c. 2004 Religion News Service
(UNDATED) The Bible is full of stories of squabbling sons fighting to be declared their father’s rightful heirs: Jacob and Esau, Isaac and Ishmael, the prodigal son and his jealous brother.
The same might be said for Republicans and Democrats this election season as they compete for God’s blessing _ or at least the votes of his followers.
“I think the Democrats are going to have to affirm that we all need to talk to God and ask, `Are we your children too, or are you only claiming the right wing?”’ said the Rev. James Forbes, pastor of New York’s Riverside Church.
As Democrats gather in Boston next week for their convention, progressives are planning a serious effort to reclaim religion. They also want to narrow the “God gap” that puts frequent church-goers in the GOP column and paints Democrats as snidely secular.
“We who would see the triumph of Democratic ideals will have to become more explicit about the values that are at the heart of our platform,” said Forbes, who will address Democrats on Tuesday (July 27) night.
By most accounts, the Democrats’ presumptive nominee, Sen. John Kerry, a Catholic, takes his faith seriously. So does his running mate, Sen. John Edwards, a Methodist. But unlike President Bush’s evangelical zeal, Kerry’s faith is reserved, New England-style private.
Kerry’s religious convictions have been overshadowed by his own church’s criticisms of his support of abortion rights and gay rights, which highlights a perennial problem for Democrats _ that the only religious issues that matter are hot-button social ones.
“Too often the debate has been organized that if you’re religious, you’re conservative, and if you’re progressive, you’re not religious,” said Melody Barnes, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a liberal thinktank in Washington.
Democrats readily concede that religious conservatives have done a better job of using religious language to rally support behind social issues like abortion and school prayer. In the process, they have warned the Republican leadership that their support is contingent on the party embracing those same issues. In most areas, they have been wildly successful.
In the process, Republicans have gained a reputation as “GOP: God’s Official Party,” as one bumper sticker put it. Last year, a survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that evangelicals viewed Republicans as more friendly to religion by a nearly 2-1 ratio, with smaller majorities also found among Catholics and mainline Protestants.
When it comes to voting, Catholics are evenly split between the two parties, while mainline Protestants lean Democratic, evangelicals are overwhelminly Republican, and most Jews are loyal Democrats. Black Protestants _ among the most active religious groups _ nearly always vote Democratic, and Muslims have soured on Bush after voting for him in record numbers four years ago.
Republicans, on average, are more likely to belong to a church (75 percent compared to 67 percent of Democrats, according to one Gallup poll). They also have higher-than-average church attendance rates, are more likely to say that religion is “very important in life” and place more confidence in organized religion than Democrats.
Combine that with Democrats’ sometimes awkward attempts to talk about religion (for example, former candidate Howard Dean saying his favorite New Testament book is Job, which is in the Old Testament) and the popular perception has been that if you care about religion, you must be a Republican.
“To ignore it entirely is political suicide,” said Amy Sullivan, an editor at Washington Monthly who has written on the need for Democrats to talk openly about religion.
“Democrats have believed that because they don’t want religion in politics, leaving it alone is sufficient. It’s not.”
Some of that, however, may be changing, with Democrats increasingly finding the moral component of political issues.
When the public is asked which party does the better job “improving morality,” Democrats are gaining ground. Just three years ago, Pew found that the GOP held the advantage, 49 percent to 26 percent, over Democrats. A Pew poll released Wednesday (July 21) showed Republicans with a slim advantage, 37 percent to 35 percent.
Increasingly, Democrats are casting non-abortion issues _ the war in Iraq, healthcare, education and the minimum wage _ as moral issues with religious overtones.
“There’s a sense that too much (moral) ground has been ceded here,” Barnes said.
Kerry says his platform is rooted in religious principles of caring for the poor, the marginalized and the vulnerable. He has openly challenged President Bush with the biblical warning that “faith without works is dead.”
Democrats reflect religious values “with our votes, our words, our actions, and our deeds,” said Rep. Bart Stupak, a conservative Democrat from Michigan. “We just don’t want to wear it on our sleeves.”
With the race nearly dead-even and Bush’s poll numbers failing to rebound, the Kerry campaign hopes to woo the 64 percent of voters who say their religious convictions will help determine their vote in November. “It’s simply saying that what you care about is what we care about,” Sullivan said.
However, on a political level, Kerry still faces some challenges.
Earlier this year, Kerry recruited Dean’s former religious outreach director, Mara Vanderslice, to do the same job on his campaign. The “People of Faith” section on Kerry’s Web site is one of her projects.
But when a conservative Catholic group criticized Vanderslice’s credentials as better-suited working for Fidel Castro, the campaign went into lockdown and pulled Vanderslice’s access to the media. Observers say it demonstrates that many Democrats still view religion as radioactive.
“Some senior leaders within the Kerry campaign think of religion as being landmines,” said the Rev. Bob Edgar, general secretary of the National Council of Churches and a former Democratic congressman. “Rather than think of a way of getting through the landmine field, they walk around it.”
DEA/MO/JL END ECKSTROM
