A Voter’s Guide for Disgruntled Evangelicals

Despite the Republican Party’s best efforts to

divert our attention to same-sex unions, the real moral issues of our day are
the war in Iraq
and the Bush administration’s use of torture against those it has designated
“enemy combatants.”

Since the rise of the Religious Right in the late 1970s,
politically conservative evangelicals have emerged as the Republican Party’s
most reliable constituency, similar to the role the labor movement once played
in the Democratic Party. George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004, for instance, was
widely attributed to “values voters.” But these same voters, according to
recent polls, are beginning to sour on the Republicans, even though they remain
wary of Democratic candidates. I offer here a voters’ guide for wavering
evangelicals.

The real moral
issues. Despite the Republican Party’s best efforts to divert our attention to
same-sex unions, the real moral issues of our day are the war in Iraq and the
Bush administration’s use of torture against those it has designated “enemy
combatants.” Centuries of just-war debates in the Christian tradition have
produced various criteria by which we judge the morality of armed conflict: Is
it a defensive war, and is the use of force undertaken as a last resort? Is the
amount of force roughly proportional to the supposed provocation? Have
provisions been made, as much as possible, to protect civilians from
“collateral damage”? The war in Iraq,
which was undertaken under false pretenses and which claims more than one
hundred civilian lives a day, satisfies none of these criteria.

The recent
legislation that effectively authorizes the use of torture is a moral travesty.
So too is the persistent refusal on the part of leaders of the Religious Right
to issue unequivocal denunciations of the practice. These are people who claim
to be “pro-life,” who purport to hear a “fetal scream.” Yet they turn a deaf
ear to the very real screams of fully formed individuals who are being tortured
in our name.

What about those
poor, defenseless babies? By my calculation, the Republican-Religious Right
coalition has controlled all three branches of the federal government since the
swearing in of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court on February 1, 2006. The
president, the majority leader of the Senate and the speaker of the House of
Representatives all claim to be evangelical Christians and unalterably opposed
to abortion.

Despite clear
majorities in both houses of Congress, however, the Republicans have made no
attempt to outlaw abortion, their stated goal. Perhaps they fear a backlash
from a majority of Americans who prefer a libertarian approach to matters of
gestation. Or maybe (more cynically) they are reluctant to settle an issue that
has repeatedly mobilized the Republican Party’s base of politically
conservative evangelicals. In either case, the Republicans’ failure to deliver
on their promises to outlaw abortion belies their putative moral convictions.

The sleaze factor.
Mark Foley. Jack Abramoff. Ralph Reed. Tom DeLay. The race-baiting ads aired by
the Republican National Committee in Tennessee.
Randy “Duke” Cunningham, former member of Congress now serving an eight-year
sentence for extortion, earned a 100 percent rating from the Christian
Coalition. Enough said.

The emergence of
the Religious Right in the late 1970s mobilized millions of evangelicals, many
of whom participated in the political process for the first time. The leaders
of the Religious Right, however, have refused to honor the noble legacy of
nineteenth-century evangelical activism, which invariably took the part of
those on the margins of society. Instead, they delivered these evangelicals
captive to right-wing politics and into the maw of the Republican Party.

It’s time for
rank-and-file evangelicals to rethink that alliance.