COMMENTARY: Democrats Need More Than Just a New Language of Faith and Values

c. 2004 Religion News Service (UNDATED) The narrative that’s emerging from John Kerry’s decisive loss to President Bush is that the Democratic Party needs to develop “a language for faith and values.” Democrats, we’re told, are too timid in talking about their religious ideals. The result is that Republicans and their radical Christian allies co-opt […]

c. 2004 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) The narrative that’s emerging from John Kerry’s decisive loss to President Bush is that the Democratic Party needs to develop “a language for faith and values.” Democrats, we’re told, are too timid in talking about their religious ideals. The result is that Republicans and their radical Christian allies co-opt “moral values” to manipulate church-going voters.

There’s no shortage of angry, even spiteful fundamentalism in the Republican Party _ or of politicians keen to exploit it. But the problem with this election narrative is not that liberals haven’t communicated their own values. The problem is that their values are now regulated precisely by the religious mood they so detest: Puritanism. In a deeply ironic turn, the party of tolerance and inclusion is fast becoming the party of existential certainty _ utterly contemptuous of dissent.


How else to explain the morally debased assaults on Bush and his supporters? Consider:

_ Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a top aide to President Kennedy, calls Bush “a fanatic” who speaks with messianic certitude.

_ Historian Gary Wills saw in a Bush victory the eclipse of Enlightenment reason. “Where else do we find fundamentalist zeal, a rage at secularity … fear and hatred of modernity?” he asked. “We find it in the Muslim world, in al-Qaida, in Saddam Hussein’s loyalists.”

_ Complained New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd: “W. ran a jihad in America so he can fight one in Iraq.”

_ Financier George Soros, who dumped millions into Kerry’s campaign, said Bush reminds him of the Nazis.

_ Michael Moore, ever the brooding crusader, critiqued the election results this way: “A great nation was felled by a poisonous nut.”

There’s much to criticize about the Bush agenda, but it’s time to ask politely: What’s happening to the soul of liberalism that it won’t distinguish between a Republican White House and the barbarism of Osama bin Laden? Why is this rhetoric of contempt never challenged by Democratic leaders? Politicians, party operatives, public intellectuals _ no one worries about the impulse to assassinate with words. It now looks as though the party of liberalism is gripped by the spirit of absolutism.

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Consider the campaign debate over stem-cell research. Bush opposes the destruction of human embryos for medical research _ as do no small number of physicians and ethicists. Yet liberals see only a contest between science and superstition. Even ministers view Bush’s position as a fundamentalist plot to win the evolution debate of the 1920s.


“They are still fighting this fight after all these years,” writes Pastor L. Edward Knudson, in a manifesto for the liberal Evangelical Lutheran Church. “Rather than base his policies on science, George Bush … bases his policies on the beliefs of these religious groups.”

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Religious progressives, in fact, inflame the Puritan temper by claiming to see something demonic at work in the administration’s agenda.

“When he calls himself a Christian, I think he should remember that it was the devil who tempted Jesus with unparalleled wealth and power,” said William Sloane Coffin, founder of the Clergy Leadership Network. “What does that say about Bush’s dreams about wealth and power?”

The Rev. Donald Shriver, president of Union Theological Seminary, preached a pre-election sermon called “Deliver Us From Evil.” It was a thinly veiled attack on Bush administration policies.

It’s the ghost of Cotton Mather, not the substance of the Bush record, that seems to inspire this kind of talk. The administration has thrown open federal coffers to religious charities to help the poor (awarding them over $1.1 billion). It has pushed after-school programs for at-risk kids (not a big voting bloc), as well as re-entry programs for ex-felons (most of whom are ineligible to vote). With strong support from evangelicals, the White House has campaigned fiercely against the sexual enslavement of women, mobilized international outrage against the atrocities in Sudan, and launched a $15 billion AIDS initiative for Africa.

This is the moral equivalent of the Inquisition?

George Soros promised that if Bush were re-elected he would “go into some kind of monastery” to ponder what’s wrong with the country. There’s plenty wrong with America, but maybe it’s time that Democrats started looking inward as well. A spiritual retreat might be appropriate for a political party whose guiding ideals have just been rejected by a solid majority of the electorate.


Confession, after all, is good for the soul.

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(Joseph Loconte is a research fellow in religion at the Washington-based Heritage Foundation and editor of “The End of Illusions: Religious Leaders Confront Hitler’s Gathering Storm”)

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