FOCUS

By Edd Doerr

TELEVANGELIST Pat Robertson's failure to come even close to winning the Republican Party's presidential nomination in 1988 taught him an important lesson: If you can't start at the top, as Gen. Dwight Eisenhower did in 1952, then start at the bottom and work your way up.

In 1989, then, building on his already impressive broadcasting and university empire, Robertson created his Christian Coalition. By mid-1995, the organization boasted a nationwide membership of 1,700,000 and 1700 local chapters. The Coalition describes itself as "a non-profit citizen action organization under IRS code 501 (c)(4)" and solicits "corporate business contributions."

"The Christian Coalition is clearly functioning as if it were a political party," notes John M. Swomley, professor emeritus of Christian ethics, St. Paul School of Theology, and chairman of the American Civil Liberty Union's Church-State Committee. "It not only supports and aids candidates, but its goal is to take control of the Republican Party." The Coalition pioneered "stealth" campaigns in primaries and elections beginning in 1990, influenced a great many local elections, and claimed credit for helping reelect Senators Alphonse D'Amato (R.-NY) end Jesse Helms (R.-NC).

The Christian Coalition's showpiece is its "Contract With the American Family: A Bold Plan to Strengthen the Family and Restore Common-Sense Values," released with much fanfare in May 1995. Borrowing its name from Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich's Contract With America, it contains the following 10 goals, about which Robertson's organization claims, "Each item in the Contract enjoys support from between 60 and 90 percent of the American people":

The Contract's Goals
1. Restoring Religious Equality. This item, supposedly in reaction to alleged "hostility toward religious values" and "anti-religious bigotry," features a proposed amendment to the Constitution to authorize so-called "student and citizen initiated" religious exercises in public schools and elsewhere.
2. Returning Education Control to the Local Level. This vague proposal ignores the fact that public education always has been primarily a state and local function.
3. Promoting School Choice calls on Congress to fund nonpublic, mostly sectarian schools under a voucher plan.
4. Protecting Parental/ Rights is aimed at blocking the U.S. from ratifying the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.
5. Family-Friendly Tax Relief proposes a $500 tax credit for children, a flat or flattened income tax, elimination of the "marriage penalty" from the Federal tax code, and allowing single-income couples the same individual retirement account privileges as two-income couples.
6. Restoring Respect for Human Life. This item calls for restrictions on late-term abortions, for ending the federal requirement that state Medicaid plans cover abortions for poor rape and incest victims, and for ending Federal funding for most family planning organizations and services.
7. Encouraging Support of Private Charities. This innocent-sounding item proposes legislation to allow individuals to "designate on their income tax returns a portion of their taxes to private charities and religious organizations. For every dollar the taxpayer designates toward a private charity, the Federal welfare funding to that taxpayer's state would be equally reduced." This proposal would shift public funds from programs under public control to institutions not under public control.
8. Restricting Pornography proposes legislation to censor sexually explicit material from the Internet, require cable companies to block access to "offensive" video and audio material to "non-subscribers," and make possession of child pornography a federal offense.
9. Privatizing the Arts proposes ending federal aid to the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and Legal Services Corporation.
10. Crime Victim Restitution proposes work and study programs for prisoners, though it does not suggest how they will be funded, and a requirement that convicted felons provide restitution to their victims after release from prison.

Popular Support?
The Contract's claim to majority support is dubious at best. How Robertson's organization handles the school prayer issue is typical. Yes, most Americans will say they favor "voluntary prayer" in public schools, but students never have lost the right to engage in individual voluntary prayer. Concerning popular support for a school prayer amendment to the Constitution, in 1995, the Gallup/Phi Delta Kappa poll found that, while respondents favored "vocal prayer" in public schools, 70 percent "yes" to 28 percent "no," the same respondents indicated by 70-to-24 percent margin that they would prefer "a moment of silence for contemplation or silent prayer" over "spoken prayer."

As for school choice and voucher plans, public opinion does not agree with Pat Robertson's position. While polls show roughly two-to-one support for some sort of choice among public schools, vouchers fall far short of approval. The cumulative votes in school voucher referendums showed opposition to vouchers and similar plans running 67 percent "yes" to 33 percent "no."

On the question of abortion rights, opinion varies widely. Public opinion supports the rights of conscience of the woman.

Bad Effects of Contract
Robertson's Contract must be seen in context, as part of the tactical and strategic package of a man with an ambitious agenda. The Contract must be seen as a propaganda document that hides more than it reveals, manipulates emotions, and distorts facts. It must be seen as the tip of a very dangerous iceberg.

The America that Robertson and Ralph Reed, the Coalition's executive director, envision would be a far different country from the one we enjoy now. In their America, public schools would be the underfunded last refuge of the poor, handicapped, slow learners, and others not accepted by voucher- funded schools. They would also be rent by conflicts over religion as local majorities or pluralities would decide the "voluntary" devotional activities to be conducted in school. Robertson's America could be balkanized along religious and other lines.

Women, particularly the poor, in Robertson's America would have their reproductive lives controlled and regulated by predominantly male legislative bodies.

Pat Robertson
As the Christian Coalition is the extended shadow of one man, Pat Robertson, it is instructive to observe what this college chancellor (Regent University), author, and religious broadcaster says when he rolls up his sleeves and goes to work. In an article on "Religion in the Classroom" in the Winter 1995 issue of the William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal, a scholarly and respected law review. Robertson writes of "a 40-year assault on religious faith" by "liberal predators" and discusses "social and moral collapse" without mentioning the fact that there is no demonstrated correlation between the presence of school prayer and indices of crime or delinquency. He also dismisses Thomas Jefferson's 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists (". . . I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise "hereof,' thus building a wall of separation between church and state . . ") as a mere "offhand remark."

In the Summer 1995 issue of the same law review, Robertson insists that "a proper understanding" of church-state separation would not bar government from "endorsing, promoting or encouraging religious belief and practice . . . or even from giving certain forms of aid (including financial) that advance the cause of religion."

Not content with just promulgating his program and distorting history and facts to lend it support, Robertson demonizes and scapegoats those who do not join his parade. In his 1993 book, The Turning Tide: The Fall of Liberalism and the Rise of Common Sense he refers to "secular humanists . . . with a well-defined and dangerous agenda"; "the liberal educational bureaucracy and its socialist friends and supporters"; and "radical feminists, homosexuals, Planned Parenthood, the [American Civil Liberties Union], People for the American Way, and their radical allies."

The Turning Tide is replete with scare-mongering assertions like the following: "For more than 30 years, liberals have forbidden little children to pray in schools"; "public education in America...was seized early in the nineteenth century as a vehicle for socialism and anti-religious cleansing"; "throughout history, the liberals have tried to reduce humanity to its lowest form and to identify humanity with the slime and the ooze of the earth"; and "institutionalized day care . . . is turning millions of children into a generation of zombies."

Religion's Victimhoods = Robertson's Lie
The rhetoric of the Religious Right seeks to paint a picture of American Christians as a beleaguered, put-upon minority. The facts belie this impression. More than 85 percent of Americans identify themselves as Christian, as do 93 percent of members of Congress. In the U.S. today, there are about 358,000 churches or places of worship and 215 theological schools with more than 58,000 seminarians. There are over 500 major religious periodicals published in the U.S. and more than 1,840 full-time Christian radio and television stations that broadcast only conservative Protestant viewpoints. More than 3,400 bookstores are members of the Christian Booksellers Association, and a number of supermarkets carry a rack of conservative Christian books. Moreover, there are 120 religion based lobbies in the nation's capital.

Nor are American churches poor. Among 44 large U.S. Protestant denominations, total contributions in 1992 alone reached more than $16 billion, a figure that does not include donations to Catholic, Episcopal, or Eastern Orthodox communities. The extent of church-owned tax-exempt property, stocks and bonds, and businesses is not easily measured, though a study published 20 years ago concluded that church assets at that time totaled over $150 billion. Church-run elementary and secondary schools receive at least $1,5 billion annually in tax aid. Catholic hospitals account for 16 percent of hospital admissions, while all church-related hospitals receive about half their budgets from public funds.

A Contract to Unite Church and State
Looking at the big picture, then, Robertson's Contract With the American Family clearly can be seen as part of a strategy to impose upon this country a truly radical agenda that would undermine the constitutional church-state separation arrangement that is the indispensable guarantor of religious liberty, has allowed religion to flourish freely here to a degree unknown elsewhere, and has enabled an extraordinarily pluralistic population to live in reasonable harmony.

Pat Robertson, his Christian Coalition, and his subsidiaries and numerous allies represent a clear and present danger to religious liberty, democratic public schools, women's rights, and the healthy pluralism that has helped make this country great.

Edd Doerr, Religion Editor of USA Today, is the executive director of Americans for Religious Liberty, Silver Springs, Maryland and president of the American Humanist Association.