Buchanan Tumbles Old Walls of Religion

What happened in the Evangel Cathedral here this week was something senior pastor Houston Miles could not have imagined when he opened his first church in this weathered textile town 27 years ago.

On Wednesday, about 800 people filed into this sprawling facility just off a bustling interstate to cheer the words of a Catholic: Patrick J. Buchanan. Asked if he could have anticipated the day when his independent charismatic church would be filled for a Catholic speaker, the compact, white-haired Miles shook his head.

“No, not really,” he said. “If I’d have gone back 30 years, I’d have had a strong feeling here. I came out of the Assembly of God, and they preached against two things: Communists and Catholics.”

Today it is “secular humanists” who stir Miles’ concerns--and, though he is not endorsing any candidate, it is Buchanan who seems to him “a man of deep conviction.”

Miles is hardly alone. As the Republican presidential race moves South, beginning with today’s South Carolina primary, no constituency will be more important than conservative evangelical Protestants, who constitute one-third or more of the vote in most Southern states. And the candidate poised to reap the largest share of their support here is Buchanan--a man from a faith that many Southern Protestant denominations had long viewed with suspicion, if not outright hostility.

That tradition of enmity inspired John F. Kennedy’s famous address to Southern ministers in Houston in 1960, when the Massachusetts Catholic declared that as president he would resign rather than let his decisions be dictated by pressure from his church. Today, the religious tensions that necessitated Kennedy’s speech haven’t disappeared entirely, but they have been submerged by a larger tide that has allied born-again Christians and conservative Roman Catholics in common cause on cultural issues from abortion to education.

“People will say something every now and then,” about Buchanan’s religion, said Mary Kerr, a Baptist homemaker from West Columbia who supports the commentator’s presidential campaign. “But then they’ll say, ‘Well, we’re not voting for pastor.’ ”

The sensitive issue of Buchanan’s faith--all the other leading contenders are Protestants--is only one of several religious fault lines that run just beneath the surface of the Christian conservative ascendancy in Southern politics. While the social-conservative community may appear monolithic from a distance, up close it is finely divided by class distinctions and religious antagonisms.

Buchanan hasn’t unified all of these diverse strands behind his campaign in South Carolina. That’s one reason why Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole remains favored to win today’s vote.

Dole has a broader appeal than Buchanan to moderates and retains significant support among the local leadership of the Christian Coalition, the influential social-conservative group founded by Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson. Among Christian conservatives, there are also pockets of support for Alan Keyes, the fiery antiabortion orator. Even Lamar Alexander had some supporters at a rally the Christian Coalition hosted in the state capital of Columbia on Thursday night.

Key Southern Supporters

Yet Buchanan’s powerful appeal to religious conservatives positions him to be Dole’s principal rival here and in Southern states like Georgia, Texas and Mississippi that dominate the next 10 days on the primary calendar. Through the first contests in Louisiana, Iowa, New Hampshire and Arizona, Buchanan has consistently attracted almost half of all votes from religious conservatives.

If he can sustain that level of support in the South--where religious conservatives are most heavily concentrated--he will maintain pressure on Dole and make it extremely difficult for Alexander to break through and rescue his candidacy in the region.

Private candidate polls show Buchanan attracting about half of religious conservatives in South Carolina, and he has drawn institutional support from each of the distinct power centers in the state’s social-conservative movement. That is a striking achievement for any candidate--given these groups’ fractious history here--but it is especially head-turning given Buchanan’s religious heritage.

“Buchanan is an example of what has always been the case with all these different Christian right constituencies,” said Jim Guth, a political scientist who specializes in religion and politics at Greenville’s Furman University. “It is almost easier for an outsider to mobilize all these different groups than to have any one of the groups mobilize the rest.”

That sectarian instinct was demonstrated when Robertson ran in 1988. In that campaign, the leadership of Bob Jones University, a 5,000-student fundamentalist college in Greenville, openly opposed him, Guth notes. That coolness derived mostly “from simple religious antagonism,” he says.

In religious terms, Robertson is considered a charismatic, an offshoot of the Pentecostal movement. Pentecostals practice an emotional form of worship that includes belief in speaking in tongues and faith healing; charismatics hold similar beliefs but exercise them within mainline churches.

Bob Jones University, by contrast, preaches a purist fundamentalism that treats the Bible as the literal word of God and is hostile toward Pentecostal practices such as speaking in tongues.

The two movements have over the years “developed a great deal of antipathy toward each other,” Guth said.

With that history of antagonism, “Robertson couldn’t persuade Southern Baptists to vote for him in any significant number” in 1988, Guth notes. As a result, although Robertson had great hopes for South Carolina, he carried only 19% of the vote and finished a distant third to George Bush; TV network exit polls showed that only one-fourth of born-again Christians in the state voted for him in that campaign.

Changing Times

But this year, Buchanan’s religious practices appear to be less of an issue in South Carolina than Robertson’s were eight years ago. “Just to give you an idea of how far this community has come, there was a bigger controversy over Robertson as a charismatic trying to get the votes of fundamentalists than there is over Buchanan as a Catholic trying to get the votes of evangelicals,” said Ralph Reed, the national executive director of the Christian Coalition.

Buchanan’s success at wooing Southern Protestants reflects both social change and the bonds that have developed between politically active, born-again Christians and conservative Catholics through alliance in causes like the antiabortion movement.

One sign of that change is the diversifying membership of the Christian Coalition itself. Reflecting Robertson’s own affiliations, the group’s initial foundation was Pentecostal and charismatic churches--which still remain fertile recruiting grounds.

Even with this increasing reach, old doctrinal divisions endure: the relationship between the South Carolina Christian Coalition and Bob Jones University remains arms-length, for example. In the current campaign, the leadership of the university tilted toward Texas Sen. Phil Gramm, who dropped out of the race, while Dole won substantial support from the state’s Christian Coalition.

Over this past week, though, Buchanan appears to be stirring the most enthusiasm among all the distinct outposts on the social right. Across the state, he has played almost every conceivable note that might appeal to culturally and religiously conservative voters.

Buchanan has emphasized his opposition to abortion, disparaged efforts to restrict the teaching of creationism, denounced “the false god of secular humanism” and pledged to “restore God and the Bible to its rightful place in American institutions.”

He has passionately defended Bob Jones University, which had its tax-exempt status stripped by the IRS in 1983 because it prohibited interracial dating, a policy that remains in force. On Thursday, Buchanan declared the revocation of the tax exemption “an act of bigotry” and said that as president he would propose legislation to restore the school’s tax-exempt status. And he has praised the flying of the Confederate flag over the state Capitol, memorably declaring at a debate Thursday that if “there is room in America for . . . ‘We Shall Overcome’ . . . there’s got to be room for ‘Dixie’ as well.”

That is the sort of language that inspires Buchanan’s critics to accuse him of “speaking in code” to inflame racial or ethnic antagonisms. But with his target audience of conservative voters, his appeals are having a measurable effect.

“He is speaking our language,” said Robert Slimp, a retired Army officer from Columbia who emphatically chanted “Go Pat Go” through Buchanan’s animated speech at the Christian Coalition rally in Columbia.

Praise and Concerns

Like almost a dozen others interviewed at the rally, Slimp said he had not given a second thought to Buchanan’s religion in deciding to support him. “A wonderful Catholic who knows what he believes . . . is better than some wishy-washy Protestant who doesn’t know what he believes,” Slimp said.

Likewise, Jerry Fonte, the pastor of a Christian Missionary Alliance church in Columbia, said he had not heard Buchanan’s religion raised in discussions about the election. “It’s nothing to what it was in the time of Kennedy,” he said. “There is more of an agreement today between Protestants and Catholics on the traditional moral values.”

Even so, Guth says he believes that lingering “underlying hostility toward Catholics” among the most theologically conservative Southern Protestants may still give Dole some “wiggle room” to hold down Buchanan’s vote among Christian activists today.

But Dole’s opportunity with religious conservatives here may owe less to concerns about Buchanan’s faith, than to considerations common to voters from all demographic groups.

After Buchanan spoke at the Evangel Cathedral, Melissa Mullis said she liked his views on abortion but added: “I’m a little afraid of him. There’s too much of that, well, I guess you’d call it populism.”

That comment is indicative of a larger change in the role of religious conservatives. Though abortion and other social issues remain more important to them than to secular voters, conversations here leave little doubt they are also moved by the same broad arguments as all other elements of the GOP coalition.

That widening convergence of interests--particularly on issues relating to reducing the size and scope of government--is solidifying the attachment between the GOP and conservative evangelicals, who are becoming the cornerstone of the party’s electoral coalition.

Nothing may better testify to that integration than the likelihood that large numbers of religiously conservative Protestants will pull the lever here today for a conservative Catholic from Washington, D.C.--without ever thinking twice about his religion.

Times staff writer Eleanor Randolph in Greenville, S.C., contributed to this story.