Concerned Women for America is impressive for its size. They claim as many as 500,000 members, and their media reach includes a daily radio show and a widely circulated newsletter.
Yet, for all its size, CWA has remarkably little influence. It's like one of those 7-footers who plays basketball for a Division III school. The other team is intimidated when this NBA-sized player first takes the court, but the fear goes away when they see him during lay-up drills.
The founder and "chairman" of CWA is Beverly LaHaye, who shares the extreme conservative politics of her husband, Left Behind co-author Tim LaHaye. CWA also shares his otherworldly religious views.
CWA sits at the extreme right end of the political spectrum — further to the right even than most of the religious right. This marginal ideology helps to account for its marginal influence, but not wholly. Its stances on most issues are indistinguishable from those of its smaller older sister — Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum. Yet Schlafly still has more actual clout than LaHaye's group.
CWA's political awkwardness stems from its theology. You can't be taken seriously in this world if you don't take this world seriously. CWA's apocalyptic theology is both too naive and too conspiratorial to be of use even to its natural allies in the social conservative wing of the GOP, for whom politics is still the art of the possible.
But like that Division III 7-footer, they can't be completely ignored. Sheer size still counts for something. CWA's homophobic, anti-feminist and anti-genital agenda is ultimately anti-human, and demands a vigorous response.
I took a group of seminary students to Concerned Women's Washington, D.C., headquarters Monday to meet with Dr. Jan Crouse, who directs CWA's Beverly LaHaye Institute. The institute hopes to replicate the model of the Heritage Foundation — a press-release-tank posing as a think-tank.
So far, the institute has failed to find its niche. It's emphasis on providing a "response" to feminism doesn't go beyond the efforts of groups like the Independent Women's Forum or the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, and it lacks the pseudo-intellectual sheen of those better-funded operations. (BLI's inability, thus far, to tap into the Scaife pipeline seems a matter of frustration for Crouse. The problem, apparently, is that Scaife is an oligarch, but not a theocrat.)
The BLI has also been a promoter of abstinence-only sex education. (One gets the sense that the abstinence-only curriculum is their second choice — that they would prefer an ignorance-only non-curriculum.) Crouse argues that the decline in teen pregnancies during the past decade is the result of these abstinence programs and of welfare reform. Some people, she said, will try to tell you that this decline is due in part to increased condom use. "But that just isn't so," she insisted. "It's just not." This seemed to me illustrative of the faith-based, La-la-la-I-can't-hear-you research methodology that characterizes the institute's work.
As we left CWA and walked to the Metro, the students tried to process what they had just heard.
"So they think women should stay home with their kids instead of working?"
"Right."
"But they're for welfare reform?"
"Right."
"So I guess it's different for poor women?"
Right.
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