FIRlnGLlne SUBJECT: "WHAT'S AHEAD FOR THE CHRISTIAN COALITION?"

Transcription

1 The copyright laws of the United States (Title 17, U.S. Code) governs the making of photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted material. If a user makes a request for, or later uses a photocopy or reproduction (including handwritten copies) for purposes in excess of fair use, that user may be liable for copyright infringement. Users are advised to obtain permission from the copyright owner before any re-use of this material. Use of this material is for private, non-commercial, and educational purposes; additional reprints and further distribution is prohibited. Copies are not for resale. All other rights reserved. For further information, contact Director, Hoover Institution Library and Archives, Stanford University, Stanford, CA Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. 0 FIRlnGLlne HOST: GUEST: WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR. RALPH REED SUBJECT: "WHAT'S AHEAD FOR THE CHRISTIAN COALITION?" FIRING LINE is produced and directed by WARREN STEIBEL. This is a transcript of the FIRINGLINEprogram #2712/1141, taped at HBO Studios in New York City, on September 24, 1997, and telecast later on public television stations. copyright 1997 FIRING LINE Transcripts and videocassettes available through Producers Incorporated for Television, 2700 Cypress Street, Columbia, SC 2920:5 803/

2 MR. BUCKLEY: As everybody knows, Ralph Reed has left as head of the Christian Coalition. He has founded Century Strategies, a campaign consulting company, which he serves as president. He is freer than he was when worldng for the Christian Coalition to advise political candidates, which is what he intends to do, with this caveat: that he will not take on as a client any politician whose programs are, in his opinion, inimical to the best interests of the family. He is here today to discuss the future of the Christian Coalition, which under his direction, grew to 1. 7 million members in all 50 states. I thought to concentrate not only on the future of the Coalition, but on the wide fears so many Americans have of the Coalition. Ralph Reed graduated from the University of Georgia, and earned his PhD in American history from Emory University. A portraitist recently concluded ruefully that one \vorry of Century Strategies is that Ralph Reed is more prominent than most of his clients. On the matter of fear,, 10 years ago it was the Moral Majority, Jerry Falwell. After the surprise victory of the Republicans in 1994, the Christian Coalition crystallized as "the enemy." Let me begin by asldng Dr. Reed: To what extent is Christianity the focus of such suspicion as there is? If you had represented, say, the Renaissance Coalition, with an identical platform, would criticism have been less pronounced, less frightened? MR. REED: I think, Bill, it is the combination of two things. First of all, I think it is the result of an e,"xperiential and cultural divide that separates the vast majority of Americans in the heartland of the country in tem1s of their values, their way of life, the things that they hold to and che1ish, versus the things that are valued by those who set most of the tone of opinion in the dominant culture. I don't want to particularize this or personalize this to any individual, but there is extensive social scientific data on the church attendance, for example, of leading editorialists and assignment editors at the major networks and the major influential dailies, their voting patterns, their political allegiances, their views of religion, their views of morality, and so forth. Eighty percent aren't sure if adultery is wrong or not; very low church attendance, tend to live in urban settings or even bohemian grove settings, whereas if you get outside of New York and Boston and Washington, and again, most of the elite, in terms of opinion and media and cultural influence, you have about percent go to church every single Sunday, they believe 1

3 most of the values that we held. And so I don't think, based on the survey data that I've looked at, that the average voter, Democrat or Republican, is afraid of religious people getting involved in our politics. I think that is an elite opinion. MR. BUCKLEY: I think you are correct. On the other hand, it's also true that many of the people who have this opinion, who have this fear, are important engines in the dissipation of thought and fear. For instance, take this: When the freshman class matriculated at Yale I 0 years ago, it was addressed by the new president, and the president warned them against the Moral Majority. I commented on that at the time, and said it would be like being warned against fleas entering a brothel, i.e., it seemed the least likely contaminant in a modem university like Yale. MR. REED: Yes. MR. BUCKLEY: But the very fact that he thought to do it-- MR. REED: Sets a tone. MR. BUCKLEY: --set the tone, yes. MR. REED: I think there is another-- MR. BUCKLEY: But then I wonder is the word "Christian" here used in such a way as to evoke the worst chapters in Christian history, persecution and so on. MR. REED: Well, and I don't think it is just Christianity. I think that secular opinion elites are afraid of religion, no matter whether it is orthodox Judaism, whether it's Islam. I mean, they are frightened by orthodox faiths in all its forms. But there is another aspect-- MR. BUCKLEY: They're not frightened of Unitarianism, are they? [laughter] But I see your point. MR. REED: I am talking about an orthodox faith. MR. BUCKLEY: I see your point, yes. 2

4 MR. REED: I mean, I think it's fair to say, for example, that the treatment that Pope John Paul II has received from the dominant media, when he speaks to those moral issues--the idea that he is inflexible, that he's out of touch, that he's old-fashioned--very much parallels their view of traditionalist evangelical political involvement, for example. But there is another reason why I think the Christian Coalition and its predecessors have received hostile treatment at times. I am not critical of all the coverage we've received. Some of it has been fair, some of it has not been, and that's part of playing in the big leagues. But another reason is that whenever you have a constituency who has been historically marginalized, and its voice has been on the margins of the political debate, and they come into the center of the debate and they begin to play a ve1y significant role-- MR. BUCKLEY: Eat with the grown-ups. MR. REED: That's right. We always called it a place at the table. There are people who have had a seat at the table that are frightened by the new entrant. And I've almost felt, Bill, that there was almost a-- MR. BUCKLEY: Frightened or resentful or both? MR. REED: Both. And I think, you know-- Richard Hofstadter refetted to it as status politics, the idea, for e."xample, that during the populist era, it wasn't just what the populists were for that frightened the city dwellers, it was the fact that they were-- MR. BUCKLEY: That they were there at all. MR. REED: It was the fact that there were all these rural, so-called hayseeds, who were now e."xercising political power. I think blacks went through that, and I think women went through that, and I think the farmers vvent through that. And I think that there is an almost unwritten rite of initiation in terms of being a responsible voice in the political discourse that you have to pass through. I think religious conservatives have passed through it; I think they're now an institutionalized force in politics. MR. BUCKLEY: Is that a numerical line that you're talking about? I.e., if they are that big-- MR. REED: No, I don't think it's numeric. 3

5 MR. BUCKLEY: You think it's the quality of the criticism? MR. REED: I think it's the quality of the criticism, and I think to some degree it is a demonstration of their ability to operate within a democratic order--particularly in our case and in other cases, if they are coming from a faith-based context, where they're saying, We believe there's right and there's wrong. What people want to know is, do they have the ability to function within a democratic order and recognize that there are limits to how much of what they believe they can impose on others in a free society. MR. BUCKLEY: That's right. It's inherently presumptuous, because there is no difference between the two. MR. REED: That's right, and let's take another example of someone vvho I think has not been able to pass through that rite of initiation, and I think that's Lewis Farrakan, even though he had large numbers. l mean, no one, with few e..xceptions, has put as many people on the Mall as he did in 1994 and '95, or whenever the Million Man March was, but after his behavior when he went to the Sudan and embraced, you know, the rulers there, and Khaddafi and others, he disqualified himself from responsible political leadership. MR. BUCKLEY: But let's take a look at the political program of the Christian Coalition. David Frost asked me a year or so ago was I not afraid of life under the Christian Coalition. And I said to him, you know, when I went to school, I thought of myself as living in a pretty free society. But everything that the Christian Coalition has.urged is what then existed. The only inconvenience, said I, that I could think of is that you would have to buy Monday's whiskey on Saturday because of the blue laws. [laughter] But in fact people think of life 50 years ago as life under tenible, terrible auspices. But there 'are certain things which the Christian Coalition wants as a matter of law. Now, of course, the most contentious of these is abortion. MR. REED: Right. MR. BUCKLEY: But the Christian-- To be a member of the Ch1istian Coalition, do you have to take a position on abortion, or can you say, I agree with you on everything except that, or other things? MR. REED: Oh, we don't have any kind of a test that you have to fill out--or 4

6 didn't--to be a member, but presumably, most of those people would have agreed with the position of the organization or they wouldn't have joined. MR. BUCKLEY: But it is correct to say, though, is it not, that most voters think of the Christian Coalition as mobilized against abortion. MR. REED: I think that's fair to say. MR. BUCKLEY: But Christians themselves are highly divided on the issue. I mean there are-- I would hesitate to put it as a matter of percentage, but I would guess that 75 percent of Protestants have no objection to abortion. Would that be, roughly speaking, correct? MR. REED: It's hard to say. I couldn't say one way or the other. I would certainly say among frequently Mass-attending Roman Catholics and frequently church-attending evangelicals, which was the base constituency of the Christian Coalition dming my tenure, that the figure was much lower than that. I think we found when we did surveys of our membership, that at least of our membership, there was maybe one in 10 to one in five that didn't agree e.,xactly with our position on abortion. But they were involved in the organization because they clearly believed there were too many abortions, they clearly believed that abortion was being used as a fom1 of birth control-- MR. BUCKLEY: Yes. MR. REED: --they clearly believed that if you live in a country in which the most common surgical procedure perfom1ed is not a tonsillectomy or an appendectomy, but the taking of an innocent human life, that that's wrong, and we ought to have an organization that says it's \vrong. MR. BUCKLEY: But to the e.,xtent that the Christian Coalition is thought of as an agent that wants a law, there would be pretty massive opposition to it, obviously. But the other is, of course, gays. Now, the Christian Coalition asks for what that would have a legislative face in respect of gays? MR. REED: I think the two main areas of law would be, first of all, that we would not favor the codification of sexual preference as a protected minority class under e..'<:isting civil rights statutes. Obviously we know that gays and lesbians hold jobs, they own property, they own businesses, they own homes, they rent apartments, they vote. In fact, the number one ideological political 5

7 action committee in America today is not a Christian PAC, it's the Human Rights Campaign Fund. So clearly the gays are not disenfranchised. They play an e,xtremely important role in our politics. But we don't believe that se,xual preference should be treated in the same way, for example, as skin color or gender or religion and things of that nature. The second area-- And that is the law in America today-- MR. BUCKLEY: Yes. MR. REED: --with obvious exceptions where states have passed that. But the Kennedy bill, that would codify sexual preference within the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has not passed, and I don't think will pass any time soon. The second area of law--and again, outside of the state of Hawaii, this is the law in all 49 states--is we don't believe that same-sex couples should be treated by the state in the same class as heterosexual marital unions. So those are the two areas of law where we would deal with the gay rights issue. Now the interesting thing, Bill, is that the gay community is actually divided on this issue. There are some gays who believe that trying to argue that childless same-se,x unions should be treated the same as marriages of heterose..xuals in the law is disingenuous, that that's not what those relationships are necessarily. Some are, some aren't, but they shouldn't be treated the same. What they are in favor of is the special rights protection under civil rights laws. Then you have others, like Andrew Sullivan, formerly of 171e New Republic, who is opposed to the special rights legislation, but wants the samese,x maitiages. What I do when I address this issue is I point out that Newt Gingrich is against same-sex marriage, Bill Clinton is against same-sex marriage, and the Christian Coalition is against same-se,x marriage. I think that's as close to consensus as you are going to get in American politics. MR. BUCKLEY: So therefore, to the e,xtent that people do feel threatened by the rea'ch of the Christian Coalition, it is an unrealistic fear politically you, assert and I accept. Are they, people who are frightened of the Christian Coalition, frightened because here indeed is a political organization that feels at liberty to make affim1ations with a sense that they are morally motivated, and in that sense repeal the kind of multiculturalism and the ldnd of pluralism that are so popular in the academic world? MR. REED: I think that's right. I think the Zeitgeist of the sort of liberal culture and one of the, you know, aftermaths of the sexual revolution was: Well, we really can't judge others, and attempting to make moral judgments 6

8 is so fraught with hazards that we should resist from doing so at all. And that was part of it, and the other part of it was, we just, even if we-- You know, that meant you might be able to determine what was right, but you shouldn't try and legislate it for anybody else. But the other part of it was, We don't know what's right or wrong. And I think you particularly saw this in the schools. It's the most dramatic place where it affected our culture, and frankly, one of the areas that got religious conservatives involved in the political process. Most people think that the modem religious conservative movement arose because of the abortion issue. That's really not true. Roe v. Wade vvas in You didn't really have the founding of the Moral Majority until 1978, and in that five-year period, while there were a lot of Catholics who got involved, primarily because of the abortion issue, most evangelicals got involved later, and the major issue that got them involved was education. It was an attempt by the IRS under Jimmy Carter to deny the tax:-exempt status of church-related schools, and secondly, it was some of the more permissive educational curriculum in the schools that began to come along at that time. And that's what got them involved. Subsequently, of course, you've seen the explosion of home schooling, and again, it serves to underscore that the agenda is a child-centered agenda. And it's not really about me taking my values and imposing them on somebody else by force of law. What it's really about is trying to protect my children and to keep someone else from taking their values and imposing them on me, my church, my home, and my family by force of law. It's a very defensive movement politically. MR. BUCKLEY: Well, I agree. The voucher system, for instance, simply asks that parents have the same kind of mobility with their children that others have. MR. REED: Right. MR. BUCKLEY: But you have been quoted as saying that democracy, in your opinion, can't work in the absence of a religious background, and Justice Douglas said exactly the same thing. When challenged to explain that, what do you say? Why does democracy, to be effective, require a people who understand the supernatural dimensions? MR. REED: I think it's required for two reasons. Number one, because the only way you can have a functioning democratic society is a society in which people voluntarily obey a code of conduct that is internalized rather than 7

9 imposed from outside by force. You know, John Adams, for example, said that our Constitution was designed for a moral and religious people only, and is wholly unsuited for any other. By that he obviously didn't mean that you had to be a member of a particular church to be an American. What he was saying was that in order to have a government limited to certain enumerated purposes, leaving all other functions to the people and a small police state and no standing am1y, which was their republican concept, the only way you can live in such a society without a strong centralized government and have peace and tranquility was eve1ybody voluntarily did what was right anyway. I think that's the first reason. I think the second reason is because in the end, the Bill of Rights and what Jefferson refers to as the inalienable rights that come down from a creator, that we respect as the foundation of our freedom, if we don't honor the Creator who gives those rights, if we don't see each human being as someone who is made in His image, whose liberty and whose life and whose pursuit of happiness are endowed by Him and cannot be taken away by any human agency or authority, I think it becomes an extremely problematic enterprise to build a society in which that's the foundation of the government unless people believe that the rights are God-given and not mangiven. MR. BUCKLEY: Yes, a democratic society in which people have rights is a society that has to exercise continence. Now we try to handle that in the Constitution by a Bill of Rights: Congress shall not, Congress shall not, Congress shall not. In fact, the Constitution is, to a considerable extent, a negative instn1ment, all the things that you can't do. Therefore, that continence has to be justified on the part of the citizens by the acceptance of a supervening law, right? That supervening' law is a law that tells us that we are all equal in the eyes of God and under the circumstances, have to respect one another. Now, if I were here--if I were Sidney Hook arguing with you--he would say that to repeat what you just did, and to repeat what I just said is simply a failure of the intellect to do the work that a superstitious God does for us. I.e., he would say we can acknovvledge the democratic necessities of continence without invoking a third force. How do you handle that? MR. REED: Well, I just make the argument that even though there may be people of superior intellect who are able to pull it off, in the history of organized human societies, it generally doesn't work. If you want to find a society where there isn't freedom--economic freedom, political freedom--look first for those societies who don't have spiritual and religious freedom and who don't believe that there is a faith-based foundation to why they organize 8

10 the way they do. And I think that if you look at what happened in Communist China, if you look at what happened in the former Soviet empire, if you look at other authoritarian regimes, it is-- MR. BUCKLEY: The first thing they did was eject God. MR. REED: That's exactly right. And because why? Because the citizenry, okay, whether intellectually one believes that those are superstitions, or whether one believes, as I do, that those are genuine beliefs, the people hold to that belief and say you have to destroy that belief before you can first break them and govern them in an authoritarian or totalitarian way. MR. BUCKLEY: Well now, the Christian Coalition, faced with the modem challenge, acknowledging, as you just finished specifying, that the principal organs of secularism are very active in the principal cultural centers of America. They feel that this is a problem that can be faced by political action? Or just that political action accident is one arm of the important mission, which is education? MR. REED: Well, the latter. I don't think that our members believe--and certainly I've never believed--that one's salvation or one's nation's salvation could be brought about by political action. What you really need is people's hearts and minds to be changed. And I think another thing that we've leamed--and it's one of the reasons why I've decided to go out and help a lot of candidates get elected, especially at the state and local level, is if you elect a moral and righteous and just president, but he presides over a bureaucracy and a Congress and state governments and state legislatures and school boards that all believe the opposite, it is impossible for such a president to govern. One of the ways that you can begin, frankly, to change hearts and minds, and one of the ways that you can legitimize the beliefs that we argue for is to demonstrate that they work in neighborhoods and communities and schools. You know, it's one thing to get up and say, Well, Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson or whoever is out of the mainstream, but it's m.uch harder to argue that if you have 12 or 15 governors and state legislators, all of whom are serving in public office, and in those places where they are serving, SAT scores are up, crime is down, budgets are balanced, ta."xes are cut, government services are better, makes it a lot harder that this is a scary agenda. I think that that has been the key success of the last five years or so, is that achievement in electing so many people to lower offices and then having them move up slowly that it made it a lot harder for them to de- 9

11 legitimize. MR. BUCKLEY: In your judgment, is this now happening, what you just have described, i.e., that the fight has prevailed in enough communities in America to be able to give us this empirical demonstration some time in the future? MR. REED: I don't think we're where we want to be, but I think people like Mike Huckabee, who's the current governor of Arkansas, people like David Beasley, the current governor of South Carolina, and many others out there- as I said, thousands of school board members. I think if Jeb Bush is able to win in Florida in 1998, he's the kind of candidate who holds to these kinds of values, but is also able to reach out to a lot of voters who may not share those values. I think he would do an outstanding job as governor of Florida, in one of the largest states in America. Those kinds of people, mnning for, winning office and governing effectively is clearly going to qualitatively change the political system in the same way that anti-war liberal Democrats getting elected in the '70s changed the political system. MR. BUCKLEY: Thank you, Ralph Reed, formerly of the Christian Coalition. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. 10