A new book by the senior editor with U.S. News & World Report says the public policy successes achieved by evangelical Christians in recent years can be traced, in large measure, to one organization. Because of the national impact of Focus on the Family, says author Dan Gilgoff, Democrats have learned not to write off "values voters."
In his book The Jesus Machine, Gilgoff takes an inside look at Focus on the Family and its founder, Dr. James Dobson. Gilgoff was given broad access to the ministry’s Colorado Springs headquarters, its state-level affiliates, and interviews with Dobson.
The book examines many recent political issues, including how Focus on the Family’s Ohio affiliate was instrumental in getting President George W. Bush re-elected in 2004 by getting a traditional marriage amendment on the ballot that year.
"It was a real long-shot campaign," Gilgoff says of the push for the amendment. "They had to collect upwards of 300,000 signatures in the course of about two-and-a-half months." The petition campaign was successful, putting the amendment on the November 2004 ballot in the Buckeye State. According to Gilgoff, that influenced many a voter.
"What the presence of that amendment on the ballot ... did was to focus the minds of voters on this hot-button issue of same-sex ’marriage’ — and that shifted a lot of support toward George W. Bush," he explains. "Of course, if John Kerry would have won Ohio, which would have required just a shifting of around 60,000 votes there, he would be in the White House right now."
Gilgoff says Focus on the Family’s vast national network is the singly most powerful web of organizations evangelical Christians have ever known. And the ministry, he says, has been instrumental in helping that bloc of faith-based voters achieve more in the past few years than at any time in history.
The book also examines another aspect of the 2004 presidential election, when Kerry’s presidential campaign hired Mara Vanderslice to reach out to religious voters. The author says Democrats did not discount "values voters" during the November 2006 congressional takeover.
"This same woman (Vanderslice) who was silenced by the [Kerry] campaign started her own consulting firm [that] was organized entirely to help Democrats reach out to religious voters," he explains, [and] in most of the campaigns in 2006 where her firm was active, you saw Democratic candidates make serious in-roads among evangelicals."
The author predicts that progress will carry over to Democratic candidates in 2008.
Copyright © Agapepress, used with permission
RSS 2.0