REGIONAL REPORT : Christian Activists Using ‘Stealth’ Campaign Tactics : Voting: Conservative religious groups try to capitalize on gains using methods shielded from the public.

On the Sunday before Election Day, 1990, thousands of San Diego churchgoers returned to their cars after services only to encounter a sermon of another sort.

“Cast your ballot for a pro-life, pro-family future,” said a political flyer that had been placed on windshields. “The candidates on this slate espouse strong, traditional family values and oppose the senseless killing of innocent, unborn children for reasons of sex selection, birth control and convenience.”

When two-thirds of the slate’s 88 far-right candidates for mostly low-level positions won several days later, it sent a thunderbolt down from the political heavens that is still reverberating.

Conservative Christian activists, melding their religious zeal with political savvy, have become a potent force in Southern California politics, winning stunning victories that have established the so-called “San Diego model” as a harbinger of their growing clout. This fall, they hope to ascend to higher political heights in San Diego while Christian activists elsewhere in California and throughout the nation seek to follow in their path.

For years a critical voting bloc, Christian activists no longer are merely a key group being wooed by candidates, but increasingly orchestrate campaigns and run for office themselves. While their impressive track record has raised eyebrows within political circles, how they win--and their penchant for targeting low-profile races that traditionally receive little media or public interest--has drawn more attention.

Many of the victories come via “stealth campaigns” in which Christian candidates quietly promote themselves through extensive church networks--blanketing hundreds of church parking lots with pamphlets, using church directories for phone-canvassing--which are all but invisible to the public. Some fundamentalist candidates fail to attend most or all public forums in their campaigns, while others typically downplay the depth of their religious convictions and conservatism when they are before non-church audiences.

“That’s just good strategy,” said Ralph Reed, executive director of the Virginia-based Christian Coalition, an outgrowth of Pat Robertson’s 1988 presidential campaign, which has offered tactical guidance to the San Diegans.

“It’s like guerrilla warfare,” Reed said. “If you reveal your location, all it does is allow your opponent to improve his artillery bearings. It’s better to move quietly, with stealth, under cover of night.

“You’ve got two choices: You can wear (camouflage uniforms) and shimmy along on your belly, or you can put on a red coat and stand up for everyone to see. It comes down to whether you want to be the British army in the Revolutionary War or the Viet Cong. History tells us which tactic was more effective.”

Although their most impressive victories have come in San Diego and Orange counties, the fundamentalists also have helped shape elections in Sacramento and northern rural areas, and now control a majority of the state’s 58 county Republican Party central committees. In Los Angeles, the movement has caught on, too, but so far has been generally limited to GOP central committee races.

Emboldened by those successes--and determined to squash opponents’ half-hopeful suggestion that 1990 was a fluke--the Christian activists plan to target hundreds of campaigns throughout California this year. Of those, arguably none are more important than the nearly 200 contests that will form the battlefield in San Diego--a crucial electoral test that could determine the staying power of their strategies.

Aligned with anti-abortionists, the Christian fundamentalists view Campaign ’92 as a critical step in a long-range plan that envisions persistent moves up the political ladder. Having started at the lowest rungs, they are seeking this year to move up to mid-range offices such as county supervisor and state Assembly. By decade’s end, the fundamentalists aspire to be major players in big-city mayoral, statewide and congressional campaigns.

Their ladder is planted firmly on a platform of “traditional values”--code words that opponents argue disguise an ultraconservative agenda of anti-abortion and pro-gun policies, opposition to advice about contraception or pregnancy counseling in schools, book bans and use of public offices as a forum for dispensing biblical maxims.

“These people want to remake the world according to their own views instead of God’s,” said Orange City Councilman William Steiner, who saw the Christian right’s grass-roots power sweep his opponent, Mickey Conroy, into office in a special Assembly race last summer.

Critics say that the fundamentalists have voted against school breakfasts and self-esteem programs on the grounds that they undermine parental authority, have sought to prevent students from being exposed to books or plays that they perceive as promoting immorality, and have used their posts to magnify their impassioned denunciations of homosexuality and abortion rights.

“We could use more morality and biblical principles guiding government,” responds Dan Van Tieghem, the Christian Coalition’s former regional executive director. “Politicians like to see the world as gray, not black and white. But we’re saying that there are absolutes, there are cases where there is a right and a wrong.”

Just as Christian activists statewide and across the country are closely monitoring the San Diego gains in the hopes of duplicating them, so, too, is an unusual alliance of Republican moderates and civil libertarians who want to block the fundamentalists from reaching their political goals.

Largely caught off guard by the fundamentalists’ 1990 success, critics express caustic disdain for the religious right’s conservative social agenda and its tactics--notably, the stealth-like campaigns and harsh character attacks on opponents that are disavowed after the damage is done.

“I have a problem with candidates who tout morality as their basis for running, yet then do some pretty unethical things in the name of Christianity to get elected,” said Rita Collier, president of the Mainstream Voters Project, a nonpartisan San Diego-based group that publishes occasional bulletins about candidates and officeholders it views as extremists.

Not nearly as monolithic as opponents imply--and fear--the religious right consists of a loose, at times uneasy alliance of conservative groups that view the church community as a largely untapped political commodity, a belief based on surveys showing unusually low voter turnout among regular churchgoers.

One group that has ascended to national prominence is the Christian Coalition, which has 52 chapters and nearly 20,000 members in the state, nearly two-thirds of them in Southern California. Regionally, it shares the stage with organizations such as the Anaheim-based Traditional Values Coalition, whose leader, the Rev. Louis P. Sheldon, professes to have ties to 7,000 conservative churches statewide, and Costa Mesa-based Citizens for Excellence in Education, which has distributed thousands of pamphlets titled “How to Elect Christians to Public Office.”

Although some of those groups were formed to lobby officeholders, their focus increasingly has shifted toward campaign politics, in which they provide volunteers, money, telephone banks and other strategic aid to favored candidates.

“We found it was far better to invest a few months trying to elect the right person rather than spending years trying to get the wrong person to vote right,” said Sheldon, whose group plans to play a major role in about a dozen California campaigns this fall. “But we still have a long way to go. On a scale of one to 10, I’d say we’re barely a two.”

Toward that end, the Christian activists, who increasingly are reaching out to their philosophical allies in the anti-tax and pro-gun movements, plan to establish candidate schools to groom new challengers and to raise money for radio commercials.

Hoping to strengthen their political foothold, the Christian activists plan to emphasize campaigns in school districts, regional hospital boards and other jurisdictions where they need only a single additional seat to gain a majority.

“Right now, they’re a vocal minority that can make noise over (its) issues,” said Marjorie Van Nuis, a director of the Mainstream Voters Project. “But if they get a majority, that’s when all hell will break loose.”

Especially troubling to their critics is the Christian activists’ style of quietly reaching the church community while minimizing their contact with the rest of the electorate. Some “pro-family” slate members in San Diego not only skipped public forums, but also did not fill out candidate statements detailing their background or views in sample ballot pamphlets printed by the registrar of voters.

There have been exceptions to that “stealth” rule. Vista school trustee Deidre Holliday notes that she went so far as to include the familiar Christian fish logo on her campaign signs in San Diego. And in Orange County, the considerable aid that Conroy received from Christian groups, which campaign aide Jim Bieber termed “a very major factor” in his victory, was well documented throughout the race.

From the perspective of the Christian fundamentalists themselves, much of the criticism stems less from ethical transgressions on their part than from public uneasiness over religious activists’ new willingness to enter politics.

Restrained for years by what the Rev. Billy Falling of Valley Center terms “the heresy of church-state separation,” most churches and pastors historically remained on the political sidelines. Falling says the Bible makes it clear that churches and Christians not only should become politically involved, but have a duty to do so.

Echoing a viewpoint common among the Christian activists, Steve Baldwin, who helped organize the 1990 San Diego slate for the California Pro-Life Council, says that “for too long, Christians saw politics as a dirty business that they should avoid.”

“What we’ve come to realize is that maybe the reason politics is so dirty and society has so many problems--high divorce rates, low school test scores, teen pregnancies, sexual diseases--is that not enough Christians have gotten involved in politics,” said Baldwin, a 35-year-old conservative activist making his second bid for a state legislative seat this year.

This year’s campaigns will test that thesis--a challenge made more formidable by bigger campaigns requiring more money and volunteers, as well as scrutiny from the press and groups such as the Mainstream Voters Project.

“We want to make sure people know who and what they’re voting for,” Collier said. “I don’t think that was the case last time.”