Bill Berkowitz: No Retreat, No Surrender: The Future for the Religious Right

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Bill Berkowitz

Five longtime observers of the Religious Right comment on the movement's future.

As we near the end of the first decade of the 21st century, the Religious Right is still heavily engaged in fighting the "culture wars," as witnessed by the current "War on Christmas," and, more importantly the apocalyptic battles over same-sex marriage that resulted in victories for the antis' in Florida, Arizona, and California this past November.  

In a pre-election piece about Bill Ayers -- a former member of the Weathermen, a group that planted bombs during the Vietnam era, and whose relationship with Obama became one of Team McCain's major talking points during the presidential campaign -- bestselling author Thomas Frank observed that "the culture wars are the familiar demagogic tactic of our own time, building monstrous offenses out of the tiniest slights. The fading rancor that each grievance is meant to revive, of course, dates to the 1960s and the antiwar protests, urban riots and annoying youth culture that originally triggered our great turn to the right."

Despite the victory of Barack Obama, the Religious Right will continue to play a significant -- albeit different -- role in America's politics.

Weeks before Obama takes the oath of office, major Religious Right organizations are monitoring  his every move. Lou Sheldon's organization, Tradition American Values, have established an "Obama Watch."  After Inauguration Day, expect angry press releases, breathless Internet Alerts, nasty blog posts, and urgent fundraising appeals; all done to rebuild and reinvigorate a wounded movement.

"New" evangelical leaders -- not as critical of or uncomfortable with Obama -- will emerge from the shadow of the old-timers, and they will try and craft a broader, less crazed movement. These new leaders will work with Obama Administration officials on a number of policy issues, including Obama's revitalized faith-based initiative, global warming, combating AIDS in Africa and poverty at home and abroad.

Obama's victory ushers in a huge turnover in personnel, which ironically may strengthen the movement as many of those currently employed by the Bush Administration will seek and find positions at Christian conservative policy centers and Christian universities.

While Sen. McCain lost, it appears that Sarah Palin won; at least temporarily. Her star continues to shine and she will be in the forefront of any conversations about 2012, which believe it or not, has already started. Whatever else Palin is, she does rev up the base and can be a formidable fundraiser for GOP candidates and causes.    

Two weeks before Election Day, I asked several long-time Religious Right researchers, writers, and activists to comment on the future prospects of the movement. Their answers to the question: "What will the political landscape look like for the Religious Right if Obama wins the presidency, or if McCain wins?" included comments about the possibility of a McCain victory. For the purposes of this story, I have edited out those remarks.  

Jeff Sharlet is the author of "The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power," and a Visiting Research Scholar at New York University's Center for Religion and Media.

It depends on who you mean by "Religious Right." If we're talking about the self-consciously institutionalized wing of the Republican Party, they die a little either way, as under Obama or McCain, they probably lose some ground in terms of appointments. But there will be silver linings for the old Christian Right: a fundraising bonanza under Obama, as they're able to paint the town red (so to speak), or the conventional wisdom that it was their armies of compassion and venom, mobilized by Palin, that won the day for McCain.

But, two weeks out, it looks as certain as it can that Obama's going to win. So it's worth giving the fortunes of Christian conservatism during his administration a bit more prognosticative consideration. If Obama wins, look for the stock of religious conservative leaders such as Rick Warren, Stephen Mansfield, author of "The Faith of Obama," and Cameron Strang, publisher of Relevant, a hipster Christian magazine that puffed Obama, to rise. Rich Cizik, the National Association of Evangelicals VP who sparred with dinosaurs such as James Dobson and Chuck Colson over the issue of global warming, will find himself in a stronger position. If his health allows it, I wouldn't be surprised to see David Kuo, a first-term special assistant to Bush for faith-based initiatives, returning to government in some capacity; he was thrilled when Obama announced his plan to actually expand Bush's program, which Kuo turned against because he saw it as too partisan -- and too modest.

Mainstream liberals tend to welcome such Christian conservatives. They're heartened by what they see as an evangelical embrace of what they consider "their" issues, as if evangelicals hadn't long been concerned about poverty, AIDS, and the fate of the "Dark Continent" to which they've sent so many missionaries. The truth is that we're seeing is not liberalization of Christian conservatism but its broadening; the religious right of the future will have a much bigger, more sophisticated, and more international agenda. Much of it will revolve around the same issues that animate liberals and leftists. But we shouldn't assume that Christian conservatives who start with us on common ground are headed for the same destination. The temptation under Obama will be to declare the Christian Right dead, again; a premature announcement mainstream media has made a dozen times over the decades, ever since the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925.

While one branch of the Christian Right withers, others will flower. It's a social movement, not a political party, defined, whether it likes it or not, by evolution rather than principles. Christian fundamentalism will survive; it'll adapt; and it may even grow stronger.

Kathryn Joyce is the author of "Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement," forthcoming from Beacon Press in March 2009.

If Barack Obama wins, the far right of the patriarchy movement will not disappear, but may step back to regroup, as they have during other Democratic administrations. Their advocacy on behalf of certain reproductive policy issues will certainly continue in enshrining broad "conscience clauses" to exempt a wide range of medical industry workers from performing job tasks they object to on religious grounds; the expansion of their antiabortion work through notification laws and the targeting of individual clinics and abortion providers on specious grounds; and will likely entail an expansion of a growing theme of their antiabortion rhetoric: that abortion providers are engaging in racist population control measures against African-American and Latino women (charges that numerous groups, including the Guttmacher Institute, have thoroughly debunked).

Throughout the campaign, the "abortion as black genocide" argument has grown louder as a concerted attack on Obama's pro-choice positions. Conservative black Christian leaders, as well as flagship Christian right activist groups such as Family Research Council, will continue to use Obama's position to highlight their latest effort to appropriate the language and legacy of women's and civil rights in service of their goals. Within individual churches and denominations, the movement will continue its push its doctrine through literature, speaking and conference campaigns, forcing further church splits over gender, child-raising, and reproductive issues.

Obama's administration may be likely to expand the role and access of faith-based initiatives. Though federal funding of religious groups' social service projects, which have resulted in a number of civil rights violations over the past eight years, is considered a product of the Bush years, in fact Constitutional historian Marcia Hamilton has argued that the Clinton Administration actually introduced the concept, and paved the way for the excesses of Bush. The Democratic Party's courtship and pursuit of moderate evangelicals such as Jim Wallis and Rick Warren, both of whom represent a putatively liberalized evangelicalism, that tempers its social conservatism with concern for poverty and the environment, indicates a willingness to bend on the sort of civil and individual rights issues that are often a target of the religious right. The effect could be a further blending of public policy and doctrine-infused faith, where the milder social conservatism of moderate evangelicals is welcomed into an Obama government as part of a "Big Tent" effort to accommodate believers -- a move potentially more insidious than the outright offensive of Palin's culture warring constituency for being that much subtler.

Rob Boston, Senior Policy Analyst, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and author of "The Most Dangerous Man in America?: Pat Robertson and the Rise of the Christian Coalition"

An Obama victory will give the Religious Right a highly visible target to attack for at least four years. The depths of the Religious Right's loathing of Obama can be hard for some people to grasp. I got a taste of it during the "Values Voter Summit" in September. Religious Right groups will use an Obama presidency to raise more funds and spur activism. They will say McCain lost because he failed to appease "values voters" -- even though he put Sarah Palin, an evangelical, on the ticket.

I expect these organizations will, in concert with secular far-right groups, attempt to destabilize the Obama Administration early on by raising some contentious "culture war" issue. This will be similar to what they and their GOP allies in Congress did to Bill Clinton over gays in the military back in 1993. The idea is to cripple Obama right out of the box by forcing him to divert attention and resources away from economic concerns, which all of the polls show are of most importance to the American people.

On a more practical level, these organizations will have to do some strategic shifting. If they have virtually no clout in the White House and among the congressional majority leadership, Religious Right groups will have to start focusing more on state and local governments. This could mean more church-state conflict and "culture war" battles in local public schools and communities.

Having said that, I do not believe an Obama victory would be a crippling blow to the Religious Right. These organizations have been declared dead before, yet they always bounce back. The unpleasant truth is, the Religious Right is probably a permanent fixture in American politics. Like any social/political movement, it will see victories and defeats at the polls. No one electoral loss will spell its doom. A recent survey I did found that the nation's top ten Religious Right organizations bring in collectively more than half a billion dollars a year. Their messages reach millions. A movement with this much money and supporters is simply not going to fade away overnight.

Frederick Clarkson, co-founder, Talk2Action.org and editor of "Dispatches from the Religious Left: The Future of Faith and Politics in America"

Whatever happens from election to election, the religious right will remain a powerful presence in public life at all levels. This may vary in different parts of the country, just like any other significant social/political movement. Things change, but the question is always -- how much?

Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska, along with former Arkansas Governor and GOP presidential contender Mike Huckabee epitomize the new generation of religious right political leaders. More importantly, the religious right continues, win or lose, to drive and dominate the politics of many states. The big unsupported declarations from pundits, mostly those Inside the Beltway that the religious right is dead or in precipitous decline or that the culture wars are over or nearly so, are as preposterous as they are frequently repeated with a confidence known only to the keepers of the Conventional Wisdom.

The religious right is sustained by animating transcendent notions of their purpose on Earth and continuing to develop and sustain a vast capacity for cultural and political action via a growing (not shrinking)  network of colleges and universities -- even law schools, as well as communications media unmatched by anything on the left. Additionally, they have formidable political organizations, such as James Dobson's national network of 35 state level "family policy councils" that have been the driving force behind the anti-gay marriage initiatives across the country in partnership with the Catholic church and other elements of the religious right.

One thing that will also probably remain constant is that Beltway Insiders will continue to convince themselves that the religious right is dead, dying, or irrelevant -- and will try to convince the rest of the country of the rightness of their view -- usually based on interpretations of convenience of polling data, rather than an analysis of the people, resources, and institutions of the religious right itself and its capacity to shape and inform state, local, and national affairs.

If the religious right finds itself occupying fewer seats in Congress and facing losses in some states, the movement will regroup. There will always be another election. We can also reasonably expect a fresh round of ballot initiatives on the usual subjects. And just as the Democratic Party seeks to downplay issues related to LGBT civil rights -- especially marriage equality, the issue will likely blow up in their faces as the religious right continues to drive the issue.

The Federal Marriage Amendment will re-emerge over the next year or two. The position of everyone from John McCain to John Kerry and Barack Obama and Joe Biden has been that they oppose marriage equality and that the matter is best left to the states. However, McCain says he will support a federal marriage amendment if states are required to recognize the marriages of other states. Massachusetts, the state that pioneered marriage equality, has repealed a 1913 anti-miscegenation law that was originally intended to prevent people from states that outlawed interracial marriage to come to Massachusetts to wed.  The law had been used to disallow same sex couples from states that did not recognize same sex marriages to come to Massachusetts to marry. Now people from anti-same sex marriage states can legally marry in Massachusetts. This will accelerate the issue of whether marriages performed in Massachusetts are valid in their home states. It is just a matter of time before this issue explodes into national politics, as well as in the states that have already thought that they settled the matter one way or the other.

Michael Reynolds is a veteran investigative journalist who has written on radical political religion and its consequences for such publications as The Nation, Mother Jones, U.S. News &World Report and others

Regardless of the election outcome, the Religious Right establishment, as exemplified by the 75-member Arlington Group and the Council For National Policy will continue undiminished as a political force.

With an Obama Administration and a Democratic majority in Congress, the Religious Right will be reinvigorated, joining with right-wing Republicans in a backlash that will dwarf their attacks during the Clinton era. The Christian Patriot militia movement will return and along with it, right-wing religiously motivated domestic terrorism. Though Obama will continue, and perhaps expand, the faith-based policies of George Bush, and give evangelicals such as Rick Warren and Richard Cizik preferred status at the White House, it will not mollify the Religious Right.

More important, there is the possibility of several vacancies on the Supreme Court, With Roe v Wade on the line, these historic appointments will guarantee explosive confirmation battles with either an Obama or McCain nominee. In vehemence, in mobilization, and in polarization, it will surpass those of Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, John Roberts, or Samuel Alito.

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

Bill Berkowitz is a longtime observer of the conservative movement and a frequent writer for Media Transparency and other online publications. He documents the strategies, players, institutions, victories and defeats of the American Right from a progressive perspective.

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