WASHINGTON — Election Day was a mixed bag for the religious right.
Religious-right voters turned out in force. But the results showed that the movement is not the political juggernaut it once seemed.
The religious right’s ideological opponents, including most of the organized Jewish community, felt good about election returns.
“On the whole, [the religious right] 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…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, 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 claimed success in electing conservative lawmakers who support a “pro-life, pro-family” agenda.
“Conservative evangelicals were the firewall that prevented a Bob Dole defeat from mushrooming into a meltdown all the way down the ballot,” said Ralph Reed, the coalition’s executive director.
Christian Coalition leaders wrote off Dole long before Election Day, looking instead toward local races and retaining Republican majorities in Congress.
“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 comprised 29 percent of the voting public, based on a poll the group commissioned.
But 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 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. Half the defeated Republican House lawmakers were on the Christian Coalition’s A-list and were targeted for defeat by opponents of the religious right.
California Republicans Bill Baker of Danville and Andrea Seastrand of San Luis Obispo went down in defeat, as did David Funderburk and Fred Heineman of North Carolina and Linda Smith and Randy Tate of Washington. Reps. Daniel Frisa (R-N.Y.) and Frank Cremeans (R-Ohio) also lost their races.
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.
Republican gubernatorial candidates tied to the religious right fell in Washington state and New Hampshire.
In the Senate, Republicans jumped from 53 to 55.
Indeed, the addition to the Senate of freshman Republicans Sam Brownback of Kansas and Jeff Sessions of Alabama will give the Senate a 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 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 it will be harder for the Jewish community to defeat legislative proposals advanced by the religious right.
But the religious right had a major setback in Colorado, where voters defeated a ballot measure that would have enshrined in the state constitution parents’ “inalienable right” to “direct and control the upbringing, education, values and discipline of their children.”
Opponents, including Jewish groups, claimed the initiative would make it harder to prosecute child abuse cases and would threaten sex education, the presence of controversial books in school libraries and access to abortion information.
Religious conservatives had viewed Colorado as a bellwether and hoped to advance similar initiatives nationwide.
Reed has declared that religious conservatives will be a permanent fixture on the American political landscape. Already looking ahead to the year 2000, Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson has vowed that his group will not again let itself become “peripheral” in the presidential race.
Robertson’s frustration concerns some in the Jewish community.
Murray Friedman, head of the Myer and Rosaline Feinstein Center for American Jewish history at Temple University in Philadelphia, believes the religious right’s frustration over this year’s losses could give way to outright anger among the movement’s more extreme elements.
This anger “might have unfortunate anti-Jewish overtones,” Friedman said.