It was a mixed bag for the religious right on Election Day.
Voters aligned with the movement turned out at the polls in force, helping to re-elect a Republican majority in Congress.
But the results proved that their movement is hardly the political juggernaut it seemed after the upheaval of 1994.
The religious right lost several of its most loyal foot soldiers in the House of Representatives, gained ground in the Senate, lost a key ballot initiative in Colorado and saw its presidential candidate, Bob Dole, go down in defeat after distancing himself from religious conservatives and their core issues.
Given the mixed results, most analysts say, religious conservatives cannot claim that the election constituted an affirmation of their agenda.
But neither was it a repudiation.
Still, ideological opponents of the religious right, which includes most of the organized Jewish community, put a positive spin on the election returns.
“On the whole, they fared much worse than they did well,” said Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism.
“Despite all their efforts, their core issues of abortion, school prayer, government funding of religious institutions, went nowhere in this campaign. Clearly they do not enjoy the support of the American electorate on those issues.”
“Their bark was bigger than their bite,” agreed Jill Hanauer, executive director of the Interfaith Alliance, a Washington-based coalition of mainline Protestant, Roman Catholic and Jewish activists.
“They were effective in some races, but people were so fearful and thought they were going to be the dominating force in elections from the state legislature to the White House, and they weren’t.”
The Christian Coalition had a different take, claiming success in electing more conservative lawmakers who will support what it calls its “pro-life, pro- family” agenda.
“Conservative evangelicals were the fire wall that prevented a Bob Dole defeat from mushrooming into a meltdown all the way down the ballot,” Ralph Reed, the coalition’s executive director, said in a statement after the elections.
Leaders of the Christian Coalition had written off Dole long before last week’s votes were tabulated, shifting their focus instead toward local races and retaining Republican majorities in Congress.
To that end, they launched a major effort to mobilize voters, distributing 46 million voter guides to 125,000 churches on the Sunday before the election.
Their efforts, most analysts agree, gave a boost to conservative lawmakers in several close races across the country.
“For the first time in 69 years, a Republican Congress has been re-elected, and it would never have happened without conservative people of faith who provided the margin of victory,” Reed said.
The Christian Coalition claims that self-described born-again Christians who attend church frequently accounted for 29 percent of the voting public, based on a poll the group commissioned.
Other polling put the number of voters aligned with the religious right considerably lower.
According to a survey by Voter News Service, a consortium of six major news organizations that provides exit-poll information, about 16 percent of voters identified themselves as members of the religious right.
The outcome in congressional races across the country, meanwhile, presented a mixed picture.
Twelve of the 70 Republican freshmen elected to the House in the religious right-backed sweep of 1994 were defeated, as were another five GOP incumbents.
Moreover, half of the defeated Republican House lawmakers were on the Christian Coalition’s A-list and had been targeted for defeat by opponents of the religious right.
With several races still undecided, at least eight House members who had received 100 percent ratings from the Christian Coalition have so far been rebuffed by voters.
Republicans Bill Baker and Andrea Seastrand of California, David Funderburk and Fred Heineman of North Carolina and Linda Smith and Randy Tate of Washington all went down in defeat. Reps. Daniel Frisa (R-N.Y.) and Frank Cremeans (R- Ohio) also lost their races.
Meanwhile, Rep. Jon Fox (R-Pa.), the only Jewish Republican freshman and a favorite of religious conservatives, clung to a 10-vote lead this week, pending a recount.
In addition, Republican gubernatorial candidates with close ties to the religious right were trounced in Washington state and New Hampshire.
In the Senate, meanwhile, Republicans boosted their numbers from 53 to 55 by winning three open seats in the South and Midwest, the stronghold of religious and social conservatives.
Indeed, the addition to the Senate of freshman Republicans such as Sam Brownback of Kansas and Jeff Sessions of Alabama will give the Senate a much more conservative face.
“We are almost certainly in for a series of bruising ideological battles,” said Carole Shields, president of People For the American Way, a group that monitors the religious right’s involvement in electoral politics.
“For the past two years, the Senate has been the moderating force on a House sometimes out of control, but no longer.”
Saperstein of the Religious Action Center added that the loss of “moderate consensus builders” in the Senate means that it will be tougher for the Jewish community to defeat legislative proposals advanced by the religious right.
Meanwhile, the religious right agenda was dealt a major setback in Colorado, where voters defeated a ballot measure that would have enshrined in the state constitution the “inalienable right” of parents to “direct and control the upbringing, education, values and discipline of their children.”
Opponents, including Jewish groups, claimed the initiative would have made it harder to prosecute child abuse cases while also posing a threat to sex education, controversial books in school libraries and access to abortion information.
Religious conservatives had been looking to Colorado as a bellwether and hoped to advance similar initiatives across the country.
Despite key electoral defeats, the religious right remains a potent political force.
Reed has declared that religious conservatives will be a permanent fixture on the American political landscape, and few dispute that assertion.
The successes of religious right candidates in elections at the local and state levels, moreover, portend a growing political presence for religious conservatives in years to come.
Already looking ahead to the 2000 presidential race, Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson has vowed that his group will not again allow itself to become “peripheral” in the presidential race.
“We’re not going to sit by as good soldiers and take whatever is given us,” Robertson told The New York Times last week, referring to Dole’s failed presidential bid and his abandonment of the religious conservative agenda.
Robertson’s frustration, echoed by others on the religious right, concerns some in the Jewish community.
Murray Friedman, who heads the Myer and Rosaline Feinstein Center for American Jewish history at Temple University in Philadelphia, believes that frustration with the religious right’s electoral losses, particularly at the presidential level, could give way to outright anger among the movement’s more extreme elements.
Jews should be wary of such a phenomenon because the anger “might have some unfortunate anti-Jewish overtones,” Friedman said, noting that Pat Buchanan, an icon to many on the religious right, has scarcely cloaked his hostility toward Jews and Israel.
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