NEWS STORY: Christian Right meeting in Memphis draws five GOP hopefuls

c. 1996 Religion News Service MEMPHIS, Tenn. (RNS)-Joined by five Republican presidential candidates, thousands of conservative Christians met in Memphis over the weekend for a two-day meeting designed to rally evangelical voters for the upcoming presidential primaries.”Our goal,”said Howard Phillips, chairman of the Conservative Caucus and one of many Christian Right leaders who spoke at […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (RNS)-Joined by five Republican presidential candidates, thousands of conservative Christians met in Memphis over the weekend for a two-day meeting designed to rally evangelical voters for the upcoming presidential primaries.”Our goal,”said Howard Phillips, chairman of the Conservative Caucus and one of many Christian Right leaders who spoke at the National Affairs Briefing,”should be to restore the country to its past great glory based on biblical Scripture and to confine the federal government to its proper constitutional boundaries.” The rally, which drew 4,000, included speeches by such conservative leaders as Christian Coalition Executive Director Ralph Reed and the Rev. Jerry Falwell, chancellor of Liberty University, as well as five GOP contenders: former commentator Patrick J. Buchanan, Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas, Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, Rep. Robert K. Dornan of California, and Alan Keyes, a former State Department official.

President Clinton and three other Republican presidential hopefuls-Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas, former Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander, and publishing magnate Steve Forbes-were invited but did not attend.


Each session of the meeting, held in the Memphis Pyramid arena, began with two pledges of allegiance-the first to the Christian flag, the second to the American flag. Key themes of many of the speeches were restoring America to its”Christian foundation,”rescuing modern American culture from secularism and reassuming control of a government gone astray.”Western culture is in a free-fall,”said Ed McAteer, president of the Religious Roundtable, which organized the briefing.”Its leadership has no clear vision of the meaning of our Constitution or of the biblical fundamentals of freedom and morality, and how the two must relate.” Buchanan, peppering his 30-minute address with references to God and country, drew cheers and ovations when he denounced abortion, homosexuality, federal involvement in public schools, U.S.military operations in concert with the United Nations, and the National Endowment for the Arts.”This is a battle for the soul of America,”Buchanan said.”This is not Weimar, Germany. This is God’s country. This is America.” The fiery, conservative oratory was reminiscent of the first National Affairs Briefing in 1980 in Dallas, where conservative evangelicals urged a national revival through Christian activism.

Gramm shied away from the focus on God that marked most of the speeches here. But he said he was the candidate who could deliver the kind of change sought by Christian conservatives.

Gramm accused Dole, the Republican front-runner, of flip-flopping on abortion, failing to oppose U.S. troop deployment to Bosnia, and being willing to compromise with Clinton on a national health care bill.”If we’re going to change America, we’re going to have to have someone who is tough and committed,”said Gramm.

Reed of the Christian Coalition had a word for the Republican candidates who didn’t attend.”If you want to retain the majority that you won in 1994 … then you cannot, you should not and you must not retreat from your time-honored and noble defense of the innocent, unborn child and the pro-family values that got you that majority.”

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