Story by Jake Weber; photos by Morris Arvoy

William A. "Bill" Ritter, ’62, combined intellectual rigor and pastoral flair for a thought-provoking scrutiny of “The Religious Right and American Politics,” on campus February 15, as Albion College’s inaugural Joe H. Stroud Visiting Scholar.

In establishing his first point, that the association of the religious right and the Republican Party has been no accident, Ritter cited statistics from the 2004 presidential election, demonstrating a clear link between church attendance, evangelical church affiliation and votes cast for George Bush. The Republicans, stated Ritter, “were either strong on issues that mattered to churchgoers, or better able to shape debate around issues that mattered to churchgoers, honing in on gay marriage and abortion, and to a lesser degree on school prayer and whether replications of the 10 Commandments should hang in public places.”

Reading from a recent Newsweek article, Ritter noted that the religious right/Republican association is bolstered from both sides. Liberty University, established by televangelist Jerry Falwell, was reported by Newsweek to spend $500,000 yearly on its program to prepare its graduates for law school, with funding coming from notable Republicans such as presidential adviser Karl Rove.

Ritter sees the religious right’s effort to “become a power broker from the inside of American politics” as something that will ultimately weaken their influence. “The religious right [wisely] narrowed its agenda to family values,” said Ritter, “but ‘went to the wall’ over abortion and gay marriage,” ignoring more pressing social – as well as biblical -- issues.

Ritter noted that the Bible contains several thousand verses about the poor and God’s response to injustice. Treatment of the poor is the second most dominant theme of the Old Testament; in the New Testament, one verse in sixteen mentions the poor. This Biblical focus on the poor, Ritter pointed out, can and should be relevant to current national policy debates concerning health care, unemployment and homelessness.

Yet the religious right’s relative neglect of poverty issues, compared to “family values,” issues, said Ritter, has created a phenomenon of evangelical splinter groups joining with liberal Christian and secular groups, to address everything from global warming to international human rights, along with U.S. poverty issues. “It’s as if [these evangelical groups] are saying, ‘Let’s see if we can find things we care about that can unite us, rather than fighting … the battles that seem to splinter us,’” Ritter noted.

William A. Ritter is emeritus pastor of Birmingham First United Methodist Church, one of the largest Methodist churches in Michigan.  Since his retirement from pastoral service, he has served as a visiting professor at Duke Divinity School and currently serves as a mentor to students at the Ecumenical Theological Seminary of Detroit.