Catholics and the 'religious right': we are being wooed.

Last September, weeks before the 1994 congressional elections, Christian Coalition President Pat Robertson addressed 3,000 cheering followers in Washington, D.C.: "We're seeing the Christian Coalition rise to where God intends it to be in this nation as one of the most powerful political forces....in the history of America." The coalition, Robertson asserted, reflects the moral values of "a mighty army" not only of 40 or 50 million evangelical Protestants, but of "30 to 40 million profamily Roman Catholics" as well.

This claim of moral alliance with what approximates the nation's total adult Roman Catholic population will strike many Catholics as inflated and highly improbable. After all, doesn't the "religious right" consist primarily of Protestant evangelicals, most of them Southern and rural, with a long history of virulent anti-Catholicism? Though Robertson's numbers are almost certainly inflated, a convergence of social interests across denominational lines is not as unlikely, on some issues, as theological differences might suggest.

Christian conservatism is an amalgam of the diverse. In a July 1994 New York Times/CBS national poll of 1,339 adults, 9 percent of the respondents identified themselves as members of the "religious right." Their profile contrasts sharply with the stereotype captured in the Washington Post's 1993 characterization of politically conservative Christians as "poor, uneducated, and easy to command." The Times/CBS poll shows educational levels approximating the national average. Respondents were as likely to consider themselves Democrats as Republicans. Their positions on trip-wire issues, such as homosexuality and a school prayer amendment, were more conservative than those of the general population by about 20 percent. Although these 9 percent were overwhelmingly Protestant, only half considered themselves to be "evangelical, fundamentalist, or charismatic Christians," labels which many find pejorative. Many Catholics who share the "religious right's" political or moral convictions are likely to reject that label because of the stereotypes to which it is attached.

A 1994 Akron University Bliss Institute for Applied Politics survey found that 27 percent of the U.S. electorate sees itself "close" or "very close" to the religious right on particular issues. "Morally conservative" evangelicals, mainline Protestants, and Catholics account for half of the U.S. population. Whatever distinctions might be made about who is on the religious right, the survey data suggest that the reality of religious conservatism is larger and more varied than the label.

A 1994 Newsweek poll found that "the fraying of America's social fabric--once considered the crotchety preoccuptation of the cultural right--has become a national (even a liberal) obsession" (Newsweek, June 13, 1994). Three of every four adults surveyed believe that the nation is in a moral and spiritual decline. Crime and drug abuse are of far greater concern to Americans than employment or health care. Newsweek proclaims a "craving for virtue" that transcends denominational lines. The religious right has provided one of the more coherent responses to this craving, especially among the 64 percent of American voters who say that religious values are "very important" in their lives (Gallup, 1992).

Catholics are among those to whom that message can and does appeal. On specific issues, such as education (tuition vouchers, sex education, condom distribution, school prayer), homosexuality, euthanasia, and abortion, the shared values of Catholics and politically conservative Christians seem clear. Professor William Dinges of The Catholic University of America, who has studied conservative Catholics, sees abortion as "the catalyst which has galvanized the trans-denominational right." The institutional right, in turn, sees the Catholic vote as a natural, if unfamiliar, potential ally, a massive prize worthy of its wooing.

No other organization on the religious right approaches the Christian Coalition in membership, media capability, political professionalism--or desire to reach the Catholic voter. Pat Robertson established the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) thirty-four years ago. It was the first TV network to devote more than half of its broadcast schedule to religious programming. The Family Channel, a 1972 CBN spinoff, is now the nation's tenth largest cable network and reaches 58 million American homes. Robertson's tabloid newspaper, Christian American, has a circulation of 270,000. By 1993, CBN annual revenues totaled $140 million, over half of which came from average daily contributions of $240,000. Robertson's International Family Entertainment holding company (in which he owns shares worth $50 million) earned 1993 revenues of $208 million and paid him a salary of $435,000.

Robertson founded the Christian Coalition in 1989, shortly after his costly ($22 million) but unsuccessful bid to win the 1988 Republican presidential nomination. He defeated George Bush in the Iowa caucus but placed a poor fourth on Super Tuesday. To himself and to others, however, he had clearly demonstrated the potency of the religious right and of his personal power over it. Coalition membership grew rapidly--57,000 in 1991 became 250,000 the following year, and 450,000 by 1993. Membership increased rapidly following Bill Clinton's election, and, by September 1994's Washington "Road to Victory" conference, Robertson claimed nearly 1.5 million contributing coalition members in some 900 chapters throughout the fifty states.

The Christian Coalition has become the dominant influence in more than a dozen state GOP organizations, largely in the South and the Midwest. Realizing that most national elections can be decided by 15 percent of potential voters who actually register for a given election (only 6 to 7 percent in local and state elections), the coalition has worked effectively to see that those who show up at the polls include a plurality of conservatives. Simply put, they are getting out the vote--selectively.

According to Akron University's Bliss Institute, an unprecedented 33 percent of voters in the November 1994 elections were white evangelical Christians, up from 18 percent two years earlier. More than two-thirds of these voted Republican. That increase was due in no small part of efforts by the Christian Coalition to register their constituency and get them out to vote. Among the results: twenty-five House races that would otherwise have seated Democrats were won by Republicans.

In the process of its steady advance, the coalition has put out the welcome mat to Catholics, and the threshold is being crossed. A Catholic approaching the Christian Coalition very quickly discovers that other Catholics have preceded him. A call to its Washington office is answered by secretary Connie Cavanaugh, cheerily efficient and Catholic. Referred to the officer in charge of Catholic Outreach, one is greeted by the unmistakably Boston accents of Gerry Giblin, Irish Catholic and 19955 graduate of Holy Cross College. Giblin, who retired from IBM after "thirty-plus" years and regularly attends a local Tridentine Mass, encountered the Christian Coalition two years ago at its national convention. Having concluded that "these people share my concerns," Giblin is now a four-day-per-week unpaid volunteer. His Washington predecessor, Marlene Elwell, also an active Catholic, is now the Coalition's executive director in Michigan.

Giblin speaks with satisfaction of "the success we had in the November 1994 elections." The Republican winners included at least forty-four anti-abortion congressional candidates in an election where only 18 percent of the voters said that they voted prolife. As for Catholic participation in the coalition, Giblin notes that 120 Catholic conferees attended Mass at the September "road to victory" conference, points to the active participation of the Legionaries of Christ, a religious order, and remarks that a Catholic priest offered the invocation at the conference's banquet. Major conference speakers included Michael Novak, the Reverend Richard Neuhaus, then-Pennsylvania Governor Robert Casey, and Paul Weyrich (who invented the term "Moral Majority," and designed for the Reverend Jerry Falwell the organization which bore that name). Panel participants included the Reverend Michael Scanlon, president of the Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio. Enthusiastic applause greeted coalition executive director Ralph Reed's statement, "I am proud to call myself an ally of Pope John Paul." Reed is a former political organizer for Jesse Helms.

The most detailed and theologically sophisticated statement of a Catholic-Evangelical alliance is "Evangelicals and Catholics Together--The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium." Signed on March 29, 1994, the declaration was the product of eighteen months' consultation between Catholics and evangelical Protestants initiated by the Reverend Richard Neuhaus (a recent convert to the Catholic church who edits First Things and heads the Institute on Religion and Public Life) and former White House aide Charles Colson (Prison Fellowship).

Neuhaus says that Vatican officials concurred in the project. Among Catholic formulators and endorsers are Cardinal John O'Connor (New York), Bishop Francis George (Yakima), Monsignor William Murphy (chancellor, Boston), Archbishop Francis Stafford (Denver), Bishop Carlos Sevilla (San Francisco), and Avery Dulles, S.J. Also endorsing the declarations were senior faculty members of The Catholic University of America, Boston College, Fordham, Notre Dame, and Saint Louis Universities, plus well-known neoconservatives George Weigel (Ethics and Public Policy Center) and Michael Novak (American Enterprise Institute). Giblin refers to the declaration as a "document of understanding" between Pat Robertson and Cardinal John O'Connor.

Among other issues, the declaration resolves "to enact the most protective laws and public policies that are politically possible...to reduce dramatically the incidence of abortion"; to oppose euthanasia; to seek transmission in public education of "our cultural heritage, which is inseparable from the influence of religion"; to work for "parental choice" in publicly-supported education; and to oppose pornography. The declaration calls for "renewed appreciation of Western culture," noting that "commonly, today, multiculturalism means all cultures but our own."

The declaration shows the convergence of Catholics and Evangelicals on certain moral and social issues. But, according to Michael Russell at the Chri8stian Coalition's Virginia Beach headquarters, the major vehicle for joint action with Roman Catholics at the institutional level has been the Coalition's voter guides. The coalition spent $2 million distributing 33 million such guides via 60,000 churches of many denominations around the country for the November 1994 elections. As "educational" guides, this $2 million expenditure did not require reporting to the Federal Elections Commission.

The voter guides present single-phrase statements of complex problems with one-word ("supports/opposes") comparisons of candidate positions on issues of concern to the Coalition. Although explicitly denying endorsement of any candidate, the guides make choices simple and obvious. The liberal People for the American Way sees them as devastatingly effective: 60 percent of all candidates strongly supported by the religious right in November 1994 won their races. (Not all candidates endorsed by the Christian Coalition sought its endorsement.)

Faced by what they see as compelling moral issues in political campaigns, some Catholic bishops or their chancery staffs have found the Christian Coalition's ready-made guides an efficient distribution system for marshaling the Catholic vote.

The New York City School Board elections of May 4, 1993, was such an occasion. At stake were 288 unpaid community school board seats. Key issues in the election included school-based condom distribution without parental consent and, in the primary schools, the Rainbow Curriculum's sympathetic treatment of homosexuals. In what the New York Times labeled "a tactical alliance" between the Christian Coalition and the Archdiocese of New York, the Family Life Office of the archdiocese announced in April that it would allow distribution of 100,000 Christian Coalition-prepared voter guides through its 213 parishes in Manhattan, Staten Island, and the Bronx. (Across the East River, the Brooklyn diocese refused a similar arrangement.) More than half a million voter guides were distributed to over 2,000 New York City churches and synagogues. Fifty-one percent of the coalition-backed candidates were elected.

Even among those Catholics who would not question the appropriateness of diocesan guidance on election issues, there is concern about the ethical character of such actions. Perhaps the most dramatic example of the emerging alliance occurred across the Potomac from the Christian Coalition's Capitol Hill office. The Diocese of Arlington, Virginia, is among the nation's most conservative. As the November 1994 elections approached, the diocese's 270,000 Catholics (13 percent of the population) became a potentially significant factor in one of the most highly contested and nationally significant senatorial races: Republican Oliver North against incumbent Democrat Senator Charles Robb. North, a charismatic Episcopalian, made his religious beliefs a central feature of his campaign. Having supplied North with indispensable help in winning the GOP nomination, the Christian Coalition actively backed him in his $16.8 million campaign, the second most heavily funded in the nation.

Enter Gerry Giblin's Christian Coalition "Catholic Outreach." In June, four months before the elections, Giblin held a luncheon at which some eight Arlington diocese priests, including the diocese's former vicar general, Monsignor Richard Burke, met with Ralph Reed. Shortly before, Catholic layman Frank Nassetta (a quietly effective federal retiree and father of an Arlington priest) had joined the Christian Coalition. When Nassetta sought diocesan approval for parish distribution of the Coalition's voter guide, Chancellor Robert Rippy anticipated resistance if the guides were presented solely as a Pat Robertson product. Within weeks and with the "blessing of the diocese" was born the League of Catholic Voters, which met for the first time in August 1994--just two months before the elections.

With the prospect of a jointly sponsored voter guide, Nassetta says, the Arlington chancery concurred in its distribution, subject to approval by parish pastors. On November 3, the 47,000-circulation diocesan newspaper, the Arlington Catholic Herald, published a full-page "voter guide" attributed jointly to the "League of Catholic Voters and the Christian Coalition." Although the fine print says that the guide's publication was "paid for and authorized by the Christian Coalition," the coalition's Washington office says and the Herald's editor confirms that no payment was made.

The Herald's publication of the voter guide "opened doors," according to Nassetta. Pastors who had previously refused distribution of the guides now agreed. On Sunday, November 6, 30,000 voter guides were distributed at some twenty of sixty Arlington parishes, mostly in the Northern Virginia metropolitan area where support for North was weakest. Lacking pastors' permission elsewhere, Christian Coalition volunteers distributed the guide anyway outside Masses on Sunday.

Several ethical questions arise from these actions:

* Although their stated purpose is "educational," the voter guide's selection of issues and the minimal descriptions of the candidates' positions are skillfully designed to lead to a specific partisan choice. Does this constitute "education" or endorsement? If the latter, it could threaten diocesan and parish tax-exempt status. According to Deacon Chris Baumann of the NCCB, diocesses and parishes engaging in such activity "could be on thin ground."

* Characterizations of Senator Robb's positions were inaccurate and misleading. In response to my query, Ms. Peggy Willhide, Robb's press secretary, documented numerous examples, ranging from misleadingly incomplete to false. (For example, contrary to the guide's claim, Robb favors voluntary school prayer.) Do diocesan officials not have an obligation to ensure the accuracy of factual assertions in the guidelines when published in the diocesan newspaper?

* Distribution of the voter guides only days before the election made any response by misrepresented candidates nearly impossible. Such timing reportedly accords with Christian Coalition guidance. Doesn't this belie the educational, nonpartisan purpose of voter guides?

* Publication of voter guides like those of the Christian Coalition by diocesan newspapers and their distribution through parishes and/or by groups bearing a diocesan "blessing" seem to imply their endorsement by the local church. Does this accord with accepted church practice?

Professor Daniel Cowdin, who teaches social ethics at The Catholic University, says that it does not: "Simplistic caricaturing by the Christian right is fundamentally at odds with the methods of Catholic social teaching. It is disrespectful of the autonomy of its audience. At its best, the Catholic social tradition has been much more sophisticated than that. It preaches issues of doctrine but leaves applications to the practical judgment of the laity--it does not load the dice."

Oliver North narrowly lost to Senator Robb in November (43 percent to 46 percent). However, in spite of one of the largest turnouts in the nation, one-quarter of Virgina voters identified themselves in exit polls as "religiously active, born-again Christians." They voted 57 percent for North and only 37 percent for Robb. As Ralph Reed concluded, "We turned out our vote, and it was overwhelmingly for North." Black voters overwhelmingly favored Robb. Among white voters in an exit poll for news organizations by Mitofsky International the following breakdown was reported:

              Robb   North    Coleman
Protestants    37     49         14
Catholics      42     47         11
Jews           75     21          4

For most of this century, American Catholics have been consistently more politically liberal than Protestants. However, a gradual conservative trend is discernible in the politics of U.S. Catholics. For Professor Dinges of The Catholic University, this is a by-product of Catholic upward mobility. Larger numbers of educated and affluent Catholics have "produced a class transformation that leads inevitably to more of them voting Republican," he argues.

Within the Catholic hierarchy, the trend toward political as well as theological conservatism is even clearer than among the laity. Professor Cowdin observes, "Catholic social thought from World War II through the pontificate of Paul VI was on a trajectory somewhat left of center." This changed with John Paul II, whose encyclical, Centesimus annus, served as a rallying point for Catholic conservatives in the same way that John XXIII's Mater et magistra did for Catholic liberals thirty years earlier. Centesimus annus, in Cowdin's view, "led to an easier merging of Catholic attitudes with those of the religious right."

Constituting nearly one-third of the national electorate, American Catholics were part of the strong swing to the right in the November 1994 congressional elections [see, Commonweal, January 13, 1995]. For the first time in recent history, more Catholics voted Republican than Democrat in an off-year election. There are now nearly as many Republican Catholics in the House of Representatives as Democratic Catholics. University of Notre Dame political scientist David Legee sees this as a phenomenon unique to this election and not a permanent change in Catholic voting patterns. Representative Peter T. King, prolife New York Republican, attributed last November's Catholic conservative swing to "the cultural gap between Bill Clinton and the traditional Irish and Italian Catholics."

As dramatic as the national swing to the right was in November 1994, Catholic laity are still not as conservative as other American Christians. Exit polls by Voter News and Surveys show that 55 percent of Catholics voted Republican compared to 66 percent of other American Christians. The Catholic contrast is even greater with the 5 percent of total voters who identified themselves as members of the "religious right," 90 percent of whom voted Republican in November.

With the exception of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops/US Catholic Conference (NCCB/USCC), no Catholic organization approaches the size, sophistication, or political effectiveness of the Christian Coalition or Dr. James Dobson's Colorado-head-quartered Focus on the Family. "The Religious Right," a study published in 1994 by the Anti-Defamation League, listed no Catholic organizations and found "as-yet limited public interaction between Catholic and evangelical organizations and differences in strategy, rhetoric, and impact." USCC's Media Relations officer, Bill Ryan, says that the USCC has "very little" contact with the Christian Coalition.

Although a few conservative Catholic groups have achieved some impact upon specific issues, such as "right to life," most are of nominal consequence in national politics. Professor Cowdin sees that as consistent with Catholic social practice. "The Catholic social encyclical tradition has no constituency. It is not a living tradition in terms of grassroots organizations. Unlike the Christian Coalition, it has not focused on the nuts and bolts of social effectiveness. There's a vacuum there, and that's part of the reason why some Catholics have been flowing into the religious right. The church has not offered them something at a parallel level."

That is what brought Gerry Giblin to the Christian Coalition. "It's a grassroots thing. People like myself and other Catholics, we're disappointed with the bishops. They verbalize, but they don't do much to get the vote out. The K. of C., Knights of Malta, Holy Name Society--they're not doing it either." Giblin seeks new channels to cooperation with conservative Catholics who, like himself, wish to "make a difference."

Clearly, the Christian Coalition is building these channels. Despite important theological and historical differences between Catholics and Evangelicals, the Coalition shares some common ground with the social and moral teachings of the Catholic church. In the current political environment, its efforts to enlist Catholics will probably meet with a degree of success.

Such inroads, however, are likely to be greater in some diocesan chancery offices than among the mass of U.S. Catholics. The laity's persisting liberalism and the widening divergence of their experience from a theologically and politically more conservative hierarchy are certainly among the factors. Any continuing Catholic evolution toward the political right will more likely come "from above" than "from below." It will probably be of limited degree and gradual pace, reflecting the continuing upward mobility of Catholics. As the new conservative ascendancy in Washington moderates its stand on abortion and cuts budgets for a variety of social programs, historical fissures between political conservatism and traditional Catholic liberalism are likely to reemerge. Witness Speaker Newt Gingrich's March 14 removal of an anti-abortion amendment from the budget reduction bill and the severe USCC criticism of the Republican welfare reform plan four days later.

Catholic impact upon the religious right will probably continue to come from active volunteers like Giblin as well as scholars and intellectuals. Catholics tend to be (or at least think they are) more cerebral than Evangelicals in their social theology. Few are likely to confuse Pat Robertson with Karl Rahner. Catholics such as Patrick Buchanan, William Bennett, Richard Neuhaus, Michael Novak, and George Weigel will continue to be ready donors of intellectual substance to the needy religious right. But the religious right's wooing of the Catholic electorate is likely to remain a rather one-sided courtship.