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Christian Third Parties

Christian Third Parties

Last updated on: September 24, 2024 at 2:00 am by Daniel K. Williams

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Christian Third Parties 2024-09-21T16:44:54-04:00 Daniel K. Williams

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When Pope Francis observed recently that both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are “against life,” and that American Christians will therefore have to vote for the “lesser of two evils,” it confirmed what many pro-life Christians have been thinking for a while: neither candidate fully represents their values. Millions of American Christian voters – whether Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox – will therefore cast their ballots for a choice that they consider far from ideal in the belief that they must choose between two undesirable options.

But a few Christians will instead go to the polls and select a third-party candidate. While third-party voting has never been the norm among American Christians, it has a long history.

In the early-to-mid nineteenth century, during the years leading up to the American Civil War, American evangelical Protestants who were alarmed at threat to America’s Protestant heritage launched several short-lived third-party political movements to preserve Protestant influence in the American government.

Anti-Masonic and Anti-Catholic Parties in the Antebellum Era

In the late 1820s, evangelical Protestants who viewed Freemasonry as a dangerous anti-Christian conspiracy formed an Anti-Masonic party in upstate New York. At the time, charges that the Masons had murdered those who turned against the organization led to an anti-Masonic fervor that swept through multiple evangelical Protestant denominations – especially the Presbyterians. (For the larger context of early 19th-century Christians’ strong antipathy to Freemasonry, see Philip Jenkins’s recent Anxious Bench post on the subject). Hoping to use the power of the state to stop the Masons from gaining further political influence, the Albany newspaper editor Thurlow Weed and the young politician William Seward joined forces with other Protestants to launch the Anti-Masonic party. The party quickly became second only to the Democrats as the largest party in New York, and it spread to other states in the northeast.

Thurlow Weed

In 1832, the Anti-Masons selected a former US attorney general who had served in James Monroe and John Quincy Adams’s administration – William Wirt of Maryland – as their presidential standard-bearer. Wirt won 8 percent of the popular vote, and carried the state of Vermont, which earned him seven electoral votes. This made the Anti-Masons the most successful third party in America at the time.

But Wirt was an extremely reluctant candidate. The Anti-Masons had nominated him against his will, so he not only refused to campaign (which was not terribly unusual for presidential candidates at the time, who usually relied on surrogates to mobilize the vote on their behalf) but also refused to make any statements against Freemasonry.

In the next presidential election (in 1836), the Anti-Masons were badly divided, but a majority chose to endorse William Henry Harrison, the Whig presidential nominee, rather than fielding a separate candidate of their own. Shortly after that, the party collapsed – at least for the moment. Most of the prominent Anti-Masons, including Weed and Seward, became Whigs. Those who lived long enough eventually became Republicans – as would Seward, who would become Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of State.

As the Anti-Masons discovered, not enough Americans shared their opposition to Freemasonry to make their cause a viable national party. And as most of them also discovered, their own political concerns went far beyond simply a concern about Freemasonry, which meant that a single-issue party didn’t make a lot of sense. More than anything, they were northeastern Protestant moralists who opposed any supposed conspiratorial threat to New England Protestant morality – which meant that over the course of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, they were often equally concerned about Mormonism, southern slavery, and the anti-Sabbatarianism of some of the Jacksonian Democrats. In essence, they were “conscience Whigs,” which is why they moved into that wing of the party as soon as they decided that they could grudgingly accept the Freemasonry of the Whig Party’s national leader, Henry Clay. In the 1850s, when the Republican Party formed as the successor to the conscience Whigs, some of the aging veterans of the now long-defunct Anti-Masonry Party found the Republican Party especially attractive. Perhaps it’s no surprise that the one state that had given its electoral votes to the Anti-Masonry Party in 1832 gave Abraham Lincoln a higher percentage of its vote in 1860 than he received from any other state. Lincoln won 76 percent of Vermont’s popular vote in 1860 – a testament perhaps to the moral fervor that still characterized the New England state that Wirt had carried 28 years earlier.

The American Party (better known by its popular moniker, the “Know Nothings”), which formed in the early 1850s to limit the political influence of Irish Catholic immigrants by making it more difficult to become a naturalized American citizen, experienced a similar trajectory. Almost immediately after its formation, it won a majority of seats in the Massachusetts state legislature in 1854, but its success on the national stage was limited. When the party nominated former president Millard Fillmore as its presidential candidate in 1856, Fillmore carried only one state: Maryland. The party collapsed shortly thereafter, with most of the Know Nothings joining the new Republican Party, which first fielded a presidential candidate in 1856, the same year as the Know Nothings’ American Party did.

Both the Anti-Masonic Party and the American Party collapsed for similar reasons: the rise of another party with a broader coalition but a similar political orientation. The Whigs were not nearly as concerned about the Freemasons as the Anti-Masonic Party was, but they shared the Anti-Masons’ general beliefs about the important role of Protestant morality in politics. Faced with the choice between voting for an Anti-Masonic Party that was sure to lose and a Whig Party that had a chance to win, most people who might have otherwise been inclined to support the Anti-Masons decided that it was better to side with the broader (but less hardline) moral platform of the Whigs. Similarly, the Republican Party was not nearly as anti-Catholic as the American Party, but its platform against Mormon polygamy and southern slavery appealed to the same type of northeastern Protestant moralists who were worried about Irish Catholic political influence – which is why the American Party collapsed and the Republican Party endured.

But there were still a few Christians who refused to engage in the political compromises needed to support a major-party ticket. One of these was Wheaton College president Jonathan Blanchard, a Congregationalist minister and abolitionist who helped revive the Anti-Masonic Party after the Civil War. But the second incarnation of the Anti-Masonic Party was even more short-lived than the first, because the leaders of the Anti-Masonic Party – Blanchard included – quickly decided that there was a much bigger threat to the American republic than the Freemasons. That threat was alcohol. To oppose the liquor interest, they needed a new third party.

The Prohibition Party

The Prohibition Party, which formed in the early 1869, is now America’s oldest third party. This year it’s on the ballot in only one state (Arkansas), with write-in status in nine others, but in its heyday, it had enough influence to possibly swing a close election. In 1884, the party secured 1.5 percent of the vote in a presidential election when it nominated Kansas governor John St. John as its standard-bearer. In the extremely close election of 1884 – in which Democratic candidate Grover Cleveland finished only about half a percentage point ahead of Republican James G. Blaine in the popular vote, and won the electoral vote only because he finished a tenth of a percentage point ahead of Blaine in New York, where some who would have otherwise voted Republican instead cast their ballot for the Prohibition Party – the Prohibition Party is almost certainly at least partially responsible for sending Grover Cleveland to the White House instead of Blaine. Harper’s Weekly recognized as much; it published a cartoon of St. John pouring a bucket of cold water on Blaine’s head.

While Blaine was not necessarily a supporter of Prohibition, he probably would have been more sympathetic to the cause than Cleveland, a states-rights advocate who, in addition to opposing national moral regulation on principle, also had a personal reason for disliking the prohibitionists, since he was so fond of beer that he had been known to routinely quaff a gallon of the stuff every night in the Buffalo bars during his freewheeling bachelor days.

The possibility that a third-party vote might keep a major-party candidate who is the “lesser of two evils” from winning, while delivering the White House to the “greater of two evils,” has plagued third parties from the 19th century to the present, and is one the principal reasons that they consistently do poorly in elections.

But in the late 19th century, Protestant opponents of alcohol thought they had good reason to believe that a third-party strategy was their best option. With neither party officially supportive of their cause – but with a few individual members of both parties sympathetic to their platform – a third party seemed to make sense. If the Prohibition Party had sufficient strength to deprive the Republicans of victory, so much the better, since it might force the Republicans to adopt an anti-alcohol platform in order to win back the prohibitionist vote.

But beyond that, Frances Willard, the president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in the late 19th century, believed that a third party was the only way to unite opponents of alcohol across the Mason-Dixon line. In the North, where the prohibitionist cause had historically had its greatest strength, opponents of alcohol had generally supported the Republican Party, since the party of Lincoln and anti-slavery was the party of midwestern and northeastern Protestant moral regulation. But in the South, the vast majority of voters, whether teetotaling Baptists and Methodists or “wet” Episcopalians, were Democrats who would never vote for a member of the party of Lincoln. The only way to expand the temperance movement’s influence in the South, Willard thought, was to separate it from the Republican Party (where it didn’t seem to be gaining much of a hearing anyway) and link it to a new party with transregional, national appeal.

Frances Willard

Under the influence of Willard and other progressive-minded temperance advocates, the Prohibitionist Party adopted one of the most egalitarian, democratic platforms of its time, calling for women’s voting rights and direct election of senators decades before these were added to the Constitution.

But because national Prohibition was its signature cause, the party experienced a steep decline as soon as the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified in 1919. With its principal reason for existence already fulfilled, was there any need for the Prohibition Party? Many potential supporters thought the answer was no. The party went from appearing on the ballot in 43 states in 1916 to earning a place on the ballot in only 26 in 1920. And even though one might have thought that its nomination of Asbury College president Aaron Watkins as its presidential standard-bearer that year might have appealed to some devout Methodists and other teetotaling evangelical Protestants in Kentucky, the Prohibition Party’s presidential ticket carried only 0.36 percent of Kentucky’s vote.

But the worst was yet to come: The Prohibition Party appeared on the ballot in only 17 states in 1924, and only 8 in 1928. With Republican presidential candidate Herbert Hoover running on a platform in 1928 that endorsed Prohibition – and with his opponent, Democratic candidate Al Smith, widely believed to be opposed to it – most Protestants who wanted to maintain Prohibition thought that a vote for Hoover made a lot more sense than a vote for a Prohibition Party ticket that was certain to lose. Out of the more than 36 million ballots cast in the presidential election of 1928, the Prohibition Party received only 21,000 votes – less than 0.01 percent or, to put it another way, less than one vote in 1,000.

The Prohibition Party started to do better after the repeal of Prohibition, since by then it was clear that it was the only party option for those who wanted to reinstate national restrictions on alcohol, which neither major party was willing to support. Some evangelical Protestants were attracted to the cause. In 1960, the party nominated former National Association of Evangelicals president Rutherford Decker, a Baptist pastor, as its presidential candidate, and the party received 46,000 votes.

But even if most evangelicals (especially Baptists and Wesleyans) still believed in personally abstaining from alcohol in 1960, they no longer considered national prohibition of alcohol the most urgent political issue – and that hurt the Prohibition Party. The Prohibition Party struggled to adapt to the new concerns of evangelical Protestants in the late 20th century, and it found itself left far behind by the Christian Right, which was much more interested in banning abortion than restricting alcohol. Since 1984, the Prohibition Party has never appeared on the ballot in more than five states, nor has it been able to win even 10,000 votes nationwide in any presidential election. Yet every four years, the party continues to hold a national convention, publish a platform, and nominate candidates who run under the current party slogan “For God and Country.”

This year the Prohibition Party’s presidential nominee, California business executive Michael Wood, has suggested a somewhat surprising makeover for the party. As a primarily single-issue party, the Prohibition Party has struggled at times with the question of what stance it should take on other issues that are not directly related to alcohol and drugs. In the late 19th century, the party was a progressive women’s rights party allied with the sort of causes that interested Protestant female activists such as Frances Willard. In the late 20th century, it was a socially conservative, evangelical party. But this year, Wood wants to move the party away from social conservatism (he’s personally pro-choice on abortion, for instance) and to turn it into a politically centrist party that has no connection with the Christian Right but that instead supports tighter regulation of drugs and alcohol solely on public health and safety grounds. The party no longer supports national prohibition, but it does favor greater federal regulation of alcohol and drugs, with a national zero-tolerance policy for any detectible amount of alcohol while driving.

Wood, who has had several members of his family killed or injured by drunk drivers or by drug or alcohol abuse, believes that if there is a national ban on alcohol advertising on television and social media, and a national law against drinking and driving, there will be a cultural change in which most Americans will no longer tolerate the idea that a person can safely get behind the wheel after having a couple beers.

It’s an interesting idea – but I suspect that at this point, most evangelical Christians who are looking for a socially conservative political party won’t find that the Prohibition Party represents their interests. Instead, they may be more attracted to one of a handful of other parties that formed in the late 20th or early 21st century and that are more reflective of the concerns of the contemporary Christian Right.

The Constitution Party

Today the most prominent Christian Right-style alternative to the major parties is the Constitution Party. The party can trace its origins to a moment in 1992 when New Right activist Howard Phillips, a close associate of Heritage Foundation founder Paul Weyrich and direct mail guru Richard Viguerie, decided to leave the Republican Party in disgust after President George Bush violated his “no new taxes” pledge. Calling his new party the “Taxpayers Party,” Phillips cast about for a presidential candidate and finally, after seeing there were no prominent people who wanted the position, decided to run himself.

When he joined the New Right political movement in the 1970s, Phillips was a Jew who was not particularly religious, but by the early 1990s, he had become a conservative Protestant who was attracted to Christian Reconstructionism. Accordingly, he invited the intellectual leader of Christian Reconstructionism, Rousas John Rushdoony, to play a key role in writing the party platform. “The U.S. Constitution established a republic under God, not a democracy,” the Taxpayers Party platform declared.

When Phillips ran for president again on the Taxpayers Party ticket in 1996, he attracted the vote of one of America’s most influential conservative evangelicals at the time, James Dobson. Dobson, who was known as “Dr. Dobson” to the millions of Christians who tuned into his Focus on the Family broadcast, was fed up with the Republican Party’s tepidness on abortion and the (unsuccessful) attempts of presidential nominee Bob Dole to water down the party’s platform position on abortion by acknowledging differing viewpoints within the party on the issue. Instead of voting for the Republican ticket, he cast his ballot for Phillips. He told congressional Republicans that his one-time defection from the Republican Party could become a much larger phenomenon. “If they want our votes every two years and then say, ‘Don’t call me, I’ll call you,’ then I will take the next step,” Dobson said in 1998. “If I go, I’ll take as many people with me as possible” (Williams, God’s Own Party, 242).

Dobson made his peace with the GOP, but Phillips did not. Under its new name of the Constitution Party (which it adopted in 1999), Phillips’s party continued to grow. In 2012, it was able for the first time to give its presidential nomination to a former member of Congress: Virgil Goode, who had represented a Virginia district in the US House of Representatives for more than a decade.

But as the party continued to grow, it also experienced several splits, since members of the party could not agree on exactly how to balance the party’s libertarian and Christian authoritarian factions – a challenge that reflected a problem the conservative movement as a whole had long faced. The party’s opposition to the Federal Reserve and the United Nations, as well as its pledge to seek the abolition of the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Education, appealed to some libertarian-minded individuals. As the 2024 Constitution Party platform states, “The sole purpose of government, as stated in the Declaration of Independence, is to secure our unalienable rights given us by our Creator. When Government grows beyond this scope, it is usurpation, and liberty is compromised.”

But at the same time, the party emphasizes that this is libertarianism of a Christian Reconstructionist variety – not the religiously neutral individualism of the Libertarian Party. The party is strongly opposed to abortion, as one might expect for a party whose presidential nominee this year is Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry. Yet instead of directly endorsing an antiabortion constitutional amendment, as the pro-life movement has long favored, the Constitution Party suggests instead that nullification or disregard of judicial authority might be a better course of action. “Although a Supreme Court opinion is binding on the parties to the controversy as to the particulars of the case, it is not a political rule for the nation,” the Constitution Party platform states. “As Roe v Wade was an illegitimate usurpation of authority, violating the natural right to life, so are all state laws that allow the destruction of innocent human life, born or unborn. We affirm both the authority and duty of Congress to limit the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court in all cases involving the personhood of all human beings in accordance with the U.S. Constitution, Article III, Section 2.” The Republican Party supports moving the Supreme Court in a conservative direction through strategic judicial nominations; the Constitution Party supports constricting their authority altogether and suggests that the court should never rule on abortion again.

Such differences help answer the question of why someone might vote for the Constitution Party instead of the Republican Party today. As a party influenced both by Christian Reconstructionism and an ultraconservative brand of constitutional “originalism,” the Constitution Party envisions a country in which states and local communities will have the freedom to restore the Christian-based political order that they imagine the founders wanted, which they believe is also congruent with biblical principles. US foreign policy will return to what it was in George Washington’s day, and tax and monetary policy will return to a pre-1913 order, before the income tax and the Federal Reserve destroyed the founders’ intention. Education will be strictly local, with no federal involvement; parental rights in education will be supreme. And states will have the freedom to return to the abortion policies that most of them had at the end of the 19th century. Some Republicans may lean in this general direction today, but most have not embraced a Rushdoony-style political program to the extent that the Constitution Party has. Not even Project 2025 goes that far.

The Constitution Party’s 2024 presidential ticket is currently on the ballot in twelve states, and is a recognized write-in option in seven others. The party’s best showing came in 2016, when it received just over 200,000 votes (0.2 percent of the total vote), with the Christian conservative lawyer Darrell Castle on the ticket. In that year, the party was on the ballot in two dozen states, and a recognized write-in option in most of the others. But in 2020, the party received less than half the vote that it had in 2016, and its limited ballot access this year suggests that it will find it difficult to beat its 2016 vote record, despite the widespread name recognition of its presidential nominee, Randall Terry.

The American Solidarity Party

In contrast to the other Christian-influenced third parties of the past, the American Solidarity Party did not have its origins in American evangelical Protestantism. Instead, in 2011, several Catholics and Protestants who were attracted to Catholic social teaching decided to start a party that was founded on the Catholic principles of solidarity and subsidiarity – that is, the principle that humans have a duty to care for each other (solidarity), but that the appropriate unit of that care starts at the local level, beginning with the family (subsidiarity). At a time when the Republican Party was embracing the principles of the free market, while the Democratic Party was firmly pro-choice on abortion, the American Solidarity Party (ASP) instead tried to translate Catholic social teaching into an American party political platform by pledging to protect human life at every level while pledging to honor the dignity of immigrants and the poor.

Because the ASP took its cues from a European-shaped Catholic social tradition that had been largely absent from the politics of both major parties for decades, its platform challenged the assumptions of both the Democratic and Republican parties. Instead of focusing primarily on government regulation to solve social evils, the ASP instead emphasized that legal prohibitions on abortion must be accompanied by expansion of the social safety net, including the federal guarantee of universal healthcare. Its position on economic issues was therefore closer to the Democratic Party than to the GOP. So was its stance on immigration and its opposition to capital punishment. But its strong opposition to abortion, along with its firm declaration that “the natural family, founded on the marriage of one man and one woman, is the fundamental unit and basis of every human society,” put it at odds with the sexual individualism and pluralism of the Democratic Party.

As its website states, the ASP is “based in the tradition of Christian democracy,” and upholds the “sanctity of human life,” the “centrality of family,” “care for the environment,” and “peace and international solidarity” – a combination that puts it at odds with Trump-supporting Republicans, pro-choice Democrats, and neoconservative Never Trumpers who endorsed George W. Bush and the War on Terror. It is unquestionably a Christian-influenced party, but not necessarily one that is congruent with the traditional Christian Right.

Not surprisingly, the ASP’s strongest support at first came from a few socially conservative Catholics who had left the Democratic Party only after it became clear that the Democrats would not renege on their pro-choice stance on abortion. But gradually, the party came to appeal to a few evangelical Protestants as well who recognized in Catholic social teaching and a consistent life ethic the fulfillment of their political quest to protect unborn human life and defend family values. In the 19th century, evangelical Protestant politics was defined largely by a deep suspicion of Catholic political power, but in the 21st century, some evangelicals (such as Karen Swallow Prior, who serves on the party’s board of advisors) have found in a Catholic-inspired political party the best expression of their Christian values.

The ASP claims to be America’s fastest-growing party, but it is still smaller than the Constitution Party – let alone larger third parties, such as the Libertarian Party and the Green Party. In 2020, its presidential ticket received 35,000 votes, compared to the Constitution Party’s 60,000. This year, it’s on the ballot in seven states, which is slightly less than in 2020, when it appeared on the ballot in eight states.

So, I suspect that the ASP will have a hard time presenting a substantive challenge to the two major parties in the way that the Prohibition Party did more than a century ago.

But nevertheless, third parties offer a way for American voters to advocate for a political vision that does not line up with the views of the larger parties. So far, evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics have not had much success in changing the direction of American politics by voting for a third party that claims to be grounded in Christian principles. But maybe there are also other valid reasons for voting for a third-party ticket. For some Christians, a vote for a third party offers the possibility for a clearer and more conscientious expression of their moral convictions than a vote for what they believe is a morally compromised major party. And at a time when even the pope has said that the two major parties offer a choice between “two evils,” maybe it’s understandable that at least a few American Christians are looking at other options – even if none of those other options are likely to attract enough support to change the direction of the national presidential race.

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