Election Reaction: Seeking Common Ground

Evangelicals hope president-elect Clinton will strive for consensus on social issues, not just for dramatic change.

Family Research Council (FRC) receptionist Sheila Ervin had hardly stepped into the office on Wednesday, November 4, when the phones began to ring. “They started before 8 A.M., and they haven’t stopped yet,” she says. Some callers were distraught about the election of Bill Clinton and wanted to talk about how it could have happened. But most, she says, were looking to volunteer in efforts to stem the social changes they fear Clinton may bring about. “There are many sleeping Christians who see the battle ahead and want to join the ranks,” she says.

In the wake of George Bush’s resounding re-election defeat last month, many media and political pundits have proclaimed evangelical activism irrelevant at best, and most likely dead. Voters turned down the evangelicals’ ideology, which was represented by George Bush, the rationale goes. But groups on the activist level disagree, saying that the election outcome was nothing more than a referendum on the economy. And many, like FRC, say they are already seeing a resurgence of grassroots interest to support their causes.

As the dust settles, it is clear that the results of the November election have not laid to rest debates about the role and effectiveness of evangelical political involvement. Indeed, evangelicals garnered a prominent place in this election—one that is likely to continue as the nation’s political climate undergoes massive changes.

Big Gop Voting Bloc

According to exit polls, evangelicals were among the most loyal groups voting for Bush, with some surveys showing as many as 61 percent of evangelicals and fundamentalists voting for him. A poll commissioned by Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition (CC) found that 55 percent of self-identified white evangelicals voted for Bush, 28 percent for Clinton, and 17 percent for Ross Perot. The only two demographic groups Bush carried were born-again Christians and those who earn more than $100,000 a year.

“If you compare 55 percent with the 38 percent of the general population who voted for Bush, there was a very dramatic level of support from evangelicals,” says John Green, director of the University of Akron’s Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics. That loyalty, coupled with an unprecedented voter turnout, has made evangelicals “the central voting bloc in the GOP,” Green says.

Still, Green and other scholars acknowledge that significant numbers of evangelicals defected from the Bush coalition. Surveys in 1988 indicated that more than 80 percent of evangelicals voted for Bush. The economy appears to be a top motivator. Exit polls show that nearly half of all voters listed the economy as their top voting concern, and evangelicals, like everyone else, are affected deeply by the shape of the economy. But Green says other factors may also have moved evangelicals to vote for the Democratic ticket: Clinton and Gore’s Southern Baptist faith and their frequent use of religious imagery, their more moderate approach than most recent Democratic presidential contenders, and evangelicals’ longstanding unease with Bush.

Many evangelicals who consider themselves politically moderate or liberal say they were attracted by Clinton’s positions on the environment, his health-care proposals, his apparent concerns for racial reconciliation, and his campaign theme of “putting people first.”

Clinton and Gore may also gain approval from evangelicals across the political spectrum for their endorsement of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a bill that most evangelical groups support (CT, June 24, 1991, p. 52), and their strong human-rights stands in areas like China and the former Yugoslavian republics.

Clashes Ahead

But most observers believe major confrontations between the Clinton administration and evangelical Christians on social issues are virtually inevitable, particularly in such areas as homosexual civil rights and abortion. For the anti-abortion movement, especially, the results of this election were a major political setback. Not only did the nation elect a President who has pledged to expand abortion rights and appoint only prochoice Supreme Court justices, but prolifers lost 11 more seats in Congress.

Just days after the election, a report in the New York Times said that Clinton, in his first 100 days in office, will likely issue a series of executive orders that will lift current abortion restrictions and expand homosexual rights. Even those evangelicals who voted for Clinton are uncomfortable with that kind of agenda. And just the thought of that has already energized more conservative Christians.

“We’re experiencing the same thing that the liberal groups experienced when Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980,” says FRC president Gary Bauer. “The left-wing groups did not fade away and leave the battle. They redoubled their efforts.”

Bauer says his group is willing to work with Clinton if they can find issues of common ground. But, he adds, they will be aggressive in defending traditional family values. “We intend to remind the President-elect that he was elected to do something about the economy, and not to follow some radical, left-wing social agenda.”

New Challenges

However, some daunting challenges lie ahead for conservative religious activists. The next few months will be a key test of how committed they are to the battle for the long haul—especially in the face of some discouraging national defeats. A second, perhaps greater challenge will be to reconstruct a winning coalition within the Republican party. Even though evangelicals proved to be the most loyal GOP voters, many moderate Republicans are blaming the Religious Right for Bush’s loss.

Intraparty struggles among various wings of the party began even before all the electoral votes were counted. Christian Coalition (CC) executive director Ralph Reed categorically denies that the blame lies anywhere other than with Bush’s poor handling of the economy. “I think the election demonstrates the indispensability of the evangelical vote to the rebuilding of the Republican party as we move into the future,” he says. Reed says his group is willing to work with all groups to rebuild the winning coalition. But are other Republicans willing to work with the CC? “They are going to have to, because they’re not going to be able to win without our active support at the grassroots,” he confidently asserts.

Some observers say that before such coalition work can happen, conservative Christians must make some changes. “The Religious Right does need to learn how to temper its language … so that it does not scare away unnecessarily people who could be cobelligerents with them on the issue that they hold dear,” says Michael Cromartie, research fellow for Protestant studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

Some Religious Right electoral activities and rhetoric came under sharp criticism from people both outside and inside the religious community. For example, a coalition of 50 religious leaders held a press conference just prior to the election to denounce Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry’s mass mailing to churches, which proclaimed that “to vote for Bill Clinton is to sin against God.”

Still, many experts on religious political efforts say conservative Christians are likely to emerge from this testing period stronger politically than ever. University of Maine professor Matthew Moen says the Religious Right is “better positioned” now than it was during its formation in the late 1970s. “Now, the Christian Right is again in the opposition, but this time they are much better organized, they are better led, and they have a clearer vision of what they are trying to do and where they are headed.”

Moen, who is author of the book The Transformation of the Christian Right, says the movement’s new emphasis on the state and local levels will continue to reap rewards. In state and local elections last month, candidates with Christian ties appeared to do very well. The liberal lobby People for the American Way (PAW) says the Religious Right won in about 40 percent of the state and local races where they were involved. A PAW report released in October identified some 500 candidates in 33 states with ties to Religious Right groups.

Moen expects the successes to continue. “It is just extraordinarily shortsighted to proclaim them dead on the basis of the November 3 election results,” he says. And John Green agrees. “All political movements prosper in opposition, and religious-based movements do particularly well in opposition because what makes them work is appeal to transcendent values,” he says. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if some of these groups didn’t double in size in the next four years.”

With the new administration, the three political options for evangelicals seem to be: seeking common ground, provoking confrontation, or retreating into uninvolvement.

By Kim A. Lawton in Washington, D.C.

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