PERSPECTIVE ON THE CHRISTIAN COALITION : Is This a Make Over or Is It a Cover-Up? : Ralph Reed’s public-relations talk of inclusion can’t mask Pat Robertson’s true agenda of intolerance.
A May 1 article about Ralph Reed’s reinvention of the Christian Coalition gave Los Angeles Times readers just a glimpse of the chutzpah that Reed and his boss Pat Robertson are displaying in their carefully orchestrated outreach to American Jews and their public-relations make-over of the Christian Coalition.
Ralph Reed has undertaken a strategic campaign to put a benign, non-threatening facade on the Christian Coalition’s well-documented agenda.
But all the public relations in the world--and Reed is good at it--cannot change the facts. Reed may be the public face, promoting inclusion and tolerance, but Robertson is still the president of the organization, and it’s he who raises the money and fires up the troops. We have no way of knowing what lies in Robertson’s heart. We do know that his prodigious pronouncements--and the Christian Coalition’s track record--on the issues of religious pluralism, separation of church and state and civility in public discourse are sufficiently disturbing for Americans to be concerned about the organization’s political goals.
Reed told The Times’ reporter, “I’m trying to create a culture of civility between the different faith traditions--whether they be Jewish, Christian or (Muslim), so that even as we disagree, we need not be disagreeable.” Ralph Reed, call the home office. Just over a month ago, on the 700 Club, Robertson said of Hinduism, “We can’t let this kind of thing come into America.” And when he was running for President, he set out an explicit religious test for public office, saying repeatedly that he would not consider appointing Hindus or Muslims to his Cabinet.
Separation of church and state is, of course, a vital concern to Jews--a minority in almost every community in America. Yet Pat Robertson has equated defense of church-state separation, especially by Jews, with an attack on Christianity. In his 1990 book, “The New Millennium,” he writes that “liberal Jews” are engaged in efforts to “destroy the Christian position in the world.” As recently as 1993, Robertson mocked concerns about Jewish children having to say prayers in Jesus’ name.
And although he says that he embraced no conspiracy theories in his 1991 book, “The New World Order,” the “historical analysis” he sets forth has been exposed as the rehashing of old anti-Semitic tracts. Robertson proposes that, in a plan for world domination, “European bankers” (elsewhere in the book identified as Jews allied with Freemasons) hired John Wilkes Booth to assassinate Abraham Lincoln.
These examples might charitably be described as insensitivity to Jewish concerns. Yet they reflect the abiding intolerance Robertson has often demonstrated toward people of other faiths, or even people whose understanding of Christianity differs from his. “You say, ‘You’re supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and this, that and the other thing,’ ” he told viewers in 1991. “Nonsense. I don’t have to be nice to the spirit of anti-Christ.”
Just a few months earlier, when a Muslim clergyman was invited to give the daily prayer in Congress, Robertson speculated that the door would now be open to “all kinds of weirdness.” Maybe Ralph Reed needs to talk to his boss about that culture of civility.
Robertson’s demonstrated religious intolerance makes the Christian Coalition’s position on separation of church and state all the more troubling. Both Reed and Robertson have recently taken pains to reject the notion of America as a Christian nation. Yet they tell their supporters something different. “The radical left has kept us in submission because they have talked about separation of church and state,” Robertson said. “There’s no such thing in the Constitution. It’s a lie of the left, and we’re not going to take it anymore.”
That disturbing view of the Constitution has been consistent through the years. As far back as 1981, Robertson told 700 Club members that the Constitution “is a marvelous document for self-government by Christian people, but the minute you turn the document into the hands of non-Christians and atheist people, they can use it to destroy the very foundation of our society.” More recently, Christian Coalition chapters have echoed Robertson’s claim that separation of church and state is a creation of the Soviet Constitution, imported to the United States by communist sympathizers.
Reed and Robertson have a track record of trying to shield the Christian Coalition from scrutiny by assigning anti-religious motives to critics of the organization’s political goals, which include: cutting federal support for the arts, humanities and public broadcasting; siphoning tax dollars away from public education and into private sectarian schools; promoting organized prayer in public schools, and denying reproductive choice to American women and the basic rights of citizenship to gay and lesbian Americans. Those of us whose spiritual understanding leads us to defend the profoundly American values of pluralism and freedom of expression and religious diversity cannot remain silent when Ralph Reed, Pat Robertson and others attempt to distort their own disturbing record in opposition to those same values.
