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The evangelical factor
By GARY STERN
THE JOURNAL NEWS
(Original publication: November 4, 2004)
Whether you call them the Christian right, the "moral majority," Bible Belters or simply the Republican base, white evangelical Christians appear to have changed the dynamics of national politics for the foreseeable future.
The numbers will be analyzed and re-analyzed for years, but Tuesday's exit polling showed that evangelical support for one of their own — President Bush — and for the Republican Party's opposition to abortion and gay marriage was a pivotal component of the GOP's big day.
In Ohio, the swing state of swing states, for instance, 25 percent of voters were white evangelicals. They voted overwhelmingly for the born-again incumbent.
"The Democratic Party has to understand that we are a formidable force, and I'm proud that Christians stood up and are being counted," said the Rev. Raymond Hadjstylianos, pastor of Living Word Christian Church, an independent evangelical church in White Plains. "We are passionate about abortion and gay marriage, about the justices who will be nominated for the Supreme Court. This is what we live for. It's the crux of our belief. This is what we are preaching."
Bible-believing evangelicals became a national political force during the early 1980s, but their influence waned during Bill Clinton's two terms. Bush's re-election team worked openly to bring out the evangelical vote, although Democrats may not have fully appreciated the implications.
Unlike Roman Catholics, who are all over the political map and generally split their votes between Democrats and Republicans, large majorities of evangelicals can be expected to support the Republican Party's agenda on moral issues.
Alison Greene, who took a leave of absence from her job as executive director of the Westchester County Human Rights Commission to volunteer for John Kerry in Florida, said Democrats believed they could win if they registered enough people and got them to the polls.
"What we didn't know was that the Bush people and the Republicans had clearly targeted the evangelicals," she said. "They really worked the ground."
Mark Silk, director of the Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., said Republicans have succeeded over a generation in making white evangelicals the base of the party. He compared it to how the Democratic Party came to rely on labor unions during the 1930s.
"It think it will be hard for Democrats, even Southern Democrats, to break this lot," Silk said. "Blacks can still get Democrats elected in congressional races. But we've seen for the first time in this election a new kind of religious politics. In this part of the country, New York and New England, you don't have this habit of bringing religion into politics. This is a wake-up call to Northeasterners to think about how the other half lives."
But what can Democrats do to appeal to evangelicals when they are so far apart on key issues?
"It's come to the point where these issues are almost exclusively the concern of the Republican Party," said the Rev. Carl Johnson, senior pastor at the New City Gospel Fellowship. "I know there are some Democrats who are pro-life and many Democrats who hold to a traditional view of marriage. But until these issues make their way into the party platform, I don't see how I could vote that way."
In a 2000 Journal News poll, only 8 percent of respondents in the northern suburbs identified themselves as evangelical or Pentecostal. But many in the religious community agree that the evangelical presence is growing in New York. Just last month, Texas pastor and televangelist Joel Osteen filled Madison Square Garden for two nights.
Monsignor William Smith, academic dean at St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Seminary in Yonkers, said evangelicals, Mass-going Catholics and others who regularly attend houses of worship will become a political force when they feel that a national candidate such as Kerry does not understand them.
"Catholics who go to Mass every week and evangelicals are really Ten Commandments-Apostles' Creed people," he said. "They're anti-abortion and roll their eyes at gay unions. The Bush White House has spent four years going after people who attend church, whether they're Presbyterians, Catholics or Mormons, and it paid off. Urban liberals think the Scopes trial is still going on and need to visit other parts of the country."
If there is any hope of connecting with evangelicals, Democrats may have to focus on the kinds of social problems with which the party has been identified, said the Rev. Jeff Schutz, until recently a pastor at First Baptist Church in Brewster, a fast-growing evangelical congregation.
"There's no easy answer on the moral issues, abortion and gay rights," he said. "How about talking about adoption, special-needs children, reforming the insurance industry, the homeless? The truth is, evangelicals can get so stuffy about moral differences that they don't get involved in these other issues."
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