Paul Waldman is a senior fellow at Media Matters for America . His next book, Being Right is Not Enough: What Progressives Can Learn From Conservative Success, will be released in the spring by John Wiley & Sons.
Most progressives probably cheered when they read in today’s paper that an influential group of evangelical leaders have decided to back an initiative to combat global warming. What they should really be celebrating isn’t just the arrival of people like Rick Warren to the environmental cause, but the split this issue has revealed within the evangelical community. Today’s news comes in the wake of last week’s announcement that the National Association of Evangelicals, contrary to what some in the organization wanted, will abstain from taking a stand on global warming. This came just over a year after the Association issued an Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility , which although it did not mention global warming specifically, was a strong statement of environmentalism:
We urge Christians to shape their personal lives in creation-friendly ways: practicing effective recycling, conserving resources, and experiencing the joy of contact with nature. We urge government to encourage fuel efficiency, reduce pollution, encourage sustainable use of natural resources, and provide for the proper care of wildlife and their natural habitats.
So why should progressives be glad about the NAE’s retreat from one prominent element of what is known as “Creation Care”? Not just because it exposes a split within the organization, but because that split reveals the forces now threatening the unity of the conservative movement. Progressives should be on the lookout for divisions among religious conservative, and between religious conservatives and other conservatives, to find wedges that can be driven home to crack the conservative movement to pieces.
The NAE’s decision came after a number of prominent evangelicals wrote an open letter to the association discouraging it from taking a position on the issue, because, “Global warming is not a consensus issue, and our love for the Creator and respect for His creation does not require us to take a position.” The names on the letter are a veritable who’s who—not so much of evangelical leaders per se—but of evangelical leaders with strong ties to the Republican Party. The signers included James Dobson of Focus on the Family, Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention, former Watergate dirty-trickster Charles Colson, Lou Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition, Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association, and Charles Jarvis of USA Next—whom you might remember from their campaign of TV ads in support of President Bush’s Social Security privatization effort.
This group may not know a lot about climatology, but they sure know which side the GOP’s bread is buttered on. Yet while they’re busy kneeling before the altar of unrestrained corporate profits and every industry’s right to pollute, the people they claim to represent may start to wonder just which god is being served.
It is a common belief among progressives that while their side is a fractious, bickering band of competing interests who can’t get their act together to agree on what to order for lunch, the right wing is a monolith, a smoothly humming political machine whose lockstep unity rivals that of the North Korean army on parade day. While this picture is not without a good deal of truth, many progressives fail to realize that underneath the endlessly repeated talking points and loyalty to President George W. Bush, the right has just as many factions as the left, each of which wants its parochial interests to be paramount.
But up until now, the conservative movement’s power has been derived in no small measure from the willingness of the various factions to adopt the priorities of the other factions as their own. So neoconservatives pay lip service to the pro-life movement and business interests claim loyalty to the Second Amendment. None of the right’s factions has done so with more zeal than the religious conservatives. To take just one example, the leader of the successful opposition to Republican Gov. Bob Riley’s 2003 effort to make Alabama’s tax code less brutally regressive was none other than the Alabama Christian Coalition. Religious conservatives have embraced tax cuts for the wealthy elite, unending war, dramatic expansions of government power, and purposeful inaction on environmental degradation. Show me a compelling New Testament justification for that agenda, and I’ll eat my hat.
And what have they gotten in return? Not much. Heard anything lately from President Bush about a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage? His campaign pledge on such an amendment was a substantial motivating factor for religious conservatives to get to the polls in 2004, but he seems to have conveniently forgotten about it.
So the message progressives should send evangelicals is this: you’re being suckered. The GOP thinks you’re nothing but easy marks, people who can be easily manipulated to work for rewards they’ll never see. At the end of the day, the ones who get repaid by the Republicans will be the ones who paid the bills: the corporate interests—from oil companies to pharmaceutical manufacturers to Wall Street firms—who never doubt that they’ll get a return on their investment in the GOP.
It’s one thing for progressives to make an argument to evangelicals that a “Christian” agenda does not begin and end with abortion and gay marriage. This argument, one made often by religious progressives who cite the hundreds of times Jesus speaks about helping the poor, is an important one. But progressives can say something perhaps even more compelling to evangelicals: the Republican Party is playing you for a fool. Every campaign season they come around and tell you all the things that will happen if you only get out and work your tail off for Republican candidates, then come Wednesday morning they pretend you don’t exist. And even some who claim to be evangelical leaders are selling you down the river. Forced to choose between God and the GOP, they put down their bibles and do whatever Karl Rove tells them. You think coastal liberals look down on you? That’s nothing compared to what a bunch of rubes the Republican Party thinks you are. No wonder Jack Abramoff’s partner Michael Scanlon bragged to one of their Indian tribe clients that they could “bring out the wackos” who “get their information through the Christian right, Christian radio, mail, the internet and telephone trees” to work on behalf of one casino against another one, without the “wackos” ever knowing whose interests they were serving.
Though there are almost three years remaining in the Bush presidency, we are rapidly moving toward the post-Bush era in Republican politics. So this is the time progressives should start driving wedges through the fault lines in the conservative coalition. If nothing else, making an argument that the GOP sells out religious goals and betrays its evangelical supporters will begin to challenge the false idea that Republicans are the religious party and Democrats are the secular party (the vast majority of Democrats are religious people).
If recent history is any guide, the internecine battles on the left will be fought in full public view, while those on the right will occur mostly behind closed doors. If progressives are to take full advantage of the right’s divisions, they should shine as much light as possible on where conservatives disagree, to force the factions farther apart. That way, they’ll be able to take advantage no matter who comes out on top in the fight for conservative supremacy.
