After achieving a position of enormous influence within the ranks of American politics, the Christian Coalition in recent months is undergoing new divisions and decline.
From commanding contributions of a record $26.4 million in l996, its collections a year later totaled only $17 million. Over twenty percent of the total staff were released, and coalition support for its Catholic and minority outreach programs stopped, as did publication of its national magazine. According to the U.S.News & World Report (Feb.16), the organization faces that financial crisis, and an escalating, bitter ideological crisis over its aims and principles.
At stake is the role the coalition should play in trying to influence the national Republican party agenda. Former director Ralph Reed helped produce the huge financial support, but did so by broadening out Coalition involvement with moderate Republicans who differed on some key social issues, such as abortion and privately financed social security.
Now, with Reed no longer in charge, the coalition faces a major identity crisis: Should it continue its alliance with the moderate Republicans or should it return to its early highly doctrinaire commitment to economic and social conservatism? Complicating the dilemma is the rise to great prominence in Christian Right circles, of Gary Bauer, the CEO of the Family Research Council.
He is attracting rapidly growing support for his no-compromise, commitment to the conservatives’ social issues agenda. In fact, Bauer, like Pat Buchanan in the 1996 campaign is seriously considering running for the Presidency of the United States, and his proposed candidacy is being taken with full seriousness by long range party strategists.
As startling as that may have sounded a year ago, Bauer’s prospects of winning the endorsement of the conservatives, including many Christian Right activists, is now being taken as an almost sure reality. There are signs his supporters are planning to enter him in such early primaries as in Iowa and New Hampshire. Analysts say that the religious right is looking for ways to keep alive the momentum that brought them to great influence within the GOP, but at the same time remaining loyal to their deeply felt moral and social convictions. At the same time, Republican strategists are weighing the costs of keeping their ranks open to the Christian Right.
Complicating the situation is the sharp criticism of Christian right cooperation with the moderates by .James Dobson of Focus on the Family. One of the most influential Christian right spokesmen in the nation, Dobson recently told a group of conservative leaders at a meeting of the Council for National Policy that should this cooperation continue, (he called it a ‘betrayal’) he would abandon the GOP and “do everything I can to take as many people with me as possible,” reports the New York Times (Feb. 12).
— By Erling Jorstad