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the states. The real battles of concern to Christians are in the neighborhoods , school boards, city councils, and state legislatures” (Watson 1997, 63). One community at a time, the Christian Coalition mobilized political campaigns to get conservative Christians involved in grassroots politics , usually local Republican party or school boards, to advance their “Christian” agenda and the Christian Right movement. Greider is right about the success of their organizing effort. By late 1990, the Christian Coalition claimed 57,000 members, 125 local chapters , and a $2.8 million annual budget. In a study of the 1992 elections, People for the American Way reported that the Religious Right won 40 percent of the state and local elections it entered (Wall 1993; Bradley 1992). By 1993, Ralph Reed claimed there were 4,000 religious conservatives sitting on America’s 15,000 school boards (Reed 1994, 191). In 1994, evangelical Christians constituted one-third of Republican voters (Marley 2007). In 1994 alone, Reed said, the Coalition had raised and spent $1.4 million to defeat Clinton’s health care plan. In 1995, probably at the top of its strength, when it was building on the reactionary congressional victory of the Contract with America and its own Contract with the American Family campaign, the Christian Coalition claimed 1.6 million members, 50 state affiliates, 1,600 local chapters, and a $25 million annual budget. One year later at the Republican National Convention, the Coalition claimed that 500 of the approximately 2,000 delegates were coalition members, probably the result of a $2 million expenditure (Watson 1997, 54, 64). Michael Lind, a sharp critic of the Christian Coalition, concluded in 1996 that “without the support of his [Robertson’s] Christian Coalition, it is unlikely that any Republican can win the nomination for the presidency” (Lind 1996, 99). The Christian Coalition fell short of Robertson’s prediction that it would become “the most powerful political force in America by the end of this [1990s] decade,” but in a relatively short time, from 1990 to 1996, the Christian Coalition had built a powerful organization of national leaders and grassroots chapters and activists. Marley (2007, 204) calls it “a time of unprecedented power for American evangelicals,” one that placed Pat Robertson and the Christian Coalition as the leader and at the center of the Christian Right (IFAS 1995). But the success of the Christian Coalition, and the primary lesson for including this anti-canonical effort in this chapter on contemporary C o n t e s t i n g C o m m u n i t y 130 practices, is not only that the Right, too, discovered the grassroots and turned to community in the 1990s and after. Rather a critical lesson is that the anti-canon of the Christian Coalition did not replicate the romance of community. For our purposes, the lesson of the Christian Right in the 1990s is not only how the Christian Coalition developed a strategy for grassroots organizing and implemented it with much success but that they also understood from the outset that this grassroots strategy was part of a broader movement building plan that linked the local to the national, linked local organizing to a national organization. In the 1990s, that meant intentionally building a strong movement infrastructure that “allowed the right to train the firepower of the entire movement on the political work of the smallest grassroots right-wing effort” (Hardisty 1999, 13). Kim Fellner, former head of the National Organizers Alliance (NOA), understands the existence and threat of the anti-canon in community organizing. She argues that “Organizing is not inherently progressive . There are a lot of right-wing organizers who do this, too” (Szakos and Szakos 2007, 8). But what the Christian Coalition did that most community-based efforts did not was build an organizational infrastructure that blended both the local and the national, that is, it went beyond community to build a federated national organization which Skocpol and others see as a much maligned but valuable model. A Christian Coalition manual, used in its Leadership Training Schools, highlights this integrated model of organizing at both local and national scales. The Christian Coalition is a grassroots organization, and every organization must have structural soundness in order to succeed. While it is true that the foundation for the success of the Christian Coalition is local, a system of coordination must be in place to insure that each part of the organization is working together. No grassroots organizations can succeed...

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