Church Groups Angered by Bush Pressure to Campaign for Him
Gandalf Grey
Bush camp's outreach hit by church groups
By Associated Press | July 3, 2004
NASHVILLE -- The Southern Baptist Convention, a conservative denomination
closely aligned with President Bush, said it was offended by the Bush-Cheney
campaign's effort to use church rosters for campaign purposes.
''I'm appalled that the Bush-Cheney campaign would intrude on a local
congregation in this way," said Richard Land, president of the Southern
Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.
''The bottom line is, when a church does it, it's nonpartisan and
appropriate. When a campaign does it, it's partisan and inappropriate," he
said. ''I suspect that this will rub a lot of pastors' fur the wrong way."
The Bush campaign defended yesterday a memo in which it sought to mobilize
church members in support of the president's reelection bid through efforts
such as providing church directories to the campaign, arranging for pastors
to hold voter registration drives, and talking to various religious groups
about the campaign.
Some religious organizations have criticized the document as inappropriate
and perhaps having the potential to cause churches to jeopardize their
tax-exempt status by becoming involved in partisan politics. A campaign
spokesman, Scott Stanzel, said the document, distributed to campaign staff,
was well within the law.
''People of faith have a right to take part in the political process, and
we're reaching out to every supporter of President Bush to become involved
in the campaign," Stanzel said.
One section of the document lists 22 ''coalition coordinator" duties and
lays out a timeline for various activities targeting religious voters. By
July 31, for example, the coordinator is to:
Send your church directory to your state Bush-Cheney '04 headquarters or
give to a BC04 field representative.
Identify another conservative church in your community that we can organize
for Bush.
Recruit five people in your church to help with the voter registration
project.
Talk to your pastor about holding a citizenship Sunday and voter
registration drive.
The Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation
of Church and State, said the effort ''is a shameless attempt to misuse and
abuse churches for partisan political ends." Lynn said his organization
would be ''watching closely to see how this plays out in the pews."
The Rev. Welton Gaddy, president of the Interfaith Alliance, a Washington
advocacy group that has been critical of the Christian right, said the
document was ''totally inappropriate."
''We are alarmed that this initiative by the Bush-Cheney campaign could lure
religious organizations and religious leaders into dangerous territory where
they risk losing their tax-exempt status and could be violating the law,"
Gaddy said.
Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform
Judaism, said ''efforts aimed at transforming houses of worship into
political campaign offices stink to high heaven."
None of those groups, however, has been as supportive of the Bush
administration as the Nashville-based Southern Baptists. Bush spoke to the
Southern Baptists' recent national convention, by video link, for the third
year in a row.
Yesterday, Land said: ''It's one thing for a church member motivated by
exhortations to exercise his Christian citizenship to go out and decide to
work on the Bush campaign or the Kerry campaign. It's another and totally
inappropriate thing for a political campaign to ask workers who may be
church members to provide church member information through the use of
directories to solicit partisan support."
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