THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW
Who Would Jesus Pick?
The religious right's would-be kingmaker talks about the presidential candidates.
WASHINGTON--Rudy Giuliani didn't score many points with social conservatives last week when he issued this impassioned endorsement of the Supreme Court's decision to uphold a federal ban on "partial-birth" abortion: "I agree with it." He certainly didn't win over Richard Land, who has said he would never vote for Mr. Giuliani. When people ask the Southern Baptist Convention's representative in Washington why the former New York mayor's promise to appoint strict constructionist judges if he's elected president isn't enough, Mr. Land replies: "If he'll lie to two wives, what makes you think he wouldn't lie to you?"
Mr. Land might, on the other hand, vote for Mitt Romney. He says that evangelical voters may be able to get over their problems with a Mormon. "Charitably speaking," Mr. Land says, "they would call [Mormonism] the fourth Abrahamic religion. When they're less charitable, they would call it a cult." And they might even let him off the hook for his flip-flops on the social issues. "A lot of people in this country who are pro-life didn't used to be."
Mr. Land says that reporters have misunderstood what it means that Mr. Romney has changed his mind. "Why does the liberal media call it a flip-flop? Because they believe in the moral correctness of their pro-choice position. The only reason someone would move from the morally correct position, as they perceive it, to the morally incorrect position is because of political expediency. But religious conservatives believe that their position is the morally correct position. So they don't see this as a flip-flop. They see this as a journey . . . as growth."
Richard Land is a man waiting to be courted, and on behalf of religious conservatives he is playing hard to get. He wants "to make certain that we never become as taken for granted by the Republican Party as African-Americans have been taken for granted by the Democratic Party." As the president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, Mr. Land represents the political concerns of the largest Protestant denomination in the country. But to look at the current field of front-runners in the Republican presidential primary, one might wonder just how seriously those concerns are being taken. Indeed, for all the talk on the left about how the religious right has taken over America, there is little indication the religious right even controls the Republican Party.
I sat down with Mr. Land--a round man with big rings on his fingers and a receding hairline--at the commission's offices in a row house a few blocks from Capitol Hill. His booming Texas drawl has been a staple of the Washington political scene for almost two decades. When he leans forward, you can see his "Inauguration 2005" cuff links. (He has a pair from the last six inaugurals, and refers to himself as the "Imelda Marcos of cuff links.") Before coming to his current job, he was a theology professor and administrator at a small evangelical college in Dallas. But Mr. Land is not some small-time preacher trying to make a dent in the big city. With a bachelor's degree from Princeton and a doctorate of philosophy from Oxford, he has often been credited with providing the intellectual heft behind the religious right's political strategy.
I wanted to find out whether Mr. Land and the evangelicals he represents are at all disheartened with the choices they will likely face at the ballot box in 2008.
To review, we have Rudy Giuliani, a twice divorced, pro-choice, supporter of civil unions; Mitt Romney, a Mormon who as recently as his 1994 Senate campaign against liberal icon Sen. Ted Kennedy was pro-choice and wishy-washy on gay marriage; John McCain, who voted against the gay marriage amendment and who crafted the campaign finance laws that have done much to damage the anti-abortion efforts of religious conservatives; or perhaps Fred Thompson, who supported McCain-Feingold and says that gay marriage is a state issue.
Mr. Land remains oddly upbeat, particularly about Mr. Thompson, the possibility of whose candidacy he finds "tantalizing." But he acknowledges the reality of his constituency's situation: "Evangelicals would be very happy if Mike Huckabee or Sam Brownback or Duncan Hunter were the nominee, but the problem with those three guys is they don't give any indication they can win." And he adds, "With Hillary Clinton looming on the horizon, electability is a very important issue."
At the very least, the evangelical influence in the Republican primary will be diluted, with some religious conservatives thinking ahead to the general election and others going for the purest representative of their values. It is noteworthy that even among the unelectable candidates, evangelicals can't make up their minds between a free-trade, open-immigration candidate like Sen. Brownback and a closed-borders protectionist like Rep. Hunter.
Mitt Romney is still a good possibility, but Mr. Land is waiting to see if the former Massachusetts governor will take his advice and give a major address on the way his faith influences his politics (à la JFK's 1960 speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association on his Catholicism).
But it seems there is just about nothing Rudy Giuliani could do to change Mr. Land's mind about his candidacy. "Three is one too many spouses for most evangelicals," he says. But by itself, that isn't the problem--the divorce rate among evangelicals is just as high as that of the general population. And Mr. Land doesn't think evangelicals would fault John McCain or Fred Thompson for their divorces. What bothers Mr. Land is the "circumstances of [Mr. Giuliani's] divorce and the fact that there is more than one of them." It's not exactly a distinction the Bible makes, as Mr. Land no doubt knows, but he may be right about how much spouse-hopping evangelicals will tolerate.
Which is also, incidentally, why Mr. Land wouldn't vote for Newt Gingrich: "I am not a big enough hypocrite to have made character an issue with Bill Clinton and turn around and vote for men who broke their oaths to their wives." Having been in his current position since 1988, Mr. Land has had more than enough opportunity to see Mr. Gingrich up close, and he has not been impressed: "When he was speaker, when they went into conference to negotiate, it was always our issues that got negotiated away and his economic issues that didn't."
Mr. Land suggests that Mr. Gingrich was good at paying lip service to evangelicals: "He always understood how important social conservatives were to the coalition." But Mr. Land believes that many of them have learned their lesson: "I think most evangelicals still don't trust him."
Trust will be the most important issue for Mr. Giuliani as well. While he has not changed his social positions to suit evangelicals, he has promised to appoint original-intent judges to the Supreme Court--the kind who might overturn Roe v. Wade and who would be unwilling to impose gay marriage on a populace that hadn't voted for it. But Mr. Land is skeptical.
If Mr. Giuliani does somehow win the nomination, Mr. Land predicts that "you will see a drop in evangelical participation in the presidential election and in races below that." Sounding more like a preacher warning of a coming plague, Mr. Land says, "even if the alternative is Hillary," a lot of evangelicals will stay home.
Returning to his political wonk persona, Mr. Land notes that in 2006, about a quarter of voters identified as white evangelicals, and 70% of them voted for Republicans. The three quarters who didn't identify as white evangelicals voted 61-37 for Democrats. Which means, according to Mr. Land, "that Republicans can't win elections just with evangelicals, but without them, Republicans face a loss of apocalyptic proportions."
It may not signal the End Times, but just about any candidate will probably be a come-down for religious conservatives after George W. Bush. That the president has a "special relationship with evangelicals" has become a sort of cliché in religious circles. But as far as Mr. Land is concerned, the president owes as much to evangelicals as they owe to him. Mr. Land is insistent that evangelicals voting against gay marriage in Ohio gave Mr. Bush the edge in that state, and, as a result, in the 2004 election. "The marriage amendment ran 300,000 votes ahead of Bush in Ohio," says the theologian who always has poll numbers close at hand.
Mr. Land has been trying to convince the White House, particularly Karl Rove, that gay marriage will continue to energize voters, and that the president and other Republicans should be campaigning for a constitutional amendment more enthusiastically. But he's had little luck. And perhaps with good reason. Younger evangelicals are not nearly as passionate about the issue as older ones.
Despite his disappointment on the gay marriage issue, Mr. Land (and his constituency) has been enormously pleased with "W." He calls the president's appointments to the Supreme Court and the federal bench "24-carat." And evangelical support for the war in Iraq is still higher than among most Americans. "They want to win," says Mr. Land, who believes there is a strong "Wilsonian streak" in the evangelical population: "They want Iraq to become a stable democracy and they're not willing to give up yet."
Oddly, strong evangelical support for the war might become a critical problem for Mr. Land in the coming months. As he throws his weight around in the Republican primaries, trying to ensure a socially conservative candidate comes out on top, Mr. Land also knows the bottom line. Mrs. Clinton has announced that if she becomes president, the troops will be pulled out of Iraq within 90 days. To avoid that outcome, evangelical voters in this country might be willing to tolerate just about anything.
Ms. Riley is The Wall Street Journal's deputy Taste editor.
