When Right Breaks The Gop Will Fall Count Your Blessings Don’T Trash Party Because Of Leader

Fri., April 3, 1998

By John Webster johnwe@spokesman.com (509) 459-5421

“Count your blessings,” exhorts an old gospel hymn. “Name them one by one … and it will surprise you what the Lord has done.”

Many social conservatives, however, have begun to hum a different tune: “Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war…” The war they contemplate is against the Republican Party, the very organization that converted them from unengaged church mice into an army that swings elections and transforms national policy.

Democrats can’t believe the luck: Shorn of their old majorities, led by a scalawag, reduced to the reactionary defending of bankrupt ideas, they are on the rocks. And now, the enemy wants to selfdestruct? Maybe there is a God.

Ellen Craswell, who ran and lost for Washington state governor, left the Republican Party last month. James Dobson recently huddled with fellow conservative leaders to consider attacking the GOP, but at the last minute backed away.

Dobson had the good sense to count his blessings. The “family values” godfather met with 25 sympathetic members of Congress, who urged him not to trash the entire party over dissatisfaction with its current leaders. As a result, Dobson’s in a position to bargain.

Craswell isn’t. By joining a third party, she became a political footnote. In religious terms, hers is the tactic that causes many a thriving church to split, lose credibility and crumble.

Ours is a two-party system. Americans who want a direct role pick the party closest to their views, then work patiently for incremental change.

Beginning with the election of Ronald Reagan, religious conservatives changed the Republican Party into a force for radical innovation. Deregulation, tax cuts and spending control freed the economy and slashed the deficit. Welfare became workfare. Conservative reforms invade the schools. Crime is falling. Freedom infects the Soviet Union. And Democrats have to parrot Republican ideas to win elections.

In 1990, Ronald Reagan examined these trends and wrote: “There is no limit to what a proud, free people can achieve.” But if conservatives give up on their churches as an agent for social change and make the heavy hand of law an instrument for their moral frustrations, they will sow the seeds, in this libertarian country, for their own defeat.

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