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For the Christian right, last year was nothing short of satanic. First, the president of the National Association of Evangelicals, Ted Haggard, was forced to quit amid allegations that he enjoyed drugs and sex with a male prostitute. Then Democrats racked up a landslide victory, regaining control of both houses of Congress and ousting some of the religious right's staunchest allies, including Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Rep. Jim Ryun of Kansas and Rep. John Hostettler of Indiana.
Even worse, Americans rejected a host of measures near and dear to the hearts of evangelicals. In South Dakota, voters overturned a ban on abortion. In California, they voted against a measure requiring parental notification when teens have abortions. In Arizona, they rejected an amendment outlawing same-sex marriages, and in Missouri, they voted in favor of stem-cell research over the militant opposition of evangelicals. In Kansas, where a backlash against the Christian right has been building ever since the state tried to impose the teaching of anti-evolution "intelligent design," voters ousted Attorney General Phill Kline, who had made a career out of hassling and intimidating abortion clinics.
"The 2006 election was a total repudiation of the Karl Rove version of conservatism," says Curtis Gans, director of the nonpartisan Center for the Study of the American Electorate at American University. "The social-rightist version of the Republican Party was defeated everywhere but where the social rightists thrive: the Bible Belt." Unless the GOP can reinvent itself and appeal to moderate and independent voters, warns Gans, it "may be consigned to where they had been from 1932 until the late 1960s -- a distinctly minority party."
The sweeping defeat has left many evangelicals feeling angry, depressed and shellshocked. For the first time since they seized control of the Republican Party more than a quarter century ago, some on the Christian right are talking privately about breaking away from the GOP. "At the end of the day, America has a two-party system -- but a third party can be a spoiler," says a top official at a leading Christian-right organization. "I don't know what's going to happen, but anything's possible."
Other evangelicals favor sitting out next year's presidential campaign -- or even dropping out of politics altogether. David Kuo, a longtime activist on the Christian right who served as President Bush's deputy director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, suggested that evangelicals take stock and consider the "negative spiritual consequences of political obsession." And a recent survey on Beliefnet.com, a nonpartisan forum on religion and spirituality, found that four out of ten evangelical voters now favor the idea of Christians taking a two-year "fast" from politics.
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But according to evangelical leaders and activists, most in the movement are determined to mount a massive counterattack in 2008 -- beginning with a no-holds-barred effort to reconquer the Republican Party and reignite the "culture wars" over abortion, gay marriage and stem-cell research. Rather than examining its own role in last year's electoral defeat, the religious right blames moderate Republicans for mounting a centrist campaign that failed to stir up voters on hot-button issues. As evangelicals see it, the party took them for granted in 2006, refusing to champion a "pro-family" agenda at the polls. "They court us in the primaries -- and once they get elected, they tell us to take our place in the back of the bus," says Tim Wildmon, president of the American Family Association, one of the most powerful groups on the Christian right. "But we're not going away. They need us more than we need them. If they cut off the evangelical arm of the party, they'll be a minority party for years and years. If they try to divorce themselves from values voters and groups like ours, they'll suffer the consequences."
Like Samson pulling down the temple on himself as well as the Philistines, social conservatives aren't afraid of bringing down the whole Republican Party. Back in 1996, when moderate conservative Sen. Bob Dole carried the GOP presidential banner, many Christian-right voters didn't bother to vote, and Dole was handily defeated. Unless the GOP heeds the Christian right, Wildmon warns, millions of evangelical voters may once again refuse to go to the polls next year. "It's true we have nowhere else to go, except to stay home," he says. But the message to Republicans, he adds, is clear: "We would rather go down on our principles. We lose? You lose!"
To ensure that Republicans get the message in 2008, the religious right is redoubling its efforts to mobilize its political machine -- including tens of thousands of churches, hundreds of radio stations and two national television networks. The Family Research Council, a leading lobby for the Christian right, is planning a huge expansion on the Internet, including videos and podcasts, to reach millions in next year's election. "We want to be sure that the lessons of the last election have been learned, and that the Republicans understand that we are not a lock for the GOP," says Charmaine Yoest, the council's vice president of communications. "When you're looking at razor-thin margins, you better pay attention to your base."
The group fired an early shot across the GOP's bow in January, when it delivered a videotaped response to President Bush's State of the Union speech. "The president failed to draw a line in the sand on behalf of life," charged Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council. "What will become of the culture of life, of the defense of marriage?" The council displayed a chart on which it noted the number of times the president mentioned the Christian right's core issues: marriage, 0; abortion, 0; stem cells, 0; cloning, 0; abstinence, 0; and values, 0.
But it won't be easy for evangelicals to force Republicans to cater to "values voters." The biggest obstacle they face is striking: Unlike the born-again George W. Bush, who paraded his Christian beliefs to win the support of the religious right, all of the leading candidates for the GOP nomination in 2008 are distinctly unsympathetic to evangelicals and their agenda. Sen. John McCain of Arizona earned the enmity of the religious right in 2000, when he denounced evangelical leaders Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as "agents of intolerance." Despite his recent efforts to mend fences with evangelicals, McCain has had little or no success. "I pray that we will not get stuck with him," James Dobson of the Christian-right powerhouse Focus on the Family told reporters. "Speaking as a private individual, I would not vote for John McCain under any circumstances."
Rudy Giuliani is equally anathema to evangelicals, not only because he is pro-choice and supports gay rights but also because he flaunted his less-than-puritanical lifestyle with his mistress while he was mayor of New York. "He is unacceptable," says Perkins of the Family Research Council. And Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, is still viewed with suspicion by many Bible-believing Christians because he has supported gay rights and because he is a Mormon.
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Without a viable candidate to back, evangelicals face an unpalatable choice: Either hold their nose and rally behind Romney, or throw their support behind a long-shot contender who doesn't have a prayer of winning, such as Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas or former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas. "We're going to work hard in the primaries to support the candidate of our choice," says Phil Burress, president of Citizens for Community Values. "But if it comes down to McCain and Romney, I'm in Romney's camp."
Beyond the field of candidates, however, the Christian right faces an even more formidable problem: The Republican Party itself is beginning to rethink its longtime union with evangelical voters. The alliance has always been an uneasy marriage of convenience, wedding business-oriented, tax-cutting centrists to an ideological, militantly evangelical base. Now, emboldened by the defeat of "pro-family" issues and candidates in November, moderates in the party are trying to loosen what they see as the Christian right's stranglehold on the party.
The rebellion by the moderates started in 2005, when former Sen. Jack Danforth of Missouri, a mainline Episcopal priest and the author of Faith and Politics, ignited a firestorm among the religious right by writing an Op-Ed in The New York Times that slammed Republicans for having "transformed our party into the political arm of conservative Christians." Then last fall, former House Majority Leader Dick Armey stunned evangelicals by calling their de facto leader, James Dobson of Focus on the Family, a "bully." Rep. Christopher Shays, a liberal Republican, was even harsher: "This Republican Party of Lincoln," he warned, "has become a party of theocracy."
The revolt of the moderates was especially evident in Kansas last year, when a host of GOP politicians left the party to run as Democrats. "It's increasingly clear that most voters don't share the priorities of the evangelical right," says Peter Montgomery, who follows religious voting trends for People for the American Way. "That's why you see so many Republicans starting to speak out against them."
The Christian right also faces a stiff challenge from Democrats, who successfully reached out to evangelical voters last November. In some cases they did so by fielding candidates with pro-life credentials, including newly elected Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania and Rep. Heath Shuler of North Carolina. In other cases they did so by simply recasting the party's rhetoric and reaching out to church groups. "They were smart," says Genevieve Wood, director of strategic operations at the Heritage Foundation and a former staffer at the Family Research Council. "They made a deliberate attempt to go after those folks."
Case in point: Ohio. In 2004, Ohio provided the critical margin to re-elect Bush, as evangelical voters flocked to the polls to support a ballot measure banning gay marriage. But in 2006, the political landscape shifted dramatically. In the governor's race, the Democrats nominated Ted Strickland, a former Methodist minister who spoke movingly about his religious beliefs, met with voters at churches, placed ads on Christian radio stations and reframed traditional Democratic issues -- improving health care, ending poverty, protecting the environment -- as "Christian values." In the end, Strickland won the race with nearly half of the white evangelical vote -- almost as much as his Republican opponent, Ken Blackwell, a conservative evangelical.
It was a stunning result. "We split the white evangelical vote and won outright among mainstream Protestants and Catholics," says Mara Vanderslice, a political consultant who helped the Democrats target Christian voters in Ohio and other key battleground states last year. As a result, Republicans lost ground among their traditional religious base. In 2004, the GOP won seventy-eight percent of the white evangelical vote nationwide. In 2006, the party's share dipped to seventy percent -- a significant swing in hotly contested races.
"It's not like you have to win 'em," says James Carville, the Democratic strategist who engineered Bill Clinton's rise to power. "You just have to do better. Even if you go up five points, it's a big deal." The swing certainly got the attention of the Christian right. "Man, a couple of points difference -- that's what the political consultants get paid the big bucks to deliver," says Yoest of the Family Research Council. "In a divided electorate, that's significant."
Despite GOP losses among evangelical voters, most observers agree that the religious right remains the bedrock of the Republican coalition. According to John Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, the GOP must win back evangelical voters in Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio if it hopes to retake Congress. "It's hard to imagine the Republican Party making a comeback in the Midwest without evangelical voters," says Green.
That's a view evangelical leaders are quick to echo. "The Republicans can't win without their base," insists Andrea Lafferty, executive director of the Traditional Values Coalition, which includes 43,000 churches. "And Christian voters are their base."
Democrats are also careful not to underestimate the continuing strength of the religious right, saying it is far too soon to predict the end of social conservatism. The Christian right has been repeatedly proclaimed dead over the past twenty-five years, particularly after the election of Bill Clinton in 1992 -- only to rise stronger than ever.
"The reports of their demise have been greatly exaggerated," says Carville, noting that the religious right's media empire and network of churches provide the Republican Party with a permanent national infrastructure. "If anybody thinks that they're not going to exert influence in the Republican nominating process in 2008, they're nuts."