments are changing about what it'll take to make the world a better
place. "I can have a much greater impact in the world if I could help
turn a heart to God, as opposed to turning a tax code," Hardy
suggests, describing a sense among religious conservatives that
"salvation is not going to lie in Al Gore or George W.
Bush."


God on the Stump


When Bush mentioned Christ at the debate in Des Moines, Reynolds thought
he said "Price," and wondered for a moment, "Who is
Price-some economist somewhere?"


What Bush was saying, however, struck political scientist Guth as
strategically inspired. On issues that are dear to social conservatives,
the self-styled compassionate conservative has soft-pedaled some of his
stands-for instance, refusing to promise to appoint only abortion
opponents to the Supreme Court-as a means of preserving his potential
appeal to independents and Democrats. At the same time, by using
evangelical language in describing his faith, Bush offers what Guth calls
"symbolic reassurance" to religious conservatives that he is one
of them.


Bush has frequently recounted how evangelist Billy Graham, with an
artfully timed question, prompted him to turn from a life of booze and
irresponsibility to one of discipline and achieved ambition. A
philosophical centerpiece of his presidential campaign is his proposal to
increase the use of religious organizations as vehicles to administer
federal dollars for social ends-such as in providing drug treatment and
after-school programs. In Iowa, his campaign has curried support, with
impressive success, from evangelical pastors.


The plurality he is predicted to draw from religious conservatives on Jan.
24 has assured Bush a strong overall lead in Iowa polls. For he has
something quite alluring to hawk. After listening to Bush speak, at her
children's Christian school, Marla Owens says she still likes Bauer
"a little better," but that she regards her vote as "a
toss-up" between the two candidates. Actually, she sounds as if she
has made up her mind. "At the end," she declares, "it's
electability."


Ah, yes, even true believers want to win. A quadrennium ago, fiery
moralist Alan Keyes came within three votes of defeating secular Bob Dole
in the Republican caucuses in Linn County, which includes Cedar Rapids.
"That's not going to happen this time," predicts government
teacher Foote. "The conventional wisdom is-wink, wink-'we want a
winner.' " And the conventional wisdom, he posits, is
correct.


Popma insists that Bauer, too, can win, in Iowa and nationally. Perhaps
more plausible is her suggestion that Bauer, the socially conservative
purist in the race, has defined some of the terms that are swirling
through the Republican debate. "Everybody else," grouses Bell,
"is doing some kind of Gary Bauer imitation," in using moral and
biblical language to chart the nation's course. And tactically, Bauer's
rivals are following his lead, too: Bauer is counting on Iowa's
evangelical churches for his political salvation. He has delivered his
personal religious testimony in many a church, attended worship services
more Sundays than not, enlisted support from 50 to 60 Iowa pastors, and is
counting on this network of churches to produce the sort of stealthy
turnout that televangelist Pat Robertson achieved in 1988, when his
second-place finish in Iowa shocked the political establishment. Turnout
is considered the key to success in the caucuses, which are ordinarily
attended by just a sixth of the state's roughly 600,000
Republicans.


Dynastic magazine publisher Steve Forbes, an emotionally distant
Episcopalian, has made the largest leap. A purely economic conservative of
the most ascetic mien when he ran for President four years ago, Forbes has
chased the votes of religious conservatives by calling for "a
spiritual renewal" and by recently distributing campaign brochures in
Iowa that named his role models and the people who have most influenced
his life: "First would be Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior."
Instead of ignoring the abortion issue, as he did in 1996, Forbes is
running a 30-second TV ad in Iowa that underscores his opposition to
abortion, pledges to appoint only anti-abortion judges, and favors posting
the Ten Commandments in public schools. Born-again, with gusto.


Probably even more telling than Forbes' expressions of faith-and the
political benefits that godliness can bring-have been Al Gore's. A Baptist
with an Episcopal education and manner, the Vice President told Lesley
Stahl of CBS News that he considers himself born-again. He also told Sally
Quinn of The Washington Post that he asks himself "What would Jesus
do?" Chris Lehane, his campaign press secretary, says that Gore has
detailed his beliefs only in reply to questions. But Gore has also taken
pains to make sure the subject comes up. When he introduced his own
initiative last spring to encourage governmental use of faith-based
organizations, he invited seven religion reporters in to conduct a joint
interview. "The purpose of life," he told them, echoing
Christian catechism, "is to glorify God."


Gore's religiosity hasn't come out of the blue. As a junior in college, he
recently told U.S. News & World Report, he "felt a
transformational relationship with my own interpretation of God, and
Christ in God." Later, he spent a year at divinity school, a time
spent thinking deep thoughts after returning from military service in
Vietnam. In Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit, his 1992
book on environmental issues, Gore wrote that his faith "is rooted in
the unshakeable belief in God as creator and sustainer, a deeply personal
interpretation of and relationship with Christ, and an awareness of a
constant and holy spiritual presence in all people, all life, and all
things." On the stump, "I have talked about my religious faith
over and over and over again," he says, and he's prone to quote the
Bible or Mother Teresa (who, in a recent Gallup poll, was named by 49
percent of Americans as the 20th-century person they admired most,
compared with 26 percent for Billy Graham).


Gore's beliefs may not help his electoral prospects in, say, New York
state, where 12 percent of the Democratic voters are Jews. But it could
help quite a lot in the heavily evangelical-and electorally potent-South,
a region Gore calls home but where he seems culturally a stranger. Being
visibly religious is also presumed to appeal to black and Hispanic voters,
who are mainstays of the Democratic coalition. Elaine C. Kamarck, a senior
adviser to Gore, has proclaimed that "the Democratic Party is going
to take back God this time."


And why not? The latest issue of The American Prospect, a liberal biweekly
magazine, describes the historic role that religion has played on behalf
of progressive causes, including "abolition, suffrage, temperance,
the Progressive era, or various utopian, labor, and reform movements-or,
more recently, on civil rights, the Vietnam era, or the 1980s' battles
over Central America and nuclear weapons."


Gore may also have another political objective in mind besides a partisan
tug-of-war over the deity. In this age of confessional politics, confiding
the intimacies of your faith to millions of Americans is a way to tell the
public who you are. "And who you are is the most salient thing there
is," says Democratic pollster Mark S. Mellman, an informal adviser to
Gore's campaign. "Ultimately, voters are less interested in [a
candidate's] positions on 75 issues and more interested in who they are as
a person."


This soul-baring may prove especially useful against Gore's only
Democratic rival, former Sen. Bill Bradley of New Jersey. Bradley was once
an evangelical Christian but now refuses to discuss his religious beliefs
because he says that they are private. Bradley's political appeal is
grounded in his image as a plainspoken, unscripted sort of politician-his
vaunted "authenticity." Gore's religiosity serves as his
reply.


"Now everybody talks our language" is what pro-Bush pastor Hardy
has learned.


Caesar Strikes Back


Naturally, this convergence in political vocabulary isn't, in this land of
exuberant pluralism, to everyone's liking. Besides Bradley, Sen. John
McCain, R-Ariz., has declined to explain or to exploit his Episcopalian
beliefs, other than in a radio commercial in South Carolina that describes
the power of his Christmas sermons as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam.
Catholic columnists have written about feeling excluded by the candidates'
Protestant-sounding expressions of faith, and Jews have felt queasy at so
many mentions of Christ.


The Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish group, has dispatched letters of
complaint to all the candidates. "It's wonderful" if candidates
go to church, says Abraham H. Foxman, the group's national director, but
not if they "flaunt" their faith and seem to hawk it for
political ends. "At a certain point," he says, "it makes
people feel left out." The group hasn't forgotten Bush's 1993 remark
that only people who accept Christ as a personal savior can enter heaven
(which he now dismisses with a crack about how governors don't get to
decide).


Even some Protestant pastors see a downside in politicians' telling too
much about the details of their personal faith. "I want to know where
a [candidate] is on this-it affects how you live, how you think, what kind
of decisions you make," says the Rev. Nyquist of First Federated
Church in Des Moines. But as the United States becomes an
ever-more-diverse, postmodern society, people will increasingly demand
tolerance and cultural relativism; when politicians talk about Jesus, he
explains, more and more voters-Republicans, Democrats, and others-will be
"turned off."


And seeming too purposeful about being religious can rankle. "I don't
think that Christ should be targeted," says Popma, who suspects that
Bush has done just that in religion-preoccupied Iowa. James T. Parmelee, a
Republican activist and former Christian Coalition operative in Fairfax
County, Va., says he's "really starting to get really sick at
everyone sharing everything-everyone wearing it on their
sleeve."


But as long as character remains at the forefront of presidential politics
(thanks in part to Bill Clinton), candidates may continue to insist that
their favorite companion on their stroll to the White House is God
Almighty. That is, until the national economy collapses or a strategically
important faraway place blows up. During such crises, a deft political
touch and quick, sure reflexes again become more-important qualifications
for the presidency than an affable personality and a knack for quoting
Scripture.


In the meantime, however, not everyone thinks that flaunting what you
believe is necessarily bad. The Rev. Jesse Jackson, a relentlessly
political man of the cloth, reminded an interviewer last summer that
"Jesus never performed any miracle at night."


Burt Solomon

National Journal