Conservative Evangelicals: In Charge or Underdogs?

Monday October 11, 2004

Are conservative evangelicals in America a major power to be contended with or underdogs who suffer from continual persecution? Both, and at the same time, if we are to believe evangelicals themselves. Jerry Falwell has stated the evangelicals control the Republican Party, but evangelicals see themselves as persecuted.

The St. Petersburg Times reports:

As America wades into another presidential election, many evangelical Christians say their beliefs are under assault by the government and mainstream culture, a feeling bolstered by leaders of "profamily" groups who vow to convert that anxiety into votes come November -- to re-elect those already running the country.

At the same time, scholars who study the nexus of religion and policy say recent victories in the courts, in state legislatures and in Washington, D.C., have given religious conservatives greater influence than at any time since the Temperance Movement, which led to Prohibition in 1919.

Yes, that's right, conservative evangelicals are rallying around the cry to "Take Back America" in order to re-elect the people who are already in charge. Makes sense, right?

President Bush is an evangelical Christian who talks openly about his faith and who says America is doing God's work in Iraq and Afghanistan, and whose religion regularly affects his policy, from limiting embryonic stem cell research to proposing nearly $3-billion to promote traditional marriage.

The Republican Congress, too, has pleased Christian conservatives lately. In April, Congress banned late-term "partial birth" abortions, though the law likely is bound for the Supreme Court. It also passed the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which adds penalties for hurting a fetus while committing a crime. Opponents say it's a ploy to undermine legalized abortion.

Congressional Republicans are pushing a constitutional amendment outlawing same-sex marriage, a priority for conservative groups. At least 39 states already have banned it, and Missouri voters recently became the first in the union to outlaw gay marriage in their state Constitution. Conservative leaders, meanwhile, brag that their lobbying led to the Food and Drug Administration's unusual decision in May to ignore its own advisory panel and reject over-the-counter sales of Plan B, which can prevent pregnancy after sex.

And the U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled that "under God" should remain part of the Pledge of Allegiance, which many schoolchildren recite.

Philip Goff, a religion professor at Indiana University-Purdue University, describes a wide gap between the political strength they have and the strength they think they have. "They have taken government. There's no doubt about it. They have more power than any time at least in our lifetime," said Goff, director of the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture there. "But they can't say that they have control, because then they lose power. They have to continue to use that rhetoric -- that paradigm of religious outsider -- in order to rally people to the cause.

With such an Orwellian perspective at work in the Christian Right, it's no surprise that it has wormed its way into the rhetoric coming out of the administration about so many other things. What would finally cause the Christian Right to think that they have actually "taken back" America? Anything short of a Christian theocracy?

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