The Values Campaign?: The Christian Right and the 2004 Elections

CHAPTER ELEVEN: California M

chapter eleven California Ménage à Trois: The Christian Right, the Republican Party, and Arnold Schwarzenegger j. christopher soper and joel s. fetzer Whatever starts in California unfortunately has a tendency to spread. Jimmy Carter There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience . And then there is California. Edward Abbey According to the quotations that begin this chapter, california is either a trendsetter for the rest of the nation or so idiosyncratic it could never be a harbinger of things to come. Christian Right activists in the state certainly hope the latter is true. The 2004 election in California demonstrated again the limitations that beset a movement whose goals are not shared by a majority of the state’s electorate. Most notably, Proposition 71—an initiative to provide public funding for embryonic stem cell research—passed comfortably in the November election, although the Christian Right was united in its opposition to that initiative. Just as important, the gubernatorial recall election of 2003 highlighted how the Christian Right’s association with the state Republican party is problematic at best. In that special election, California voters ousted Democratic Governor Gray Davis from the state’s highest office and replaced him with Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger. The 2003 recall election could help to resurrect a Republican Party that recently seemed consigned to political irrelevance, but Schwarzenegger ’s liberal views on social issues, as well as some of his own lifestyle choices in the past, stray dramatically from those of most conservative Christians, to say the least. Both of these elections underscored how muted 216 California Ménage à Trois 217 the Christian Right voice is in California politics. Although the Christian Right is not politically powerless in state politics, by itself the movement cannot shape public policy, nor is it a controlling faction in the state’s GOP. In both cases, it must reach beyond its natural constituency of white, evangelical Protestants to have an impact on politics. At the same time, the movement’s leaders are wrestling with the advantages and disadvantages of pursuing a pragmatic or ideological approach to politics. The Religious and Political Culture of California The primary obstacle to Christian Right political mobilization in California is demographic: There are too few conservative Christians in the state. The Christian Right generally derives its principal strength from white, evangelical Protestants (Green 2000). The 2004 National Annenberg Election Survey reported that 17 percent of registered voters in California were evangelical or born-again white Protestants. By contrast, more than half or close to half of registered voters in Tennessee (51 percent), Kentucky (50 percent), Mississippi (46 percent), Arkansas (49 percent), and Georgia (41 percent), to name a few states, were white, evangelical Protestants. Even ostensibly “blue” states such as Washington (26 percent) and Oregon (27 percent) had larger percentages of white evangelicals than California. Of the thirty-four states for which the survey had data, only six states (Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Utah) had a lower percentage of white evangelicals registered to vote than did California (National Annenberg Election Survey 2004; California Opinion Index 2005). Although California is more liberal than many states, evangelical Protestants in California are no less conservative than their religious counterparts in Tennessee, Mississippi, or Georgia. Polls over the past decade have consistently shown that white evangelicals in California have more conservative attitudes on a wide range of social issues than any other subgroup in the state. According to a 2004 poll (Field Poll 2004), 79 percent of evangelical Christians in California opposed same-sex marriages, nearly two-thirds (63 percent) favored amending the Constitution to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman, and a plurality (49 percent to 42 percent) favored laws that would make obtaining an abortion more difficult. From the standpoint of the Christian Right, the “problem” is not that evangelical Protestants have adopted the state’s liberal values but that overall the state is liberal or moderate on the social issues that matter most to the Christian Right. A 1997 poll indicated that 62 percent of Californians 218 soper and fetzer supported first-trimester abortions, and a majority favored publicly funded abortions for indigent women (Field Poll 1997). The percentage of Californians who wanted no changes in the state’s abortion laws or who wanted to make obtaining an abortion easier remained virtually unchanged between 1991 (72 percent) and 2004 (71 percent). Only 22 percent...