Breaking Camp: Political Fractures Among the Christian Evangelicals

By Bart Mongoven

Political rifts within the evangelical Christian camp of the Republican Party are continuing. Among the recent events that have brought the feuding -- usually hushed -- closer to the surface was the publication on March 12 of a letter, drafted by Focus on the Family's James Dobson, that sought to put a halt to efforts by the National Association of Evangelicals lobbying group to bring about congressional action on climate change. The National Association for Evangelicals, however, has told the petitioners it has no intention of changing its position on the need for action on the climate change issue.

The feud over global warming is only one of numerous points of contention within the evangelical community. While the splits among evangelicals are not new, they have never been as clearly in the open as they are now.

Awareness of the fault lines among the public and mainstream media has grown particularly in the wake of the yearly Council for National Policy meeting, which took place in early February in Amelia Island, Fla. This event, strictly closed to the press, brings together leaders of the evangelical movement for intime discussions of priorities, positions and strategies. The 2007 meeting was intended to bring clarity to the movement's position on potential GOP presidential nominees.

From details that are now leaking out, however, it appears that clarity was not achieved. The fissures that have developed among evangelicals during the past five years are far from healing, and the political implications of the disunity are potentially far-reaching. The first clear manifestation of the problem, from a political standpoint, will be in evangelicals' inability to unite behind a single presidential candidate for 2008.

Political Camps and Lessons from History

In all fairness, the "religious right" wing of the Republican Party was never as unified or monolithic as voters or the media tended to perceive. Broadly put, the politically active evangelical Christian community always has been more of a triune body, made up of:

• Pragmatists, or realists, who -- like most evangelicals -- are critical of the dominant culture but who also want to get as much out of the political system as possible and are willing to make compromises on all but a small number of issues;
• Liberals, who eschew the critical approach usually associated with traditional religious conservatives and try instead to teach the Christian message from within the dominant culture; and
• Idealists, who see American society as being under attack by anti-religious figures or by damaging secular attitudes. The idealists would choose to lose politically, while sticking up for the entirety of their values, rather than be compromised or co-opted.

Beyond these three is a fourth group: A growing number of evangelicals (particularly young ones) who have turned from politics and government entirely and are dedicated to working at the community level -- seeking small-scale but concrete impact in support of the Christian mission.

The three politically active groups have managed to live successfully under one tent for most of the past 20 years, but the differences between them have crystallized since the GOP captured control over both Congress and the presidency.

Now, with the GOP weakened in Congress and moral questions about some Bush administration policies openly discussed, these differences are taking on enormous importance. They also are significant from a wider party perspective, since the discussions carry implications for the shape of the Republican Party moving forward.

To understand this, it is critical to review the circumstances surrounding two key elections -- the presidential votes in 1984 and 1992 -- which guide the thinking of religious evangelicals as they look toward 2008.

1984 was the last year that traditional progressive Democrats, personified by candidate Walter Mondale, mattered in a national election -- and Mondale lost 49 states in his bid to supplant Ronald Reagan. In the wake of the election, "Progressives" -- loosely defined as idealists (empowered by the party reforms of 1972) who were deeply suspicious of the military, business and laissez-faire capitalism -- came to be seen by party leaders and major donors as a core problem. Perceptions grew (and were cemented by Michael Dukakis' massive defeat in 1988) that Progressives alienated middle-class voters and marginalized the Democratic Party. Out of this line of thinking were born groups like the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), founded by then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, to increase the power of the party's moderate center.

Clinton, of course, ran for president as a moderate who conveyed the message that he was not a prisoner to traditional Democratic constituencies. Meanwhile, within the party, the DLC wing took and retained power until the 2003 invasion of Iraq and 2005's Hurricane Katrina. "Progressive" Democrats, once heavily represented among the party's leadership, were essentially jettisoned from power.

The 1992 election also is key in the GOP's current thinking. The Clinton campaign had successfully framed the Republican Party as captive to the religious right; evangelicals and their supporters played into this portrayal at the Republican National Convention, from which emerged a platform that reflected the strong influence of religious conservatives. The capstone, of course, was Pat Buchanan's famous "Culture War" prime-time address, which alienated Republican moderates and convinced mainstream media that everything they had been hearing about the conservative "takeover" of the party was correct.

These examples have different meanings to the various camps of the evangelical right. For the pragmatists, who wish to keep some level of power and influence and accept the necessity of compromise, they stand as warnings not to make the perfect the enemy of the good. Pragmatic evangelicals are trying desperately to avoid alienating the political middle -- fearing particularly that the Republican Party would abandon them, out of political necessity, much as Democrats ignored traditional progressives for two decades.

The same is true for liberal evangelicals, who have come to view issues like climate change and the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay as important challenges to their values -- not as important, perhaps, as issues like abortion, but significant nonetheless. These more liberal evangelicals are most concerned by events like those of 1992 -- events that cause evangelicals to be perceived or portrayed as outsiders to mainstream society, consequently reducing their ability to carry their message of faith forward in socially relevant ways.

The idealists, on the other hand, apparently want to maintain their association with and influence within the GOP -- on their own terms. They cannot abide compromises on any their long-held policy positions and are resistant to compromise even on lower-tier issues.

This thinking explains the letter on climate change by Dobson, the symbolic leader of the idealist camp, to the National Association of Evangelicals. Fearing that they too could fall victim to the fate of the Progressives, the idealists' response has been an attempt to strengthen ties with the Republican Party.

Implications: The Candidates and Party Primaries

In this context, it is easy to see why the Council for National Policy meeting in Florida was likely as contentious a meeting as the group has had in a long time. Indeed, the very fact that details have been leaking out to the press is evidence of the rifts that are in place -- and of course, the information being leaked sheds further light on the points of contention. At this point, it does not seem likely that evangelicals will be able to agree on a single Republican presidential candidate for 2008.

Part of the problem facing the movement is the candidate list itself. None of the heaviest hitters are inherently attractive to evangelicals, as George W. Bush was in 2000 or Pat Buchanan was in 1992 (or, especially, 1996). Of the leading candidates, Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney shares evangelicals' core values, but evangelicals are deeply suspicious of him nonetheless. For one thing, he is a Mormon -- which many view as a cultish sect of Christianity -- and his conservative social values stem from what he portrays as very recent changes of heart.

The front-runner for the GOP nomination -- current polls notwithstanding -- is Arizona Sen. John McCain. McCain's acrimonious relationship with evangelicals is widely recognized: He has dismissed evangelicals as overly doctrinaire and closed-minded, and has publicly voiced concern about their influence within the Republican Party. Few evangelical Christians would vote for him even in a general election, let alone a primary. The other top contenders are former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich -- both of whom are social moderates, and whose private backgrounds include extramarital affairs and divorce.

The candidates most strongly playing to the religious conservatives are Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and California Rep. Duncan Hunter. All of these are long shots for the party's nomination, much less for the election.

If Brownback or Huckabee were to win the outright support of the conservative evangelicals, the Republican Party would face a worst-case scenario: The "religious right" movement would openly oppose a more "electable" candidate like the socially liberal McCain or Giuliani. The result would be not just fratricide in the primary season -- with whoever emerges being too weak to survive the general election slugfest -- but also a possibility that the chasm now emerging between evangelicals and the rest of the Republican Party will grow more formal and entrenched. The result would be a weakened Republican Party that gravitates toward the political center and political dispersal of the grassroots evangelical movement.

Sensing this, the pragmatists appear to have adopted a new strategy, designed to contain any potential damage from the evangelicals' rifts and to capitalize on remaining strengths for the GOP. In other words, the strategy is to emphasize national security, and particularly the idea that winning the war against terrorism is a necessary precondition for achievement of Christian ideals. Since the Council for National Policy meeting ended in late February, news stories about national security as a unifying concept among Republicans have multiplied. The pragmatists appear to be trying to develop the idea that a vote for Giuliani or McCain in the general election would be very much in keeping with the Christian mission.

The strategy is a long shot. Antipathy for McCain runs particularly deep among religious conservatives, and Giuliani is unabashedly pro-choice. If either wins the GOP's presidential nomination, the idealists almost certainly will sit out the election or vote for a third-party candidate.

If the evangelical camp breaks apart, the next question to emerge will concern how the Republican Party responds.