c. 2004 Religion News Service

(David P. Gushee is the Graves Professor of Moral Philosophy at Union University in Jackson, Tenn.)

(UNDATED) The role played by religious faith and moral values in this election is the biggest story to emerge in the wake of George W. Bush’s victory.

It is staggering but true that in a time of war and terrorist threats, more voters cast their ballots based on their perception of the faith and moral values of the two candidates than for any other reason. The huge majority of those voters went for President Bush. They won him the election.

These voters are all around me here in Tennessee, a state that went for Bush by a large margin. They are not necessarily committed Republicans. They are not generally all that interested in politics. They are just regular folks who go to church on Sunday (and often on Wednesday), work hard all week, raise their families and try to do the right thing.

When it came time to vote, these folks could not imagine punching the chad for a candidate who had never cast a vote for any measure to restrict abortion during his 20 years in the Senate.

They heard Sen. John Kerry say that he was not for gay marriage, but saw that he was very friendly to the organized gay-rights community. They heard him talk in general terms about his faith but had trouble embracing a candidate who seemed able to bracket off his “personal” moral beliefs from his “public” moral responsibilities.

Many of these voters don’t like the war in Iraq. They don’t like partisanship. They had various other concerns. But for these “moral values” voters, such hesitations about Bush were outweighed by the sense that a vote for Kerry would be a vote for the weakening of American moral values, which they already perceive to be in decline.

To put it more viscerally: For these voters to vote for Kerry would be to vote for a cultural stranger.

This is not to say that Kerry ran a bad campaign. Undoubtedly he will be savaged in the post-election analysis, but this will be most unfair. The reason why the electoral map was overwhelmingly red across the South, Midwest and Great Plains is not because of Kerry.

This is a Democratic Party problem, not a Kerry problem. Until the Democrats run a candidate who does not offend the moral values of those who decided this election, they will not win the White House or Congress again.

Before the election, an increasingly intense debate raged within the media about what it really means to vote according to Christian values. This debate will only intensify in days to come.

In a variety of venues, self-identified religious progressives pleaded with Christian voters to consider a wider understanding of “moral values” when going to the polls. They argued that such matters as war, economic and budget priorities, racial justice and environmental policies are also moral issues, because they also are addressed in the Bible.

For some vocal progressives, alarm over a narrow understanding of the key moral issues in the election led to increasingly intense opposition to Bush.

For moderate progressives, such as myself, the moral blind spots of both candidates _ in different areas _ made the vote an agonizing call rather than an obvious choice. For most religion/morality voters, however, the vote wasn’t agonizing at all: Bush was the choice.

Democrats have much soul-searching to do. As long as abortion-rights and gay-rights activists set the agenda of the party, they will keep losing. Republicans should do some soul-searching, too, because a 51 percent-48 percent vote is not a landslide.

But the group that needs to do the most soul-searching is the religious community: churches, seminaries, and Christian colleges, pastors, teachers and writers. We need to get much better at teaching the whole moral vision of the Bible, so that the voters who stream out of our churches will hang on tightly to their traditional moral convictions but also develop a deeper passion for the poor, love for God’s creation, desire for racial justice, commitment to peacemaking, concern for global human rights and so on.

It is not too much to say that in an age of Republican ascendancy, and in an era in which that ascendancy depends on committed Christian voters, the people who will be most influential in setting the agenda of this nation are those who shape the moral vision of Christian communities.

If they demand that policies change because of a broad and rich understanding of biblical moral values, senators and congressmen and presidents from places like Tennessee, North Dakota and Texas will have to listen. This is real power, it is a gift, and it must be used responsibly.

DH/PH END RNS