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Evangelicals Sway White House on Human Rights Issues Abroad
October 26, 2003
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
WASHINGTON, Oct. 25 - Shortly after George W. Bush took
office, an odd coalition came to the White House to see
Karl Rove, the president's powerful political adviser, to
ask that the United States intercede in the civil war in
Sudan. The group included Charles W. Colson, the born-again
Christian who spent seven months in jail for his role in
Watergate, and David Saperstein, a Reform rabbi and a
longtime lobbyist for liberal causes in Washington.
The two-decades-long war in Sudan was not a front-burner
problem for the new administration, and Mr. Rove was not a
foreign policy adviser. But the religious strife between
Christians and Muslims in a conflict that had killed two
million people was of enormous concern to American
religious groups, particularly the evangelicals who make up
a major portion of President Bush's electoral base.
Mr. Rove, the participants in the meeting recalled, was
unusually receptive during a nearly hourlong conversation.
"He made it clear how seriously the administration was
going to engage on this," said Rabbi Saperstein, director
of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism.
Close to three years later, the White House has lived up to
Mr. Rove's promise to engage not only in peace talks in
Sudan, but on other human rights issues of critical
importance to American religious groups, most notably sex
trafficking and AIDS.
Administration officials and members of Congress say the
religious coalition has had an unusual influence on one of
the most religious White Houses in American history. The
groups have driven aspects of foreign policy and won major
appointments, and they were instrumental in making sure
that the president included extensive remarks on sex
trafficking in his speech to the United Nations General
Assembly in September.
No one disputes that Mr. Bush already cares deeply about
those issues and has a personal faith that his advisers say
brings a moral dimension to a foreign policy better known
for war. "To put it simply, it's a fairly radical belief
that a child in an African village whose parents are dying
of AIDS has the same importance before God as the president
of the United States," said Michael Gerson, Mr. Bush's
chief speechwriter and an important White House policy
adviser who is a born-again Christian.
But it is also true, religious leaders and administration
officials note, that white evangelicals accounted for about
40 percent of the votes that Mr. Bush received in the 2000
presidential election. In 2004, political analysts say, he
is unlikely to be re-elected without the strong support of
this constituency, which is predominately but not wholly
Republican, and which in other years has thrown significant
support to southern Democrats like Bill Clinton. Mr. Rove
is now tending to the constituency with great care.
"You're not going to run into too many people who are
smarter than Karl," said Dr. Richard D. Land, the president
of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the
Southern Baptist Convention, who is in regular contact with
Mr. Rove. "Karl understands the importance of this segment
of his coalition, and I think the president understands it.
The president feels that one of the contributory factors to
his father's loss is that he didn't get as many evangelical
votes as Reagan did."
The human rights issues offer a politically safe way for
the president to appeal to his base of white evangelicals,
who leading scholars and pollsters define by their
membership in historically white evangelical denominations,
like the Southern Baptists and the Assemblies of God.
Evangelical churches believe that the Bible is truth, that
members have an imperative to proselytize and convert and
that Jesus Christ is the only way to salvation.
"There are these issues below the radar screen that are of
deep concern to the evangelical community, and while they
are sincerely held by the administration, they also have
the benefit of allowing the president to say, `I have
responded to what you wanted me to do,' " Rabbi Saperstein
said. "But they're not issues that will alienate large
segments of the center in America. These are all-win issues
for the administration."
The religious dynamic at the White House reflects a larger
change within American evangelicals themselves, and their
interest over the last decade in moving beyond the divisive
domestic issues that consumed them a generation ago -
abortion, school prayer, homosexuality, pornography - into
an international arena.
The change is taking place in part because of a new focus
on what evangelicals call "the persecuted church," or
fellow Christians in other regions of the world who face
abuse. The change also stems from leaders' concluding that
evangelical groups made little headway on domestic social
issues in the 1980's.
"Evangelicals today are more interested in making a
difference than in making a statement," said the Rev.
Richard Cizik, the vice president for governmental affairs
of the National Association of Evangelicals, which
represents 43,000 congregations. "We made a lot of
statements in the 1980's and got zip."
Mr. Cizik said that evangelicals were now more willing to
work with Jewish and feminist groups on certain foreign
policy issues and that the failure of evangelicals in the
1980's to meet their goals was in part a failure to
collaborate. "Evangelicals have thought historically,
`Well, we'll do politics the way we do faith - we'll just
convert the opposition,' " he said. "But you can't do
politics the same way you do religion."
The groups now find the Bush White House to have an open
door, particularly with a president who uses evangelical
language in his speeches and credits his faith with helping
him to give up drinking.
"There was no movement under Clinton," said Mr. Colson, the
founder and chairman of Prison Fellowship Ministries, who
once Mr. Gerson's boss. "We couldn't get anyone to talk to
us."
Other religious leaders say that this White House far
surpasses the administrations of Ronald Reagan and Mr.
Bush's father in its attentiveness.
"Under previous Republican administrations, they would take
our calls and often return them," Dr. Land said. "In this
administration, they call us. They say, you know, `What do
you think about this?' "
The closeness has led to collaboration on policy, most
recently on human trafficking. Religious leaders like Dr.
Land and Mr. Colson pushed the White House for months to
have the president denounce the coercion of women into
prostitution around the world and the forcing of men and
children into modern-day slavery.
"We certainly encouraged the White House to make it a
prominent issue," Dr. Land said, adding that the United
Nations speech "was one place we suggested it could be
done."
The issue had also risen within the administration, which,
as Dr. Land put it, "has a lot more evangelicals in it, and
traditional Catholics," than previous administrations. Mr.
Gerson, for one, said that he had been talking about
international human trafficking for nearly a year, and that
it was "bubbling up" on the National Security Council. It
was of interest, Mr. Gerson said, to Elliott Abrams, a
senior director for Middle East affairs, and to Stephen J.
Hadley, the deputy national security adviser. Condoleezza
Rice, the national security adviser, and Andrew H. Card
Jr., the White House chief of staff, were also focused on
the issue, Mr. Gerson said.
About three weeks before Mr. Bush's United Nations address,
Mr. Gerson said, "we went in and talked to the president in
the Oval Office - Steve, Condi, Andy and myself. He was
very interested and supportive of the idea of having
trafficking in the speech. And that became the major topic
of discussion in the meeting - where it's happening, how
large. And he had a lot of questions."
Earlier in the year, religious groups say they successfully
lobbied for a new director of the State Department's
Trafficking in Persons Office, which was created in 2000 by
legislation aggressively pushed by a coalition of
evangelicals, Catholics, Jewish groups and feminists. John
Miller, a former Republican member of Congress from Seattle
who had worked on human rights issues on Capitol Hill, was
the group's choice. Mr. Rove is said to have raised
concerns that Mr. Miller supported Senator John McCain in
the 2000 presidential campaign, but the groups held fast.
"Essentially a variety of people let out the word that this
is not the hill you want to die on - this is the guy we
want," said Allen Hertzke, the director of religious
studies at the University of Oklahoma and the author of a
forthcoming book, "Freeing God's Children: The Faith-based
Movement for International Human Rights."
Mr. Miller, for his part, said the influence of the groups
on human trafficking had been substantial. "They're
consumed by this issue," he said. "I think it's great. It
helped get the legislation passed, it helped spur me, I
think it keeps the whole government focused."
The groups were also influential in the development of the
president's commitment to fight global AIDS, particularly
the part of the policy based on Uganda's A.B.C. campaign,
which promotes, in order, abstinence, being faithful and
condoms.
Mr. Colson, who has enormous influence among evangelicals
because of his books, lectures and radio program, said
President Bush personally told religious leaders that he
was supporting them on the A.B.C. campaign in a meeting at
the White House this spring.
After the meeting, Mr. Colson said he went up to Mr. Bush
and said emphatically that faith-based policy worked. "He
said, `You don't have to tell me,' " Mr. Colson said the
president replied. "He said, `I'd still be drinking if it
weren't for what Christ did in my life. I know faith-based
works.' "
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/26/politics/26RELI.html?ex=1068287099&ei=1&en=204032f2c4642f62
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