WASHINGTON (ABP) — The 2004 presidential campaign has begun in earnest but, for Christian voters, deciding between the two major candidates may not be as black and white as campaign ads make it out to be.
A significant majority of evangelical and other Christian voters supported President Bush over Al Gore in the 2000 election — continuing a trend of Christians favoring Republican candidates in national elections. Chief Bush political adviser Karl Rove has made no secret of his desire to get as many evangelicals to the polls as possible in 2004 to boost the president's re-election chances over his Democratic rival, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.).
But, according to Christian observers of Washington politics, the issues may not be as simple this time around.
“I just think that this election is unlike the last three,” said Corwin Smidt, a political science professor at Calvin College, an evangelical school in Grand Rapids, Mich.
One reason for that conclusion, Smidt said in a phone interview, is because controversial social issues may take a backseat to other concerns — such as joblessness and terrorism — even for many Christian voters.
While moral issues like abortion and homosexuality often were paramount for Christian voters in previous elections, Smidt said, “I do think that the economy will be an issue for many evangelical voters” this time around.
Gay marriage continues to grab headlines, but Smidt and other political observers say the candidates' views on such hot-button issues may be less important to voters than other topics.
A recent bipartisan poll commissioned by two Christian anti-poverty organizations showed that 78 percent of voters would rather hear about a candidate's position on helping the poor than about the candidate's position on gay marriage. Only 15 percent of respondents thought a candidate's views on marriage were more important.
That doesn't mean gay marriage won't be an important issue, observers agree.
The debate over same-sex marriage began when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled in November that the state must issue marriage licenses to gay couples. The Bush campaign has used that issue to illustrate its differences with Kerry.
Bush supports an amendment to the Constitution that would ban same-sex marriage. Although Kerry has said he opposes same-sex marriage, he supports “civil unions” or other legal arrangements that would provide essentially the same rights and responsibilities as marriage. He also opposes amending the federal Constitution to keep states from enacting same-sex marriages.
Many conservative Christian activists oppose even civil unions, calling them “counterfeit marriages.” But White House spokesmen have said Bush would not support outlawing civil unions.
Although polls show that a large majority of Americans — and an even wider margin of evangelicals — oppose legalizing same-sex marriage, those polls also show gay marriage is of very low priority for most voters. In addition, support for civil unions has increased.
Some observers predict opposition to gay marriage will soften in time, however. Polls show that younger voters support same-sex marriage and other gay rights. A recent poll by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life showed that those in their early thirties and younger are evenly divided on gay marriage, while opposition to the practice increases steeply with age.
Although support for same-sex marriage is lower among religious young people, they still support it more than their older counterparts.
Smidt said he observed this distinction even among his students at conservative Calvin College, which is affiliated with the Christian Reformed Church. Many of those students distinguish between their theological beliefs about homosexuality and their civil beliefs.
“I think there's kind of a tension that goes on,” he said. “We don't want promiscuous gay relationships. So when you're talking about civil unions of gay people, somehow that is more decent than the [promiscuous] gay lifestyle you sometimes see.”
He also noted that the more contact voters — including evangelicals — have with gays, the more supportive of gay rights they tend to become. The Pew survey's results support that observation. “I think that, basically, there's some sense — particularly in urban areas — that evangelicals know some gays, and they don't necessarily want to punish them,” Smidt said.
Baylor University's Derek Davis said the sudden emergence of the gay-marriage issue may account for its lack of decision-making importance to many voters, despite its social significance. “I think it's a much bigger issue,” he said. “It's newer, it's fresher. People haven't made up their minds on it.” Davis is a political science professor and head of the school's J.M. Dawson Institute on Church-State Studies.
Although abortion has proven to be a decisive issue for many evangelical voters in past elections, that too may change this year, the political scientists suggested. Bush and the Republican Party oppose abortion rights. Kerry and the Democratic Party support them.
Despite 16 years of pro-life Republican presidents since 1980 and nine years of a Republican majority in Congress, abortion remains legal in all 50 states. Smidt said that fact, coupled with the presence of a staunch anti-abortionist in the White House, may mute the power of abortion as a deciding issue for many evangelical voters in this election.
“I think when you tend to have someone who is supportive of your particular position … the issue becomes less of a threat because the person who is in office seems to stand where you are standing,” Smidt said.
He also pointed out that pro-life activists have focused in recent years on goals less ambitious than outlawing abortion altogether, such as the recently passed ban on so-called “partial-birth” abortions. The success of such “common ground” measures “has tended to mute some of the activism on abortion itself,” Smidt said.
Davis agreed that for many voters — including some evangelicals –abortion may not be as significant in this election as in the past. “I think, to some extent, it's sort of a worn-out debate for a lot of people,” he said. “They've heard so much about it, and they already have their own views.”
Another issue on which evangelical voters show some ideological diversity is one that Davis said is paramount in this election — the future of church-state relations.
“I think church-state issues are right at the heart and center of what our democracy is all about, what our public philosophy is all about, what the very nature of our democratic order is,” said Davis.
Bush has been a supporter of government programs to fund education and social services through religious providers. Strong church-state separationists oppose those efforts, and Bush has run up against significant opposition in Congress to his so-called “charitable-choice” and school-voucher proposals. Nonetheless, he has succeeded in passing a voucher program for the District of Columbia and he continues to expand charitable choice via executive order.
Davis said a Kerry administration wouldn't push such proposals. Kerry has opposed vouchers and charitable-choice legislation in the past and has expressed strong support for church-state separation.
More importantly, however, Davis said, whoever is elected president in 2004 will get to appoint at least one justice to the Supreme Court — and perhaps as many as three. The court currently is closely divided on most church-state issues, and any movement in justices could tip the court's balance for years to come.
“People who would believe that we need to have a strong separation of church and state would be disappointed by [Bush's likely] appointments” to the court, Davis said.
Economic issues are more likely to be a factor this year than in the previous two elections, especially for voters in manufacturing and other blue-collar communities where unemployment is high. Since blue-collar employment sectors tend to have higher numbers of religious voters than white-collar sectors, Smidt said, the economy may be more of a factor for religious voters than in recent elections.
That would be a welcome shift, says Yonce Shelton, director of public policy for the Christian anti-poverty group Call to Renewal. Christians “have much more agreement on poverty” than social issues, he said. “And that means poverty should be just as much of a topic in debate.”
Shelton's group co-commissioned the survey — conducted by a bi-partisan polling firm — that determined most voters are more concerned about reducing poverty than discussing gay marriage. However, he cautioned, his group's view “is not that gay marriage isn't a moral issue.”
“We're not saying that gay marriage shouldn't be debated and discussed,” Shelton said. But it is not “the only religious [issue] in the political context,” he added.
While Call to Renewal initially supported Bush's faith-based initiatives to fund religious charities, the group recently criticized that effort's implementation. “We just don't think that the faith-based initiative or the 'compassionate conservatism' has translated into a broader focus on social services,” Shelton said.
But another Christian economic scholar had a different take on what sort of government actions ultimately serve economic justice. While helping the poor is “an imperative” for Christians, said Sam Gregg of the Acton Institute, that goal can be consistent with laissez-faire economic views.
The Michigan-based Acton Institute promotes conservative theories of economics among Christian leaders. Gregg, the institute's director of research, said that Christians' election choices between competing economic plans often are not as clear as their choices on issues of “clear moral evil.” Compared to abortion and euthanasia, for instance, “there's a chasm of difference … between proper Christian electoral choices on social issues and on economics issues,” Gregg said.
Tax cuts that tend to benefit corporations and wealthy individuals can ultimately do the most good for the poor, Gregg said. The long-term way of trying to help the poor is employment growth, he said. “Of course, we should have safety nets to help those who can't help themselves. But that should not be the normative way of dealing with poverty.”
Gregg said more government spending on social programs doesn't necessarily represent a clear good. “I don't know how many trillions of dollars have been spent on [fighting] poverty by the United States government” since the Great Society programs of the 1960s, Gregg said. “But it hasn't made poverty go away.”
Gregg added that encouraging individual responsibility and work is a strongly biblical concept. “Christians believe that work in itself is a good thing for human beings,” he said. “Genesis is very clear about that.”
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