Onward, Christian soldiers? - Christian coalition - includes related article

Reason, Jan, 1994 by William L. Anderson

Such fears are based partly on the Christian Coalition's reputation for "stealth" campaigning. In 1990, the group helped numerous evangelical activists win local school-board elections, especially in Southern California. Instead of directly participating in political debates, the candidates ran low-profile campaigns, distributing coalition "voter guides" in local evangelical churches. About 40 percent of them were elected. But the way they won created the impression that they were hiding "a radical agenda behind a back-to-basics mask," as Tom Teepen of the Atlanta Constitution wrote.

An elated Reed declared, "I paint my face and travel at night. You don't know it's over until you're in a body bag. You don't know until election night." He says he now regrets those remarks, and the coalition has largely abandoned stealth tactics. But the quote, frequently cited by opponents, still haunts him.

From the coalition's perspective, there are two major problems with stealth campaigning. It antagonizes voters, and the candidates it elects cannot claim a mandate to, say, introduce creationism or remove material they find offensive from the curriculum. Furthermore, they have not built the alliances that would help them achieve their goals and win re-election.

As a result, the coalition's candidates have not had much of an influence. The officials elected a few years ago either have since been defeated or are on the defensive. Kenneth L. Woodward, writing in the May 17 Newsweek, reported that the coalition's push to dominate the nation's 16,000 school boards has fizzled. He also noted that boards with conservative Christian majorities have generally made few if any changes in the schools they oversee.

To have a significant impact, the Christian Coalition will have to overcome the problems created by its early tactics. More important, it will have to convince a skeptical public that it is not a threat to individual liberty, that its agenda is not one of religious intolerance.

In truth, evangelicals differ on the extent to which the law should reflect Christian values. For example, although they all believe that heterosexual marriage is the only proper context for sex, most would leave such matters to the individual. On the other hand, a minority among the Reconstructionists, themselves a minority within the evangelical movement, believe the state should enforce religious law, including the death penalty for homosexuality and abortion.

Reed is eager to distance the Christian Coalition from such theocrats. "We want to assure people that we do not want to legislate our theology," he says in Robertson's new book, The Turning Tide. The coalition supports a ban on abortion except in cases of rape, incest, and danger to the mother's life; opposes anti-discrimination laws and legal marriage for homosexuals; and favors vigorous enforcement of obscenity laws to close down stores that specialize in sexually explicit material. But it does not seek to regulate private, noncommercial sex acts involving adults.