With nearly every election cycle now come the somber reports in the news media of the death of the Religious Right. In the 20 years I’ve been in the movement, we have died four times.
Our first death was in 1988, following the failure of Pat Robertson to win his campaign for president. The second death was in the late ’90s, following the demise in influence of the Christian Coalition. Another obituary was written in 2006 when the Republicans lost control of Congress.
And now, once again, we read of our death. This time the Angel of Doom was columnist Kathleen Parker who pronounced the last rites in a column that began this way: “Is the Christian Right finished as a political entity?” And for Parker, to ask the question was to answer it, in delicious expectation.
Many of the reporters who write our funeral stories present these facts as evidence: Evangelicals have split. Older evangelicals emphasize the tired issues of marriage and abortion, while younger evangelicals gravitate to trendier issues, such as global warming and the fight against poverty.
One reporter went so far in an interview with me as to point out that two evangelical leaders who emphasize these newer issues have been leaders at two conservative religious organizations, Richard Cizik at the National Association of Evangelicals and Pastor Joel Hunter at the Christian Coalition.
She missed her own point. These men “have been” leaders. Neither is in his role today, precisely because these organizations got fed up with so much emphasis on these issues. They are not unimportant matters, but they will have secondary influence as long as the unborn are killed in their mothers’ wombs and as long as the definition of marriage is threatened. These are the problems that motivate most evangelicals to engage politics. Mike Huckabee did not win the Iowa caucuses by talking about the polar ice caps. He did it by emphasizing marriage, faith and the pro-life cause.
And by the way, At Focus on the Family we believe we fight poverty every day by teaching people how to keep their marriages intact. It’s how we spend 90 percent of our income, and the failure of the intact family is a leading cause of poverty in our country. Like many reporters, this one wasn’t convinced. If it’s not a government program, it’s not a poverty program.
In their haste to pronounce us dead, reporters routinely ignore the most profound grass-roots uprising of our era, the writing of marriage definitions into 30 state constitutions. That’s 30 victories in all 30 states that have put this question to voters, and many of those victories have been landslides. This has been a continental phenomenon, from the Midwest, through the South, the Intermountain West, and the Left Coast states of Oregon and (shudder!) sophisticated California. The marriage movement lags only in the older states of the Eastern seaboard, which do not permit citizen initiatives.
And here is the most ignored fact of all. In nearly every marriage amendment state, the action was led by organizations nurtured to life by Focus on the Family’s James Dobson, who the media routinely offer up as exhibit A, the T-Rex of Jurassic Park.
In her column, Kathleen Parker indicts Dr. Dobson for the capital crime of saying, among other things, that he would vote for John McCain for president, thereby betraying the evangelical movement as a tool of the Republican Party. Why was this a betrayal? Although McCain is pro-life, he is not pro-life enough for some evangelicals, whose cause Parker has taken up. Most notably, the Arizona senator supports using federal money to fun embryonic stem-cell research, which results in the deaths of nascent human lives.
Why, then, did Dr. Dobson decide to endorse McCain late in the campaign? It was because of McCain’s profoundly pro-life answer before a national TV audience about when life begins (“at conception”) compared to Barack Obama’s dodge (“that’s above my pay grade”); other factors were McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as running mate, the Republican party’s adoption of the most pro-life, pro-family platform in our era, and by contrast, the almost viciously pro-abortion positions of Obama. These are the developments that convinced Dr. Dobson to depart from a purely pro-life position and announce that he would vote for McCain.
Parker has now joined another conservative columnist, Cal Thomas, who attracts attention by turning the machine guns on politically active conservative Christians and their leaders. For Thomas and Parker, Dr. Dobson has no right to active citizenship even though he is not a pastor, and Focus on the Family may not defend the traditional family, although Focus is not a church.
Parker’s animus is as puzzling as her myopia. Unlike many reporters, she has never visited, never phoned, never gained her information firsthand, never sought out our side of any issue. She is content to shoot from a great distance, always with second and third-hand information.
No wonder she misses so badly.
Tom Minnery is senior vice president of Focus on the Family Action.
