Christian Activists Assume Large Role in O.C. Politics : Volunteers: Conservative churchgoers learn how to win elections and advance like-thinking candidates.

For Pam Henkoski, a 34-year-old San Clemente mother, politics is a ministry.

Like many other “born-again” Christians, she recently began to view public schools as wielding an alarming secular influence over children, one that cannot be neutralized with a few hours of weekly Sunday school.

After praying for guidance, she petitioned the Capistrano Unified School District Board of Trustees to allow the teaching of creation theory along with the theory of evolution. Then she joined parents from other Christian evangelical churches to monitor classrooms, curricula and textbooks, and to share their findings. Now her group hopes to unseat the trustees’ majority in November.

For Christians, she said, “being active politically, to the point of electing godly people, is a responsibility that we have. . . . It’s not my intent to convert every child in every school. (But) what I’m doing is going to affect every child in a positive way.”

Orange County churchgoers constitute a major network for conservative politics, according to The Times Orange County Poll on religious beliefs and practices. While about one-third of the general public approves of religious leaders speaking out against homosexuality or abortion rights, for example, nearly half of all churchgoers do.

Further, the churchgoers overwhelmingly approve of mingling church and state when it comes to expanding the role of religion in public schools. Nearly three in four favor allowing school prayer and the teaching of the biblical version of creation, and they find support in the general population, where six in 10 county residents also hold these views. It is an issue seen in such stark terms that Christian political consultant Gary Metz calls it a “battle for the minds of our children.”

“The poll gives us some indication of one source of Orange County’s activism on the conservative political front: a very solid group of churchgoers who are in favor of their religious leaders speaking out on these controversial issues,” said Mark Baldassare, who conducted the poll for The Times.

Churches play a particularly significant role in a county that has few other institutions where people congregate on a regular basis, Baldassare said.

“It appears that for many people, being in an Orange County congregation is a source of support for conservative beliefs, rather than liberal ones,” he said.

The poll questioned residents on a broad range of topics, from individual religious practices to the belief in a spiritual other world.

In a county with a relatively brief political history, this ability of churchgoing people to form networks has had a significant impact.

Today, armed with their own political consultants and enthusiastic foot soldiers, these coalitions--often loosely organized and sometimes rising and disappearing in response to specific issues and candidates--are making an ever-larger imprint on the county’s political life, according to candidates and consultants.

Flash points that mobilize these groups include such issues as gay and abortion rights, pornography, school-based health clinics and “secular humanism” in schools. Over time, the groups have begun to emerge as a major force in school board and state campaigns--particularly in special elections.

First efforts were halting, however.

In 1989, the Rev. Louis P. Sheldon of Anaheim unsuccessfully supported an anti-abortion candidate--Richard Lyles--for a state Assembly seat in San Diego County. That same year, Christian challengers in the Newport-Mesa Unified School District, who called for abstinence-based sex education programs, failed to unseat the incumbents.

By the following year, however, Sheldon’s forces were strong enough to play an important, though not decisive, role in a campaign by Assemblyman Gil Ferguson for the state Senate.

Ferguson, a conservative Newport Beach Republican, was outspent by three of his GOP opponents, more than 5 to 1, yet lost the race to Frank Hill (R-Whittier) by just 1.4% of the vote.

Ferguson called the support he received from church groups vital. “They can really bring out numbers, enough to ensure that a district of 400 precincts is covered twice before Election Day,” he said. “That makes up for hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

Sheldon, a vocal critic of gay rights ordinances, emerged with his Traditional Values Coalition during the late ‘80s. The focus of Sheldon’s group has mainly been on state government issues and candidates. Other situations where he or other groups played a role include the following:

* Roman Catholics and evangelical Christians temporarily shut down abortion clinics during huge Operation Rescue sit-ins in 1990.

* More recently, Christian groups claimed credit for passing an Irvine measure denying anti-bias protection to gays and for electing at least four candidates statewide to the Legislature in the last two years and to school boards in Orange and Santa Ana.

* Last year, the Traditional Values Coalition joined with the National Rifle Assn. to turn out hundreds of volunteers who played a key role as Huntington Beach Mayor Tom Mays beat five other Republicans and won a seat in the Assembly.

* This year, two more Sheldon-backed candidates won seats in Assembly special elections.

One was in Northern California, where Sheldon organized churches in Stockton to campaign for Republican conservative Dean Andal. On Election Day, Andal scored a stunning upset over a Democratic favorite in a mostly Democratic district.

The other race was in Orange County, where an election in California’s second-most-Republican Assembly district turned into a contest between a well-financed moderate supported by Gov. Pete Wilson’s political machinery and a conservative who had never held public office.

One week before the August election, polls for both candidates showed moderate Orange City Councilman William G. Steiner leading Mickey R. Conroy by at least 10%. But with a last-minute flurry of attack mail and an army of at least 300 volunteers walking door to door, Conroy won the race, 43% to 37%, with the balance going to minor-party candidates.

Sheldon’s son, Steve, explained how the coalition and similar groups work.

On legislative issues, pastors might tell congregants to call the governor, he said. For candidates, church members use church directories to make campaign calls.

Members might say on the telephone, he said: “Hi, this is John calling. And, remember, I was in the choir last year, and our kids went to camp last year, and I’m calling for Mickey Conroy.”

The key, Sheldon said, is that “they know each other and they’ve seen each other.”

Church members “start at the church level, and they designate the precinct,” said Republican political consultant Dave Ellis of Costa Mesa. “They work the phones better than anybody I’ve ever seen. When you have a low turnout, they can get their people to the polls. . . .”

“At the local level, they are foot soldiers that I don’t think can be beaten in a special election. . . . It’s better to have them with you than against you,” Ellis said.

Some defeated candidates would agree. Christian activism resulted this year in the first defeat ever for the local teachers union in an Orange Unified School District Board of Education election, Ellis said.

Russell Barrios, an incumbent board member who was unseated by Christian-backed opponent Robert H. Viviano, said that judging by the numbers and types of questions he fielded over the phone, the Christian forces were the largest he had seen in three years.

Their questions often came in the form of a code, Barrios said. “People wanted to know if I supported clinics in our school. What they were really asking about is abortion, and dispensing of condoms. . . . People wanted to know if we wanted our students to leave school without permission of their parents. They meant, do you allow students to go off campus for abortions without parental consent? It’s like everything has subtitles. You learn the dialect after a while.”

Another winner in the race, Maureen Aschoff, said support from fellow Christians aided her campaign. She said a Christian political consultant from San Diego gave her a list of 4,000 names; campaign supporters called them, using the Sheldon coalition’s telephones.

“I talked to hundreds of people on the phone who said, ‘I know you’re a Christian, and that’s why I’m voting for you,’ ” Aschoff said. Many of them had heard her name through their local evangelical church, she said.

Despite all this experience, however, veteran politicians note that the plunge into politics by the religiously committed is often marked by idealism and political naivete.

“Only recently, starting with my attempt to win the Senate seat . . . did they learn how to run an election,” Ferguson said. “Actually, the first one was the campaign to (elect Lyles in San Diego County). But what we found out was that they didn’t know how to telephone, and they didn’t know how to knock on doors.”

“I don’t mean to ridicule them, but they would stop at the first house and hold a meeting, and then they’d start praying,” he said. “They were learning. They had to learn how to make telephone calls without praying between each one.”

Schools are a special target of the activists. Public schools are a “spawning ground for all major social and religious concerns of the country,” said Robert L. Simonds, founder of the Costa Mesa-based Citizens for Excellence in Education, a national Christian group focusing on replacing “unresponsive” school board members with conservatives.

Simonds said he has 120,000 dues-paying parents on his national mailing list this year, who helped elect about 1,450 school board members. The goal next year is 3,000, he said.

“What we do is educate the public and churches and school people on who is available, what they believe in,” he said. “. . . We aggressively interview and analyze the believers who are running for the school board, so people will know exactly who they get.”

Because of a perceived “anti-Christian bias,” he said, Christians work quietly by word of mouth. In Orange County, he estimated 60% of Christian candidates run without openly declaring themselves as Christians.

His pamphlet, “How to Elect Christians to Public Office,” has been sent to 15,000 people on request in the past two years, he said.

In it he writes: “The church must maintain the Christian heritage of our republic, because only the Bible-believing church can know the true importance of liberty and freedom. . . . The Christian religion (the Bible) is the basis for all morality,” right and wrong.

Many people resent what they see as religious activists’ imposing their beliefs on others.

Harriett S. Walther, vice president of the Saddleback Community College Board of Trustees, remembers in 1988 being asked point blank whether she is a Christian. “I am not. I am Jewish,” she answered.

The questions she fielded, she said, were mostly irrelevant and seemed aimed at eliminating diversity.

“Adults in higher education are there to be able to discuss any kind of issue,” Walther said recently. “It’s not the role of higher education to promote any specific lifestyle of religious preference, or to limit the discussion of the many ideas . . . that exist in our community.”

The county’s Christian soldiers realize they sometimes tread on others’ sensibilities. But they say they know where to draw the line between religion and politics so churches do not lose their tax-exempt status.

New recruits may not focus on the legal limits to such activities, though, because they get so excited about affecting the political process, said Irvine lawyer Thomas E. Stepp Jr., a consultant to a new grass-roots organization called the Orange County Christian Political Awareness Committee.

The group is still forming and may file as a political action committee and support Christian candidates or ballot measures, he said.

Donna Blanchard of Orange, a founder of the committee, declared: “We are going to take over Orange County, elect Christians to public office, bring prayer back to schools and restore what this country is built on: trust and love of God.”

She said just 20% of Christians are registered to vote, and the group is contacting pastors of the county’s major churches, hoping to set up voter registration tables outside the churches or to have their political notices placed in church bulletins.

So far, Stepp said, he has met with two or three pastors who are “very glad this is taking place.”

But, he said, “some of the more senior fellows seem a little skeptical about the effectiveness. I think they’ve seen these things come and go.”

Nevertheless, he said, the average person’s “interest in this thing is so overwhelming, it has consumed most of my time.”

According to Metz--the county religious political consultant who has helped publish “The Samaritan Strategy,” another Christian political manual--”There is a growing sense that there needs to be stewardship on the part of the Christian community. If we want to see our culture continue to exist, we have to be involved. We can’t ignore it. . . .

“There aren’t easy solutions, but since there is this war of values in our culture right now, somebody has to enter the fray and provide a look at some of these issues.”

Others say the escalating war prompts the need to take sides.

“We have to choose between embracing diversity and plurality, or imposing uniformity,” Saddleback’s Walther said. “I don’t think there’s a middle ground. And I don’t think there’s room for apathy.”

How the Poll Was Conducted

The Times Orange County Poll, the most comprehensive poll ever taken on religious beliefs and practices in Orange County, was conducted by Mark Baldassare & Associates. The telephone survey of 600 Orange County adult residents was conducted Oct. 4-7 on weekend days and weekday nights using a computer-generated random sample of telephone numbers. The margin of error is plus or minus 4%. For subgroups, such as church members, the margin would be larger.

A Look at the Series

Sunday: Religion and beliefs--a Times Orange County poll.

Monday: A look at full-service churches.

Tuesday: Rejecting the religious mainstream.

Wednesday: The challenge for parents.

Thursday: The super-churches.

Friday: Mixing church and state.

Religion and Politics

RELIGION IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS

“Do you favor or oppose an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to allow prayer in the public schools?”

Don’t Favor Oppose Know Orange County 62% 32% 6% U.S. (1988)* 68% 26% 6%

* The Gallup Poll

O.C. Breakdown

Don’t Favor Oppose Know Church-goers** 74% 21% 5% Others 54 39 7 Liberals 45 49 6 Moderates 64 28 8 Conservatives 70 25 5 Democrats 49 46 5 Republicans 69 24 7

** Churchgoers are those who said they had attended a church or synagogue in the last seven days; others are those who said they had not.

“Do you think teachers should be allowed to teach creation--that is, the Biblical version of the origin of man--in a public school?”

Don’t Yes No Know Orange County 60% 35% 5%

Don’t Yes No Know Church-goers** 72% 24% 4% Others 52 42 6 Liberals 48 45 7 Moderates 56 37 7 Conservatives 69 29 2 Democrats 51 41 8 Republicans 67 30 3

HOMOSEXUALITY

“Do you think homosexuals should or should not be hired for the clergy?”

Should Don’t Not Should Know Orange County 40% 42% 18% U.S. (1988*) 51% 42% 7%

* The Gallup Poll

O.C. Breakdown

Should Don’t Should Not Know Church-goers** 27% 56% 17% Others 53 29 18 Liberals 63 19 18 Moderates 46 30 24 Conservatives 30 56 14 Democrats 56 28 16 Republicans 35 48 17

** Churchgoers are those who said they had attended a church or synagogue in the last seven days; others are those who said they had not.

ABORTION

“A woman should be able to get an abortion if she wants one, under any circumstances.”

Don’t Agree Disagree Know Orange County 58% 38% 4% U.S. (1987)*** 53% 44% 3%

*** ABC television poll

O.C. Breakdown

Don’t Agree Disagree Know Church-goers** 34% 62% 4% Others 74 21 5 Liberals 78 17 5 Moderates 61 33 6 Conservatives 46 51 3 Democrats 67 31 2 Republicans 52 44 4

** Churchgoers are those who said they had attended a church or synagogue in the last seven days; others are those who said they had not.

POLITICAL ACTIVISM

“Do you have a favorable or an unfavorable opinion of religious leaders and organized religion...”

”...Speaking out against Homosexuality

Don’t Don’t Favor Favor Know Orange County 30% 54% 16%

Don’t Don’t Favor Favor Know Church-goers** 45% 39% 16% Other 19 66 15 Liberals 13 72 15 Moderates 19 62 19 Conservatives 44 42 14 Democrats 16 69 15 Republicans 40 44 16

** Churchgoers are those who said they had attended a church or synagogue in the last seven days; others are those who said they had not.

”...Being involved in the Anti-Abortion Movement”

Don’t Don’t Favor Favor Know Orange County 35% 54% 11%

Don’t Don’t Favor Favor Know Church-goers** 49% 40% 11% Others 24 65 11 Liberals 24 63 13 Moderates 29 59 12 Conservatives 45 47 8 Democrats 27 63 10 Republicans 42 46 12

** Churchgoers are those who said they had attended a church or synagogue in the last seven days; others are those who said they had not.

Source: 1991 Times Orange County Poll and other polls