The Bush campaign’s decision to try and obtain church directories for partisan political use continues to haunt them. Good; it was a sleazy move that deserves the negative attention it’s received.
It started a couple of months ago, when a “religious outreach” scheme was launched.
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.
It’s prompted widespread condemnation from religious leaders from across the country (and across the ideological/theological spectrum), which just continues to grow.
Ten teachers of Christian ethics at leading seminaries and universities have written a letter to President Bush criticizing his campaign’s outreach to churches, particularly its effort to gather church membership directories.
The Aug. 12 letter asked Bush to “repudiate the actions of your re-election campaign, which violated a fundamental principle of our democracy.” It also urged both presidential candidates to “respect the integrity of all houses of worship.”
The letter’s signers included evangelical Christians who teach at generally conservative institutions, such as the Rev. George G. Hunter III of Asbury Theological Seminary in Kentucky and Richard V. Pierard of Gordon College in Massachusetts. Other signers included the Revs. Paul Raushenbush of Princeton University, Walter B. Shurden of Mercer University in Georgia, James M. Dunn of Wake Forest Divinity School in North Carolina and Ronald B. Flowers of Texas Christian University.
“When certain church leaders acceded to the request of the Bush/Cheney campaign to hand over the names and addresses of their congregants, they crossed a line,” the letter said. “It is proper for church leaders to address social issues, but it is improper, and even illegal, for them to get their churches to endorse candidates or align their churches with a specific political party.”
This letter is but the latest in a series of religious complaints about Bush’s unprecedented tactics. There was also this one:
“I am appalled,” [Richard Land, president of the SBC’s ethics and religious liberty commission] said in a statement. “I suspect that this will rub a lot of pastors’ fur the wrong way … 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 for a political campaign, to ask workers who may be church members to provide church member information through … directories.”
And this one:
Susan Gibbs, the spokeswoman for the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., which oversees 140 parishes in Washington and Maryland, said parish directories publish information only for use among church members and not for use by outside organizations no matter what their purpose.
“Parish directories are for helping parishioners get to know each other better and are strictly for that purpose. They are not intended to be used for any outside commercial purpose, solicitations or anything else,” Gibbs said.
And this one:
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.”
No word on whether the Bush campaign is prepared to abandon the effort that sparked the criticism in the first place.