Yesterday, the Washington Post had a great scoop about the latest Bush scheme to rope churches into his campaign.
The Bush-Cheney reelection campaign has sent a detailed plan of action to religious volunteers across the country asking them to turn over church directories to the campaign, distribute issue guides in their churches and persuade their pastors to hold voter registration drives.
Campaign officials said the instructions are part of an accelerating effort to mobilize President Bush’s base of religious supporters. They said the suggested activities are intended to help churchgoers rally support for Bush without violating tax rules that prohibit churches from engaging in partisan activity.
Today, everybody else plays catch-up, but several outlets found interesting reactions. Surprisingly, even Bush’s conservative and religious allies feel like he’s gone too far this time.
Richard J. Mouw, president of the Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., one of the largest evangelical Protestant seminaries, said: “Theologically speaking, churches are really in a position to speak truth to power. But this smacks of too close an alliance of church and Caesar.”
Mr. Mouw added that the Bush campaign should not take evangelical votes for granted.
“I find,” he said, “that a lot of church people, including a lot of evangelicals, are increasingly nervous about the credibility of the Bush administration on issues that a year or two ago people were ready to trust them on, like foreign policy.
“Rather than just assuming that evangelical churches are ready to hand over their membership lists, they would do much better to spend some time trying to convince us that they really do have the interests of biblical Christians at heart.”
Even the Southern Baptist Convention’s Richard Land, a key GOP ally, said he was “appalled” by Bush’s scheme.
“First of all, I would not want my church directories being used that way,” he told Reuters.
The conservative Protestant denomination, whose 16 million members strongly backed Bush in 2000, held regular drives that encouraged church-goers to “vote their values,” Land said.
“But it’s one thing for us to do that. It’s a totally different thing for a partisan campaign to come in and try to organize a church. A lot of pastors are going to say: ‘Wait a minute, bub,’ ” he added.
You know the Bush campaign has screwed up when Richard Land is criticizing it.
So, how long until BC04 abandons this nonsense?