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The gospel according to Karl
Bush's mastermind Karl Rove is going all-out to mobilize an army of Christian soldiers to carry the president to the Promised Land in November. But will mainstream churches rebel?

Winning the souls, or at least the votes, of conservative evangelical Christians is central to the Republican Party strategy under President Bush. But when Republican congressional leaders last month tried to push through the House Ways and Means Committee a top priority for evangelical Christians -- an easing of Internal Revenue Service rules barring preachers from using their tax-exempt pulpits to endorse political candidates -- it suffered a surprising setback. Although House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., and other prominent Republicans backed the tax law change, there was one problem: The committee chairman wasn't on board.

Rep. Bill Thomas, the cantankerous California Republican who chairs the tax-writing panel, stunned the House leadership by derailing its attempt to attach the controversial change in the tax law to an unrelated bill, the Hill newspaper reported. It's not clear whether Thomas objected to the substance of the provision, which opponents have decried as a violation of church-state separation, or whether he was just being ornery. His spokeswoman said she didn't know the details, and Thomas could not be reached for comment. But for White House political chief Karl Rove, who has staked victory in President Bush's campaign on turning out evangelical voters in November, the incident underscored the precarious nature of his strategy.

With Democrats revved up to defeat Bush, independents leaning toward Democrat John Kerry, moderate Republicans turning away from the party and many gay Republicans having left it altogether, it's now more important than ever for the White House to get its conservative evangelical voter base to the polls. And if Republicans can't change the law preventing churches from devoting tax-exempt resources to partisan politics, the Bush-Cheney reelection effort appears ready to stretch the rules as far as possible. The campaign recently asked religious volunteers across the country to hand over their churches' directories for the Bush-Cheney database and to distribute pro-Bush "voter guides," prompting an outcry from religious leaders. Even Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's ethics and religious liberty commission and a prominent Bush supporter, recoiled at the idea of churches becoming directly involved in a political campaign. "I am appalled," Land said in a statement. "I suspect that this will rub a lot of pastors' fur the wrong way ... It's one thing for a church member motivated by exhortations to exercise his Christian citizenship to go out and decide to work on the Bush campaign or the Kerry campaign. It's another, and totally inappropriate for a political campaign, to ask workers who may be church members to provide church member information through ... directories." ...

...In courting religious conservatives, Bush has chosen not to emphasize the broader Christian values that many Americans, regardless of party affiliation, share.

"Bush has shown an ideological commitment to the literalist Christian tradition at the expense of the broader view of the larger religious community," said the Rev. Bob Edgar, general secretary of the National Council of Churches, a mainline Protestant group. "He is the first president not to meet with the leadership of mainline Christian traditions since George Washington. We've been able to talk with the prime minister of Britain and the chancellor of Germany, but not our own president. And we would have had some positive things to say," Edgar said, mentioning Bush's $15 billion international HIV-AIDS prevention and treatment program. "But on moral questions, like the morality of going to war, we felt the president should have listened more carefully." ...