Election: Faith Coalition Plans to Reveal How Christians Voted
In a presidential race that many analysts have deemed too close to call, the results of an extensive post-election survey of Christians, including evangelicals and voters across denominational lines will be revealed by the Faith and Freedom Coalition on Wednesday.
Prior to the election, FFC founder Ralph Reed had promised to use his coalition to mobilize an army of grassroots activists nationwide in order to get Christian voters to the polls in numbers never seen before.
The coalition said that it has distributed 30 million voter guides passed out in 117,000 churches, 24 million pieces of mail, and has made 23 million get-out-the-vote calls.
Get Our Latest News for FREE
"That could make a difference in swing states such as Ohio and Iowa, which have strong religious communities," the coalition stated.
Additionally, the FFC made over 122 million voter contacts to "evangelicals, faithful Catholics, and other voters of faith" in key states this year. Besides using the U.S. postal service, the group's voter education effort included 18 million text messages and emails. The post-election survey will detail the share of the electorate of the FFC-contacted voters, how they voted, and why they voted as they did.
The FFC plans to hold a news briefing at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday to discuss the survey in order to show the impact of the evangelical vote and other faith-based voters on the outcome.
Reed has been arguing that conservatives were partly responsible for Obama's victory in the 2008 election when 17 million evangelical Christians chose not to vote.
"The church has allowed this to happen. I vowed that after the 2008 elections that as long as I have breath in my body that was never going to happen in America again," Tampa Bay Times quoted Reed as saying. "If we have to, we will crawl across broken glass, but we are coming and when we come we are going to have the biggest victory we have had for time-honored values in the history of this country. That's what's getting ready to happen."
Referring to Obama's contraceptive mandate, Reed said people of faith were being forced to "violate their own religious conscience" by covering contraception and abortifacients in employees' health care plans. "My friends, this is an injustice that we are not going to let stand, and either in the courts or on Election Day, we're going to end it once and for all."
At an FFC event last Sunday in Colorado GOP vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan said that President Barack Obama is taking the nation in the wrong direction against treasured values.
"It's a dangerous path," Ryan said at the FFC event hosted by Reed. "It's a path that grows government, restricts freedom and liberty, and compromises those values, those Judeo-Christian, Western civilization values that made us such a great an exceptional nation in the first place."
Mitt Romney, the GOP presidential candidate, has said that he will defend religious freedom if he is elected as leader. President Obama has made the same pledge, as highlighted in a report by The Christian Post that compares the official campaign promises of both candidates.
"In a changing world, my commitment to protecting religious liberty is and always will be unwavering. As America's diversity grows, we have a chance to reaffirm the pluralism that has defined us as a nation. A pluralism expansive enough to protect the rights of all to speak their minds and to follow their conscious," Obama has promised in a campaign ad that directly addresses the American people.
The Faith and Freedom Coalition describes itself as a grassroots organization "committed to supporting America's time-honored values such as faith, hard work, marriage, family, personal responsibility and helping the least among us."
