CQ WEEKLY
– IN FOCUS
April 25, 2009 – 11:16 p.m.
Young Evangelicals Break From Old on Gay Unions
By Ben Weyl, CQ Staff
Within just a few days this month, the push for gay marriage found a wave of fresh momentum. A unanimous state Supreme Court decision legalized the practice in Iowa. The state legislature overrode a gubernatorial veto and instituted the practice in Vermont. And Democratic Gov. David A. Paterson announced plans to push legislation that would open the door to the practice in New York.
Beyond the political and legal arguments on the issue, however, are demographic shifts indicating that the controversy over same-sex unions may eventually fade altogether. Younger Americans are far more supportive of civil unions and gay marriage than older generations; in December, pollsters for Newsweek found that 51 percent of people between ages 18 and 34 support gay marriage, compared with 39 percent of all respondents.
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Leaders of evangelical Christian organizations — the most vocal opponents of gay marriage as the issue polarized the electorate for much of this decade — now face a similar divide in their own ranks. In a survey last fall by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, Inc., 58 percent of white evangelicals ages 18 to 29 said they support either civil unions or gay marriage; support dropped to 46 percent among white evangelicals who were older than that. (Asked about gay marriage exclusively, the support figures were 26 percent for the younger group and 9 percent for the older group.)
“The data do show a growing divide between younger and older evangelicals. There clearly is a generational difference,” said Amy E. Black, a political scientist at Wheaton College, an evangelical liberal arts school in Illinois. She characterizes the thinking among many younger evangelicals as, “What big deal is civil unions, really? What I care about is the environment, or what I care about is human rights.”
The attitudinal divide between younger and older evangelicals was also revealed last November, when one-third of white evangelicals under 30 voted for Barack Obama . That was double the share of the vote that John Kerry drew four years before from the same demographic, exit polls showed, even though both Democratic candidates supported civil unions, abortion rights and stem cell research.
The trend poses a big challenge to an already beleaguered evangelical Christian movement as it tries to get its message heard this year in Washington, where both the White House and Capitol are filled with people who don’t generally share similar views. To keep growing, the movement will have to bring in new generations of activists with new ideas. But most evangelical organizations aren’t about to relax their orthodoxy on hot-button culture-war issues for the sake of broadening their appeal with the young. And as a practical political matter, evangelical leaders worry that they will jeopardize their established activist base if they stake out more conciliatory positions on issues such as gay marriage or the environment.
This tension came to a head at the leadership level in December 2008, when Richard Cizik, who had worked for the 30 million-member National Association of Evangelicals for close to 30 years, was forced out as vice president for government affairs for expressing support for gay civil unions. He also had won the ire of social conservatives for elevating the issue of climate change and what he called “creation care” within the evangelical movement.
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“What I have seen for some time is that the National Association of Evangelicals was tracking to the left of where most evangelicals in this country are,” says Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, who led a failed 2007 campaign by evangelical leaders for Cizik’s ouster. “A lot of that was being pushed by Richard. . . . I think he was trying to take the organization to places where the membership did not want to go.”
These days, Cizik contends, the evangelical world is headed toward ideological places well beyond “the litmus test of issues for those in the religious right.” That’s why he says he’s planning to launch “an organization designed to build partnerships that empower young evangelicals toward a holistic agenda.”
“I’m interested in creating a place both intellectually and practically, where young evangelicals can come to appreciate the larger set of issues,” Cizik says.
Wheaton’s Black agrees that the evangelical movement could use organizations such as Cizik’s project to attract new blood. “I think we’re beginning to see shifts in the movement already,” she said, “as younger people become more active in politics and, perhaps as importantly, as some of the old guard leaders die, retire, lose some of their political potency.”
Diminishing Clout?
As a political force, the social conservative movement — which many credited with producing the margin of victory for President George W. Bush ’s re-election in 2004 — finds itself at its lowest ebb of influence since the religious right took off in earnest in the 1970s. The once-mighty Christian Coalition is all but a spent force in national politics. Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell died two years ago. And Focus on the Family leader James Dobson, who had been touted as the likeliest heir apparent to movement leaders such as Falwell and Christian television entrepreneur Pat Robertson, resigned his post in February.
“I’m not sure we know who is going to take the mantle,” Black said of the leadership void in the evangelical movement. “It’s such a moment of transition. It’s not clear who the new spokespeople will be.”
The most prominent emerging evangelical leader is Rick Warren, pastor of the 20,000-member Saddleback Church south of Los Angeles and author of the bestselling “The Purpose Driven Life.” But he, too, has been caught in a good deal of culture-war crossfire. Warren drew protests from evangelicals when he hosted Obama at Saddleback in 2006. But social liberals were at least as infuriated when Warren, who had endorsed Proposition 8, the anti-gay-marriage initiative in California, was invited to give the invocation at Obama’s inaugural.
Evangelical leaders say the travails of figures such as Warren and Cizik don’t point to any leadership crisis in the movement. “Clearly, there has been movement in the country and in quarters of public opinion in favor of gay marriage,” said Leith Anderson, the National Association of Evangelicals president, before adding, “I would think that most evangelicals have not changed their opinion and are not likely to in the near future.”
Nor does Anderson see demographic shifts in attitudes toward culture-war issues presaging any future divisions in the movement’s ranks. “I don’t know about a generational conflict,” he said. “I think there is going to be more generational discussion.”
Perkins concluded that the polling on younger evangelicals’ acceptance of gay marriage means “there’s work to be done there.” But he also adds that, in the big picture, evangelicals are already closing ranks. “I think what we have seen since the first of the year is a much more engaged citizenry. People are concerned about the policy decisions emanating not only from places like Iowa and New Hampshire and Vermont but also from Washington,” Perkins said. “I think overall fundraising is not up because of the economy, but from the activist level, there is more activity. People want to make a difference, they want to engage.”
Hill Redoubts
Meanwhile, social conservatives are preparing for an uphill battle against two pieces of legislation that are priorities of gay-rights activists. One, which the House Judiciary Committee approved last week, would expand the law that sets special punishments for hate crimes to cover offenses motivated by disdain based on sexual orientation or gender identity. The other would prohibit employment discrimination based on sexual orientation. Two years ago, the House passed a job bias bill that lost steam in the Senate, and both chambers endorsed hate crimes legislation, but it died under a Bush veto threat.
Evangelicals should oppose legislation that “gives special status to people based upon their sexual behavior,” Perkins said, because “that’s not a shared value of America.”
Obama did not often discuss gay rights when he was a candidate, but there seems to be little doubt that he would sign both measures. “It’s helpful that you have an administration that is open to LGBT equality and interested in working with you toward moving those kinds of bills,” said the legislative director for the gay advocacy group Human Rights Campaign, Allison Herwitt, using the acronym for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. “I think that it will be a very good working partnership once bills start moving.”
Gay rights advocates say they intend to wield the power of faith as part of their legislative push. Nearly 300 clergy members will come to the Capitol next week to urge lawmakers to support gay rights legislation as part of Human Rights Campaign’s second annual Clergy Call for Justice & Equality.
Perkins vows that his corps of supporters will be out in full force, too — and also be dug in for the long haul. “I’ve been giving a lot of thought to this lately in terms of how do you gauge success; what is success? I think, unfortunately, we have looked at our engagement in the culture . . . as a destination, that there would be a point where it’d be like a GPS, ‘You have arrived.’ I don’t think it’s that way,” he said.
“I don’t think in this life at any point we’ll arrive at a point and say, ‘You know our work is done, we’ve done everything we need to do, now let’s go have fun.’”
FOR FURTHER READING: Hate crimes (
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