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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
The truth is that Democrats face a religious -- and racial/ethnic -- crisis. The GOP successfully convinced many black religious voters that the Democrats are the party of abortion and lax "family values." (Faith-based initiative money helped, too.) Those black evangelicals were largely responsible for Bush's increase of support among blacks from 9 percent to 11 percent. The same tactics worked with Catholic (and increasingly evangelical) Latinos: Bush won an unprecedented 44 percent of the Latino vote.
If the GOP lures away significant numbers of single-issue voters like blacks, Latinos and unions, the Dems will have lost a good portion of their current base. As James Carville recently noted, the party's domination by special-interest groups has resulted in "litanies, not a narrative." Carville highlights a problem the Dems in the upper echelon of the party should have seen coming: the surfeit of groups who are now tied to the Democrats by single issues like civil rights, immigration, the minimum wage and unions. The problem is that a single issue is a single thread, and the Republicans have proved adept at snipping it with the sharp scissors of "values."
The Democrats need to fight the values war with the Republicans on their own religious turf -- and then claim their fair share of that turf. While people like me check into Salon, Slate, Daily Kos and Atrios on a daily basis, few of these sites are going to convince anyone beyond the liberal choir, whereas a site like Sojourners might. Sojourners magazine bills itself as dedicated to faith, politics and culture, and its online edition is likelier to make inroads with the red staters with its admonitory "Confessing Christ in a World of Violence," part of which states:
"Where is the serious debate about what it means to confess Christ in a world of violence? Does Christian 'realism' mean resigning ourselves to an endless future of 'pre-emptive wars'? Does it mean turning a blind eye to torture and massive civilian casualties? Does it mean acting out of fear and resentment rather than intelligence and restraint?"
Sojo.org is peppered with quotes by people like Angelina Grimke, an abolitionist and feminist who once declared, "I have not placed reading before praying because I regard it more important, but because, in order to pray aright, we must understand what we are praying for." Such lines should remind even those who regard religion as the opiate of the masses that there's a difference between peaceful potheads and Christian Coalition crackheads.
I am not advocating a conflation of church and state -- I don't believe in it. What I'm arguing is that progressive believers and secularists alike have always based their political and social decisions on a deep sense of what is morally sound and just. This is why my religious mother votes Democratic. Her view not only supports the separation of church and state in the abstract, but in practice. In contrast, religious fanatics like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell clamor for theocracies, ironically enough, because they are so insecure in their faith that their deepest fear is that the church's dictates are not potent enough, and can only become so by extending the church's reach into the state. Our country's history has shown us that religious progressives act as much better bulwarks against these religious fanatics than secularists, and that's one of the many reasons why the Democratic Party should enlist the aid of its own ecumenicals if it seeks to maintain a healthy separation of church and state.
The more progressive believers also want to uphold the separation of church and state because they understand that in the real world, absolutes rarely apply. Even Bush, who professes to believe in moral absolutes, finds himself on a slippery slope of his own making when it comes to gay marriage. If Bush really believed in the "sanctity" of marriage in the true evangelical sense, he would come out and state unequivocally that a marriage is not valid unless it was sanctified by Christ, for that is what his religion teaches him. He would thus be forced to admit that he considered invalid all Jewish marriages, all interfaith marriages, all marriages between atheists ... the list goes on. When moral absolutism meets political expediency, moral absolutism loses.
Yet red staters don't hold Bush accountable for this hypocrisy, because he offers a moral vision -- a romantic, traditionalist vision of society as it once supposedly was. Despite all his talk of living in a post-9/11 America, what he really offered was a vision of a pre-1960s, pre-sexual revolution, pre-civil rights era America. And that appealed to people afraid of the radical changes they see all around them.
