— Alabama coalition leader
The Christian Coalition has to be one of the most cynical organizations in our political history. Formed in the 1980s as a conservative political fundraising and organizing organization, its overarching mission was to fight liberalism with a mutation of Christianity that focused on the Bible’s most hateful and regressive precepts.
Its practical purpose, however, was to get out the votes of unsmart Americans who bought into the paranoid view of society propounded by coalition leaders like its founder, the diamond-mine owner Pat Robertson and its first leader, the corrupt GOP political operative Ralph Reed.
Robertson and Reed have moved on, and the Christian Coalition has gradually lost its resonance. Now there is new evidence of its decline:
Three disgruntled state affiliates have severed ties with the Christian Coalition of America, one of the nation’s most powerful conservative groups during the 1990s but now buffeted by complaints over finances, leadership and its plans to veer into nontraditional policy areas.
“It’s a very sad day for our people, but a liberating day,” said John Giles, president of the coalition’s Alabama chapter, which announced Wednesday that it was renaming itself and splitting from the national organization. The Iowa and Ohio chapters took similar steps this year.
Giles said he and his Alabama colleagues have “a dozen hard reasons” for the action but would elaborate on only one — a perception that the coalition’s leadership was diverting itself from traditional concerns such as abortion and same-sex marriage to address other issues ranging from the environment to Internet access.
Giles predicted further defections and said the coalition was now left with only a half-dozen strong state chapters and a weak presence in Washington.
“In our prime, we were rated the seventh-most powerful lobbying organization in the country,” he said. “Now, there’s not even any blip on the radar screen.”
At its peak, the coalition had a presence in every state, but in some cases a modest one.
The coalition’s president, Roberta Combs, insisted her organization — which is $1 million in debt — would survive the defections, and was unapologetic about her interest in new directions.
“We’re going to have a new mission, a new vision — much more broad-focused,” she said. “They don’t like some of the comments I’ve made about the environment and some of these other issues.”
The coalition, which claims more than 2 million members, was founded in 1989 by religious broadcaster Pat Robertson and became politically powerful under Executive Director Ralph Reed before he left in 1997. Robertson, who turned over the presidency to Combs in 2002, has been criticized for provocative public statements, while Reed lost an election in Georgia last month after being linked to disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
