Christian Coalition
Leadership Training

From Media, Culture and the Religious Right, ed. Linda Kintz and Julia Lesage, Minneapolis: University of MN Press, 1988.

by Julia Lesage

I became interested in studying the Christian right, especially its more moderate electoral sector as represented by the Christian Coalition, because this style of organizing and the attitudes it builds on remind me of the people I knew in the small midwestern town, Dixon, Illinois, where I grew up. In that environment, the professional class of doctors, lawyers, bankers, and teachers mingled everyday with farmers and trades people and we shared a general sense of mutual decorum and respect in our relations with each other. The state of Illinois, like many other states, has long had an urban/rural, Democrat/Republican split. In Dixon, which was generally a Republican town, many people, mostly men, felt free to comment liberally on national "politics." However, they displaced overt expressions of homophobia, sexism, and racism on to the realm of humor, what Freud would call "tendentious" jokes, rather than raise these as specific social issues. My mother was a Democrat, a Jew from New York. She and her small group of Jewish friends always provided for me a refracted optic on this small-town world which I both loved and found constricting. In my adulthood, I also began to see the ways in which Dixon residents would set aside that generally accepted decorum that prohibited raising controversial topics. In particular, in the seventies and eighties, I heard women openly, albeit still politely, disagree with each other about abortion.

In the academic towns or urban environments where I have spent most of my adult life, this world of small town mores remains mostly unacknowledged, even though many of my friends and associates have their origins there. And in the university where I teach, my peers also cling to a now self-destructive ignorance about the Christian right, ignoring how it strategically defunds their workplace, that is, public education, and having little understanding of the conservative right's cultural agenda or its social base. For me, looking at the Christian right is often like looking in a mirror because its participants choose to live within a politically resistant counterculture. Similarly, in my adult life, I have participated in forming a left and feminist counterculture, one which has much in common with the dreams of the utopian socialists of the nineteenth and early twentieth century in both the United States and Europe. Like those in right wing, single-issue pressure groups, I know the appeal of an intellectual and social community that places itself apart from mainstream values. For this reason, to find this kind of social fulfillment, I too have participated in running an underground newspaper, helped found a university women's studies program, founded and co-edited Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media for twenty years as an independent "alternative" publication in media studies and media activism, and made low-budget social activist video as part of the independent film and video community. These experiences have made me sympathetic to the notion of an "alternative" or "parallel culture," which offers its participants another, perhaps saner cultural experience than that offered by the dominant culture.

Ironically, this utopian mentality has much in common the countercultural strategies of what Ralph Reed calls "the "leave-us-alone" coalition of pro-lifers, anti-tax groups, conservative Christians, home schoolers, small businessmen, and gun advocates" [Reed, Active, p. 71], although those people often see my subcultural world as the enemy. Furthermore, while that conservative coalition studies my world in terms of what it sees as a dominant liberal, 'secular humanist" ideology and while it organizes politically to engage in battle against it, my academic and media colleagues usually eschew knowledge or intellectual contact with this diverse, widespread, often very popular, and increasingly powerful conservative cultural force. Instead they conveniently demonize the Christian right -- in much the same way that right wing legislators' attacks on the National Endowment for the Arts or the National Endowment for the Humanities demonize them. [Schapiro]

The people the Christian right is grooming for political office and for lobbying legislators are not the "crazies" that many people associate with the militia movement, Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing--although Christian Coalition members may know and associate with the McVeighs. Rather, in the ranks of these activists are many women who speak courteously and dresses tastefully when they go out in public and educated men who would never throw pig's blood on the staff of an abortion clinic or shout obscenities at the women going in. For the most part, these people become involved in politics out of their evangelist conviction that it is necessary to spread the Word, be a beacon on a hill. Furthermore, the skills Christian Coalition activists learn through studying political organizing tactics and refine through fieldwork pull them into the social process of the community at large.  In addition, political experience often helps make them more upwardly mobile economically or more secure professionally. The conservative political leadership training offered by the Christian Coalition also has a special appeal to women who had children young or who have worked mainly in the pink collar ghetto, to retirees who need to find ways to earn a supplemental income or are isolated socially and have free time on their hands, or to working or lower middle class men in transition from one kind of work to another, as happens so often in their careers. It also appeals to professionals and small businessmen, who would gravitate toward the Republican party for its pro-business and anti-regulation stance, and who would benefit from learning how to solidify contacts with the state political apparatus.

Ralph Reed, executive director of the Christian Coalition, says that a 1993 survey found that the average "committed" Christian in their ranks is a forty-year-old woman who went to college, is married with children, with a household income of about $40,000. [Reed, Active, p. 193]  She often works outside the home and lives in the suburbs or exurbs of a major metropolitan area. In other words, the demographics of conservative Christians are often those of baby boomers struggling to maintain a middle-class lifestyle, which requires that both adults in the family work. The focus of such a group as the Christian Coalition on "family values" is a rhetorical device that unifies people around their desire for a folkloric traditionalism, their fears about economic insecurity and their ability to maintain a "home," and their wish that childrearing, especially when both parents have to work, might somehow be more predictable.  Both demographics and rhetoric unite the Christian right into a loosely defined subculture which finds its unity around the expression of moral values.

As a subculture, the Christian right must co-exist with the many other subcultures in the United States, some of them antagonistic to each other.  In general, subcultures are both constraining and enabling for their participants; although everyone participates in various subcultures, some individuals are more self-consciously "border-crossers" than others. When a subculture that was previously isolated, such as the religious right, chooses to enter electoral politics, as does the Christian Coalition, then certain aspects of the subculture become important to analyze -- in this case, the degree to which religious conservatives cling to their shared world-view, the degree to which their relation to other subcultures shifts or stays the same, and the ways they relate to the dominant culture (which is white, middle class, male, politically conservative in some key institutions like the military, and politically liberal in other important institutions like the press). Some subcultures with which I am familiar include ethnic and religious ones -- Jewish, Catholic, Italian, Black, Latino; political ones -- left/feminist, gay male, cultural lesbian, Black nationalist, ecology activist, New Age; vocationally or demographically based ones -- teens, children, retired people, college students, college teachers in the arts and sciences, independent media makers; and the major economically determined ones -- working, middle, and upper middle class.

Subcultures govern style, both lifestyle and language style. Semantically they perpetuate discourse communities which legislate the range of what can/cannot be said, should/should not be imagined, and is or is not valorized/vilified. Conservative rhetoric indicates the shared values of the religious right subculture. Conservative discourse praises manliness and femininity, the family with a father and mother, parental control over children, private property, the deserving poor, the individual's right to try and fail economically, the free market, private property, lower taxes, less government, military duty, and American patriotism.  Similarly, words that indicate consensus about the malevolent forces in society refer to the media, immigrants, public schools, illegitimacy, welfare, "redistributionist" economics, the counterculture (mine, that is), multiculturalism, homosexuality, feminism, government spending (except on the military), and any indication that gender roles might be socially constructed. Not only does the religious right articulate such a moral consensus, it has also developed a media-savvy, politically active, interconnected subculture. This large, diverse network receives little analytic attention from either progressive activists or mainstream media, which the conservative right's political activity always seem to take by surprise. Ralph Reed glowingly describes his own subcultural world in the following terms:

“Few in Washington understand what Bill Kristol has called "the parallel universe" in which religious conservatives live, where the radio and television programs reach more people everyday than network newscasts and where pro-family organizations can mobilize the grassroots as effectively as the labor unions and civil rights movements did at their peak. Home-school parents and students, for instance, use personal computers to access lessons and communicate with hundreds of other home schoolers, constituting a ready-made network of hundreds of thousands of cybercitizens.” [Reed, Active, p. 177]

The research material which has stimulated this essay is a set of leadership training tapes prepared in 1993 by the Christian Coalition for its political action leadership schools.  My analysis of the tapes will describe the specific political advice they contain as well as explore their wider implications, including the psychology upon which the tapes' speakers rely upon and the place filled by this kind of organizing within the panorama of contemporary U.S. social life. The tapes provide an insight into how the Christian Coalition functions as a religious organization oriented to electoral politics; my analysis will look specifically at the Christian Coalition's self-definition as a "grassroots" organization, its understanding of routine electoral politics in the United States, its economic aspects, and its development of a specific kind of rhetorical strategy. In examining the way this organization functions, I also want to assess the potential effects of their involvement on the participants

Christian Coalition

In 1986, a year before Pat Robertson decided to run for the 1988 Presidential election, he announced to viewers of the 700 Club nationwide:

“If, by September 17, 1987, one year from today, three million registered voters have signed petitions telling me that they will pray, that they will work, that they will give toward my election, then I will run.” [Boston, pp. 35-36]

Such a plea did not make him the Republican candidate but resulted in a very successful fundraising campaign. He raised $10 million by the time he actually entered the race, and in 1988 when he dropped out, Robertson had spent almost all the $27 million U.S. Campaign Law allows. [Rosenbaum, p. D23] Robertson failed politically in 1988 because he campaigned on the basis of fundamentalist rhetoric and had a seriously faulty understanding of U.S. political process. [Boston, pp. 35-62] Afterward, he returned to his teleministry, which had lost much of its viewership in his absence, and once again managed his CBN network, pulling it out of serious financial straits; he now defines his social role mainly as family broadcasting entrepreneur. However, Robertson did not want to give up his large financial investment in electoral politics, his base of political support, and his newly-gathered political mailing list. At a Bush inaugural dinner in Washington, D.C., Robertson met future protégé, Ralph Reed, former executive director of College Republicans, where he asked Reed to send him a memo on how to organize a grassroots organization. In the next year, 1989, Reed worked to establish this new political vehicle, the Christian Coalition.

On the basis of Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network's and political campaign's mailing lists, Reed began recruiting activists from the Robertson political organization. His goal was to build a grassroots organization that would conduct voter surveys and recruit and train local candidates for office and for precinct work in the Republican party. In establishing the Christian Coalition, Reed refined the strategy of a direct mail campaign developed by Washington, D.C., fundraiser Richard Viguerie in the 1970s and subsequently exploited by Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell. Reed and other conservative strategists had long understood how valuable a political tool direct mail could be for raising money and building a political base, but earlier direct mail campaigns had primarily focused on raising money for national candidates and "hot button" conservative causes since the seventies. These including such esoteric fundraising efforts as Spiro Agnew's defense fund. However, Robertson's summary defeat in the 1988 primaries and, before that, the Moral Majority's failure to establish a serious electoral presence indicated that direct mail and television alone could not develop the political activism and mass base required for a permanent religious conservative presence in U.S. politics. Furthermore, as Reed puts it:

“One of the first things we learned was that the red-hot rhetoric that sizzled in direct mail and on cable television may drive core supporters to their checkbooks but ultimately limits one's effectiveness in the broader society.” [Reed, Active, p.119]

Currently, in the unofficial Reed-Robertson partnership, the two men's rhetorical differences reveal their division of labor in the Christian Coalition. Operating with a new, politically sensitive style, Reed describes political issues in terms of social problems and desirable social policy outcomes. He avoids religious reasoning, especially references to verses of scripture.  In contrast, Robertson continues a line of millenarian thinking long familiar to his evangelical viewers and readers.

Politically such a rhetorical shift is extremely important. Today as the Christian Coalition has moved into the mainstream, it has taken control of many state Republican Party organizations. Now local Christian Coalition chapters generate their own mailing lists, annotated with a variety of information about potentially sympathetic voters, and these mailing lists are used for electoral and lobbying campaigns, even more than for fundraising for specific causes. With 1,700 chapters established in 1995 in voting districts scattered throughout the United States, the Christian Coalition targets and identifies its constituencies in far more subtle ways than the earlier direct mail solicitations did. Currently, the philosophy behind generating and using the mailing list is to locate those voters who in some ways agree with conservative Christian social philosophy; follow-up surveys refine these points of agreement, which letters sent out to supporters then refer to.

Chapter members often talk face-to-face with prospective conservative voters and maintain personalized, regular contact. And Christian Coalition members' active participation in local churches turns church voter-education groups, church mailing lists, and even the support of local clergy into very powerful tools at the Coalition's disposal, for they function like mailing lists to help set up an initial contact with the desired voting bloc and which make the follow-up face-to-face contact even more effective. The pay-off comes when the voters receive and act on items such as candidate "Report Cards," which they can take into the voting booth; fax alerts about upcoming legislative struggles statewide or nationally; or a letter or phone call about a local controversy, such as the need for a conservative group to build support to remove a text from a school curriculum.

The Training Tapes

In the original 1989 memo Reed sent Robertson about how to form a grassroots organization, he laid down a basic principle that has made the Christian Coalition a dynamic institution able to respond to the exigencies of electoral politics and to energize and educate its core members. He insisted that the organization launch and maintain "an ambitious training program modeled after the leadership schools of Morton Blackwell." [Reed, Active, p. 13]  Like Reed, Blackwell had served as the executive director of the College Republican National

Committee and later had set up his own conservative Leadership Institute in Virginia.  Reed used this connection to develop the Christian Coalition's training program, now carried out in two-day workshops throughout the United States. As the Christian Coalition has grown, these training schools have proven vital to the organization's ongoing practice, educating Coalition members as socially effective activists, especially its 550 county chapter organizers and its even more numerous precinct leaders. In particular, the training schools teach a detailed understanding of political process and develop sophisticated public relations skills. Conducted over a period of a weekend, these Leadership, Citizen Action, or Schoolboard Training Seminars are frequently held in many moderate-sized cities; in spring 1995, for example, the Coalition's internet posting listed upcoming seminars in Anchorage, Alaska; Topeka, Kansas; Fargo, North Dakota; Albany, New York; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Aurora, Illinois; Alexandria, Virginia; Charleston, North Carolina; as well as in Queens, New York. [CC World Wide Web site, January 16, 1996]

In the videotapes made for the Christian Coalition Leadership Schools, one of the speakers is, in fact, Morton Blackwell, and some tapes bear introductory remarks from Pat Robertson. These tapes were filmed in 1992 or 1993, although the leadership manual accompanying these tapes has an earlier 1990 copyright date, indicating that this particular set of tapes comes out of several years' experience on the part of the Coalition's national organizers [Fisher].  At the seminar where most of these tapes were shot, attendees indicate that many are running for local or state office or are working on the staff of an avowedly Christian candidate, suggesting that many are already active politically in the electoral sector. Although the speakers and the audience members do not contrast themselves to other Christian conservatives involved primarily in single-issue organizing campaigns, such as right to life picketing at clinics, most of the tape's presenters insist that electoral politics has to focus on winning votes from the undecided center -- a crucial 15%. Although the tapes' speakers occasionally use religious rhetoric for motivational purposes, the political advice they offer is general enough to be of use to anyone entering electoral politics. And clearly some of the presenters have worked for both Republican and Democratic candidates since they speak from the perspective of high-powered professionals who run public relations or public-opinion survey firms. They offer advice that is more secular than religious.

Christian Coalition members have used this leadership training to great advantage, with particular success in local elections to county commissions, city councils, and school boards. After their initial organizing experiences, Coalition members seek even more ways to share and gain political acumen. As a follow-up to the initial leadership training in a group setting and their subsequent political experience, many Christian Coalition organizers or local political office holders look forward to attending the yearly Christian Coalition National Conventions, where they go to more how-to workshops and, equally important, swap political wisdom among themselves, often about tactical victories achieved at the grassroots level by people new to politics.

The Christian Coalition Leadership training tapes are part of a kind of video production broadly known as "industrial video." Within that broad category, they belong to the genre of "training tapes." In the media industry, such production takes place outside the entertainment industry in the "industrial video" sector, and it comprises the bulk of what professional media makers do. In the United States, for example, the social service and business sectors constantly generate how-to videotapes for specialized training. In terms of distribution, such tapes are often promoted within a "training package." This means that the tapes will be introduced by a live facilitator, perhaps an expert, who introduces the tapes and leads a discussion. The package also includes a training manual to be given to each participant; the attendees annotate the manual with notes from lectures and discussions, perhaps fill out some of the pages as part of the workshop, and refer to it later to refresh their memory. Sometimes participants can check out the training tapes again from a local office. The tapes then reinforce what they learned or they may use the tapes themselves to do new training sessions, creating a chain effect. The training workshop's group setting allows attendees to learn strategies and techniques from the videotaped experts and also from the more experienced presenter. An equally important result of the training session is that participants meet and share experiences with like-minded people in the same line of work with whom they may maintain professional contact for years.

To prepare for this paper, I watched and took careful notes on the verbal content of the thirteen 1993 training tapes, each from 30-45 minutes long. The tapes show mainly talking heads lecturing, with some overhead transparencies projected, and almost no cutaways to show audience members' responses. Cumulatively, the tapes are so full of political savoir faire that I took over 85 pages of notes on them, and they taught me much about electoral processes, grassroots organizing, and rhetorical strategies for public self-presentation, especially for dealing with the press. In a broader sense, the tapes also fascinate me not only for their Realpolitik but for the questions they raise and the contradictions they reveal.

Grassroots Organizing

 In one tape, How to Organize a Christian County Chapter, Guy Rogers, then director of Christian Coalition chapter organizing, discusses the process of chapter development. "By 1996, he declares, "we want to have identified ten million pro-family voters." To identify those voters and get them to the polls, each Christian Coalition chapter conducts and maintains an up-to-date, precise constituency analysis, household-by-household in its district. Sometimes such a canvass will help political candidates' fundraising; other times it will facilitate mobilizing people to lobby for a specific issues. Of course, it's used most directly to get conservative voters to the polls. Rodgers says chapters should redo their survey every six months because issues and voters' feelings about them change.

Rodgers advises Coalition canvassers who phone households in their voting district initially to ask one or two rather liberal-sounding questions as well as a few questions oriented toward conservative issues. All the caller has to do is get a yes or no answer to discover the Coalition's potential supporters. Then the canvassers phone those potential conservative voters for a more detailed follow-up interview.

Finally, those interviewed get a written response tailored to the phone survey; each letter includes literature targeted specifically to the issues they support -- and not, for example, a pro-life mailing if that would anger them. In this way, contact with the conservative constituency remains nuanced and does not assume that people agree on the same issues. The Christian Coalition has learned more and more to use an appeal to common sense and a broad definition of traditional values to build its base.

Rodgers explains further how to build a local Christian Coalition chapter, speaking with grassroots savvy and citing details and tactics familiar to anyone who has done this kind of work. He presents a timeline for increasing a chapter's numbers from three to eighty committed members over eight weeks. In organizing a chapter, the final step comes when the core group of activists invite 400-500 people to a county-wide organizing meeting, out of which group of contacts Rodgers expects eighty interested people to attend. To locate the potential attendees, Rodgers suggests contacting people from pre-existing anti-pornography lists and church directories. At the organizing meeting, people sign up for positions such as running a finance committee, acting as public-affairs liaisons to churches who will set up social action "mission" committees in each parish (for voter registration, for example), or serving as precinct captains who conduct the strategically important voter-identification surveys. Rodgers adds as an aside that since the canvass director should be attentive to detail and good at follow-up, that task is usually taken by a woman. Very little strategy is improvised in this kind of activism, and even novices can have the confidence to execute their tasks well since the process of doing the survey and the questions to ask are all carefully laid out in the Christian Coalition's "leadership packet."

This strategy for political activism has two immediate effects. First, it provides a "grassroots" networking of like-minded religious conservatives. For the Coalition members involved in canvassing or making local phone calls, the activity creates a sense of being enveloped in a conservative community as the caller become acquainted with names and addresses of sympathetic voters who live nearby. Not only does doing the voter survey institutionally reinforce the activists' shared structure of feelings, but those moral convictions now gain the force of a public voice, if not yet public policy. And the simplicity and certainty that comes with political action give the symbolic structure of "like-mindedness" or "common sense morality" even more coherence. Motivating someone else to act on moral concerns which have long concerned you both means that as a local political organizer, you have taken a step to awaken in others a collective sense that change is possible and reassures both of you that you are acting effectively as agents of that change.

Evangelism charges its adherents to go out into the world to make converts.  When evangelists enter social action movements, they demonstrate their commitment to a widely socially-acceptable cause, social reform, which they join to their religious motivation.  For many committed Christians, it is probably easier and less embarrassing to collect petitions to place an initiative on the state ballot than it is to hand out religious pamphlets or preach the Bible in a public place.  Particularly for women, Christian political activity means that they can move out of the domestic sphere into a movement with social impact. Sometimes, such women's zeal also reflects their need to escape the conservative mores imposed by their extended family or small community in which they live, mores which have limited the women's social options. From their participation in a national organization and in local organizing across class lines, Christian Coalition activists move into a satisfyingly larger "community."

In this light, Christian Coalition activism can be seen as creating new "conditions of possibility" for its members. That is, it gives people an historical sense that they are participating in a new kind of politically significant, empowering, religious-conservative community.  The term "conditions of possibility" comes from Lawrence Grossberg's We Gotta Get Out of this Place, an analysis of the increasing cultural conservatism in the United States over the last two decades.  Grossberg's thesis is that any culture at a given historical moment offers its participants possibilities for emotional investment and thus for "making meaning."  Grossberg describes contemporary social life, what some have called "the postmodern condition," in terms of a struggle to care about something, organize moments of stable identity, and find the passion needed to enact one's own projects and possibilities. [Grossberg, p. 83]  For grassroots political activists, the ritual of participating indeed "organizes moments of stable identity"; when an activist arouses in another the passion to act politically, that social act creates its own gratification and thus ensures the activists' further involvement.

This sense of involvement extends to those who are not political activists. Religious conservatives throughout the United States find that political life is being made available to them in new ways, empowering them with a newfound sense of participating in national issues. Because of the Christian Coalition's success in gaining control of local Republican parties and wielding a large influence nationally, it has given a new kind of self-esteem to the larger body of religious conservatives. For example, Ralph Reed's oft repeated statement, "We just want our place at the table," plays on fundamentalist Christians' perception of themselves as perpetual outsiders, indeed martyrs. Their grassroots political success, however, means the fundamentalist community that had formerly seen itself as an oppressed minority finds pleasure in its sustained local and national political successes. Because of the communal reinforcement many people gain from identifying with these victories, more and more conservatives can then be politically organized into effective local or nationally-targeted, single-issue campaigns, where large, well-organized groups always exert a powerful influence.

At this point, it seems important to address the question of the relation between electoral organizing, "grassroots" politics, and a popular movement.  To energize a large group of people, to instill in them a conviction that change is possible, and to get them to act in a collective way is to form a popular movement.  Such movements depend on effecting both subjective and objective changes, which potentiate each other.  That is, to act, people have to believe that change is possible, and it may be the successes or martyrdom of an early few that galvanize the many to take action in a broad-based movement for social change. Action shapes the imagination, and a renewed sense of possibility in turn shapes future action. Organizing which originates at the base is grassroots organizing, and popular struggles may reinforce or contradict the struggle for official political power, particularly state power.

In this specific instance, although political organization on the precinct level may guarantee its success in local elections, the degree to which the Christian Coalition represents or intends to become a broader, popular movement is not clear. First of all, there are limits to asserting that the Christian Coalition is a grassroots political organization. It has much in common with traditional party organizations, especially at the precinct level, since all electoral campaigns face the same two tasks.  Electoral campaigns have to convince the undecided to get out and vote, and they must influence people to vote for their candidate. To do that, in their campaign propaganda they must use a rhetoric that appeals to the swing vote, usually the centrist middle. When the Christian Coalition does this kind of electoral work on the precinct level, it does not seem to function much differently from the way I observed party politics functioning in Chicago, especially in immigrant and working class neighborhoods. Additionally, the Christian Coalition has to increase religious conservatives' turnout from a usual 40% to very high 70-80%. And to do that, the organizing drive has to turn about and use a rhetoric that supports the issues most favored by the religious right.

Earlier I spoke of the empowerment experienced by the like-minded when they have political success. There are also drawbacks to this heady sense of common cause. Not just fundamentalist Christians but any committed, cohesive social group " subcultural, ethnic, minority, trade union, or religious denominational " has a certain inward-looking aspect. When members of a subcultural group become politically active, their like-mindedness often acts to their detriment, particularly in blinding them to the political realities of the coalition building upon which electoral politics rely. Over the last five years, we have seen that religious conservative groups in action often fall into the trap of what presenter Mike Murphy labels in these tapes, "listening to the echo chamber." By that Murphy means that any group of political activists who take their view of social reality mainly from those who agree with them may fail to grasp the political realities of the campaign, especially what's on voters' minds.

Ralph Reed and the Christian Coalition leadership understand that in casting a wider electoral net, the organization has to persuade fundamentalists to embrace members of groups toward whom they otherwise might feel antipathy. In particular, because of its pro-family, anti-drug, self-help stance, the Christian Coalition can tailor a special pitch to conservative Blacks, and it has already found many allies among anti-abortion Catholic activists and clergy as well as orthodox and conservative Jews. The question that remains is whether "casting a wider net" will liberalize the religiously-oriented political movement. If it has 40% of the vote and needs 51%, it must develop a language style to communicate to secular voters. In particular, because the mainstream press may eagerly jump in a sensationalistic way from citing the platforms of conservative candidates to references to making references to militia violence and that movement's role in events like the Oklahoma City bombing, the electorally-active Christian right needs to control its public rhetoric to capture the high ground rather than give the press the occasion to describe it as driven by violence-prone crazies.

On another level, if we analyze the Christian Coalition structurally, other factors belie the notion that it is a grassroots organization. There is built-in tension between its top-down organizational style and local members' needs and desires. The nationally-organized Christian right funds and organizes Christian Coalition chapters because it has a need for large numbers of activists, activists it trains to make more effective. However, in the process, the national leadership may ignore that local issues on a grassroots level are often what coalition members most urgently want to deal with. For example, the Christian Coalition has a national television show on the satellite feed from National Empowerment Television. Frequently Coalition chapters meet to watch and discuss a show, and members are asked to organize to support issues raised at the national level. Obviously national mobilization has a powerful political effect. Yet it is in organizing around local issues closer to home that the Coalition has had most of its political victories, so much so that at the 1995 National Convention, Ralph Reed declared that the Coalition would not try to pick a Presidential candidate, saying that it would concentrate its efforts at the "grassroots," where it was the most effective.

A permanent tension exists between the exigencies of electoral politics and the need to recruit followers who otherwise strive to promote a much narrower conservative cause. For example, Coalition members are now running for local or state office " schoolboards, city councils, state legislatures, planning and zoning commissions, or county commissions; they campaign openly as conservatives, knowing they have an organized base and a national organization, the Christian Coalition, to support them. However, there are many other fundamentalist leaders who do not want to compromise and adopt the broadly popular rhetoric needed to win elections. These people eschew the secular basis of electoral campaigns. Instead they prefer to work on single-issue struggles where they can openly state the problem in terms of their religious and moral beliefs.  Currently such activists come into conflict with long-time members of the Republican Party. For example, many conservative religious voters adamantly demand that the Christian Coalition and ultimately the Republican Party require a strong anti-abortion stand from any candidate whom it supports, even though that insistence may cost the Republican Party electoral victory. Influential fundamentalist leaders such as James "Dr." Dobson, head of the large family-oriented publications and media group, Focus on the Family, reinforce such a demand by insisting that any backing down on the abortion issue would betray all the Christians recruited into mainstream political life.

In general, in contrast to working in precinct party politics, when people struggle for a single-issue cause, they experience a particular kind of emotional gratification -- that of socially aroused and discharged passion. For example, in the campaigns for and against gay rights, communities experience all the emotions of social polarization. Not only do people who attend rallies take the occasion to release their own anger but they see that anger socially reinforced.  Socially shared anger creates meaning; for the religious right, anger against homosexuality itself becomes its own just cause. However, emotional meaning may not coincide with a rationally effective political strategy. In this case, conservative politicians' very common tactic of using anti-homosexual rhetoric to unite and energize their subculture has also often resulted in a failed, overtly anti-homosexual electoral campaign. Furthermore, extending Grossberg's analysis about historical conditions creating new "conditions of possibility, .. discursive mediations and strategic deployments" [Grossberg, p. 13],  it is clear that when the religious conservative leadership strategically deploys anti-homosexual discourse in a subculture already antagonistic to gays, that leadership irresponsibly creates "conditions of possibility" for violence against homosexuals, even though many people in that subculture would not participate in such violence directly. Looked at from the perspective of its shared, almost universal condemnation of homosexuality, the conservative Christian community perpetuates its common ground and promotes a sense of cohesion in contradictory ways, sometimes around retrograde goals.

Sara Diamond has argued that such contradictions are common within the democratic process of struggling for political power. She asserts that the differences between the goals of the Christian right single-issue causes and the Christian Coalition's electoral strategy affirm the vigor of the Christian right political movement as a whole. This may be true even though religious conservatives variously support many issues that remain a political liability in the larger electoral sphere. Diamond describes one group, Christian Action Network or CAN, which focuses on single issue campaigns, and CAN's relation to the Christian Coalition:

"CAN was front and center in last year's [1993's] lobbying to maintain the bans on gay military personnel and on federal funding for poor women's abortions. CAN also took credit for persuading Congress to cut the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts by $8.6 million. Though CAN opposes subordinating Christian right activism to the interests of the Republican party per se, there is nothing particularly 'extreme' about its tactics. CAN uses direct mailing to mobilize phone calls and letters to Congress members. That CAN pursues a narrow-issue focus and the Christian Coalition hopes to make itself indispensable to the Republican Party is, if anything, a sign of the Christian right's maturity. Social movements are successful to the extent that activists and leaders with divergent strategies can each find a niche. ... Both types of groups [single issue and electoral] are successful because they exploit elements of routine electoral politics: Congress members' response to constituent lobbying and persistent low voter turnout, both of which are advantageous to the highly mobilized evangelical minority." [Diamond, Wrath, pp. 91-92]

Although I generally support Diamond's thesis, I am worried about the degree to which right rhetoric and single-issue campaigns, waged with so much passion, create a climate of opinion which facilitates acts of extreme violence. Although most conservative religious people would denounce the Oklahoma City bombing as a horrific act of terrorism, the religious conservative political umbrella is offered to groups like the militia movement, the NRA, and the "wise-use" land movement. Such groups belong well within what Ralph Reed calls "the leaveus-alone coalition." Conservative political discourse has currently opened up a social space to groups that once had general social opprobrium. In this vein, the trials of Timothy McVeigh and the Montana Freemen may reveal the groups' self-justification through "dominion theology" and thus expose a seamier side of the fringe groups that share much of the ideology of Christian right. [Diamond, Wrath, pp. 47-56] In this tension between the Christian conservative mainstream and its margins, the violence that comes from right-wing fringe groups may yet irrevocably taint mainstream religious-conservative activism, especially the public opinion about it.