‘Religious Bigotry’ Alleged

Evangelicals made the winning difference last month as Virginians elected a Republican governor for the first time in 16 years in a campaign that sparked charges of “religious bigotry.”

George Allen, son of the legendary pro football coach of the same name, was the victor November 2 after Democrats tried to link him to fellow Virginian Pat Robertson and the Christian Coalition.

In the race for lieutenant governor, Republican Michel Farris, an evangelical lawyer and leader in the homeschool movement, lost to incumbent Donald Beyer, Jr. But in garnering 46 percent of the vote, Farris surprised analysts who had said his views were too conservative and religiously based to be taken seriously.

After the election, Republican congressional leaders sent President Clinton a letter asking him to put a stop to religiously hostile campaign efforts. “As the nation watched the Virginia elections this fall, they witnessed religious bigotry most thought had expired with the anti-Catholic bias against John F. Kennedy in 1960,” stated the letter signed by Reps. Newt Gingrich of Georgia, Robert H. Michel of Illinois, and others. “As one who seems sensitive to the role of faith in the public square … we would ask you to denounce this type of religious intolerance.”

In Virginia, the strategy appeared to backfire. Six months before the election, one poll had ex-attorney general Mary Sue Terry, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, with a lead of 29 percentage points. But Terry’s support nose-dived when she began a series of television ads and speeches portraying Allen as a pawn of the extreme forces of the Religious Right. In an election in which one out of three voters were evangelicals, Allen received 58 percent of the overall vote and 76 percent of the evangelical vote, polls indicated.

Ralph Reed, Jr., executive director of Robertson’s grassroots political organization, Christian Coalition—which has 860 chapters in all 50 states—said, “I find this mean-spirited attack on faith in the public square a reason for hope, not despair. The voters made it clear that religious bigotry has no place in Virginia.”

Voter guide controversy

The Christian Coalition was not the only conservative group to make headlines. Two nonprofit organizations run by evangelicals, Concerned Women for America of Virginia and The Family Foundation, printed a million “voter guides.” The guides accurately summarized candidates’ positions and made no endorsements.

But the Democratic party argued that they violated state election laws because neither group had registered as a political organization with the state board of elections. A Democratic-appointed judge in Fairfax County agreed to and signed a statewide restraining order banning distribution of the guides, which many churches planned to pass out with bulletins the Sunday before the election.

“These extremist right-wing groups can’t hide under the guise of being neutral anymore,” the Virginia Democratic party said in a news release. The conservative groups say the action amounted to politically motivated censorship and was a violation of First Amendment free-speech rights. On November 1, the day before the election, the Virginia Supreme Court overturned the ruling. In the end, nearly all the guides were distributed.

Not a millstone

The Allen victory helped dispel the theory that the Religious Right in general and Robertson in particular are liabilities to the Republican party. Analysts say Robertson and conservative Christians can be as important to Republicans as Jesse Jackson and African Americans have been to some Democrats.

According to the Christian Coalition survey, 38 percent of Virginians who cast ballots identified themselves as evangelical, born-again voters.

“What this shows is evangelicals are fast becoming—if they’re not already—the key Republican electoral constituency,” says John C. Green, a political scientist at the University of Akron and a leading authority on evangelical political involvement. “The arguments that the Republican party has to move away from evangelicals will become increasingly muted.”

Robertson, a religious broadcaster based in Virginia Beach, ran for President in 1988. From the ashes of his campaign he formed the Christian Coalition, which now claims more than 500,000 members and wields considerable influence within the Republican party in six states, including Virginia.

Reed says Beyer ran a “vicious campaign of lies and distortions” against Farris, who has worked for conservative organizations headed by Jerry Falwell and Beverly LaHaye. In devastating television ads, Beyer falsely claimed that Farris wanted to ban classic works of children’s literature, such as The Wizard of Oz, from public schools.

However, Farris says he advocates allowing Christian students offended by one text to be able to study from another. He denies ever seeking to ban The Wizard of Oz or other books from public schools.

By Mark O’Keefe in Norfolk.

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