Christian Coalition

The Christian Coalition was founded on September 25, 1989, when Pat Robertson convened an organizational meeting in Atlanta following his failed 1988 presidential campaign. Robertson had demonstrated that evangelicals constituted a massive, underorganized voter bloc — the campaign's failure revealed the need not for a different candidate, but for a permanent political machine. Ralph Reed was hired as its first executive director on October 2, 1989. At its founding, the Coalition had a budget of $200,000 and approximately 2,000 members. Within five years it was the most operationally effective grassroots political organization the Religious Right had ever produced. Its four signature innovations defined a generation of Religious Right politics: 1. Voter guides distributed in church pews: Billed as nonpartisan; critics and the FEC argued they were slanted to favor Republicans. The Coalition said it placed some 33 million guides in churches before the 1994 midterms. In 1999 the IRS denied the Coalition's long-pending application for tax-exempt status, and the same year a federal court largely rejected the FEC's suit over its election activities. 2. Stealth candidate strategy: Activists were trained to run for school boards, city councils, and local Republican party committees without identifying their Religious Right affiliation. Coalition training materials explicitly instructed candidates to conceal movement origins until elected. 3. State party capture: By 1994, press reports credited the Coalition with a dominant role in between 12 and 18 state Republican parties; Ralph Reed demurred, saying it wanted only 'a role commensurate with our numbers.' 4. Legislative scorecards: Congress members were rated on Religious Right priorities, creating accountability pressure and informing voter guide content. The Coalition's own survey found that religious conservatives constituted 33% of the 1994 electorate — up from 24% in 1992 and 18% in 1988. Reed claimed the Coalition provided the winning margin in approximately half of the Republicans' 54-seat House gain. Reed's resignation in June 1997 triggered the Coalition's rapid decline. The IRS tax ruling (1999), the FEC lawsuit, and Robertson's own 2001 resignation effectively ended the organization's political effectiveness. But its infrastructure — the precinct-level organizing, the state party capture model, the voter guide template — was inherited by successor organizations and remains in use.

Themes this entry appears in

• Christian Nationalism
• Political Strategy
• Anti-LGBTQ
• Anti-Democratic
• Abortion Politics
• Politics & the Pulpit

Connections from Christian Coalition

• influenced → Republican Revolution (1994) (1994) — The Christian Coalition distributed approximately 33 million voter guides through church networks before the November 1994 midterms, was credited in press reports with a dominant role in between 12 and 18 state Republican parties, and operated the precinct-level organizing that converted anti-Clinton backlash into a historic 54-seat House gain. Religious conservatives constituted 33% of the 1994 electorate — the Coalition's own post-election survey documented this figure. Reed claimed the Coalition provided the winning margin in approximately half of the 54 seats gained.
• opposed → Hillary Clinton (1993) — Du Mez describes opposition to Hillary Clinton, from her health care effort onward, as a staple of Christian Coalition mobilization in the 1990s. Clinton's health care reform effort, her public policy role, and her unapologetic feminist identity made her the perfect foil for the Christian Coalition's mobilization apparatus. Her presence in the White House was one of the Christian Coalition's most reliable fundraising and mobilization tools through the 1990s.

Connections to Christian Coalition

• Buchanan's 'Culture War' Speech (1992) influenced (1992) — Buchanan's August 17, 1992 'Culture War' speech at the Republican National Convention provided, in Frances FitzGerald's and Du Mez's accounts, the Christian Coalition and the broader Religious Right with a master political narrative — America as a battlefield in a religious war — that validated their sense of existential threat, provided a military metaphor for political organizing, and mainstreamed language previously confined to Religious Right internal communications. Ralph Reed subsequently incorporated 'culture war' framing into Christian Coalition communications and strategy.
• Moral Majority influenced (1989) — Sara Diamond describes how, when the Moral Majority dissolved in 1989, Reed built the Christian Coalition as its institutional successor — inheriting its model of using churches as political organizing units, its mailing lists, and its framing of evangelical Christians as a unified voter bloc. The Coalition's voter guide strategy was a refinement of the Moral Majority's voter registration drives. Reed studied the Moral Majority's failures (over-dependence on Falwell's personal brand, top-down structure) and corrected them with a decentralized, precinct-level organizing model.
• Pat Robertson founded (1989) — Robertson founded the Christian Coalition in September 1989 to convert his failed 1988 presidential campaign's donor and volunteer infrastructure into a permanent political machine. The campaign had demonstrated the electoral scale of the evangelical voter bloc; the Coalition was the institutional vehicle to harness it.

Sources

• Christian Right rebounds to sway GOP in campaigns — Christian Science Monitor (1994)
• Christian Coalition of America (IRS denial and FEC case, 1999) — Wikipedia (2024)
• Roads to Dominion — Sara Diamond (1995), pp. 229–265
• Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism — Michelle Goldberg (2006), pp. 31–55
• How the Religious Right Shaped Lesbian and Gay Activism — Tina Fetner (2008), pp. 60–90
• Thy Kingdom Come — Randall Balmer (2006), pp. 35–52