Catholic-evangelical alliance reshaping U.S.

In 1960, the last time a Roman Catholic ran for president on the Democratic ticket, evangelical Protestant leaders warned their flocks that electing John F. Kennedy would be like handing the Oval Office to the Antichrist.

So deep was the antipathy toward Catholics that the president of the National Association of Evangelicals sent a distressed letter to pastors saying: "Public opinion is changing in favor of the church of Rome. We dare not sit idly by — voiceless and voteless." The Rev. Billy Graham's magazine Christianity Today said in an editorial that the Vatican "does all in its power to control the governments of nations."

Forty-four years later, less than a fortnight in Christian history, evangelicals and conservative Catholics have forged an alliance that is reshaping American politics and culture.

Now another Catholic Democrat from Massachusetts, Sen. John Kerry, is running for president. But this time evangelicals are cheering on the handful of Catholic bishops who have said they will deny communion to politicians like Kerry who support abortion rights. In an about-face, Christianity Today says in a June editorial that it is "certainly appropriate" for bishops to expect a Catholic president to submit to Vatican authority.

More than political expediency is at work here. Once blinded by suspicion, evangelical and some Catholic leaders have spent more than a decade laying the groundwork for a religious realignment. Though the old animus is not dead, there has been a rapprochement with both moral and theological dimensions, and broad political implications.

Coalitions of Catholics and evangelicals form the backbone in the fights against gay marriage, stem-cell research and euthanasia, and for religious school vouchers. Catholic and evangelical leaders who forged relationships in the anti-abortion movement, which the Baptist theologian Timothy George has called "the ecumenism of the trenches," are now working side by side in campaigns on other culture war issues, and for Republican candidates.

Catholics, once a solidly Democratic voting bloc, are now fractured. Polls of the 2000 election showed traditionalists and centrists breaking away to join conservative evangelicals in voting for George W. Bush. "Voting groups are far more fluid than they used to be," said Patrick Allitt, a professor of American history at Emory University.

Allitt recalls seeing his glimpse of the new alliance at an Operation Rescue anti-abortion rally in Atlanta in the 1980s.