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GOP's crucial '08 base divided

By Ralph Z. Hallow
September 28, 2007

Gary Bauer said the religious right must be "careful not to slice up candidates we may turn to and ask our voter" to back.

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Religious conservatives are at odds over which of the candidates for the Republican presidential nomination should get their backing.

Many of the top leaders on the religious right privately say it's impossible to name a top-tier, declared Republican hopeful who can pass the "straight face" test as someone social conservatives can honestly say they would trust if elected.

Catholics and Protestant evangelicals on the right account for about a third of the Republican Party's electoral coalition, and it's difficult for a Republican to win without them.

"The problem is that there isn't someone seen as a titular head of the evangelicals who provides guidance on what and who they should be supporting," said Merrill Matthews, an evangelical and resident scholar at the Institute for Policy Innovation in Dallas.

Most leaders of major social conservative organizations don't like to talk outside their own circles about the movement's splintering. Few are eager to be quoted about internecine antagonisms developing, in part because they fear it will undermine the movement's political clout and the eventual Republican nominee's chances of winning the Oval Office.

But religious-right leaders consider national political leadership a moral trust, and after several secret summits, these leaders are deeply, sometimes acrimoniously, at odds.

Focus on the Family President James Dobson twice said publicly that former Tennessee senator Fred Thompson is not a Christian.

American Values founder Gary Bauer told The Washington Times that Mr. Dobson, once Mr. Bauer's mentor, "hurt the whole conservative Christian movement" by so labeling Mr. Thompson. "Come on, Dobson can't even come up with a biblical basis for saying something like that."

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