Evangelicals have been tricked

Before any of you out there jump to your computers and start blasting me with e-mails saying that a liberal like me shouldn’t try to analyze the Moral Majority, let me tell you a little of my history.

I was raised in an evangelical household. I went to 14 years of conservative Christian pre-school, elementary and secondary school in Kentucky, one of the reddest states in the union. I was a fervent member of Southeast Christian Church, a mega-church that paid $150,000 for a statewide ad campaign supporting the constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. Almost all of my friends were self-described “Jesus Freaks.” And at SMU, I have attended both Campus Crusade for Christ and Victory Campus Ministries, two of the largest evangelical student organizations on campus, several times each.

It was after the 2002 elections, after I had campaigned for Mitch McConnell, Anne Northup and other Republican representatives from my home state, when my beliefs started to challenge my politics. President Bush was leading our country to war in a reckless manner without taking the time and the caution to determine if there was truly any reason to fight. The numbers of innocent civilians killed in Afghanistan and Iraq began to climb. His tax cuts had not helped the neediest in our economy, and he was lobbying the country for more of the same. Though some of my friends continued to fervently and blindly support Bush’s positions, many of them began to question his leadership.

Didn’t the Bible say, “It is to a man’s honor to avoid strife, but every fool is quick to quarrel” (Proverbs 20:3 NIV)? Didn’t Jesus and his disciples advocate a system of economics where, “selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need” (Acts 2:45 NIV)? It seemed like the evangelicals’ “moral values” were being ignored.

Of course, it was at this point when Karl Rove and his team of conservative strategists began to shift their focus towards creating a political debate built on issues that government should have no interest in. Thus they pushed through a partial birth abortion ban with no protection for a woman’s health, which was overturned by a U.S. District Court. And then they came up with their master plan to win the evangelical vote and thus the election: pressing Congress to create a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

For evangelicals, especially those who know at least one gay person, this issue became greatly troubling. The vast majority of conservative Christians strongly believe that marriage should be restricted to between a man and a woman, but they also value human rights and don’t think that the government should treat anyone unfairly. Many evangelicals I’ve talked to have said that they would be supportive of civil unions as a compromise to ensure fairness while respecting their beliefs. John Kerry had long been a proponent of this viewpoint, even supporting a Massachusetts state constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage while creating equal civil unions. Bush waited until the very end of his campaign to quietly announce his support for civil unions.

So even though both candidates’ positions on the issue were almost exactly the same, and even though Bush’s proposed amendment had no hope of passing, facing strong opposition even from congressional Republicans such as John McCain, the strategic move allowed the Bush campaign to be able to paint their candidate as more supportive of “the sacred institution of marriage.” And in states such as Ohio, Kentucky and Oklahoma, all of which had state versions of the amendment on their ballots, this was enough to reelect Bush to a second term and allow him to carry to victory candidates such as Jim Bunning of Kentucky and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, both of whom vilified homosexuals, comparing them to child molesters and saying they were unfit for common society. Even though many evangelicals object to this portrayal of their gay neighbors, friends and family members, they chose to vote for those candidates because they had been tricked into thinking they more closely represented their belief system.

But the Republicans who rule Congress do not reflect their belief system, and they won’t fight for the issues that matter most to evangelicals, even the issues that they campaigned on. We have had over 30 years of conservatives rallying against legalized abortion, during which we have had five Republican presidents out of seven, but the only efforts to restrict abortion were throwaway legislation that was overturned. Hollywood is still liberal, gays can still be gay, feminists still fight for equality and multiculturalists still advocate tolerance. Years of conservative governments have done nothing to change everything they’ve complained about — and rightly so; these are areas that our Constitution prohibits the government from encroaching upon. Republican politicians know that what they really care about implementing — their harsh economic principles with a return to the pre-Depression’s unregulated capitalism — won’t win them elections. That’s why they dress up their campaigns with impassioned social rhetoric and then let that rhetoric vanish during off-election years. Their façade panders to what evangelicals see as the elements of an ideal society, but it misses an important point: faith is personal, and it has no place as a government institution.

Most evangelicals recognize the value of separation of religion and the state, and they want a revival of faith through individuals and the church, not the government. They don’t want a purposeless, unwinable war, and they don’t want to help greedy corporate bigwigs at the expense of the poor. I know this because I know evangelicals — I’ve lived around them all my life — and I know what truly lies at the heart of their beliefs is compassion. No matter how much they cling to the label, the majority of the Republican Party doesn’t share in this fundamental belief. You only have to look beyond the rhetoric to see that when Republican politicians promise to support evangelicals’ morals, they are only tricking them.

Josh Skees is a sophomore cinema/television and political science double major. He may be contacted at [email protected].