Are Evangelicals Losing Influence in the GOP?

Are evangelicals losing influence in GOP?

Party eyes middle ground in battle with Democrats

By Kyle Henley, The Gazette, (Colorado Springs, Colorado), November 21, 2006

Evangelical Christians in El Paso County can take some good news and some bad news from the recent election.

The good news is that the Ted Haggard debacle a week before the election appeared to have little impact on results.

In El Paso County, Republicans won by the same kinds of margins they always have, despite the fall of Haggard -- a GOP insider who had led the 14,000-member New Life Church in Colorado Springs and the National Association of Evangelicals. He lost both posts after acknowledging he had a long-term relationship with a gay prostitute and had bought methamphetamine.

The bad news for evangelicals who remain loyal Republicans is that their influence may wane in a party that is looking to swerve to America’s middle so that it can better compete with Democrats.

The drubbing taken by Sen. Rick Santorum, the Republican evangelical Christian from Pennsylvania, underscored what looks like a big swing of the political pendulum. The looming question comes down to this: Did Republicans lose their religion or did they scare off moderates with religious zealotry?

"I think the big story of 2006 is the support for Democrats by religious moderates," said David Domke, a professor at the University of Washington who has written several books on the relationship between evangelicals and the Republican Party.

"The GOP is not the only game in town for Christian voters," Domke said. "The Democrats have made tremendous inroads."

The best Colorado example is Gov.-elect Bill Ritter, an antiabortion Catholic who spent three years as a missionary in Zambia.

Throughout the campaign, no one questioned Ritter’s faith. It allowed the Democrat to focus on education, the environment, the economy and other key issues. He won handily.

"The election became about other things," said Jim Wallis, a Christian political writer. "These Democrats may be socially conservative, but they are strongly populist on other issues -- caring for the poor and needy, caring for the environment and opposing the war in Iraq. That combination is a winning combination in America."

Some, including Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, say GOP officeholders chased conservative Christian voters away by failing to support their pet issues in Congress.

To Dobson and other conservative religious leaders, the GOP lost its spiritual compass by failing to pass a constitutional ban on same-sex marriages. Congress also passed a bill -- ultimately vetoed by President Bush -- that would have opened the door for federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research.

"Certainly, the Republicans managed to create a great deal of dissatisfaction among Christian conservatives," said John Green, senior fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. "They did not pursue the social agenda as rigorously as expected. But you wouldn’t want to push that too far. The Republicans did do many things Christian conservatives wanted, such as the appointment of two justices to the Supreme Court and pushing forward on policies to limit abortion."

It is an important debate in the Pikes Peak region, one of the strongest Republican enclaves in the nation and home to more influential conservative Christian organizations than anywhere else.

At the top of the religious pecking order here is Dobson’s Focus on the Family, a Christian media giant and a political heavyweight.

Dobson was quick to get the finger-pointing started after the election. He released a statement Nov. 9 accusing Republicans of abandoning conservative Christians.

"If they hope to return to power in ’08," Dobson wrote, Republicans -- must rediscover the conservative principles that resonated with the majority of Americans in the 1980s -- and still resonate with them today. Failure to do so will be catastrophic. Values voters are not going to carry water for the Republican Party if it ignores their deeply held convictions."

Dobson’s message will not be universally embraced by Republicans. Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, who now runs FreedomWorks, a conservative think tank, has spent months warning GOP leaders that they’re pandering to conservative Christians and losing the support of a nation that is more concerned about the price of gas, good schools and the economy than about the social conservatives’ agenda.

"Americans want more freedom and choice in education, health care and retirement security," Armey wrote in a recent Washington Post opinion essay. "Republicans -- too busy dreaming up wedge issues to score cheap points against Democrats -- have lost sight of their broad national agenda."

Polls taken after the election show that evangelical Christians still backed the GOP in large numbers. On Nov. 7, Republicans pulled 70 percent of the evangelical vote and Democrats collected 28 percent of it. That’s not a major change from 2004.

"People are looking for whether evangelicals left the Republican Party," Domke said. "The data just doesn’t show that, because they still voted strongly Republican. The bigger story is that mainline Protestants and Catholics left the GOP and voted Democrat."

While evangelicals remain overwhelmingly Republican, Wallis said, Christians as a whole may be the nation’s newest swing voters.

"God is not a Republican or a Democrat," he said. "You are not going to see the faith community in anybody’s pocket."

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