[Dialogue] Spong Part 3

[KroegerD@aol.com]

November 24, 2004


Election 2004 Part 3 - An Analysis of the Evangelical Vote in the 2004 Election 


The rise of the evangelical, religious vote in the United States can be viewed externally and historically, my task this week; or internally and emotionally, my task next week. 

I begin this week's analysis before the civil war for I believe I can demonstrate that evangelical religion in America still manifests an ever-present and deeply embedded racism.

In 1860 the United States saw a four-party split in the electorate and for the first time elected a president, Abraham Lincoln, from the new Republican party which was uncompromisingly against slavery. The deep South, confident that the end of slavery would result in the death of its whole way of life, moved immediately toward secession. South Carolina led the way out of the Union, soon to be followed by the more moderate middle South, including Virginia which quickly produced the leaders of the new confederacy, a fact symbolized when the Capital of the Confederacy moved from Montgomery to Richmond. With seeming inevitability came war, Emancipation, Southern defeat, and the bitter days of reconstruction. White Southerners who indelibly identified the Republican Party with the "evils of Abraham Lincoln and the carpet-baggers," endured this oppression for eleven years with barely suppressed hostility. With the election of 1876 the chance came to regain regional independence. The Republicans nominated Rutherford B. Hayes, the governor of Ohio to run against Samuel J. Tilden, the Democratic governor of New York. Ulysses S. Grant's administration was rocked by corruption and Tilden appeared to have the advantage, even though the Democrats were still widely regarded as soft on the war and thus as traitors to the Union. Tilden won the popular election by over 250,000 votes, but the returns in three southern states: Florida, South Carolina and Louisiana, were disputed. The Senate appointed a 15 person committee consisting of 5 congressmen, 5 senators and 5 Supreme Court justices to solve the controversy. After some skirmishing and in deference to the Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, the committee's balance was 8 Republicans and 7 Democrats, greatly enhancing Hayes chances of victory. Southern leaders saw this as the opportunity they had been seeking and seized it. Dangling their votes before Hayes, they extracted from him the promise to end reconstruction. He agreed and the disputes in all three states were decided in Hayes' favor by a party-line vote, making him the president-elect by a 185-184 Electoral College margin. In that moment the white South regained its power, reconstituted slavery as legal segregation, and used poll taxes and voter intimidation to create a 'manageable electorate.' Blacks were effectively disenfranchised and the evangelical church approved these efforts, while the white South settled into being solidly Democratic. Religiously blessed, racial politics was born and it was destined to be unchallenged through World War II.

I was born into that kind of South. Republicans frequently declined even to nominate candidates for statewide offices since they had no chance of winning. The only contested elections were in the primaries in which only shades of differences separated the Democratic candidates. By and large they all favored segregation, fought legalized alcohol, opposed labor unions and regularly combined patriotism with religious zeal. It was a winning combination.

The South cultivated national power in two ways. First, Southern politicians tended, once elected, to remain in office for the balance of their active lives, using seniority to achieve chairmanships of key committees, thus effectively dominating both legislative branches of government. Operating under Senate rules they used the filibuster to prevent passage of any law detrimental to their regional self-interest.

Second, as time passed and the scars of war faded, the South was rewarded for its faithfulness to the Democratic Party. In the 20 elections between 1928 and 2004 a Southern or border state vice president adorned the Democratic ticket 14 times. In 5 other elections a Southerner headed the ticket, Carter and Clinton twice and Gore once. The South had clearly become a political force, albeit a minority one. Presaging cracks in that political base, however, began to appear as early as 1928.

In that year the Democrats nominated the governor of New York, Al Smith, a Roman Catholic, favoring legalized alcohol. Those views were anathema to the Protestant South, so despite putting Senator Joseph T. Robinson of Arkansas on his ticket, Smith lost Florida, Tennessee, Texas, North Carolina, Virginia and the election to Republican Herbert Hoover. This was the first indication that the combination of race with religion would become a driving force in the South. However, the Hoover depression soon sent the South scurrying back to the Democrats through both the Roosevelt years and the first part of the Truman presidency.

World War II was the great catalyst for change in this country, particularly in the South. Black troops, drafted along with all other citizens, served with distinction, albeit in segregated units and normally under white command. That experience, however, gave these African Americans a much larger view of the world and they returned home no longer willing to be submissive to oppression and segregation. American politics would never be the same.

In the 1948 Democratic Convention the racial politics of the Democratic South became obvious. Reflecting the rising number of black voters in the North, the mayor of Minneapolis, Hubert Humphrey, fought successfully to place a pro civil rights plank into their national platform. Southern delegates led by Democrat Strom Thurmond, Governor of South Carolina, walked out and organized their own 'Dixiecrat' party, which nominated Thurmond for president. He carried 4 states in a no longer solid South. In 1952 and 1956 Dwight Eisenhower, a Kansas military hero, received Southern support, until he appointed Earl Warren to be Chief Justice, and Warren used that office to gain a unanimous decision outlawing segregation in 1954. Eisenhower's later use of Federal troops to enforce the Court's decision in Little Rock, Arkansas, was understood throughout the South as a Federal invasion, cooling their Republican flirtation.

Racial politics underpinned by evangelical religion began to dwarf all other Southern issues. The governor of Alabama, George Wallace became the voice of this movement, first by defying Federal power to desegregate white schools in "the sovereign state of Alabama," and then by reviving 'Dixiecrat' power in his own presidential bids as the "States Rights" candidate.

Wallace never won but Republican leaders went to school on his ability to mine deep wells of Southern racial resentment. In 1964 Barry Goldwater, in his quest for the presidency, adopted 'States Rights' as his theme and began to win Southern supporters. It was not racist politics, Goldwater said, it was rather a reflection of the traditional Republican values that combined military strength with lower taxes and smaller government. The southern white voter, however, read between the lines and suddenly the Republican Party emerged as a vehicle for expressing Southern grievances against federally forced desegregation. Goldwater lost but he carried a majority of the states in the old South. A political realignment was clearly underway.

Armed with a national mandate by his victory over Goldwater, Lyndon Johnson did two things that would seal the fate of the Democratic Party in the South, as Johnson himself said, for "at least 50 years." One was the passage of the Voter Rights Act of 1965 removing all barriers from black voters and secondly appointing to the Supreme Court Thurgood Marshall, the black lawyer who had argued the desegregation case before that court in 1954. These actions created a new and thus far, a lasting marriage between Southern white voters and the Republican Party.

In 1968 Richard Nixon adopted Goldwater's Southern strategy and rode it to a narrow victory over the Democrats. Inside America the pressure from black voters demanding equality kept rising while the divisions over the Vietnam War were becoming intense. Nixon maneuvered skillfully to make the Republican Party the party of law and order against racially tinged civil unrest, and the party of patriotism against draft dodgers and flag burners. He squeezed the Democrats into the public perception of being pro black and anti-American. With George McGovern carrying their banner in 1972 Nixon's winning majority was massive. In the South Democrats like Phil Gramm of Texas and Richard Shelby of Alabama saw the handwriting on the wall, and following the example of Strom Thurmond, began switching parties. Ambitious former Democrats began to run as Republicans. Mills Godwin was the Democratic governor of Virginia in 1965, and the Republican governor in 1973. As the stigma of the Civil War and reconstruction died, Republicans received huge majorities of the South's white vote, while the Democrats became the party of Southern blacks. Race talk began to be covered over with piety and code words like 'family values' and 'strict constructionist.' That was deemed to put a more acceptable face on racism. It was, however, still the dominant underlying theme of Southern politics. "We are not anti-black," went the spin. "We are pro-family, pro-God, and pro- Bible."

Next these white evangelicals discovered allies in the Southern black church on the issue of homosexuality about which the literal Bible could still be quoted, blissfully forgetting that they once quoted the Bible against these same black Christians to justify segregation. The homophobia in official Roman Catholic proclamations also opened a door to a heretofore unheard of Protestant/Roman Catholic alliance. Evangelicals now began to champion the anti-abortion position of Roman Catholicism as just another way to protect "family values," and to extend nationally the new consensus of religion and conservative politics. Karl Rove and George W. Bush saw the opening and exploited it politically. The rest is history.

Next week I will conclude this series by looking at this movement internally.

-- John Shelby Spong



-- 
Dick Kroeger