Randall Balmer: Religious right’s leaders sidestep important issues

The writer is an Episcopal priest and a former Nebraska resident. He is professor of American religious history at Barnard College, Columbia University. His most recent book is “God in the White House: How Faith Shaped the Presidency From John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush.”

If it weren’t so pathetic, it might almost rise to the level of comedy, albeit in a tragic sort of way.

Several leaders of the religious right, their ranks depleted by the deaths of Jerry Falwell and D. James Kennedy, met in New York City last September in an apparent attempt to strategize their return to relevance.

In November 2008, the religious right had failed to deliver enough evangelical votes to the Republican presidential candidate (who couldn’t seem to decide whether he was a Baptist or an Episcopalian). Younger evangelicals voted for Barack Obama in 2008 at twice the rate of those who supported John Kerry four years earlier.

According to polling data (and confirmed by my own conversations with this cohort), younger evangelicals discern a much broader spectrum of issues — the environment, poverty, health care, military interventions, AIDS, torture — as moral issues. This places them at odds with the old-line leadership of the religious right, who insist that the only salient moral issues are abortion, same-sex marriage and religious freedom.

This older generation of leaders, meeting in New York, wanted to set their younger colleagues straight. So they drafted the “Manhattan Declaration: A Call of Christian Conscience,” released late last month.

“We argue that there is a hierarchy of issues,” Charles Colson, one of the drafters, told the New York Times. “A lot of the younger evangelicals say they’re all alike. We’re hoping to educate them that these are the three most important issues.”

The statement suggests, with precious little corroborating evidence, that there is somehow a danger that churches will be forced to perform abortions and solemnize same-sex marriages.

“We will not comply with any edict that purports to compel our institutions to participate in abortions, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia or any other anti-life act,” the statement reads, “nor will we bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships.”

Just who is making those demands? When’s the last time a desperate woman knocked on a church door to get an abortion, mistaking a pastor for a physician? This kind of paranoia is straight out of the Rush Limbaugh/Fox News playbook.

Yet Colson, together with signatories like James Dobson of Focus on the Family, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council and Timothy George, dean of Beeson Divinity School, are trying to gin up the dangers to religious liberty — much the way that George W. Bush ginned up “weapons of mass destruction” to justify his invasion of Iraq.

In this case, it’s a desperate ploy by the religious right, having lost its credibility with many voters, to become relevant again.

“We pledge to each other, and to our fellow believers, that no power on earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate us into silence or acquiescence,” the Manhattan Declaration says.

Who knew that silence was ever a danger with this crowd? No, I take that back. This same group, approximately 150 politically conservative evangelicals and Roman Catholics, managed to be deafeningly silent in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq and when the Bush administration engaged in the systematic use of torture against those it designated as “enemy combatants.”

These same individuals — Colson, Perkins, Dobson, George — purport to hear a fetal scream. Yet they turned a deaf ear to the very real screams of fully formed human beings who were being waterboarded and tortured during the Bush administration.

In 2006, while I was writing my book “Thy Kingdom Come,” I sent an inquiry to eight religious right organizations, including those headed by signatories to this “Manhattan Declaration,” asking them to send me a copy of their group’s position on the use of torture. I received only two responses; neither organization could bring itself to condemn the Bush administration policies on torture.

Having failed to bestir themselves in opposition to torture or the invasion of Iraq or the despoiling of the environment — God’s creation — the tired leadership of the religious right now wants to take a heroic moral stand against the blessing of same-sex marriages.

Pathetic, indeed.

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