1. McCain and the Religious Right.
How easy is it to play the religious right? So easy even John McCain can do it.
For weeks after McCain clinched his party's nomination, all we heard from the religious-right leadership was what an unsatisfactory candidate he was. He was insufficiently in favor of "life" because he perhaps thought stem-cell research was a good idea. His campaign-finance legislation trampled on the free-speech rights of anti-abortion groups. He was opposed to a federal constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, even though he thinks it's just fine for states to amend their own constitutions. His story about the Vietcong prison guard drawing a cross in the sand was nice and all, but couldn't he talk about Jesus more? He threw John Hagee and Rod Parsley under the bus. He waited too long to visit Billy Graham. You know, all that stuff that really matters for being president during the worst economic, military, and foreign-policy crises of our lifetimes.
Back when we pondered the possibility of a cross-dressing former mayor of New York, a non-church-attending Hollywood actor, a Mormon from Sodom, or a Southern Baptist minister with a hick name as the Republican nominee, the religious right was threatening rebellion by forming a third party. But then the Democratic primary turnout made Republicans look as old and tired as their eventual nominee. The religious right woke up to the reality that sinking the GOP was not exactly the best path to continued political relevancy.
After McCain clinched the nomination, the religious-right leadership slowly realized they had to play the game -- but they ended up getting played by McCain. Religious-right leaders acted publicly as if they were withholding judgment until McCain gave them something -- and oh, that something was not much: perfunctory support for the California gay marriage ban and a pledge to clone John Roberts and Samuel Alito for any Supreme Court appointments. That's it. No prayer sessions, no random citations of Bible verses, no evangelical code words embedded in speeches, and not a single rhetorical bone about Christian nationhood. Even his recently retooled campaign slogan, "Reform, Prosperity, Peace," abandoned religious-right buzzwords like "values," "family," and "faith."
The religious-right leadership has no choice in the general election but McCain, and McCain has known that all along. Religious-right leaders' ambition to take over Washington has now been scaled back to stopping Obama, and it's not even clear they can do that.
2. Huckabee's Triple Threat.
The religious right has made a lot of noise about The Only Acceptable Running Mate for McCain, Mike Huckabee, even as McCain's short list apparently doesn't include him. But now it has become clear that Huckabee is more interested in the television studio than in the West Wing -- at least for now.
On his blog this week, Huckabee revealed that he was traveling to New York for discussions with Fox News about hosting his own television program. Earlier in the week he was in Iowa, the state that gave him the first victory of his presidential campaign. While there, he raised money for the Iowa Family PAC, which is in a tizzy about "homosexual activists" funding campaigns in the state, and the possibility, as Huckabee put it, that Iowa "is in danger of becoming the next California in the same-sex marriage 'hit parade.'" He campaigned for McCain at the Iowa Republican Party Convention and then embarked on a bipartisan trip to Rwanda with Cindy McCain.
So imagine this: Huckabee gets his own Fox News show while running a political action committee supporting Republican candidates and actively campaigning for the Republican nominee. He has a book coming out in the fall about his campaign and the future of conservatism and hasn't ruled out running for president again. So from his perspective, why would he want to be chained to McCain when he can get free advertising for himself?
3. Criticism is Leading CUFI to Alienate Core Supporters.
A former regional director for Christians United for Israel (CUFI) tells me that attendance at next week's Washington Summit will be down from last year, not because Christian Zionism is losing its currency but because Christian Zionists are disappointed that John Hagee is working too hard to win the hearts of Jews at the expense of Christians.
Jim Hutchens, a former military chaplain, is president of the hard-line Christian Zionist group The Jerusalem Connection International, which has opposed any Israeli-Palestinian peace deal even more vociferously than CUFI has. Hutchens told me that after he confronted Hagee last year over the assertion in Hagee's most recent book that Jesus did not come to be the Messiah for the Jews, CUFI removed him as Mid-Atlantic regional director. He was offered a co-director position for the District of Columbia, Hutchens said, but he decided to cut ties with CUFI completely. (A spokesperson for CUFI said she didn't know what had precipitated the split, or which party initiated it.)
With Hagee's efforts to garner Jewish support for CUFI, "the focus now," said Hutchens, "is Jews united for Hagee." Hutchens lamented that Hagee is too fixated on reaching out to Jewish constituencies, particularly in the reform movement, and has emphasized politics over what Hutchens believes to be biblical imperatives. "The focus should be on Christians," said Hutchens, adding that "[Hagee] has done to his base what McCain has done to his -- and that is neglect them."
Hutchens and the other Christian Zionists he says share his concerns and are skipping the CUFI Summit represent the hardcore fringe of Hagee supporters. As Hagee has felt pressure from Jewish groups alarmed by his prophecies of their demise at the end of days unless they convert, he has inched away from his more extremist Christian alliances. So anxious is Hagee for respectability that CUFI has now even toned down its rhetoric on Iran, claiming that it will lobby next week for stepped-up diplomacy and sanctions to thwart Iran's nuclear ambitions, rather than the military intervention that has long been the centerpiece of Hagee's apocalyptic theology. But Hagee's efforts to make himself seem like a reasonable moderate with a purely political, not religious, agenda just won't work -- nor will his attempt to shut out critics by convincing YouTube to remove all videos of him on copyright grounds or by closing next week's summit to the press. Abundant evidence of his extremism remains in plain sight, and Jews whose approval he craves will continue to question the core claim of his Christian Zionist project: that he is a good friend to them and to Israel.
4. California Pastors Supporting Gay Marriage Ban Coordinate with Arizona, Florida.
A group of California pastors who are working with the Christian-right legal group the Alliance Defense Fund in support of Proposition 8, the proposed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, have reached out to pastors in Florida and Arizona, where similar measures are on the ballot. The group aims to organize 200 sites for a conference call for pastors from all three states to coordinate strategy on July 30, twice the number of sites they had for the 1,600 pastors who participated in a California-only conference call in June.
The group is also sponsoring a period of fasting and praying from Sept. 24 through Nov. 2, culminating in a stadium event hosted by evangelist Lou Engle of The Call. Engle is a close friend of Sen. Sam Brownback, the Kansas Republican who is a national co-chair of McCain's campaign and was highlighted in the film Jesus Camp (he brought the boxes of tiny plastic fetuses to scare little children about abortion, and his group Bound for Life regularly demonstrates against abortion in front of the Supreme Court). According to the religious-right American Family Association's news service, Engle believes that "with some of the laws being passed in California, God's judgment is looming, so they will be crying out for His mercy."
5. The Call in D.C.: One Million on the Mall?
Before California, Engle is organizing an Aug. 16 event on the National Mall because, according to his Web site:
We believe that our nation is in a critical hour and in desperate need of revival. ... Even within the church truth has been substituted for spiritual relativism and religious tolerance. Sexual immorality, racism, and abortion are just as prevalent from our pews and pulpits as they are in our secular universities. We are in an hour of crisis, an hour when we have to confront our own spiritual barrenness as the church and in the place of prayer cry out to God for mercy on our nation and revival in our land. Our hope in this hour is in God and God alone. On August 16, 2008 we are calling for 1,000,000 people to again gather together in the National Mall to fast and to pray for God to pour out His undeserved mercy on our land.
While Engle probably won't be able to get a million bodies on the Mall during the hottest month of the year, he will have some help from high places -- and I'm not talking about the highest place. Among the luminaries participating in a pre-event pastors' meeting will be none other than the ubiquitous Mike Huckabee.
Contact me at tapthefundamentalist@gmail.com.
