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Friday, August 1, 2008
Has the Democratic Party embraced an anti-fundamentalist Christian stance?
Shaunti Feldhahn, a right-leaning columnist, writes the commentary this week and Andrea Cornell Sarvady, a left-leaning columnist, responds.
Rebuttal
Do liberals really envision a far right “bogeyman?” Nonsense. Bogeymen are imaginary. I was thinking of this issue recently while boating in New Hampshire, and conjured up the very real faces of Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson floating in the water below. Talk about scary. Then I heard the voice of conservative editor Paul Weyrich, saying again as he did in 1980, “We are talking about Christianizing America….”
Was I ever glad to snap back to 2008, where the Christian Coalition’s polarizing crusade has lost a great deal of steam, capped by the surprising rise of John McCain. Barack Obama has a hard time reaching religious voters? Any talk about personal faith sends confident McCain into blinking, blank-stare overdrive.
Meanwhile, quite a few evangelicals are rethinking their voting options. Forget about what happened back in 2004, forget about mainline Protestants—a recent CNN poll shows that 30 percent of white evangelical voters are planning to pull the lever for Obama, and they’re voting Democratic for some very faith-based reasons. Sure, if antipathy towards a woman’s right to choose and gay equality are what float your boat, it’s smart to dock elsewhere. Yet for evangelicals concerned with stewardship of the earth, poverty and homelessness, genocide and war, there’s plenty of reason to join “ardent secularists” and others in a search for common ground.
This year, some fundamentalists will sit out Election Day, confused and disappointed in their party. In that way, they’ll resemble moderate Republicans in recent years, forced to cede political power to a faction they find utterly misguided. In fact, for real “intense resentment of the religious right” look no further than the moderate half of the GOP. Liberals and Libertarians alike shiver when government is propelled by a religious crusade. Yet we don’t dwell on “bogeyman” fears, and for Christian conservatives to conclude that antipathy towards their kind drives Obama’s support is too self-centered by half. Desperate desire for change spurs us to action, not bitterness. How defensive do you have to be to deny that our nation is struggling, like a rapidly drifting boat miles from shore, storm clouds sweeping the sky?
So deal with your persecution complex later, folks. It’s time to grab some oars.
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Commentary
By Shaunti Feldhahn
Barack Obama has been trying to reach religious voters - but is caught in a quandary of his party’s own making. Since the 1980s, the Democrats have unfortunately made the “religious right” a bogeyman, a scapegoat for America’s problems. Not surprisingly, secularists have flocked to the Democrats’ banner and religious folks (with the exception of black churchgoers) have left it. And as the Democrats’ constituency became less religious, the party naturally began to champion more social policies that ran counter to traditional religious values. Which only fed the cycle. As a result, in each election since 1992 if you were a white Protestant who regularly went to church, and you voted Democratic, you were in a small and lonely minority (about one out of five in 2004).
In the 1992 Clinton-Bush election, among those rarely or never attending religious services, three of four supported Clinton - the same ratio supporting Kerry 12 years later. According to a July Gallup poll, those who don’t identify with a religion and feel it isn’t important support Obama overJohn McCain 65 percent to 26 percent — a ratio of 2.5 to 1.
Studies show that ardent secularists have become as large and loyal a Democratic voting bloc as organized labor. In a report by Baruch College/CUNY Professors Louis Bolce and Gerald De Maio, in the 2000 Bush-Gore election both unions and secularists “comprised about 16 percent of the white electorate, and both backed Gore with two-thirds of their votes.”
The problem - and the reason for Obama’s dilemma — is that many in this voting bloc are what political scientists call “anti-fundamentalists:” their political motivation is intense resentment of the religious right. In their eye-opening report, “Prejudice for the Thinking Classes: Media Exposure, Political Sophistication, and the Anti-Christian Fundamentalist,” Bolce and De Maio show that nearly one in five white non-evangelicals “hold intensely antagonistic feelings toward Christian fundamentalists” and conclude, “one has to reach back to pre-New Deal America[‘s] political divisions between Catholics and Protestants … to find a period when voting behavior was influenced by this degree of antipathy toward a religious group.”
With such unfortunate perceptions embedded in a core constituency and its trajectory of anti-religious policies, the Democratic Party has an uphill battle to make people of faith feel welcome.