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Sound off, moderate Christians

By ROBYN E. BLUMNER
Published February 5, 2006

With Samuel Alito on the Supreme Court, it is not just abortion rights that are endangered. Sandra Day O'Connor often joined the liberal wing of the court in keeping church and state separate. Alito won't.

For the last 40 years, the Supreme Court has been the one government institution that could be counted on to run interference when the elected branches tried to substitute the Bible for the Constitution. Under the unified front of Alito, Roberts, Scalia and Thomas, that backstop will wither. Expect the high court to demur more and more when politicians try to insinuate religion into the classroom and the law.

That means that another approach to protecting religious pluralism, the rights of nonbelievers and even science is needed, and it has to come from moderate Christians themselves - those who understand the danger of transforming our land of the free into the land of the Darwin-free.

And those voices need to be raised soon, because the threat of fundamentalism directing government is growing, even as the bulwarks against it are weakening.

If you want to see the culmination of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson's dream - the church as party headquarters - go to Ohio. There, two preachers, the Rev. Russell Johnson of Fairfield Christian Church and the Rev. Rod Parsley of World Harvest Church, are diligently working to build an army of conservative Christian voters who will dominate the Republican Party, then Ohio government, then Washington.

Johnson, who calls those to his left "secular jihadists" and condemns public schools for not teaching that Hitler was "an avid evolutionist," has founded the Ohio Restoration Project. Its mission is to enlist 2,000 religious leaders as "Patriot Pastors" who will sign up hundreds of thousands of new voters and mobilize an activist corps within their flocks.

The goal is to capitalize on the 2004 election success that had regular churchgoers in Ohio who identified themselves as white evangelical or born-again voting for George W. Bush over John Kerry by an astounding 97 percent to 3 percent ratio.

Parsley, an Ohio televangelist with a megachurch of 10,000 weekly worshipers, has launched Reformation Ohio, an organization with similar goals.

While they expect their efforts to pay off with multiple election victories, in the short term Johnson and Parsley want to elect Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell governor in November. Blackwell is an African-American Christian conservative who led a successful ballot initiative in 2004 to ban same-sex marriage.

Johnson and Parsley say their institutions do not endorse candidates. But they have engaged in transparent electioneering on behalf of Blackwell - exclusively featuring him at events and in educational materials.

The details of Johnson's and Parsley's political activities are exhaustively laid out in a complaint filed with the IRS and signed, not by the ACLU or People for the American Way, but by dozens of religious leaders. Initially, 31 pastors of Methodist, Baptist, Lutheran and other, mainly Protestant, denominations signed the letter that says the tax-exempt status of Johnson's and Parsley's churches and affiliated organizations should be revoked. Since then, at least two dozen more have asked to be included.

The pastors say when they told their congregations about joining the complaint, the response was overwhelmingly positive.

Here is the countervailing force. If the Christian Right is going to turn its followers into Republican Party operatives and its churches into political war rooms, then the moderate Christian community has to push back.

Slowly, it's starting to happen.

John Danforth, an Episcopal priest, retired U.S. senator from Missouri and lifelong Republican, has been speaking out. He says the embrace of the Christian Right agenda by Republicans has made the nation meaner and has stymied action on vital national issues such as Social Security and health care.

"As a senator, I worried every day about the size of the federal deficit," Danforth wrote last year in the New York Times. "I did not spend a single minute worrying about the effect of gays on the institution of marriage." He's writing a book to call moderates to arms.

Former President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat and Baptist Sunday school teacher, has written a bestselling book on how his Christian faith teaches lessons of tolerance, peace and humility that are antithetical to the supremacy, absolutism and sanctimony of the Christian Right. In Our Endangered Values, Carter openly frets about our nation's future under the sway of saber-rattling hatemongers in Christian robes.

Joan Brown Campbell, a founding member of the Interfaith Alliance and a former general secretary of the National Council of Churches, says, "We need to, as moderate Christians . . . be very clear that Christian control of government would be unacceptable and dangerous to our freedom."

Louder please. Much, much louder.

[Last modified February 3, 2006, 17:25:03]