Will GOP Unity Hold?
March 14, 2006
J. Bottum is convinced or would really like us all to believe with him that religious conservatives in the GOP will stay there unless the almost unthinkable happens: a serious pro-life Democrat alternative becomes available. (Indeed, there is an oft-heard longing in some quarters for the second coming of Bob Casey.) In Bottum’s calculation, the GOP is the pro-life party, even if it’s not as pro-life as anti-Roe conservatives would like.
This is familiar stuff and true enough on a general, national level, but it breaks down when considered historically as the present development of still-changing contingencies. As George Marsden reminds us, Evangelicals were not particularly opposed to abortion before or after Roe. They had to be mobilized by Catholics and more reflective Reformed-Evangelicals like Francis Schaeffer, whose intellectual roots go back to European Protestant-Catholic coalitions motivated by the Church’s engagement of the ills of modernity in the late nineteenth century. New contingencies could change minds and sever these alliances; taking their strength for granted is a risky proposition. Furthermore, Bottum’s reasons for confidence in a GOP-religious right unity break down when that union is considered on a regional and individual level. That is where we can see the trends that inevitably alter national voting patterns and coalitions.
Small but significant changes and trends are the focus of Amy Sullivan’s exposé of GOP and conservative religious leaders’ “hypocrisy” or willingness to put the party and winning ahead of principle and philosophical consistency. Since Sullivan’s article was the occasion for Bottum’s reassuring comments on religious conservatives and the GOP, it would have been interesting to know his thoughts on the tales Sullivan recounts, such as “her set-piece example … southern Republicans who are opposing study of the Bible in public schools because the bill was supported by Democrats.” Surely Neuhaus is right that this is “not enough to break the religious voters from the Republican party,” but that is not quite what Sullivan is saying.
Sullivan’s story focuses on a highly effective Evangelical youth vote organizer, Randy Brinson, and Richard Cizik, vice president for governmental affairs at the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE). Both Brinson and Cizik were burned by the GOP and old-guard Evangelical organizers like Chuck Colson who used their political machines to shut down the Alabama “Bible bill” and the NAE’s proposed statement on “global warming” as threats to the GOP. Both items, with their trans-partisan appeal, would entail cooperation between Democrats and religious conservatives and help deconstruct the polemical (but approximately correct) differentiation of religion-friendly Republicans from secularist, anti-religion Democrats. Sullivan indicates that the result of the smackdowns on Brinson and Cizik has been short-term success for the party enforcers, but it comes with a potential long-term loss. Brinson is working with Democrat leaders and Cizik expressed his sense of the need to do the same. One may detect in Sullivan’s essay a smirking condescension toward these earnest evangelical rubes looking for a politics of sincerity, truth, and what’s best for the world–sure, try the Democrats!
I hope people like Cizik are thinking a little deeper than that. Playing both sides is a fine strategy, but at the end of the day you have to get off the fence on one side or another. A man can even get used to it, if he has a healthy dose of cynicism to acclimate his sensitive soul to the perennial realities of power-focused, machine politics. But can religious conservatives get used to it? I have my doubts. There isn’t a lot of intellectual reinforcement for political realism. Idealism abounds in academe, and possibly more so in Christian academic quarters. Vacuous notions of sensitivity and “nuance” are popular virtues there.
Like Sullivan, I’ve seen the same writing on the wall in such things as Christianity Today’s editorial “declaring that ‘single-issue politics is neither necessary nor wise.’” This editorial was a shaky effort on the eve of the last presidential election to advocate political savvy and skepticism that mainly implied that abortion-on-demand is not such a grave evil that Christians should be willing to endure the GOP and back a candidate who, now in retrospect, has made two crucial supreme court appointments. Pick your own principles and moral equivalences was the upshot at CT.
CT, less a movement magazine than an effort to domesticate and market Evangelicals as good (sensitive and nuanced) liberal citizens, is in my estimation increasingly center-left, not “center-right” as Sullivan has it. Currently CT is embarked on a long project of publishing articles underwritten by the Pew Charitable Trusts about how Christians can be “a counterculture for the common good.” Pew as in J. Howard Pew of the Sun Oil Company, who, as Marsden notes, has “financed conversionist religious groups to be bastions for preserving older ideas of a Christian society” since the 1950s. Of course I’m all in favor of “older ideas of a Christian society,” but I wonder what exactly you end up getting, “countercultural” or otherwise, with that kind of backing. It seems at least worth some comment, if not a useful starting point for discussing cultural-political realities with questions like, “What authority should readers ascribe to an externally-funded for-profit media corporation, and why should they do so?” I have elsewhere noted as well the shilling being done out of CT/CTI for the “emergent church movement” which ironically most resembles and is most at odds with the rest of Evangelicaldom in its attack on “older ideas of a Christian society.” Another turn of the MacIntyreian crank gives you “Whose tradition, whose older ideas?”
This walking, talking, ever-schismatic identity crisis called “Evangelicalism” is rich with rubes who will unpredictably play and decry the political games of manipulation, cooptation, and subversion. Some have already fled leftward and many more may follow out of frustration and reaction to being manhandled by theocon commissars who dare put the party ahead of principle…and perhaps even God. Complicating matters greatly, the truth is, this is not a wholly censurable reaction, even when it entails the absurdity of Bono and the callow mendacity of Jim Wallis. How many bitch-slaps and halved half loafs can religious conservatives be expected to take before a goodly number of them turn to such quivering mush? What kind of party and movement are they in after all; does not some guilt lie with it? When John Podhoretz, a writer for the GOP hardline loyalist mouthpiece, The National Review, writes today that the eminently intelligent and unmushy Frederica Matthews Green and other religious conservatives “live ideologically” (i.e., you’re a lefty!) by making “choices that gratify [them] because they represent a fulfillment of ideas [they] hold,” it’s clear that some people may be in the same party, but they’re not on the same planet. How sustainable is that coalition?
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