January 7, 2002
Without a visible enemy, Religious Right loses organization
___By Mark O'Keefe
___Religion News Service
___WASHINGTON (RNS)--Pat Robertson's departure from the floundering Christian Coalition illustrates a political paradox religious conservatives have yet to overcome: When their enemies take over, Christian right groups thrive. When their allies hold political power, they weaken.
___With President Bush in the White House, Republicans controlling the House and evangelical Christians holding state and local offices across the country, the future of not only the Christian Coalition but of all Religious Right organizations never has seemed more in doubt.
___The reason these organizations are struggling, say analysts who follow them closely, is that real political power requires compromise and accommodation, characteristics absolutist groups have difficulty embracing. It's much easier to rally Christian political soldiers when they perceive their faith is under attack by the political establishment and the press.
___"The religious conservative movement thrives on being in the opposition and in insurgency," said Marshall Wittmann, the former Christian Coalition legislative affairs director who is now an analyst for the Washington-based Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank.
___"It has always been a reactive movement, reacting to the excesses of liberalism. The great difficulty comes when the movement's friends come into power and they ultimately can't deliver on the Religious Right agenda.
___"So in a very real sense, the Religious Right is a victim of its own success."
___Robertson, 71, resigned his presidency Dec. 5 to focus on what he called his "renewed call to the Christian ministry."
___The Christian Coalition began in 1989, formed from the direct mailing list of Robertson's 1988 Republican presidential campaign.
___Wittmann began work for the Christian Coalition Feb. 1, 1993, the same day the Washington Post ran a front-page article in which it said, without attribution, that followers of Jerry Falwell, founder of the now-defunct Moral Majority, and Robertson were "largely poor, uneducated and easy to command."
___Robertson urged viewers of "The 700 Club," his syndicated television show, to protest. They jammed the newspaper's phone lines and sent fax after fax with copies of their academic diplomas and income tax returns.
___The next day, the Post ran a correction, saying, "There is no factual basis for that statement."
___Nonetheless, the Christian right had won a symbolic victory. "Nothing mobilized the movement like that line," said Wittmann, who left the coalition after two years.
___A similar grassroots reaction came in 1994, when Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders, under attack by the Christian Coalition for promoting the distribution of contraceptives in public schools, charged the "un-Christian" Religious Right with "selling our children out in the name of religion."
___The Christian Coalition peaked during President Clinton's first term. In 1996, it claimed 2.8 million members and a $26.5 million annual budget.
___It steadily declined in Clinton's second term and fell into disarray once Bush was elected. Its budget plummeted to less than $3 million. Chapters disbanded. And it was buried in a mountain of debt amid allegations that its membership numbers had been inflated for years.
___"The good news," said Barry Lynn of the liberal Americans United for Separation of Church and State, "is that the Religious Right is having serious organizational problems. The bad news is that the Religious Right is running the country."
___Indeed, the organization that once focused on criminalizing abortion, legalizing school prayer, opposing gay rights and adopting vouchers for private-school education seems to have lost its center of gravity. The issue most prominently displayed on its website in recent days has been "making 'God Bless America' our second national anthem."
___"Robertson and his allies worked very hard to elect a lot of Republicans to state and national office, and now you can argue that Republicans basically control the government," said John Green, a longtime scholar of the Christian right and director of the Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron in Ohio. "But it's very hard to tee off and attack your friends when they're the ones making the necessary compromises."
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