Religious bedfellows - New York, New York school board elections - News

Christian Century, May 5, 1993

The Christian Coalition, Pat Robertson's political arm, has decided to face off with what it perceives as the forces of evil in New York City. And the coalition's ally in its effort to win local school board seats in elections on May 4 is the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York. The pact between the archdiocese and Robertson, the conservative religious television host, former Baptist minister and former presidential candidate, clearly demonstrates, the experts say, not only the staying power of the Religious Right but also the potential power of a conservative Protestant-conservative Catholic alliance.

The battle is now engaged, and one of the weapons is a voter guide being prepared by the Christian Coalition. The guides, if approved by the archdiocese, headed by Cardinal John O'Connor, will be distributed through all the Catholic churches in the city. New York Newsday called the growing liberal-conservative conflict a "holy war," and, in a headline that especially rankled the Religious Right, the New York Times described the cooperative effort to defeat liberal candidates as a "tactical alliance."

The holy-war image was also used in a release from the American Jewish Congress, which urged the Catholic Church to "distance itself" from the coalition's involvement in the school board contests. Other denominations have joined the plea, and the city's Council of Churches has criticized the campaign as one that seeks to "force feed" religious doctrine to children.

Ralph Reed, head of the Christian Coalition, dismisses such accusations as simply another example of New York hype. What is happening in New York, he said, is no different from what the organization has done in countless other municipalities across the country. "This past weekend," he said in an April 20 interview, "we distributed 350,000 mayoral voter guides in Los Angeles. We went into about 2,100 churches; 700 of those churches were Korean, and we printed a special Korean voter guide. To me, that's as much a part of what we do" as the New York effort.

Both Reed and Mike Russell, communications director for the coalition, spoke of the "highly sensitized" nature of politics in New York, where everything is "overplayed" and "magnified." Reed said Catholic dioceses and especially individual Catholic congregations in other parts of the country had previously distributed the coalition's "nonpartisan voter guides," which are based on candidate responses to questionnaires. However, a spokesman for the Chicago archdiocese, one of those listed by Reed, denied that it had ever cooperated with the Christian Coalition.

Even if events in New York tend to be magnified, the high-profile cooperation of the New York archdiocese was bound to draw special attention. The two religious traditions - Protestant Pentecostalism and Roman Catholicism - share little theologically, although their interests match up in several spots on the social agenda, most notably education issues and abortion. If the archdiocese approves the voter guide, which will be printed during the last week in April, Catholic officials will distribute more than 100,000 of the pamphlets through its parishes. Another 390,000 win be distributed via more than 1,700 other churches.

The pamphlets, in Spanish and English, contain responses to questionnaires by some 600 candidates running for open seats on the city's 32 school boards. The responses focus on parents' rights: the right to inspect instructional materials, to withdraw their children from classes in which subject matter conflicts with their moral values, and to be consulted before their children receive condoms and information about sexuality in school-based clinics. Another topic is voluntary prayer in schools.

The New York situation appears custom-made for the coalition's methods, according to an analysis in the March/April issue of the journal Public Perspective. Authors Ted G. Jelen, professor of political science at Illinois Benedictine College, and Clyde Wilcox, associate professor of government at Georgetown University, commented concerning Robertson's coalition: "At the state and local level the organization serves as an umbrella for a decentralized collection of evangelical activists. In this way, the Christian Coalition may be able to avoid forcing activists to support positions on a wide variety of issues, and can encourage flexible, single-issue action in different settings."

With the New York school board battle, the Christian Coalition also appears to have overcome what Jelen and Wilcox term "religious particularism," or "belief in the superiority of one's own narrowly construed tradition or denomination." In the past, religious divisions have limited the coalition's range of influence. Decisive for the formation of the coalition was the introduction last year of a curriculum in the city's schools that advocated tolerance of various nontraditional lifestyles and of homosexual couples as parents. Ousted school chancellor Joseph Fernandez accused the Catholic Church and the Religious Right of distorting the curriculum and causing him to lose his job.