POWER OF FAITH

Religion's importance to Kansans means candidates can't avoid it

BY DEB GRUVER AND STEVE PAINTER

The Wichita Eagle

Incumbent Phill Kline preaches from pulpits across the state, as he has for years.

Paul Morrison, Kline's Democratic challenger, says the attorney general "exploits the church to his own ends."

Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, a Catholic, spoke at length at a conference on faith after stinging criticism from her archbishop about her stance on abortion.

Jim Barnett, her Republican challenger, speaks about his faith only if asked.

Faith and politics are mixing freely in the two highest-profile statewide campaigns this election year.

Candidates avoid talking about faith at their own risk, some political scientists say.

"They're representing a constituency that, 90 percent of them believe in God," said Bob Beatty, political science assistant professor at Washburn University in Topeka.

"God is basically part of our political discourse," he said. "We only notice it when it seems to be starting to dominate the discourse."

Church sign's message

A sign at Spirit One Christian Center near Hydraulic and Harry definitely is political.

On one side the sign reads: "Morrison accepts blood money from abortionist Tiller. How many babies??"

The other side reads: "Abortionist Tiller has given $300,000 to Sebelius. Price of 1,000 babies!"

The Morrison and Sebelius campaigns say the sign is untrue.

"The governor has never received money from ProKanDo and has not a single donation from Dr. Tiller in her race for governor," spokeswoman Nicole Corcoran said. "These claims are totally false and made-up numbers. It's unfortunate they're trying to mislead Kansans."

Pastor Mark Holick said Tiller donates to political action committees that spend money supporting candidates. He said the signs don't say Tiller directly contributed to the campaigns.

He said the sign is within the church's right.

"We always preach about biblical issues, and life is a biblical issue," Holick said. "We can't tell people how to vote. We can speak to the issues, where the politicians stand on a particular issue, such as life or marriage."

To keep their tax-exempt status, federal law says churches cannot intervene in any campaign on behalf of any candidate for political office.

The IRS has threatened to pull tax-exempt status from the All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, Calif., because of an anti-war speech delivered just days before the 2004 presidential election.

Holick said he didn't think the sign violated IRS regulations.

An IRS spokeswoman, Sue Hales, would not comment, saying federal law prohibits the IRS from talking about any specific taxpayer.

Faith's influence

Faith influences the way candidates campaign and the way people vote, said Brett Shirk, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas and Western Missouri, whose south-central Kansas chapter recently sponsored a forum titled "Sex, Religion and Kansas Politics" at Wichita State University.

Voters wonder "does this person have spiritual grounding in something that could act as a guide or foundation, especially in times of crisis?" said Walker Lambert of the Faith & Politics Institute.

His group is a proponent of political leaders "listening to those inner voices in order to lead with conscience, to use that as a foundation for courageous action."

Lambert used Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi as examples of leaders with spiritual grounding, of people who led with a code of deep belief in something larger than themselves.

The idea, Lambert said, is "I'm an actor in a larger play. It's not just about the individual. What actions can I take in order to improve the human community and just not improve myself?"

Attorney general race

Kline says he has spoken at church gatherings throughout his political career. He speaks without notes, telling his life story.

"I share it because it's a story I hope will inspire others, how God can positively impact their lives," he said.

Raised a Methodist, he now belongs to a nondenominational Christian church.

Morrison has criticized Kline's fundraisers and his office's pursuit of abortion patients' medical records, which Kline says will help prosecutors identify and prosecute sex predators.

Morrison's faith, Catholicism, holds that abortion is morally wrong. His beef with Kline over the records, he says, is about medical privacy.

"To me, that is strictly an abuse-of-authority, violation-of-privacy issue," he said.

He and his wife have led marriage preparation classes for their church since 1989. Occasionally, he said, his faith and his job as Johnson County prosecutor clash.

The Catholic Church condemns the death penalty but stops short of saying the state has no right to impose it.

Morrison successfully pursued the death penalty in the case of serial killer John Robinson.

"I did what the law obligated me to do, and I did it with a clear conscience," he said.

Gubernatorial race

Sebelius, also Catholic, has likewise run afoul of her church's condemnation of abortion. A longtime abortion rights supporter, she has twice vetoed bills to regulate abortion clinics.

In a September column, Archbishop Joseph Naumann of the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas criticized her most recent veto and her fundraising.

"It is never permissible for a Catholic to support the legalization of the killing of innocent lives by abortion, much less to lead the fight for legal abortion," he wrote.

He rejected Sebelius' argument that all outpatient clinics should be subject to the same regulations. Abortion, he wrote, "is the only 'surgery' that always results in the death of a child."

Sebelius' indirect response came at the Kansans for Faithful Citizenship conference in Johnson County.

"My Catholic faith teaches me that all life is sacred, and personally I believe abortion is wrong," she said.

The answer, she said, is not to make abortion patients and their doctors criminals, but to focus on pregnancy prevention and help for expectant mothers.

"We must stand with women who feel so alone that abortion seems like their only choice," she said. "These women need people to walk with them, not cast stones at them."

Barnett voted for both bills that Sebelius vetoed but hasn't made it an issue in his campaign.

A Methodist, he talks about his faith only when pressed.

"My faith leads me to respect life, from the earliest stages of life to natural death," he said.

A doctor, he has parted ways with some conservatives who, following the highly publicized Florida case of Terri Schiavo, pushed for state intervention in end-of-life cases. Schiavo's husband won a lengthy legal battle to have the feeding tube removed from his wife, who had been in a persistent vegetative state for more than a decade.

"Certainly, those are gut-wrenching decisions that are best made between the family and the physician," Barnett said.

A monopoly on faith?

In the August primary, voters upended the conservative majority on the State Board of Education, which was critical of the scientific theory of evolution.

"That's a false choice that's been given to us, that you have to choose between God and evolution," said Boo Tyson, executive director of a group called Mainstream Voices of Faith, based in Johnson County.

The group was formed, she said, out of "frustration with the notion that all people of faith believe and think alike, and that the religious right speaks for all people of faith."

Such left-leaning groups have come and gone over the years but tend to lack staying power, said Joe Aistrup, head of the political science department at Kansas State University.

While conservatives generally agree on abortion, same-sex marriage, evolution and embryonic stem cell research, he said, moderates lack a galvanizing issue.

"People that are moderate are not too extreme about anything, so it's really hard to motivate that type of group," he said.

Mary Kay Culp, executive director of the anti-abortion group Kansans for Life, considers the moderate groups to be faith wannabes.

"It's just so blatantly insincere," she said. "The liberal religious use it as simply a strategy, rather than a deeply felt belief."

Beatty, the Washburn professor, doesn't see faith fading as an issue in political campaigns, if for no other reason than large numbers of people tend to gather on Sundays.

"If you can tap into that, you can mobilize voters," he said.