Mitt Romney failed in his bid to win the White House back for Republicans, but the biggest losers in Tuesday’s voting may be Christian conservatives who put everything they had into denying President Obama a second term and battling other threats to their agenda.
Instead of the promised victories, the religious right encountered defeat at almost every turn. Not only did Obama win convincingly, but Democrats held onto the Senate – and the power to confirm judges – and Wisconsin elected the nation’s first openly gay senator, Tammy Baldwin.
Meanwhile, Republican senate candidates Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock went down to unanticipated defeat in large part because of their strongly anti-abortion views, and an effort in Florida to restrict abortion failed. For the first time ever, same-sex marriage proponents won on ballots in four out of four states, while marijuana for recreational use was legalized in two out of three states where the question was on the ballot.
Even Michele Bachmann, an icon among Christian conservatives, barely held onto her House seat in Minnesota while Tea Party favorite Allen West lost his congressional district in Florida.
“Evangelical Christians must see the 2012 election as a catastrophe for crucial moral concerns,” R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, wrote in a sobering post-mortem.
“DISASTER,” David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network wrote on his blog. He then amended his lament to read: “COLOSSAL DISASTER.”
Yet as bad as the results were for social conservatives, they may now face an equally difficult fight as they try to defend their agenda. Sifting through the electoral rubble, some conservatives and GOP leaders argue that the party’s positions and presentation on issues like gay marriage and abortion rights turn off more voters than they attract.
This internal battle is in many respects the natural aftermath of a painful political loss, and Republicans are already involved in a process of soul-searching — and back-biting — that will likely continue for some time as the GOP tries to figure out how it can find a winning formula.
But this time around, more than in previous election cycles, Christian conservatives are a particularly large target, and they are feeling especially exposed to criticism.
Even before the votes were counted, for example, Romney’s shift to the center – he studiously downplayed social issues like gay rights and abortion in the last month of the campaign – coincided with a surge in the polls and bolstered arguments that the party should soft-pedal traditional sexual morality in order to win elections and promote economic conservatism.
As Jennifer Rubin, a conservative columnist who backed Romney, wrote Wednesday in The Washington Post, “the issue of gay marriage is a generational one, a battle that social conservatives have lost … The American people have changed their minds on the issue and fighting this one is political flat-earthism.”
Christian conservatives are not about to accept that view, however, and in the hours after Romney’s defeat they seemed to take two main tacks in rebuttal.
One was to double-down on their agenda by pinning the blame on Romney and his campaign for not stressing social issues much more forcefully.
“Mitt Romney is a good man, but let’s just be honest – we Republicans nominated the most liberal Republican nominee in history,” said Rep. Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican who joined a Wednesday morning webcast with Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council.
Jordan said that doubts about Romney’s convictions, as well as his campaign’s modulation near the end, disappointed values voters and doomed the ticket.
Marjorie Dannenfelser, head of the Susan B. Anthony List, a leading anti-abortion lobby, agreed.
“What was presented as discipline by the Romney campaign by staying on one message – the economy – was a strategic error that resulted in a winning margin of pro-life votes being left on the table,” Dannenfelser said. “Victory was handed to the opponent.”
The other tack that emerged, however, was to concede that Christian conservatives may need to change the tone if not the substance of their message in order to appeal to voters who are increasingly non-male, non-white and even non-Christian. The electorate today is increasingly Latino, and younger, and both those groups are turned off by anything that smacks of righteous moralizing.
“No party can win if it is seen as heartless,” said Mohler. “No party can win if it appeals only to white and older Americans. No party can win if it looks more like the way to the past than the way to the future.”
Indeed, exit polls indicated that evangelicals turned out more strongly for Romney (or against Obama) than they had for any other Republican in history – but that nearly 80 percent margin was still not enough in raw numbers to put the GOP ticket over the top.
“My message really today is we have more work to do to become more diverse, but the party has to start building bridges and practicing the politics of addition to bring more people in,” Ralph Reed, head of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, said at a morning-after briefing in Washington.
“My corollary message,” he added, “is there is no inherent conflict between those folks coming in and us. In most cases there's a great deal of commonality.”
But in the wake of Tuesday's defeat, that's a message that Christian conservatives are going to have to sell to the Republican Party itself before they can make it to the general public.
Gone, and never coming back. I’ve been predicting for years upon years that this day would come as generations shifted so that the bulk of adults would not have been alive during Red Scares, the Cold War, and the (barf) “Good Ol’ Days” of a racist, segregated, and repressive America of the mid 20th century.
Guess what? A religious movement obsessed with what people are doing in their private lives and homes, and not obsessed with the growing scandal and abuse in their own churches, is fading away into history, to be placed alongside movements like Manifest Destiny, Segregated Schools and Drinking Fountains, and Women Should Wear Long Dresses and Not Vote.
In addition to losing members from old age and not getting much in the way of fresh young blood, the Christian Right is now a liability to the GOP, and the GOP is going to move left with America on social issues. The Right has finally and truly lost the battle of women’s choice, gay marriage, and (next in the crosshairs) evolution in schools and climate change.
This election was a gain for people who believe in scientific fact, who want laws to apply to everyone equally, and for those whose motivating value is respect for the dignity of all people — not just white, Christian, straight, middle class Americans. And this can only be a good thing for the spiritual, mental, and economic health of our nation. Yay!
Ummmm did you read the polls? They lost but not by landslide margins on the social stuff. This is a divided country, I think your analysis is way to loose with the results.
Not so. But Halo 4 is calling to me more than looking up statistics are calling to me. And the trendlines on votes for gay marriage initiatives and gay marriage-supporting candidates past is extremely telling. This is the beginning of something that’s going to build and build every year for the next two decades(ish).
The true mission of Christ’s church has never been to take over the world, or even countries. It has been to unashamedly spread the gospel message of Jesus Christ to every nation. That gospel begins with humanities utter depravity and inability to reach God in any way, and then the grace and mercy of Jesus Christ to come and die to pay the price for our vile sinful souls, and His resurrection to shout the victory for all who would come to Him. The election was not a gauge of one man or the other’s character but a gauge of the character of our country, and it’s been found extremely shallow, selfish, and the worst part, ungodly. I have become convinced by looking at all the results, that God has abandoned our country. Not true believers, but our country as a political entity. All the social indicators were on a slow but steady increase until the early 1960’s when the supreme (in name only) court began to oust God from the public domain (as if they could). The Almighty God is loving and extremely patient but I believe we are seeing the results of our 50 year rebellion against Him. I think it’s sad that many Christian leaders feel so discouraged by not being able to take control of the government. It is entirely corrupted and we would be much better served by having pulpits filled with men of courage and aflame with the righteousness and humility of Christ. Instead many of them are peddling the same message that came from Sodom and Gomorrah. It is time for true believers in the Lord Jesus Christ to get serious with God and build their faith by prayer and study of the Word for the times to come. We are going to have an opportunity to stand for Him, possibly to the death.
@Dennis
Riiiight… I’ll be waiting on that fire and brimstone to come raining down on Washington, California, and New York. (Leaving the Midwest intact, I assume.)
The fact is, millions of people are getting along just fine in life without a strict religious code. And if you want to practice your life with sincere belief and strict religious practice — go for it! I’d defend your right to do that to the death. If that right was in peril, I’d defend it just as hard as I defended gay marriage. Really!
What America is rejecting is the notion that strictly religious people have the right to impose their religious beliefs on everyone else. It worked for a long time, but that ship is running out of steam, and we saw that quite clearly on election day.
They are rejecting not what religious people say, but what God has said from the day that He started speaking to mankind. And I’m not for Republicans or conservatives in this. Many of them are sell-outs to money and all the rest, just not publically. I’m not for imposing anything, just commenting on what I see. America in the majority is standing for homosexuality, drunkeness, freedom to abuse drugs, gambling (instant profit based on the pain and suffering of the losers), debt and sexual promiscuity. Have I missed anything? Things to be proud of? The implosion of societies of men has been documented throughout man’s history, over 500 of them, and we are just following the pattern. I believe that we will see some of the most collosal upheavals in society in the next 4 years than have been seen possibly in history.