Cruz Woos Evangelicals, Saying Religious Liberty Will Be the Defining Issue of 2016

Speaking to a group of Christian conservatives on Thursday, senator Ted Cruz was the only candidate to dispense with his stump speech. Instead, his remarks focused entirely on religious liberty, which he said will be the central issue of the 2016 presidential election.

The speech, which Cruz delivered at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority Conference, was indicative of the crucial role social conservatives and evangelicals will play in Cruz’s bid for the Republican nomination. The Texas senator has, during his three years in Washington, tried to define himself as the most conservative man in the race. Perhaps less obvious, though, is that Cruz is positioning himself as the natural second choice of social conservatives who are now backing some of his rivals, particularly Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, and the retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson. On Monday, he made a political and personal case that he should be their man.

Cruz already has a large following among religious conservatives, something that was clear from the moment he was introduced. He received the loudest applause of any speaker that day, and the crowd roared with approval as he cheered leaders and groups on the Christian right, such as Ralph Reed, the founder of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, and Concerned Women for America’s Penny Nance.

“I believe 2016 will be the religious-liberty election,” Cruz told the crowd. “Religious liberty has never been more threatened in America than right now today.” Throughout his speech, he tapped the frustration felt by many Christian conservatives that some actions by the Obama administration have put religious conservatives on defense — for instance, the mandate in Obamacare that employers provide coverage for contraception, a requirement that the Little Sisters of the Poor and other religious organizations have found problematic.

The message was not subtle: The senator also talked about his own experiences as a litigator who has fought for Christian causes. With the Supreme Court set to issue a ruling on the legality of gay marriage, Cruz described his career as a lawyer and solicitor general of Texas who successfully defended religious liberty before the Supreme Court. He specifically mentioned that he defended the display of the Ten Commandments monument at the Texas Capitol and worked to keep “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance.

He also aimed a broadside at some of the other Republicans running for president who, he charged, have not been as vociferously supportive of the religious-freedom law passed in Indiana, which sparked a political uproar across the country.

“I think Indiana was, as Ronald Reagan put it, ‘a time for choosing,’” Cruz said.

“More than a few Republicans, sadly, even more than a few Republicans running for president in 2016, chose that moment somehow to go rearrange their sock drawer. I’ll tell you this, I will never, ever, ever shy away from standing up and defending religious liberty, ever.”

Cruz was the last of three presidential hopefuls to speak on Thursday afternoon, after Senators Marco Rubio and Rand Paul. Both Rubio and Paul delivered variations on their standard stump speeches rather than exclusively keying their remarks to the crowd.

As Cruz sold himself, he buttered up the crowd, too. “The men and women in this room are going to play a critical role” in electing a Republican president and bringing a sea change in the politics of the country, Cruz told the people assembled in a ballroom at the Omni Shoreham hotel in Washington, D.C. He urged the audience to reach out to the networks in their states and help “turn out people of faith” on Election Day — even people who don’t always vote Republican, like “Reagan Democrats, blue-collar, working-class Catholics, up and down the Midwest into New England.”

Of course, Cruz is not the only candidate competing for the evangelical vote. Santorum, Huckabee, and Carson are all drawing supporters from among conservative Christians. But this may be one time in Ted Cruz’s life when he’s okay being runner-up — for the time being.

I'm posting this piece on Ted Cruz because of its emphasis on "Religious Liberty" which is also a theme of this March 2015 piece from Religion Dispatches.

Hopefully this will set up an interesting discussion on this issue and strategy for the 2016 election.

It's a long piece and I'm excepting a chunk of it to peak your interest for discussion (a full read is best). If you have trouble accessing Russell Moore's Wall Street Journal article linked in the piece - put this in "search" What Will Matter to Evangelicals in 2016 and that should give you access.

Evangelicals Looking for Walker to “Do Nothing” in 2016 Election

".......Emphasizing that ours is a “Christian nation” and pushing “hot button issues” as a style of campaigning has been detrimental to evangelicals, said Mary Jo Sharp, who teaches apologetics at Houston Baptist University and analyzes political campaigns as part of a class she teaches there. “It’s very difficult to hear” that kind of rhetoric, she said. “Christians are not supposed to be the dividers.”

Over the course of his political career in Wisconsin, Walker “hasn’t presented as any kind of culture warrior,” said Hunter Baker, Associate Professor of Political Science at Union University, a Southern Baptist school in Jackson, Tennessee. “One of the worst things that ever happened with conservative Christians,” said Baker, was that they “give in to a tribal impulse,” by questioning “are we getting the respect we perceive we once had, are we losing ground, we need to mobilize, we need to increase our force.” That, he added, “is a losing strategy. It gives people the sense you’re working from resentment.”

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal last month, Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, wrote that in 2016 evangelicals won’t be looking to candidates to “know the words to hymns,” “repeat clichés about appointing Supreme Court justices who will ‘interpret the law, not make the law,’” or to use “‘God and country’ talk borrowed from a 1980s-era television evangelist.”

Moore “has a good feel of the pulse of evangelicals” and “represents a wide segment” of them, said Tobin Grant, a political scientist at Southern Illinois University and blogger on religion and politics for Religion News Service. Unlike his predecessor, Richard Land, known for inflaming the culture wars, Moore’s “focus is more on religious and social concerns than directly political ones” and has “less interest in changing DC and more interest in keeping DC out of the way of the church,” Grant said.

These evangelicals are listening for a candidate who can signal he is “one of us” without pandering. Both evangelical and Catholic candidates who have earned the culture warrior label for their strident pronouncements—Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum, or Mike Huckabee—are seen as embarrassing embodiments of stereotypes these conservative Christians would like to shed.

Instead, they are looking at a candidate like Walker, or even Jeb Bush (a Catholic), who is personally religious and, crucially, “gets” evangelical culture. Bush’s Right to Rise PAC recently signed Jordan Sekulow, executive director of the American Center for Law and Justice, as a senior advisor—a move the Christian Broadcasting Network’s David Brody called the move “a big get” for courting the evangelical vote. While Sekulow has been at the forefront of the culture wars, the ACLJ is also one of several religious right legal firms who, for example, brought legal challenges to the Affordable Care Act’s contraception coverage requirement.

Walker hits the right evangelical notes without overplaying his hand—and that’s exactly the way they want him to keep it. John Mark Reynolds, professor of philosophy and provost at Houston Baptist University, said that Walker “would do well to do nothing to appeal to us. We get it. He’s one of us. He sounds like one of us. He leans forward like one of us. He answers questions like one of us.”.........

“What will matter to evangelicals,” Moore wrote in his Wall Street Journal op-ed, “is how the candidate, if elected president, will articulate and defend religious-liberty rights.”

The religious liberty issue is, for evangelicals, a “four-alarm fire,” said Denny Burk, Professor of Biblical Studies at Boyce College, part of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. He said evangelicals expect the candidates “to have the courage of their convictions to persuade people about what’s going on.”.....

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