RACE TO THE BOTTOM.

After Shelving Its Outreach Program To African-Americans, The Christian Coalition Gives Top Priority To The `God-Fearing, Caucasian Middle Class'

On the stage of the Christian Coalition's "Road to Victory" Conference Sept. 18-19, it seemed like the best of times. GOP heavyweights and a gleeful Pat Robertson won repeated ovations from the crowd of nearly 4,000 as they exulted in the presidential sex scandal and predicted Republican electoral gains.

But for the Rev. Earl Jackson, an African-American minister surveying the nearly all-white activist ranks and relegated to a near-footnote on the program, it may have seemed like the worst of times.

"I'm a preacher," said Jackson in an interview with Church & State, putting a happy face on his brief Sunday morning sermon after most attendees had left the annual, two-day conference at the Washington Hilton.

"For many of us, Sunday morning is the highlight of the week," the Baptist minister observed. "I was not slighted."

Yet in a marked shift away from appeals to diversity at previous Coalition events, Jackson was one of just four black speakers on the conference docket, which also featured startling appeals to white racial resentment and condemnations of affirmative action.

Jackson, president of the Samaritan Project, a minority-focused ministry based in Chesapeake, Va., once represented the main truss of what former Christian Coalition head Ralph Reed hoped would be a bridge between the mostly white religious conservative group and the black community.

In December 1997, however, Jackson lost his outreach job as budget shortfalls forced a new set of Coalition leaders to pare down staff and programs. The group cut loose the Samaritan Project to sink or swim on its own. Never was the impact of the departure of Jackson and Reed, his political godfather, more apparent than at the Coalition's national gathering.

The most strident rhetoric on race came from Saturday's dinner speaker, former big-screen star and now president of the National Rifle Association (NRA) Charlton Heston. "Heaven help the God-fearing, law-abiding Caucasian middle class," Heston said at one point in his remarks, in which he used martial imagery to urge a political mobilization of conservatives.

"Sabers are rattling in America's mild-mannered living rooms. Americans are ready to fight for the true booty of cultural war--their values. They want them back. They want the America they built," Heston said to rousing applause.

He later invoked the occupants of those living rooms, again pressing racial buttons. "They want an America," Heston said, "where you can ... be white without feeling guilty, own a gun without stigma ... and prosper without being blamed."

Heston was not the only Coalition conference speaker to touch on racial themes. Introduced by a staffer of militia ally Rep. Helen Chenoweth of Idaho, Linda Chavez urged conference-goers to consider the work of the civil rights movement finished and to overturn affirmative action. (Chavez is president of a Washington-based anti-affirmative action group, the Center for Equal Opportunity.)

Alluding to the Declaration of Independence and its ideal of equality, she said, "It took us nearly 200 years to make that principle a reality through our statues." But as a result of legal changes in the "fifties and sixties," Chavez continued, "every single person in this country was going to be treated by government as an individual with certain rights and certain protections."

Her assurance that the work of securing equality before the law is done appears to lead Chavez to wince at clear assessments of racism's persistence, such as the September 1998 report of President Clinton's panel on race relations.

"How can it be ... that we can have an official commission appointed by our chief executive to talk about this important issue of race in America ... and we can fill it with ugly words like white privilege and racial domination," she asked.

Chavez instead lauded conservatives in California, where voters in 1996 "passed a prohibition" of affirmative action by a statewide initiative, Prop. 209.

A former Reagan administration official, Chavez pointedly criticized the Republican-controlled Congress that "failed to take the initiative to once and for all ban not just racial discrimination but racial preference under the law."

In doing so, she flouted the admonitions of fellow "Road to Victory" speaker Rep. J.C. Watts (R-Okla.), the lone African-American Republican in Congress. Watts' demanding schedule on Capitol Hill forced him to switch places in this year's speaker lineup with failed Senate candidate and Iran-Contra figure Oliver North.

Since his election to Congress in 1995, Watts has urged GOP leaders to cease their legislative assault on affirmative action and to avoid further alienating people of color. (He didn't mention that stance, however, in his remarks to the Coalition.)

Joining Jackson, Chavez, and Watts on the conference program was Kay Coles James, a professor at Robertson's Regent University and participant in a July segment of the president's initiative on race. In that appearance, James seemed to contradict herself on the issue of racial discrimination.

She said she "run[s] across so many middle class African-American students" who "have had every opportunity," but later lamented that "no matter how middle class you become, if you're still black, you're still discriminated against in many areas."

The paucity of people of color on the Christian Coalition conference program signified a shift from the 1996 and 1997 events. Listings for those years, with Reed steering the message and Jackson on staff, show at least ten African-American and Latino speakers.

Still, Jackson, who says his group is now "independent" and in the midst of "staffing up," was making the best of his new status. "I have many, many friends at the Christian Coalition," he said. Asked whether that cooperation carries over to circulating the Coalition's voter guides in black churches in upcoming elections, he said "We [Samaritan Project] are a 501(c)(3) organization. We can't get into that."

The Coalition's voter guides have sometimes proved a racial flashpoint. In October 1996, the Christian Coalition faced allegations of race-baiting after a voter's guide circulated by its Texas affiliate placed the likeness of a black candidate above positions opposed by the organization and represented stances favored by the group with a white candidate's image. State and national civil rights leaders denounced the depictions.

Reed, then the organization's executive director, told The New York Times the incident was "a mistake made by an outside vendor and not by any member of the Christian Coalition staff. It was wrong. It should not have happened. I was personally offended."

But a cover letter distributed with the guides saying they had been closely reviewed for accuracy by attorneys left a residue of skepticism among many Coalition observers.

Jackson, who recently added the title "bishop" to his name during a June "consecration" service in Boston, insisted he was not snubbed at the September conference.

"I was not relegated in any way," he said. "The implication is that I'm somehow dependent on them [Christian Coalition]. I'm not."

Given the lower priority it is placing on outreach to racial minorities, the Christian Coalition is offering Jackson every opportunity to prove it.

Hans Johnson, a Washington writer and columnist, is co-author of the New Members of Congress Almanac (1997-99).