God's Lobbyist:
You can chart Richard Land's clout by his phone log. The 58-year-old
Texan, the Southern Baptist Convention's main man in Washington,
recalls that the Reagan Administration returned his calls promptly;
the first Bush White House less so and Clinton's staff (eventually)
not at all. Now? The men around his longtime friend George W. Bush
don't sit around waiting for Land's call. They reach out to him,
individually and as part of a weekly teleconference with other
Christian conservatives, to plot strategy on such issues as gay
marriage and abortion.
Land, who helped engineer his 16-million-member convention's 1979
shift from moderacy to hard-line conservativism, has a hand in most
of its key policies, from its 1995 apology for having supported
slavery to its 1998 statement that wives should submit to the
leadership of their devout husbands. Since arriving in Washington in
1987, Land has cultivated dozens of sympathetic members of Congress.
Princeton- and Oxford-educated, he is as formidable a public
spokesman as he is in Washington's corridors and regularly battles
culture-war foes on venues such as Meet the Press. "People think
they're going to be dealing with some bootstrap preacher," says Larry
Eskridge, associate director of the Institute for the Study of
American Evangelicals at Wheaton College. "But he can match pedigree
and training with the best of them."
