By Kevin Eckstrom
Red, color experts tell us, is a serious color. It denotes passion, heat, importance, even danger. Power ties, celebrity carpets and stop signs are all red. Red says, “Stop what you're doing and pay attention.”
So it was with 2004. From the red-state heartland that re-elected President Bush to Mel Gibson's blood-splattered The Passion of the Christ, 2004 was very red indeed. The long-suffering Boston Red Sox might even say God was feeling kind of red when he intervened to break the curse and allow them a World Series championship.
Bush's win in the country's crimson center, and Gibson's unexpected success with The Passion, were both fueled by conservative and evangelical Christians, who flexed their cultural and political muscles everywhere from the ballot box to the box office in 2004.
The term “values voters” gained prominence in the American political lexicon. It was, as the San Diego Union-Tribune put it, the year of the “Passion of the Christ vote.”
“Evangelicals didn't emerge in this election, they arrived,” said Luis Lugo, executive director of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. “They were not on the outside looking in and being courted-they were on the inside in a very real sense.”
Religion played an unprecedented role in the 2004 elections as both camps vied for the hearts and minds of church-going voters. As Bush cemented support among his evangelical base, Sen. John Kerry and the Democrats stumbled to portray his campaign as Catholic faith and social justice in action.
At the same time, Kerry came under blistering criticism from a vocal minority of bishops who threatened to deny him Communion because of his support of abortion rights. Kerry, the first Catholic presidential nominee in 44 years, lost the Catholic vote to Bush, 52 percent to 47 percent.
While Democrats hoped so-called “527” political committees would help carry the race for Kerry, Lugo said ultimately it was the “316s”-evangelicals whose favorite Bible verse is John 3:16-who carried the election for Bush.
Exit polls showed that Bush increased his support among church-going Catholics, Jews, mainline Protestants and conservative blacks, and drew 78 percent of evangelicals, up from 72 percent four years ago.
“At both the grassroots level and the upper reaches of the party, I think you have the evangelical community being fully mainstreamed into American politics,” Lugo said.
What caught so many people offguard was the prominence of the so-called “values voter,” the one-in-five voters who told exit pollsters that “moral values” were their chief concern, and who went overwhelmingly for Bush. Pollsters did not, however, define what “moral values” meant.
Religious conservatives immediately promised to cash in their electoral chips in Bush's second term, pressing for anti-abortion court nominations, a continued block on embryonic stem cell research and a constitutional ban on gay marriage.
In February, those same voters also showed up in record numbers for Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, a bloody, gut-wrenching account of the trial and crucifixion of Jesus. Protests from Jewish groups that the film was anti-Semitic did not stop churches from buying out entire theaters for Gibson's self-funded runaway hit, which finished the year grossing more than $600 million in global ticket sales.
“Evangelicals have historically been suspicious both of Hollywood and Roman Catholicism,” said Randall Balmer, an expert on American evangelicals at Barnard College in New York. “It was an odd sort of cultural alliance that made it such a popular film.”
Days after Gibson's film hit theaters on Ash Wednesday, U.S. Catholic leaders released a watershed study on the clergy sex abuse crisis, finding that 10,667 minors had been abused by 4,392 clerics since 1950. The church said it had spent at least $657 million to settle abuse lawsuits.
“There is absolutely no excuse for what happened in the Catholic Church,” Bob Bennett, a Washington attorney and member of the bishops' National Review Board, said at the report's release. “This is not a media crisis or a personnel crisis. It's the age-old question of right and wrong, good and evil.”
Homosexuality issues roiled churches and society at large as Massachusetts became the first state in the country to allow gay civil marriage. Two lesbian ministers in the United Methodist Church faced trial for breaking rules that require celibacy-one, Karen Dammann, was acquitted in Washington state while the other, Beth Stroud, was defrocked in Philadelphia.
Conservatives' push for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage failed in both the House and Senate, but voters in 13 states adopted state-level amendments to prohibit gay marriage. At the same time, Canada's Supreme Court cleared the way for the government to allow nationwide gay marriage early in 2005.
At the U.S. Supreme Court, an atheist's challenge to the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance was dismissed on a technicality. The court said Michael Newdow did not have proper parental standing to mount the challenge on behalf of his schoolage daughter. Newdow has vowed to press the case.
The high court also ruled 7-2 that states may not be forced to provide scholarships to theology students, and agreed to take up in 2005 the fiery-hot question of government displays of the 10 Commandments.
On the international scene, ailing Pope John Paul II entered the 27th year of his papacy, becoming the third longest-serving pope in church history. The globe-trotting pope, slowed by the effects of Parkinson's disease, made only two short overnight trips, to France and Switzerland.
Middle East tensions spilled onto American shores in July when the Presbyterian Church (USA) angered Jewish groups by voting to explore financial divestment in companies that aid Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory. After a high-level summit with church officials in September, Jewish leaders mounted a campaign to keep the divestment issue from spreading to other churches.
And in the strife-torn Anglican Communion, a high-level report censured its U.S. branch, the Episcopal Church, for installing an openly gay bishop but stopped short of imposing any real penalties. Conservatives said the report's call for an apology from the U.S. church did not go far enough. Bishop V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, whose consecration set off the international controversy, said he remains more committed than ever to keeping his job.
Lugo said 2004 will be remembered for shaking up the American religious landscape. It was a year in which traditional labels became less useful, when new and odd bedfellows kept company, when loyalty to one's “values” trumped church, partisan and sometimes racial lines.
In other words, 2005 should be interesting.
“The major fault lines no longer run along denominational lines, they're running through denominations and across denominational lines,” Lugo said. “It's one of those defining moments that tends to define allegiances for the long term.”
Religion News Service
Kevin Eckstrom writes for RNS.