If the Republican Party nominates a pro-abortion candidate for president, should conservative Christians throw their support behind a third-party candidate? That was the question on the table at a meeting of 40 Christian leaders — including James Dobson, Tony Perkins, and Gary Bauer — in Salt Lake City on September 29. The answer, it turned out, was “yes.” Warren Cole Smith reports for WORLD:

Though the vote among the activists in Salt Lake City was nearly unanimous, even many of those in the room said it’s too early.

“The reason conservatives don’t have the kind of influence in the party we want is because we are not willing to get in the trenches,” said a Washington, D.C., activist who spoke at the meeting but did not give permission to be quoted. “We’re talking about taking over the presidency, when we can’t even take over our own county commissions and city councils.”

Indeed, the logistics of mounting a third-party campaign in just a few months would be daunting. Early in the meeting, Fischer and historian and conservative activist Bill Federer made a brief presentation that concluded no third party had ever made a successful run at the White House. Jim Clymer, president of the Constitution Party, acknowledged that his own party, which has been at this for years, is not even on the ballot in many states.

If the cost of running a third-party candidate is great, the cost of tilting the election toward the Democrats, which a conservative third-party candidate would likely do, is even greater. On the Monday after the meeting, Gary Bauer wrote to his supporters: “It would break my heart if we ended up with two pro-abortion candidates. Nonetheless, I urged extreme caution to those attending this meeting. We should not forget that the Clinton presidency came about because a third-party effort divided conservative votes in 1992. The Clinton years were a disaster.”

Bauer went on to say that “the one thing the pro-family movement would be very hard pressed to recover from is another Clinton presidency in 2009.”

OTOH, Dobson, who for years has railed against the GOP’s tendency to woo evangelicals at election time then kick them to the curb once elected, insisted that it’s time the party understood that abortion is a make-or-break issue for this key constituency. Whose position do you more closely align with — Dobson’s or Bauer’s?