Year One: Evangelicals Still Not Sure about Bush

As George Bush marks his first year in office, many in the evangelical community, 80 percent of whom supported him in 1988 (according to exit polls of white evangelicals), still feel unsure about where they fit in his administration. For conservative evangelicals, two issues raise particularly thorny questions: appointments to government positions and abortion.

Many are concerned that more evangelicals have not been nominated for the 4,000 administration-appointed jobs to be filled by the Bush team. Tensions boiled over last summer when the administration failed to name Indianapolis attorney John Price to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Top Religious Right groups pushed Price, while opposing Albert Sikes, who was eventually approved as chairman. (Contrary to the fears of his critics, under Sikes’s leadership the FCC has taken action against indecent broadcasting. Recently several fines were handed down to radio stations.)

On abortion, most evangelicals have been pleased the President is holding firm, and they were grateful last year for his vetoes of congressional bills that would have increased federal funds for abortion. Yet they are also uneasy about Bush’s awkwardness in publicly discussing abortion and disturbed by reports that White House staff advisers favor backpedaling on the issue.

Mending Fences

In an apparent move to mend fences, the White House held a special briefing for evangelical leaders late last fall. Nearly 100 evangelical leaders heard a speech by Bush and had an unprecedented opportunity for give-and-take exchanges with Vice President Dan Quayle, chief of staff John Sununu, personnel director Chase Untermeyer, Republican National Committee chairman Lee Atwater, and other administration leaders.

Among those in a select group given a private photo opportunity with the President: television personalities Oral and Richard Roberts and Pat Robertson, Vonette Bright of the National Day of Prayer, Assemblies of God superintendent Raymond Carlson, Gospel Films president Billy Zeoli, Paul Crouch of Trinity Broadcasting Network, former Southern Baptist Convention president Adrian Rogers, and Amway founder Richard DeVos.

While the meeting stayed amiable for the most part, frustrations were evident, especially over abortion and appointments. “We don’t want to sound ungrateful, but we also don’t want to seem satisfied,” Rogers told Sununu. “We feel used,” he said, adding that he believed only 1 percent of all appointments so far in the administration could be considered evangelicals. “In this infrastructure, there is not an understanding of who we are,” Rogers said.

Noting that he has been the subject of several in-depth tax audits, Paul Crouch told Sununu he would particularly like to see more evangelicals in the Internal Revenue Service. “We’re getting a lot of heat,” he said.

In response, Sununu questioned the 1 percent figure and noted that the appointment-approval process is complex. He urged evangelicals to continue to submit names of qualified individuals for future appointments.

Pat Robertson took up the issue with Untermeyer, who commands the appointment process. Untermeyer said that since all nominees are mandated to reflect the President’s positions, the majority of evangelicals who voted for Bush should be happy with the appointments, regardless of religious orientation. He noted that in contrast to other special-interest categories, ensuring evangelical representation is difficult because there can be no religious test for political office. Responded Robertson: “If you don’t want us to be identified [in the appointments], we won’t be identified next election.”

After White House political director Jim Wray spoke about retaining the “winning coalition” that elected Bush, he was questioned about the growing number of prochoice Republican candidates. “The Republican party is bigger than one or two issues,” he said.

Family Research Council president Gary Bauer said, “If Republicans think evangelicals will vote for someone who is right on taxes but wrong on gay rights and abortion, they are miscalculating.”

Atwater acknowledged that in the three most visible elections last November (the governors’ races in New Jersey and Virginia, and the New York City mayoral contest), the Republican candidates all made “a grievous error” by allowing their opponents “to define their position on abortion as extremist.”

Atwater denied that Republicans are taking evangelicals for granted. “We need your help, and we need it bad,” he said. Bush told the group, “This administration does [respect] you, and we will listen to you.”

No Dog-And-Pony Show

Doug Wead, White House special assistant for public liaison who arranged the meeting, proclaimed it “very successful.” “It was not intended to be a public-relations, cover-up-the-problems event,” Wead told CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) Office of Public Affairs director Robert Dugan told CT he found the meeting “extremely helpful.” “It means access, and evangelicals feel very appreciative of the opportunity to interact with these people and to be taken seriously,” he said.

Dugan acknowledged there is a potential for White House briefings to be a token gesture designed to soothe ruffled feathers. “The question is whether you feel the administration is seriously interested in the concerns of evangelicals or putting on a dog-and-pony show,” he said. “And in my view, this administration is serious about evangelicals.”

Although the meeting was billed as a briefing for evangelical leaders, those on the middle to left of the political spectrum were not invited. “There is a kind of designation that evangelicals are people who are on the political Right,” said Tony Campolo, chairman of the board of Evangelicals for Social Action. “A lot of us on the evangelical Left have the sense that Bush is a man who can be talked to, who is no captive of the New Right,” he said, “but that meeting frightens me. Is it an attempt to keep the right wing happy or does it mean he is identifying with that frame of mind?”

Wead said the White House did not mean to exclude any evangelicals. “We began with denominational leaders, prominent educators, writers, evangelists, TV and radio [ministers], and tried to come up with a good mix,” he said, although he admitted the group was predominantly “conservatives.”

Part of the problem, said Jim Skillen, Association for Public Justice executive director, is in trying to make the evangelical community into a “political subculture.” “Evangelicals don’t have any sufficiently distinguishable public-policy philosophy that allows them to have a uniquely represented status in American politics,” he said.

Most observers agree that the political significance of the meeting—and the political clout of evangelicals—remains to be seen. Several appointments have yet to be made, and abortion remains a hot political issue (see p. 46). A senior White House official confirmed to CT that most of Bush’s top advisers are urging him to step back from his abortion position, or at least to downplay the issue. Several other controversial issues await action as well. Thus, evangelicals, like most Americans, according to Skillen, “are still ‘wait-and-see’ people.”

By Kim A. Lawton.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.