As I have mentioned before, it’s hard to imagine conservatives being more successful at the ballot box without being joined by even MORE conservatives at the ballot box.
That means that in order to win, we have to do more to identify, educate and mobilize others who think like we do. And to make the best use of our time and leverage our existing relationships, it makes sense to spend some time focusing on organizing in churches.
Importance of Political Organization in Churches
1) Churches are where the conservatives are
The statistics don’t lie. Conservatives are more likely to attend church than liberals. Very conservative individuals attend more frequently.
If you want to look at it from a partisan standpoint, all you need to know is that Romney beat Obama by 20 points among those who attend church at least once a week.
Again, it’s a matter of hunting where the ducks are.
There are hundreds of thousands of churches all across the country that bring their members together every Sunday, and they can have a tremendous impact when they are informed and motivated.
Sadly, people in most churches are little better than others when it comes to the basics of citizenship, such as registering and actually voting on Election Day. On average, only about half are actually registered, and about half of those that are will cast a ballot in most elections. Not a recipe for political success.
Given that the average race is usually won or lost by about five percent, the possibilities are obvious.
2) Organize with “Church Contacts”
In order to organize something, somebody has to be in charge, or else not much gets done. That’s where a church contact comes in. A church contact is simply someone whose job it is to serve as a point of contact between their church and outside conservative political groups and activity.
The three primary goals of church contacts are:
- To identify fellow conservatives
- Make sure they are registered to vote
- Keep fellow church members informed.
(Get details on “how” to organize churches with church contacts here)
Since politics is cyclical, the activities that a church contact would focus on will vary from season to season. But whether it’s preparing for an election, or educating people on how to lobby those who have been elected, there’s always something to do.
Once somebody is actually in charge, things are more likely to get done – and people in the church know who to go to in order to stay informed or get involved.
3) Know what churches can and cannot do in politics
As I’ve mentioned before, there’s always a lot of confusion over what churches can and cannot do in politics. Of course a lot of this confusion is generated by liberals who don’t want to see churches dominated by conservatives get more politically involved. (Go figure)
The thing to know is that there is a LOT that they can do that most of them currently don’t do. Most of what pastors and church members hear about it being legally “taboo” is garbage.
Lack of knowledge leads to fear…and that leads to inactivity and ineffectiveness.
That said, it’s important to get informed and know the rules. So click here for the full list of What churches can and cannot do in politics.
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Remember, politics is all about math, and our job is to focus on addition and multiplication. That means getting more conservatives involved – and churches are full of them.
Have any other thoughts or experiences with political organization in churches? Feel free to share in the comments below!
(Get more tips like these in my “Grassroots 101 Training Series“. Check it out!)
Celebrating (less) Independence
The land of liberty ain’t what it used to be.
Hardly a cause for a celebration of independence.
And just what are we supposed to be celebrating independence from anyway? Large, distant, unrepresentative government that infringes on our liberties?
Take a moment today and read the list of charges made in the Declaration of Independence against the British monarchy. I won’t spoil it for you, but a person could be excused for thinking it was meant to describe some of the actions of our own federal government.
In fact, the last time we celebrated a real expansion of liberty from intrusive, dictatorial government was when the Declaration was written two-hundred and thirty-seven years ago. Each passing Independence Day since has seen a government grown larger at the expense of the liberties of the people it is supposed to serve.
(Read “Common Sense”, the book that helped start the Revolution)
The primary means our Founding Fathers employed to control government and preserve liberty was separation of powers, taking political power and splitting it into executive, legislative and judicial functions. The novel idea was to set them in opposition to one another so that each one would check the powers of the other two.
It would be nice if we actually lived under such a government.
It’s a measure of who is really in charge of our country when you compare the size of the Congressional Record (the sum of all of the proceedings and legislation enacted by Congress) versus the Federal Register (the sum of all the regulations put in place by faceless, unelected bureaucrats). The Register wins hands down, totaling just shy of eighty-thousand pages in 2012 alone – and almost 1.5 million since it was first published in 1936.
The Roman historian Tacitus once said, “The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws”, but he didn’t live long enough to see a modern “progressive” tax code-enabled, social-welfare regulatory state. Today he might say, “The more oppressive the government, the more numerous the laws”.
So, how did it get to this point? Slowly but surely, Congress passes broad stroke legislation with language like “as the Secretary shall determine”, allowing executive branch bureaucrats to fill in the details. That’s how two-thousand page bills like Obamacare spawn over ten-thousand pages in new regulations.
The problem with the regulatory state is that it is an end-run around the separation of powers. It coalesces more power in the executive branch, (which means into the hands of bureaucrats); and more of it in Washington, DC, as opposed to the state and local governments that are closer to the people.
Of course the beauty of the regulatory state for the political class is that nobody is really in charge. And when a scandal presents itself, it’s met with calls by government enablers for “better regulations”, or more people or money to better enforce them; never with why they should exist to begin with.
The simple fact is the more regulators that the government has (and Obamacare adds an additional sixteen-thousand), the more power it has over the individual, and the more opportunities it has to exert bias, (as the recent IRS scandal demonstrates).
If our representative branch has abdicated much of its authority, the judiciary is steadily eroding what’s left.
Just this past week the Supreme Court claimed that Congress was bigoted to try to defend the definition of society’s most fundamental institution as it has been understood for several thousand years. This was on top of their condoning a lower court decision which threw out a referendum passed on the same subject by voters in California.
Further, Christian Americans are now being hauled into court on “civil rights violations” for refusing to provide services for gay weddings, Christian charities are forced to close in states that won’t allow them to practice faith based adoption services, and others face millions in fines for not providing abortion-related services in company health-care plans.
And this is the land of liberty?
Instead of celebrating independence on July 4th, maybe we should treat the occasion more like Memorial Day, honoring what our Founding Founders achieved, and remembering what we’ve lost.
I think it’s safe to say that they wouldn’t be doing too much celebrating.