Party’s Hold on State Threatened : Religious Warfare Splits Arizona Republicans

The mixture of religion and politics has always made for a heady brew. But Republicans in Arizona have had so much of that blend this year that they are suffering from a statewide hangover.

The state party has been plagued for months by struggles that have more to do with the pulpit than the precinct hall. The intra-party squabbles have pitted Christians against Jews, Christians against Christians, fundamentalist Christians against Mormons and Mormons against Mormons--while Democrats and neutral observers look on in disbelief.

“It really is sad for us,” said Kit Mehrtens, the state’s Republican national committeewoman. “People who might like to join the Republican Party are turned off by its image. I don’t feel that the people of Arizona go along with this garbage.”

Party Seen as Weakened

One thing just about every Republican here can agree on is that religious wrangling in the name of politics has weakened the party at a time when changing demographics had been turning Arizona into a Republican stronghold.

Largely because of the GOP’s internecine struggles, no Republican gubernatorial candidate seems to have much of a chance in the 1990 election against Gov. Rose Mofford, the moderate Democrat who assumed the job when former Gov. Evan Mecham was removed from office.

The Republicans’ strongest hope in the governor’s race, Rep. Jim Kolbe of Tucson, has decided to seek reelection instead.

With the morally charged issue of abortion looming larger than ever, the relationship between religion and politics may grow tighter in states around the country. Arizona’s experience offers insight into the potentially explosive results of that combination.

The GOP’s church-and-state problem stems from a marriage of convenience between two segments of the party’s conservative wing.

Backers of Mecham--a group, known here as the Evanistas, with many Mormons in its ranks--joined forces with fundamentalist Christians who had worked for television evangelist Pat Robertson in his 1988 presidential campaign.

This faction became a highly visible element at party gatherings; some delegates prayed in tongues on the floor of the state convention this year. Gradually, religious tension increased. One county chairman active in the Christian right complained to the news media that Jews have too much control over GOP finances, drawing a formal rebuke from the state party’s acting chairman.

The Evanista coalition showed its muscle at the convention when it won adoption of a resolution in which the Arizona Republican Party formally declared that the United States “is a Christian nation . . . a republic based upon the absolute laws of the Bible, not a democracy.”

The resolution grew from a local flap into a national embarrassment when the Washington Post reported that Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor had played a key part in its adoption.

Letter From O’Connor

O’Connor, a former GOP activist here, wrote a letter to a leading fundamentalist Republican asserting--incorrectly, as it turned out--that the Supreme Court has issued three rulings “to the effect that this is a Christian nation.” O’Connor’s imprimatur helped assure the adoption of the resolution.

The next war of religion started when two Mormon Evanistas expressed outrage at an anti-Mecham cartoon in the Arizona Republic, the major daily newspaper in Phoenix. They petitioned Mormon headquarters in Salt Lake City, demanding that the cartoonist, Steve Benson, be kicked off a Mormon High Council because of the cartoon.

Benson, 35, said he was stunned by that move because he is a devout Mormon and a graduate of the church-owned Brigham Young University. He is not just any devout Mormon, either; his grandfather is the faith’s current prophet, seer and revelator, Ezra Taft Benson, 90, who heads the 6-million-member worldwide church.

The cheery, talkative Steve Benson’s cartoons are tough, razor-edged and occasionally offensive to one group or another. On the wall of his impossibly cluttered studio here hangs a sign that could serve as a motto for any editorial cartoonist: “I don’t aim to please--I just aim.”

The Mormon Church removed Benson from his council position, although he still is permitted to teach Sunday school at his local ward, or parish. Shortly thereafter, 12 prominent leaders of other Christian faiths, representing the local Bishops and Executives Round Table, distributed a letter criticizing Benson’s use of religious symbols in the anti-Mecham cartoon.

That interfaith letter, in turn, sparked counter-criticism from other ministers and civic leaders, which served to raise the level of political-religious tension one more notch.

The latest development on the church-state front involves the apparent breakup of the Mormon-fundamentalist GOP coalition. Soon after Mecham announced plans to run again for governor next year, a prominent leader of the Republican fundamentalists, Annetta Conant, declared that she could not support him.

“It has only to do with religious philosophy,” she said. “Gov. Mecham is a Mormon. . . . I find Mormonism a cult and not Christian.”

Such contretemps led former Sen. Barry Goldwater, the grand old man of the Grand Old Party here, to complain that his party has been taken over by “a bunch of kooks.”

That complaint did not faze members of the religious right. “When he says kook,” Conant declared calmly, “we take it to be an abbreviation for ‘kindred of our King.’ ”