LOCAL ELECTIONS : Christian Right Has Impact on Campaigns

As Christian worshipers ease into church pews this morning, thousands of them will discover voter guides that pin down Ventura County candidates on thorny issues of abortion, homosexual rights and distribution of condoms on school grounds.

By the end of Sunday services, Christian Right organizers will have handed out 40,000 such guides designed to show the faithful how to vote in races from the school board to governor.

“It is a mandate from Scripture for Christians to get involved,” said the Rev. Ken Craft of the Sonrise Christian Fellowship in Simi Valley. “Jesus said, ‘Occupy until I come.’ He never said, ‘Hide out and tuck yourselves away in your little churches.’ ”

Craft plans to slip voter guides into church bulletins for his 1,000-member congregation this morning, as part of an unprecedented push by the Christian Right to influence the outcome of elections in Ventura County.

This election season, conservative Christian activists have refined the art of practical politics that they began to learn only a few years ago.

They have recruited candidates for local offices and targeted those hostile to their social agenda. They have hosted political fund-raisers, held meet-the-candidate kaffee klatches in their homes, drafted questionnaires and organized political forums to quiz candidates on their moral positions.

“Our people are becoming aware of how the system works,” said Sara DiVito Hardman, state director of the Christian Coalition. “We have matured tremendously here in California, particularly in the last three years.”

The surge in activity in this county has alarmed one national liberal group. People for the American Way has called on its activists to help get out the vote on Election Day and inform voters about candidates who advocate teaching creationism, abstinence-only sex education and school-sponsored prayer.

“All of that is intolerant of public education and of Christians and non-Christians with a different world view,” said Jean Hessburg, the group’s California director. She suggested that local school boards are not the best arena for such debates.

But that’s precisely where many conservative Christian activists want to hold them.

“This is basically a cultural war,” said Mike Dunn, a Newbury Park resident. He said he has pushed Conejo Valley School Board candidates to disclose their beliefs on everything from sex education to a “textbook promoting homosexuality.”

Dunn, a firefighter who recently gave his infant son the middle name “Reagan,” said he gets many of his ideas from James Dobson’s Focus on the Family radio and publishing empire.

Local Christian Right activists point to other national groups for the source of their inspiration: Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum, Beverly LaHaye’s Concerned Women for America and religious broadcaster Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition.

Though only about a year old, the eastern Ventura County chapter of the Christian Coalition has quickly moved to the political heart of the movement. It holds monthly meetings and candidate forums at the East County Sheriff’s Station and boasts a mailing list of 400 members.

The coalition’s most ambitious effort so far was teaming up with the Pro-Family Caucus of Ventura County to assemble a voter guide on virtually all city, school board and county races. The state chapter has furnished similar guides on candidates for Congress, the state Legislature and statewide offices.

The local guide asks candidates for county supervisor whether they would support the use of public funds to perform abortions and laws forcing abortion protesters to remain hundreds of feet from medical clinics.

It asks city council candidates about restrictions on adult entertainment businesses and school board candidates about education vouchers that allow parents to select their children’s schools.

“I’m sure that liberals won’t like these questions,” said Ray Allen of Moorpark, head of the east county Christian Coalition chapter. “We just want to bring back good family values.”

Indeed, many candidates declined to participate in the guide, particularly those who do not share the group’s socially conservative agenda.

Simi Valley City Council candidate Michael S. McCaffrey, who describes himself as a centrist, said he was put off by questions that had little or nothing to do with the job of a council member.

“The City Council deals with land-use issues (and) providing police to this community,” he said. Council members, he said, “deal with mundane things like trash pickup and sewer and water. Let’s talk about those issues.”

Though he didn’t send in the questionnaire, McCaffrey went to a political forum attended by a dozen pastors who were there to assess the candidates and take what they gleaned back to their congregations.

One of the pastors scolded McCaffrey for failing to return the Christian Coalition’s questionnaire and warned him that conservative Christian voters are too numerous to ignore.

The forum was sponsored by High Adventure Ministries, a worldwide Christian radio network based in Simi Valley that has recently spent its time beaming “1.5 million watts of intercessory prayer and spiritual warfare” over the African nation of Rwanda, according to its October newsletter.

The network’s chairman, George Otis, wrote: “For hours, the Word of God was proclaimed. I spoke directly to the demonic forces that are responsible for all the bloodshed in Rwanda. . . . We have seen the mass murder subside, we saw the doors open for the distribution of food, water, clothing and medical supplies to millions in Rwanda and the refugees who crossed into Zaire.”

For tax reasons, the Christian Coalition cannot formally endorse candidates.

And its voter guide goes beyond the socially conservative issues that prompted Pat Robertson to launch the Christian Coalition in 1989 as a way to take control of the Republican Party and American politics beginning with the grass roots.

The guide covers fiscally conservative themes of lowering taxes and cutting government spending. It even asks candidates for their positions on municipal bonds to raise revenue.

The questions reflect the ambition of the Christian Coalition leaders, who want the group to broaden its appeal and thus its membership.

Steve Frank, a Republican activist in Simi Valley who often helps organize conservative Christians, said he sees the movement maturing. Many of the activists, he said, have grown more politically sophisticated. They know how to frame issues in less threatening ways.

“They’ve learned that the issue is not abortion or homosexuality or pornography, but the issue is strengthening the family,” Frank said. “And, by strengthening the family, you end abortions, lessen pornography and lessen homosexuality.”

In past elections, the Pro-Family Caucus has distributed cards that endorse a slate of candidates for public office.

But this year, the 300-member group decided to abandon slate cards in favor of the voter guides, said Al Pacheco, the caucus’s executive director. The decision came partly, he said, so caucus members would not be forced to choose among the growing number of candidates who hold socially conservative views.

The Pro-Family Caucus was launched four years ago to identify conservative Christian candidates, train them in how to run for office and then spread the word, said Pacheco, a former member of the county’s Republican Central Committee.

Caucus members prefer to concentrate their energy on school board and city council elections, he said. “That’s where two or three hundred votes can swing an election. That’s where we can make a difference.”

Other groups have also published voter guides. The Southern California Christian Times, an independent newspaper published in San Diego, has printed its roster of local candidates “who believe in traditional family values and uphold the sanctity of human life.” The paper is sold locally in Christian bookstores and to subscribers.

Leading the list are supervisorial candidates Frank Schillo of Thousand Oaks and Scott Montgomery. Others include Norman Walker and Glenn Woodbury, candidates for Simi Valley Unified school board; Angela Miller, Marty Bates and Walt Madrid, who are running for different seats on the Ventura County Board of Education, and Karen Boone, a candidate for the Ventura County Community College District board of trustees.

Montgomery said he shares many of the beliefs of conservative Christian groups. His campaign literature boasts that he authored the “toughest anti-adult entertainment ordinance in (the) county,” and vows to do the same thing for unincorporated areas if elected to office.

“I consider myself a fairly devout fundamental Christian,” Montgomery said. “I work real hard at living a life that tries to embody that religion.”

Montgomery is on the Christian Coalition’s mailing list and the east county chapter’s leader, Ray Allen, acknowledged that he has volunteered his time to help with Montgomery’s campaign.

Conservative Christians have become most passionately involved in school board elections across the county, their interests stirred by debates over school vouchers, sex education curricula and the California Learning Assessment System tests.

The CLAS tests were designed to measure a student’s ability to think critically, an educational approach that some conservatives fear could prompt children to question their parents or even Bible-based authority. Many of them see it as a battle between educators’ attempts to mold student minds and families’ efforts to instill their own values.

Kathleen Parsa of Ventura, a member of Concerned Women for America, agrees that CLAS tests sparked considerable concern. “It was something that really caused people to take a serious look at what’s going on in the classroom.”

Even though Gov. Pete Wilson’s veto canceled the CLAS tests, Parsa said textbooks and various curricula are filled with the same educational philosophy underlying the exams. Parsa said she is helping Miller with her campaign for county school board.

“Our church teaches the Bible,” she said. “When you see society diverting from the teaching, that’s when you get concerned.”

In Thousand Oaks’ school district, Dunn said a contentious debate over a pamphlet urging abstinence helped nudge him to put together a voter guide on the Conejo Valley school board election. He distributed 16,000 copies of the guide by inserting it in a local newspaper.

Initially, Dunn sent out a questionnaire to the 10 candidates anonymously, using the name “Concerned Parents,” so as not to influence the answers.

Six candidates responded, indicating their views on 14 topics, including showing R-rated movies in class, President Clinton’s job performance and whether it is appropriate to demonstrate how a condom works by using a cucumber in sex education classes.

Dunn said he was disappointed that some of the candidates did not return the questionnaire.

Susan H. Witting, a Thousand Oaks lawyer, was one of those candidates. She had tangled earlier with Christian Right activists when she raised objections about the abstinence-only pamphlet provided by Focus on the Family.

Besides being bothered by some of the topics in the questionnaire, Witting said she was troubled that the group never identified itself or explained who was behind the voter guide.

She said she was further distressed to discover that someone had spray-painted 666--the mark of the Antichrist--in large red numbers on about 20 of her campaign signs posted in Newbury Park.

“I’ve lived here a long time and I’ve never seen anything like this,” Witting said. The vandalism, she said, underscores the importance of electing candidates who are “not pushing an extreme political agenda.”

Such vandalism has been reported by both sides of the highly emotional debate among school board contestants in several cities.

Boone, who holds conservative Christian views and is a candidate for the county’s community college district board, said she has noticed many political signs have been trampled or slashed in Ventura.

“It seems like more of mine are being destroyed than just knocked down,” she said. And, one of her supporters who posted a sign, she said, “had two tires slashed and a window smashed.”

She said she finds many of her supporters are couples with young children who are concerned about the deterioration of public schools. “It’s people with school-age children that are becoming more and more concerned and more and more involved. They feel that they have a vested interest.”

Times correspondents Maia Davis and Tracy Wilson contributed to this story.