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July 15, 2004

Bush campaign criticized for efforts to mobilize church supporters

by Chris Herlinger
Ecumenical News International

NEW YORK — U.S. President George W. Bush’s re‑election campaign is being criticized for efforts to mobilize church members as a way of securing the president’s base of support among conservative Christians.

      The source of controversy is a memo from within the Bush campaign made public last week suggesting that church‑going Bush campaign volunteers provide the campaign with church membership rosters and directories and that the campaign help pastors in registering voters.

      “This is a shameless attempt to misuse and abuse churches for partisan political ends,” said the Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of the advocacy group, Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “People go to church to worship, not to be proselytized by politicians.”

      The controversy revives a long‑standing dilemma in the United States between the formal separation of church and state and the prominent role religious faith and values have always played in U.S. political life.

      Under U.S. law, churches and religious groups can lose their status as tax‑exempt organizations if they formally become involved in partisan politics. At the same time, it is common for those with a religious commitment to become politically active and participate in political campaigns.

      The Bush campaign defended the memo, saying the moves in obtaining church membership lists were appropriate. “People of faith have as much right to participate in the political process as anybody else,” Steve Schmidt, a Bush campaign spokesman, told The New York Times newspaper.

      Still, some prominent church figures, often described as conservatives, were among the critics of the memo. The Rev. Richard Land, a prominent leader within the Southern Baptist Convention, quoted by the Reuters news agency, said he was appalled at the document.

      “I would not want my church directories being used that way,” he said.

      Richard J. Mouw, president of the Fuller Theological Seminary in California, a prominent evangelical Christian institution, told The New York Times:“Theologically speaking, churches are really in a position to speak truth to power. But this smacks of too close an alliance of church and Caesar.”

      The controversy over the campaign memo comes as a new poll found that more than three‑quarters of U.S. Protestant clergy surveyed believe the separation of church and state has gone too far.

      The survey of 700 pastors in all 50 U.S. states was conducted for the magazine Facts & Trends, a publication of the Southern Baptist Convention.

       The poll found that 78 per cent agreed the separation of church and state had become too extreme; eight per cent said the separation of church and state “had not gone far enough” while 13 per cent said the separation was “about where it should be.”