"It's not that we're pushing our morals," says Eron Powers, 25, from Brighton. People see "we need some sort of (moral) basis."The Values Agenda
Moral issues spark push to alter society
Since Bush's re-election, more people have become vocal about their positions.
WASHINGTON -- Religious conservatives, who voted their values in the last election and discovered their power, aren't planning to stop with re-electing a devout Christian in the White House and passing nearly a dozen same-sex marriage bans across the states.
They hope to continue to make a mark on public policy at all levels of government, and there are plenty of signs their clout has already taken on deeper dimensions: They're even influencing the parlance of political leaders who disagree with them on most issues.
Their true political strength is hard to gauge, but they want their values and morality more broadly reflected in a wide swath of society, with families, teachers, entertainers, judges and even foreign policy-makers. And they've prompted a broader debate about the role that religion should play in the public square.
For folks like Fred Zydeck of Orchard Lake, it's overdue. The retired veterinarian says he couldn't even get his hair cut without signs that God has been extricated from public life.
His hairdresser recounted that she had just gone to the annual holiday event at her daughter's public school, but instead of calling it the "Christmas pageant" they were now calling it the "winter pageant" and there were no songs that referred to the Christian holiday.
"In our country, the pendulum swings, and it swung too far to the anti-God side," said Zydeck, a Roman Catholic who voted for Bush. "The pendulum is going to start swinging back. They're going to say, hey, let's be reasonable about this."
Just what exactly counts as reasonable is a thorny issue, and millions of people who count themselves as religious don't subscribe to the evangelical movement.
"Our nation's laws must be rooted in constitutional values and reasoned analysis, not someone's personal take on scripture," says the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
Adds Willie Scott, 65, a member of the Genesis Lutheran Church in Detroit: "Many church people, particularly those on the right, are abusing their faith for political gain, and I mean that sincerely without trying to knock anybody maliciously. What I hear is the church's position without hearing who we are, the core of us, as a church. To me, the source of your guidance should be Christ."
Most Americans may not actively get involved in battles over whether "In God We Trust" should be on the dollar bill, "one nation, under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance and the Ten Commandments on courthouse walls.
But a vocal group of folks wants families to be headed by a husband and a wife, pregnancies to end with the birth of a child and public school teachers to instruct kids that the universe was created by God. They are fed up with Super Bowl Sunday "wardrobe malfunctions" and other Hollywood excesses. And they want bureaucrats and politicians in cities, statehouses and the halls of Congress to step in and help re-assert morality in public discourse.
"People say you can't legislate morality," says the Rev. Marvin Winans, the Pentecostal pastor of the 3,000-member Perfecting Church in Detroit, who has met several times with Bush at the White House. "But you can legislate laws that reflect morality. To say the church needs to stay out of government is ridiculous."
Winans was part of a small but growing number of African-Americans who cast their vote for Bush after years of supporting Democrats.
Faith hits public arena
The concept of the "values voter" first emerged in an exit poll after the election, when more people -- 22 percent -- selected "moral values" as the one issue that mattered most in deciding how they voted for president. Eighty percent of the voters who picked moral values chose Bush.
Though most political analysts agree the multiple-choice poll question may have been flawed because of the way it was presented and because the priority didn't play out in other polls, nobody is underestimating the influence that values and morality will have in government decision making in the coming years.
Faith may not be any more prevalent in people's lives than it used to be, but it's coming out of the privacy of homes and houses of worship and into the public arena.
"People have been forced to be more vocal about what they believe, or to stand up against what they don't believe," says Corey Utley, a Michigan State University student from South Lyon who is a member of Citizens for Traditional Values, and Catholics in the Public Square. The 24-year-old worked on the Michigan ballot proposals to limit gambling and prevent same-sex marriages.
"It has not been a change in views per se, but a feeling that we need to force the issue."
The November elections heightened their expectations.
"The religious conservative groups feel especially emboldened, not only about their religiosity in the public square, but also they're not reluctant to push more strongly on their policy views," says Mark Rozell, a public policy professor at George Mason University.
Rozell says the movement started with activism at the local level, on school boards and library boards, and bubbled up to the national level. Religious conservatives used to view themselves as outside the mainstream, he says, "but now they see themselves as part of a broad majority governing coalition."
'Now is their time'
Having for years been told by the Republican establishment that they should lay low because their demands on social issues may hurt the party, they feel "now is their time," Rozell says.
"They have a president who is more sympathetic than ever, a strong Republican Congress, so from their standpoint, the circumstance has never been better," he says.
In his State of the Union address Wednesday, Bush gave a nod to several of their issues, including support for a constitutional amendment to allow marriages only between a man and a woman "for the good of families, children and society."
It came as little surprise to Washington insiders. A couple weeks earlier, top Christian leaders who had backed Bush's re-election effort had threatened -- in writing -- not to support the president's top priority of altering Social Security if he didn't aggressively work to ban same-sex marriage.
The theme is resonating on Capitol Hill as well.
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., has thrown his support behind the constitutional amendment, boosting the anti-gay marriage measure's chances of advancement even though neither side thinks it has the votes to pass right now.
Expect as many as 15 additional states to follow the 11 that passed bans on gay marriage on statewide ballots in November, says Carrie Gordon Earll, a spokeswoman for Focus on the Family, a prominent conservative Christian group.
The ballot proposal passed by Michigan voters is expected to have ripple effects on universities, public school systems and other employers that give insurance benefits to employees' same-sex partners.
Brad Snavely, executive director of the Michigan Family Forum, says his group plans to continue to focus on ways to "strengthen and affirm the institution of marriage" by promoting responsible fatherhood, trying to reduce out-of-wedlock births and encouraging adoption.
"I do sense a growing discomfort with a values-free approach to life," Snavely says.
A new Detroit News poll that showed that most Michigan voters are fed up with sex, violence and profanity in movies and on their TV screens. They want the president of the United States to have strong religious beliefs. And they're not worried about the influence that fellow evangelical Christians are having on Bush's policy making.
Many of them want "life" to take a front seat in politics. Thwarted in courts from outright banning abortion, religious activists will play a prominent role in trying to get conservative judges confirmed by the U.S. Senate.
Earll says Focus on the Family has and will organize grass-roots efforts to pressure senators standing in the way of such votes.
"There is a particular judicial philosophy that we would like to see on the court," she says.
Religious conservatives also will be trying to chip away at the pregnancy-ending procedure through legislation.
Abortion is target
Abortion bills likely to be heard in Congress include making it illegal to transport a minor across state lines to circumvent one of the 40 states that have parental notification laws, and making it mandatory to inform women having abortions 20 weeks or later into the pregnancy that the fetus could feel pain and offering anesthesia for the unborn babies, according to the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, a major conservative group that's active on the political scene.
Also on the state and federal horizon are bills to ban human cloning and the use of state dollars for embryonic stem cell research.
On the agenda in Michigan: strengthening parental consent, allowing doctors and hospitals to opt out of abortion procedures, and evaluating whether insurance companies offer abortion services as a built-in benefit as opposed to a feature they have to actively add to their policies, says Ed Rivet, legislative director for Right to Life of Michigan.
The group also wants vaccines to be labeled if research using embryonic stem cells was used to create them, he says.
Bush also has been opening up government relationships with faith-based institutions that want to provide social services with the help of tax money. School voucher aid to religious schools is playing out in a number of Southern states, and many also have seen battles between supporters of evolution and creationism.
Democrats, stunned that Republicans seem to have cornered the public market on values, say they have been behind some of the greatest "morality" movements of the last century, working for abolition, civil rights, safe and fair labor, and a clean environment, and working against war and poverty.
David Chaffee, a retiree from Petoskey, says he voted against Bush for moral reasons -- for attacking another country, polluting the environment, discriminating against persons born gay, running up a deficit that his grandchildren will have to pay for, among other grounds.
Democratic activists want the public to see that the liberals' agenda reflects basic religious tenets, such as caring for those who are less fortunate. They'll be closely examining the priorities Bush outlines in his budget proposal, to be released Monday, says John Podesta, whose liberal group Center for American Progress recently hosted a roundtable on "Health Care, the Budget and Morality."
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has put together a task force to look at ways to frame the party's policies in faith-based terms.
Joseph Loconte, a religion fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation and an informal adviser on faith-based issues to the White House, says he thinks conservatives will have more to say to solidify and broaden their appeal on issues of values as well.
"It's the idea that Christianity does have a lot to say about poverty, crime, drug addiction, and that conservative Christians need to weigh in on those issues, argue for the common good in a broader sense of the cultural good," he says.
Loconte says some religious leaders are urging more government action to stop the spread of AIDS in Africa and elsewhere, to stop sex trafficking and to stop genocide in the Sudan. And the Baptist Convention says it will encourage legislation that "targets the world's last dictatorships for extinction."
Kevin den Dulk, a political science professor at Grand Valley State University, says Bush is faced with a lot of competing interests so it's unclear how much he'll deliver of the values agenda.
"The business community is forcefully supportive of relatively open trade with China, and conservatives are equally forceful against open trade with China because of its religious freedom record, abortion and other things" den Dulk says. "Which way do you go?"
You can reach Lisa Zagaroli at (202) 906-8206 or lzagaroli@detnews.com.
Reneah Britain, 6, climbs up to look at the Ten Commandments engraved on tablets that originally stood in the Alabama Judicial Building in Montgomery until ordered removed.
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