New York Post, October 15, 2006

By Ryan Sager

With less than a month to go before Election Day, the last thing the Republican Party needs is major flare-up between its Evangelical wing and the rest of the party. But as the GOP’s support sags, especially among churchgoers, that’s just what’s breaking out.

The gap between the Bible-thumpers and the tax-cutters is nothing new. Ever since the Religious Right hit the polls in the late 1970s and early 1980s, there’s been a tension built into the Republican coalition. The party needs religious voters to win elections, but many in its establishment are embarrassed to be associated with, and annoyed to have to put up with, what they see as a bunch of fundamentalist rubes. In turn, those voters perpetually feel shortchanged and disrespected.

A quick look at the polls shows that religious voters are feeling especially left in the cold by the GOP this fall: Whereas weekly churchgoers favored President Bush over Democrat John Kerry by 58 percent to 41 percent in 2004, they’re splitting dead-even right now as to which party they favor to win Congress.

Why the loss of confidence in the GOP? No doubt, part of it is the Mark Foley scandal. But, at a deeper level, tension looks to be growing between an increasingly pro-government Religious Right and the rest of the party.

Witness, for instance, the escalating war of words between former House Majority Leader Dick Armey and James Dobson, the president of Focus on the Family and the most politically influential Evangelical leader in America.

Armey retired from the House in 2003, but still serves as a regular adviser to House conservatives. I interviewed him late last year for my book on the party’s problems - and he laid into the growing influence of the Religious Right in the GOP and how far he thinks it’s brought the party from the limited-government ideals of the Reagan and Gingrich revolutions.

“Where in the hell did this Terri Schiavo thing come from?” Armey asked, referring to the extraordinary bill rushed into law by Republican congressional leaders in a (futile) bid to keep the vegetative woman on life support, against her husband’s wishes. “There’s not a conservative, Constitution-loving, separation-of-powers guy alive in the world that could have wanted that bill on the floor. . . . That was pure, blatant pandering to James Dobson.”

“Dobson and his gang of thugs are real nasty bullies,” he added.

When these quotes hit the press last month, Dobson’s group issued a furious response, questioning Armey’s status as a “champion of family values.” But Armey only hit back harder, issuing an e-mail response Wednesday night, criticizing leaders of the Religious Right for supporting tax hikes at the state level and forming an alliance with the liberal group MoveOn.org in favor of greater government regulation of the Internet (the so-called “net neutrality” bill).

“When it comes to James Dobson, my personal experience has been that the man is most interested in political power,” Armey wrote. “America’s Christian conservative movement is confronted with this divide: small-government advocates who want to practice their faith independent of heavy-handed government versus big-government sympathizers who want to impose their version of ‘righteousness’ on others through the hammer of law. . . . Our movement must avoid the temptations of power and those who would twist the good intentions of Christian voters to support policies that undermine freedom and grow government.”

Armey’s delineation of the divide is shrewd. And it is precisely the Christian conservatives who believed they could “get something” from an all-Republican federal government who’ve found themselves most disappointed.

One such soul, David Kuo, former second-in-command in Bush’s Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, has a book out tomorrow, “Tempting Faith,” that rails against the Bush administration for using that program as nothing more than a political ploy.

It’s already well-documented how the administration has used ostensibly nonpartisan events related to the faith-based program to rally the GOP troops and court black churches in swing states. At the same, it failed to win significant funding for a program that was supposed to be the cornerstone of “compassionate conservatism.”

During the 2004 election, Republican leaders promised “values voters” a constitutional ban on gay marriage. But President Bush immediately dropped the issue after he won re-election, preferring to make a go of reforming Social Security.

It must be hard for many Christian conservatives not to feel a little used - and quite a bit abused. But it’s all the predictable outcome of a party whose elites cynically condescends to such voters, pressing their buttons over and over and hoping they never catch on. And, in turn, it’s the predictable outcome of a base that’s come to expect too much in terms of cultural salvation from a bunch of two-timing politicians.

The Evangelical political movement certainly isn’t ready for a divorce from the Republican Party. But it’s fair to say we might see the elephant sleeping on the couch come Election Day.

Ryan Sager (rhsager.com) is author of “The Elephant in the Room: Evangelicals, Libertarians, and the Battle to Control the Republican Party.”