Stoking The Religious Divide

The American Prospect, May, 2005

In the religious war now being waged by the Republican Party, battles are designed not to be won but to mobilize troops for larger battles to come. The ultimate goal is not to dismantle the wall between church and state, although this would be a by-product. It is to bring the majority of Americans who consider themselves religious into the Republican Party, and thereby secure GOP dominance for generations to come.

Republicans could not have seriously believed that their eleventh-hour legislation to "save" Terri Schiavo would be upheld by the courts. The Schiavo law was an unprecedented and blatant usurpation of judicial authority. But their goal wasn’t to end up with that law or even to keep a Terri Schiavo alive. It was to further energize and mobilize the religious right.

Right-wing cable television and talk radio used the case to rant against judicial “elites” who, supposedly in league with America’s other cultural elites, were imposing their own immoral values on good God-fearing Americans. “The Schiavo case dramatized the need to do something to restrain the judiciary,” said Richard Lessner, executive director of the American Conservative Union. “So when we get to the coming battles over judicial nominees in the Senate, perhaps the public will be somewhat more engaged, in realizing what’s at stake. In this case, literally life and death.”

It’s a straight battle line from Schiavo to the current fight over Bush’s nominees to the appellate courts, to the biggest battle of them all, which will be over the next Supreme Court. But winning these battles is not the main point of staging them. It’s to further inflame passions of the religious right and to bring other religious Americans to the cause.

When House Majority Leader Tom DeLay accused the courts of “running amok” for overturning the Schiavo law, it wasn’t to help his colleagues in the Senate summon enough votes for a rule change to end the filibuster and clear the way for Bush’s judicial nominees. Notably, the forum he chose was a conference called “Confronting the Judicial War on Faith,” sponsored by religious conservatives.

Nor was Texas Republican Senator John Cornyn trawlinig for additional Republican votes when he opined days later on the Senate floor that recent courthouse shootings might be motivated by distress about judges who “are making political decisions and yet are unaccountable to the public.” If anything, DeLay’s and Cornyn’s outbursts have made it harder for Senate Republicans to get the votes they need.

But Bill Frist and other Senate Republicans aren't really aiming to change the filibuster rule. Frist tipped his hand a few days ago when he agreed to join a group of prominent Christian conservatives in a telecast charging Democrats with being "against people of faith" for blocking Bush's nominees. His objective isn't to change Senate rules. It’s to change American politics.

To the Republican leadership, fights over Bush’s judicial nominees aren’t contests over the nominees themselves. They’re steps toward a larger war. After all, blocking judicial nominees is old sport. During the six years Republicans controlled the Senate when Bill Clinton was president, they stalled sixty of his nominees – 45 percent of all the names Clinton sent there. To date, Democrats have blocked only ten of Bush’s, while forty two Bush nominees have been confirmed. Bush resubmitted all but three who withdrew their names, and used a recess to give William Pryor a temporary seat on the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Why all the fuss, then? Republicans are using these fights to stoke anger against America’s supposed “secular elite.” That most of Bush’s blocked nominees are avowed opponents of Roe v. Wade, or against homosexuality and stem-cell research, or in favor of religious displays in public places are the central realities in this drama. It’s no accident that Judge Pryor, Bush’s sole recess appointment to the bench, denounced Roe as “the worst abomination of constitutional law in our history.”

All this is mere warm-up for Supreme Court confirmation fights that will consume months if not years of the remaining Bush administration. Even here, the Republican goal is not so much to win a specific contest as to use these battles to drive the war – a war designed to divide the nation between religious and secular, and force Americans to define themselves as one or the other. Republicans think this new fault line in American politics will systematically favor the GOP, just as the old fault line, running along economic lines, favored Democrats.

They may well succeed, but it’s a dangerous gamble. Most Americans consider themselves religious, to be sure, but when it comes to politics they are decidedly secular. They don't want politics to be dominated by religious belief. If polls are to be believed, most thought it wrong for Congress and the President to intrude in the Schiavo case, most don’t want to get rid of the filibuster, and most want an independent judiciary. In a recent Gallop poll, respondents by a margin of more than two to one thought that the “religious right” had too much influence in the Bush administration. Rather than secure the Republican Party's dominance, using religion to divide Americans may marginalize the GOP for generations.