From the WSJ Opinion Archives
HOUSES OF WORSHIP
Ballots and Believers
To get church-goers to vote may require more than prayer.
The now famous "527" independent-expenditure groups, named after the section of the IRS code that governs them, have become the bête noire of this year's presidential campaign. Hardly anyone has praise for the negative campaigning of either the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, challenging John Kerry's Vietnam record, or the MoveOn.org Web site, which has run ads comparing President Bush to Hitler.
But at least one independent-expenditure group claims to be completely positive in its approach and outlook. Let Freedom Ring, based in suburban Philadelphia, isn't spending anything to attack Sen. Kerry. Instead it is reaching out to people of faith to tout the record of President Bush. "We want to counteract the mudslinging that turns many Christians off of the political process," says Colin Hanna, its president. "Religious conservatives are a unique kind of 'swing voter' in that they don't swing between Bush and Kerry, but between Bush and not voting."
To further separate itself from 527 groups, Let Freedom Ring was formed as a 501c4, a nonprofit designation that allows groups to spend up to 49% of their donations on political activity without having to disclose contributors. It is attracting wealthy Christians who don't want to be seen as political but who are willing to support positive messages. Still, the group is agreeing to voluntarily disclose the names of contributors who finance any political TV ads they run.
The group's other projects include voter-registration drives, e-mail campaigns and a film that focuses on how the religious faith of President Bush, GOP Sen. Rick Santorum and Democratic Sen. Zell Miller developed. It held a contest in which it selected 10 sample TV and radio ads out of nearly 100 submitted for possible production and airing in 12 battleground states. Most of this year's hotly contested states are in the heartland--from Ohio to Missouri--and are more religious than the country as a whole.
Let Freedom Ring was launched with more than $1 million in seed money from Dr. Jack Templeton, a retired pediatric surgeon. His father is John Templeton, the prominent money manager who set up a prize in 1972 to focus attention on innovators in religion and science. (Winners of the prize, worth more than $1 million, have included Mother Teresa, the Rev. Billy Graham and Prison Fellowship leader Charles Colson.) So far, the senior Mr. Templeton has refrained from contributing to Let Freedom Ring, but Mr. Hanna says that he is confident the group will eventually raise between $5 million and $10 million to finance voter-registration drives, grass-roots organizing and TV commercials in 12 targeted states, including Pennsylvania and Ohio.
Mr. Hanna says that he became sensitive to the intersection of religion and politics while serving as a county commissioner in suburban Chester County, outside Philadelphia. In 2001, he and his colleagues were sued in litigation supported by the ACLU for refusing to remove a bronze plaque containing the full text of the 10 Commandments that had hung on the outside wall of the Chester County Courthouse since 1920.
The lawsuit alleged that the plaque was a violation of the First Amendment. In 2002, the county commissioners lost in federal district court, and for the first time in American history a judge ordered a religious plaque to be covered up. It remained shrouded for the next 16 months until the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously reversed the lower-court ruling. The plaque remains on the courthouse wall. "I learned both how hostile many elites are to religion and also how supportive average people were of our traditions," Mr. Hanna says.
He therefore isn't surprised that Let Freedom Ring has strong critics who view it as a religious stalking horse for the Bush campaign. "Some forces want the presidential race to wind up in a round of Bible 'Jeopardy' in late October," says Barry Lynn, director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. "This is one more massively funded effort to achieve Karl Rove's stated goal of getting three [million] to four million more Christian evangelical voters to the polls."
Actually, the current controversy involving independent-expenditure groups is in part a healthy clash of moral views. Mr. Templeton makes no secret of his strong faith. His counterpart, George Soros, is enthusiastically secular in his outlook and has bankrolled not only MoveOn.org but ballot measures to decriminalize drugs. It's not that long ago that few would have thought religion would play the kind of strong role it is playing in this year's presidential race, but it now appears that the two are destined to mix--if not in the formation of policy, then on the campaign trail.
Mr. Fund is author of "Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy," just out from Encounter Books and available from the OpinionJournal bookstore.
