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"We have to come together on issues and we have to come together in color," he said.

Hispanic leaders, too, are taking different approaches to future alliances.

Yuri Mantilla, director of the Colorado-based Focus on the Family's Hispanic Voter Education Project, said the same diversity reflected in the campaign against gay marriage is needed to address issues such as embryonic stem cell research and judicial nominations.

"The future of these movements has to be diverse—Hispanic-American, African-American, Asian-American, all united," he said. "That's essential."

The Rev. Daniel de Leon, pastor of Templo Calvario in Santa Ana, Calif., one of the largest Hispanic evangelical churches in the country, said he and other Hispanic leaders are considering forming a separate bipartisan network to influence Capitol Hill with stances opposing abortion, supporting the traditional family, and selecting judges who will uphold such positions.

De Leon attended a May press conference in which a multicultural group of religious leaders announced a poll showing the majority of Americans supported a federal marriage amendment.

But he said there's a need now for Hispanics to start some political action on their own.

"I think the coalition will start small and narrow but I think it's almost, by its very nature … going to expand," he predicted.

Matt Daniels, president of the racially diverse Alliance for Marriage, based in Washington, said that religious conservatives who worked in concert this fall now have momentum to continue with plans to revive a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage in 2005. A similar effort failed this year in both houses of Congress.

The Rev. Jerry Falwell, who recently announced a new Faith and Values Coalition, estimated that 10 percent of the people who worked with him on voter registration in the past year were African-American and a similar percentage were Hispanic. Such diverse outreach will continue as he aims to get 40 million religious conservatives to the polls in 2008.

"We're going out to everybody, every American who breathes and who shares our faith," he said.

But as some religious conservatives ooze optimism, scholars are voicing skepticism that the chain of events that gave them victory in November will lead to much more.

"There are some things that bring them together, but there are a lot (of things) that hold them apart," said Clyde Wilcox, professor of American government at Georgetown University in Washington.

The Christian Coalition tried and failed in the 1990s to woo blacks to their cause "primarily because they were trying to get African-Americans to be Republicans," he recalled.

The Rev. Walter Fauntroy, a longtime Washington pastor and civil rights activist, said new efforts to draw African-Americans like him into a grand coalition with a broad-based agenda aren't likely to succeed. He opposes gay marriage—and joins in the diverse array of faces at Alliance for Marriage events—but he would "part company with all of them" on tax concerns.

"I would educate my friends in … the religious conservative movement that when this warfare of life is over, the question will not be how you voted on the gay marriage issue," Fauntroy said. "The question will be, `When I was hungry, did you feed me?' … I will not work on issues that penalize the least of these for the benefit of the wealthy few."

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November (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48