HOW LONG DO YOU WEAR THE SACKCLOTH FOR?:

GOP's faith-based quest for a touch of color (Salim Muwakkil, April 10, 2005, Chicago Tribune)

The Republican Party's attempt to cultivate new black leadership through appeals to moral concerns and faith-based funding has had some success. And for good reason.

The black church, which often has been portrayed as a monolithic hub of progressive activism, has a strong conservative tradition. Like most religious institutions, its primary emphasis is piety, family and personal morality.

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., for example, was bitterly opposed by much of the clergy leadership for his social activism. But King's notions of civic protest and social agitation also have a strong following in the black church, and that wing is reacting strongly against the GOP's new religious outreach.

The GOP is trying to exploit this venerable split by aggressively courting blacks through appeals to so-called moral issues and by channeling educational resources through faith-based institutions.

As the party of Abraham Lincoln, the GOP historically was the first electoral home of blacks. That political allegiance began to change after the New Deal presidency of Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt. After President Lyndon B. Johnson linked the Democrats to the civil rights movement--in rhetoric and legislation--the black electorate became the party's most dependable bloc of voters, where it remains.

The GOP has used a variety of tactics to redress this electoral imbalance. In the 1970s, President Richard Nixon sought to appeal to the surging black nationalist community with a focus on "black capitalism." In the 1980s, then-Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) famously urged Reagan Republicans to abandon all attempt to convert the civil rights fraternity and "to invent new black leadership. ... "

The GOP then tried to incubate a corps of right-leaning black intellectuals to challenge the liberal arguments linking African-Americans to Democrats. Scholars such as Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Shelby Steele and Glenn Lowry (who has since turned left), among others, were heavily recruited and dispatched to public punditry. These attempts were hampered by, among other things, a lack of connection with the cultural currents of the black community.

Even the high-profile appointments of folks like Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice by GOP leaders have failed to cause a significant change in black electoral behavior.

But Republicans now see the Bush administration's "faith-based initiatives" as a new opportunity to wedge the party into the black community. The church is the black community's dominant institution, and its religious values always have encouraged social and cultural conservatism.

Although those values share much with those of the religious right and conservative Republicans, black voters had powerful reasons for shying away from an American right wing that often welcomed racist ideology. Republicans think that sordid history is old news to most black voters and the time is right to exploit common cultural ties.

If not now, when? If not us, who?

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 14, 2005 8:32 PM