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Edited by Mark Silk THE PEW PROGRAM ON RELIGION AND THE NEWS MEDIA CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF RELIGION IN PUBLIC LIFE TRINITY COLLEGE HARTFORD, CONNECTICUT 2000 i i R E L I G I O N A N D A M E R I C A N P O L I T I C S Copyright © 2000 CE N T E R F O R T H E ST U D Y O F RE L I G I O N I N PU B L I C LI F E Trinity College 300 Summit Stre e t H a rt f o rd, Connecticut 06106 iii C o n t e n t s Contributors. vii Introduction Mark Silk . 1 1. Locating Religion in American Politics John Wilson. 7 2. Religion and Politics in the 1990s: Confrontations and Coalitions John C. Green. 19 3. The Press v. the Pulpit: State and Local Coverage of the Religious Factor in Politics Mark Rozell. 41 4. Social Movements and Religion in Contemporary American Politics Rhys H. Williams. 52 5. Pietists and Pluralists: Religion and American Politicians Michael Kazin . 63 6. Religion and the Law in American Politics Marci A. Hamilton. 75 The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Pew Charitablerusts. T i v R E L I G I O N A N D A M E R I C A N P O L I T I C S v C o n t r i b u t o r s JOHN C. GREEN is professor of political science and director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron. He has done extensive research on religion and American politics. He is co-author of The Diminishing Divide: Religion’s Changing Role In American Politics; The Bully Pulpit: The Politics Of Protestant Clergy; and Religion and the Culture Wars. MARCI A. HAMILTON is professor of law and director of the Intellectual Property Law Program at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University. She is a nationally recognized expert on the religion clauses of the First Amendment and has published extensively on issues involving free exer- cise, establishment, and legislation affecting religion. She also has been involved in appellate litigation involving religious issues, including before the United States Supreme Court, and frequently has been asked to testify before Congress and the state legislatures on First Amendment issues. She is current- ly writing a book on the influence of Reformation theology on the Framers of the Constitution. MICHAEL KAZIN is professor of history at Georgetown University. He is the author of Barons of Labor: The San Francisco Building Trades and Union Power in the Progressive Era; The Populist Persuasion: An American History; and co- author of America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s. He writes frequently for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and other peri- odicals. He is currently doing research for a book about William Jennings Bryan and his followers. MARK J. ROZELL is associate professor of politics and director of the gradu- ate program in congressional studies at The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. He is the author of numerous studies on Christian right pol- itics in the United States. and on the media and politics, including The Press and the Bush Pres i d e n c y and (with Clyde Wil c o x ) Second Coming: The New Christian Right in Vir ginia Politics, and he is co-editor (with John C. Green and Clyde Wilcox) of Prayers in the Precincts: The Christian Right in the 1998 Elections. MARK SILK is director of the Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College, Hartford. From 1987 to 1996 he was a staff writer, editor- ial writer, and columnist at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He edits Religion in v i R E L I G I O N A N D A M E R I C A N P O L I T I C S the News, a review of news coverage of religion, and is author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World Warand II Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. RHYS H. WILLIAMS is associate professor of sociology at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is co-author (with Jay Demerath) of A Bridging of Faiths: Religion and Politics in a New England Cityand editor of Cultural Wars in American Politics: Critical Reviews of a Popular Myth. He has published articles in the American Sociological Review, Social Problems, the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Sociology of Religion, and the Christian Century. JOHN F. WILSON is Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor in the Department of Religion at Princeton University. A specialist in American reli- gious history, he is the author of Public Religion in American Culture and editor of Church and State in America: A Bibliographical Guide(2 volumes). He cur- rently serves as Dean of the Graduate School at Princeton University. 1 I n t r o d u c t i o n Mark Silk he 1998 midterm election and Congress’s subsequent failure to convict TPresident Clinton of a high crime or misdemeanor mark a turning point in America’s religious politics—or so it looks at the moment. Nineteen-eighty saw the emergence of the Christian right—a carefully wrought political movement that helped put Ronald Reagan into the White House and send a clutch of liberal Democratic senators into retirement. The movement was animated by a belief that the majority of Americans were moral if not religious folks who opposed “abortion on demand” and “the gay lifestyle,” supported tough justice and prayer in school, and expected all able- bodied citizens to work for a living. During the 1980s, evangelical Protestant activists became the shock troops of an invigorated Republican coalition, and traditionalist white evangelicals became the most Republican religious voting bloc in the country. The expec- tation was that the appeal of moral reform and smaller government would soon persuade American voters to make the GOP the country’s majority party. When both houses of Congress fell into Republican hands in 1994, it appeared to have done just that. Just four years later, the electorate was no longer with the program. Against both historical precedent and immediate expectations, the GOP lost seats in the House of Representatives, and Republican candidates running with strong Christian right support lost important statewide races in the South and Midwest. Worst of all, the great moral imperative of removing President Clinton from office proved incapable of winning the support of more than a third of Americans. Even traditionalist white evangelicals favored impeach- ment to the tune of only 55 percent. After the president’s acquittal, longtime conservative activist Paul Weyrich concluded that the “whole strategy” had been a mistake because it was based on the false premise that “a majority of Americans basically agree with our point of view.” According to Weyrich, the country had suffered a “cultural col- lapse” of such proportions that politics could not reverse it. Without rejecting political participation as a means of self-defense, he called on religious conser- vatives to quarantine themselves from the morally polluted American main- stream by creating their own separate educational and cultural institutions. In a related key, syndicated columnist Cal Thomas and Michigan pastor Ed 2 R E L I G I O N A N D A M E R I C A N P O L I T I C S Dobson, once comrades-in-arms in the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, published a nostra culpa, Blinded by Might: Can the Religious Right Save America?, arguing that Christian conservatives had sold their souls for a mess of political pottage. “After 20 years, there’s a nearly complete failure of the reli- gious right to change anything substantial in this country,” Thomas told Michelle Bearden of the Tampa Tribune. “We went about it all wrong. We looked to Washington to change our lives, instead of looking at our own hearts. We ignored that change has to come from within.” While the Weyrich-Thomas-Dobson summons to disengagement drew vigorous dissent from other Christian right leaders, a strategic re-positioning was clearly under way. In the 1996 presidential campaign, the then executive director of the Christian Coalition, Ralph Reed, had been pilloried by fellow Christian rightists for trying to broker a deal permitting GOP presidential candidate Bob Dole to dance away from his party’s embrace of a constitution- al ban on abortion. On the road to 2000, barely a peep went up when the early GOP frontrunner, Texas governor George W. Bush, did just such a dance, say- ing the country was “not yet” ready for such a ban. The Christian Coalition itself seemed to be coming apart at the seams. With Reed now in business for himself as a political consultant (to Bush among others), the Christian right’s standard-bearing organization seemed incapable of finding capable leadership as it sought to retire a mountain of debt and rede- fine its mission. While other, less prominent, conservative religious lobbies were out and about, increasingly the movement as a whole looked less like a wild political animal than a house pet—requiring plenty of care and feeding, to be sure, but thoroughly domesticated. Yet anyone expecting the retreat of the Christian right to signal a with- drawal of religion itself from the national political stage proved badly mistak- en.

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