Some Christian Leaders Want Further Political Activism

However, others—including Charles Colson—warn against the seductions of political power.

Conservative Christian involvement in politics this year found expression in a coalition of leaders known as the American Coalition for Traditional Values (ACTV). The new organization, chaired by author Tim LaHaye, will chart its postelection course at a Washington, D.C., meeting this month.

LaHaye said he plans to convene ACTV’s board “to prioritize the moral issues about which we’re concerned, then try to orchestrate a ground swell of pro-moral and Christian people to get these established.” The board includes denominational leaders Charles Stanley (president of the Southern Baptist Convention) and Thomas Zimmerman (general superintendent of the Assemblies of God) as well as Jim Bakker, Bill Bright, Jerry Falwell, D. James Kennedy, James Robison, and 16 other prominent evangelicals and fundamentalists.

Not all of them, however, are enthusiastic about seeing ACTV join the ranks of proliferating Christian political interest groups, “ACTV began with two purposes, voter registration and nonpartisan voter education,” said board member Robert P. Dugan, Jr., director of the National Association of Evangelicals’ Washington office. “My hope would be that after the election it would lie dormant a while and then gear up again in 1986.”

Apparently a grander scheme has been LaHaye’s intent all along. “We didn’t set this up just for the election year,” he said, but rather to engage in battle over “whose values are going to dominate in American society.” Some observers speculate that ACTV could become LaHaye’s equivalent of the Moral Majority or replace other conservative groups that have faded from view in Washington, such as Ed McAteer’s Religious Roundtable and Pat Robertson’s Freedom Council.

Another goal LaHaye envisions for ACTV is the development of a “talent bank” of Christians to serve in government as political appointees or civil service employees. “Among government employees there should be the same [proportionate] number of Christians as in the population at large,” LaHaye said, ACTV will supply information about positions in government and encourage Christians to apply, he said.

According to an ACTV fact sheet, “We Christians are the largest single group in America—polls show we make up 25–30 percent of the population, but we certainly do not have 25–30 percent of the influence in this country. We intend to.”

For LaHaye, that strategy began with a voter registration drive involving churches across the country, using a mailing list compiled from most of the ministries represented by ACTV’s board. He said 2 million new Christian voters were registered by ACTV, but that claim is difficult to verify. Gary Jarmin, ACTV’s national field director, said 15 percent of the group’s registration sites reported 25,000 registrants, projecting a total closer to 200,000.

The registration drive, budgeted at $1.5 million, was fueled by a fund-raising campaign directed by Joe Rodgers, former finance chairman for the Reagan-Bush reelection committee. Participating churches received training guides, posters, and detailed instructions on how to set up a voter registration project. Jarmin supervised 350 field directors who in turn directed “church captains” to get their congregations organized.

ACTV’s second priority was “nonpartisan voter education,” which included a brochure comparing the two major political parties’ positions and ACTV’s positions on its top 10 moral issues. On each issue addressed by the party platforms, ACTV’s position aligned with the Republican platform. An ACTV leadership manual opens with a letter from President Reagan saying, “I thank you and your colleagues for your faithful patriotism.” Yet contributions to ACTV were tax deductible, a perquisite allowed only to organizations that do not endorse a candidate for office.

The group’s clear identification with the Republican party drew sharp criticism from several quarters. Robert L. Maddox, President Carter’s liaison to religious groups and head of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, called on ACTV’s participants to “make it clean. Exit the closet and show your true political allegiance.”

Others balk at being tagged as a minority special-interest group. “The emergence of rival power blocs within the parties is not too promising for a democracy,” observed theologian Carl F. H. Henry. Tactics employed by conservative fund raisers “exploit the anxieties of the aged and the nonreflective,” he said. “That’s a disservice to social stability and to critical understanding.”

With increasing passion, Prison Fellowship head Charles W. Colson is warning against the seductions of power. “Our well-intentioned attempts to influence government can become so entangled with a particular political agenda that it becomes our focus; our goal becomes maintaining political access. When that happens, the gospel is held hostage to a political agenda, and we become part of the very system we were seeking to change.”

Colson said Christians need to “see through the political illusion” and “understand that the real problems of our society are, at their root, moral and spiritual. Institutions and politicians are limited in what they can do.”

Yet among some activists, political involvement is glorified for its perceived spiritual benefits. “God is using the one thing [politics] that we never thought he’d use to bring the body of Christ together,” said ACTV’s Jarmin. However, he freely admits he would like to see moderate-to-liberal evangelical congressmen such as Sen. Mark 0. Hatfield (R-Oreg.) and Rep. Don Bonker (D-Wash.) “retired to another line of work.”

Senate Chaplain Richard C. Halverson, like Colson, has grown increasingly outspoken about conservative Christian activism. “In our culture, the measure of faith has become the measure of getting the results you want. That’s not biblical faith,” Halverson said. “Sometimes I’m absolutely amazed and cannot believe the things I hear spoken as though they are God’s truth when they are simply human tradition.”

The theory behind LaHaye’s plan involves tipping the scales of consensus in American public life by inundating government structures with like-minded conservatives. Critics such as James Skillen, of the Washington-based Association for Public Justice, are troubled by this because the implication is that conservatives “have all the answers, and that’s the end of the matter.” In a democracy, however, the process of making public policy requires compromise among people with genuine differences of conviction.

LaHaye views this as a high-stakes battle. “It will take until the twenty-first century for even the most conservative President to turn this country back from its slide toward socialism,” he said. Keeping conservatives in power is essential, LaHaye has written, because “we are probably on the verge of a national moral revival, and with the perpetuation of freedom we could export it all over the world.”

The role ACTV will assume in LaHaye’s game plan is sure to be a central one. How much cooperation he continues to receive from key Christian leaders—after the election-year dust begins to settle—will indicate whether LaHaye can steer the Religious Right in the direction he hopes to go.

Deaths

Doris Schluntz Hillis, 75, missionary to India for 20 years (14 of those with her husband, Don Hillis, under The Evangelical Alliance Mission), supervised a boarding school in India, conducted children’s missionary conferences in the United States; September 3, in Orange City, Florida, of natural causes.

Harold V. Huber, 60, president of the Montana District of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod; August 17, in Billings, Montana, of a heart attack.

L. D. Thomas, Jr., 65, a founder of the evangelical Mission Society for United Methodists, former pastor of the First United Methodist Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma; September 24, in Vail, Colorado, of a heart attack.

William C. Martin, 91, last surviving bishop of the former Methodist Episcopal Church South, senior bishop of the United Methodist Church, president of the National Council of Churches in 1953 and 1954; August 30, in Little Rock, Arkansas, following a brief illness.

Congressmen’S Wives Raise Money To Combat Famine

The wives of four U.S. congressmen launched an effort to assist African nations plagued by drought and famine after visiting several of the hardest-hit regions. They have teamed up with World Vision to generate public awareness, organize fund-raising activities, and coordinate a “National Planned Famine” next spring in Washington, D.C.

The women are members of a congressional wives’ prayer group, which invited World Vision president Ted Engstrom to speak earlier this year. His report of extensive starvation and malnutrition in Africa stirred the group to respond. Carolyn Bonker, wife of U.S. Rep. Don Bonker (D-Wash.); Janet Hall, wife of U.S. Rep. Tony Hall (D-Ohio); Lisa Edwards, wife of U.S. Rep. Mickey Edwards (R-Okla.); and Grace Nelson, wife of U.S. Rep. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) accompanied World Vision representatives on the 10-day trip. They visited remote, primitive villages where they met African women desperate to save the lives of their babies.

In Nioro, Mali, they held a listless, month-old girl whose mother died during childbirth. Women in the village were unable to nurse the baby, Nelson says, because the only food available consists of bitter green leaves cooked in warm water. The water is drawn from a nearly depleted well with dead animals floating in it. Because supplies are so short, the leaf concoction is prepared only once every four days. The baby’s grandmother showed the visiting Americans how she was trying to nurse the baby herself, with no success.

At a meeting on Capitol Hill, the women showed slides of their visit to 100 Christian women in leadership positions and urged them to organize fund-raising activities immediately. Lois Decker, who heads a fellowship of state legislative wives in Colorado, believes groups like hers will respond when they learn the facts. She plans to challenge the members of her prayer group to put their faith to work on behalf of starving African villagers.

World Vision will distribute collection boxes for churches and other groups to use to gather donations. Paul Carey, director of resource development for World Vision, says the organization earmarked $36 million for emergency famine relief where the problem is most severe: Ghana, Mali, and Senegal. The organization will assign projects to churches that want to help, building on an idea that has worked elsewhere. Recently, World Vision acted as go-between when church volunteers in Edina, Minnesota, raised $65,000 to buy a new drill for water wells among the Karapokot people of western Kenya.

“Our dream is to build a network of women around the country,” Carey says, and to tap resources from Christians in America who are not yet supporting relief efforts in Africa. Media exposure about the congressional wives’ trip already has generated some response.

Women in Melbourne, Florida, which is in the district represented by Nelson’s husband, read a newspaper account about her trip and organized a walkathon and danceathon to raise funds. They also plan to solicit pledges from fast-food restaurants, suggesting a one-cent donation on every hamburger sold.

Throughout their visit to west Africa, the congressmen’s wives met tribal chieftains who said, “When you go home, ask the Americans to pray for rain.” That and relief efforts generated abroad sustain a slim hope of recovery from a disaster affecting nearly half the African continent and claiming tens of thousands of lives each year.

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