CQ WEEKLY
March 7, 2005
Page 562
Finding Faith In the Center
By John Cochran, CQ Staff

Ronnie Shows was fighting for political survival in the fall of 2002, after two terms in Congress, when he drove out to a family diner near Philadelphia, Miss., to meet 10 local ministers and try to win their support.
As Shows tells it, everything was going his way at first. The ministers liked his views on trade, on Medicare and other issues that have traditionally been a strong suit for Democrats. In a part of the nation hard hit by plant closings and job losses, the Democratic Party’s populist message on economics seemed a sure-fire winner. The ministers also liked his opposition to abortion. He’s a “pro-life” Democrat.

But when Shows finally asked for their endorsement, the answer was a flat no. Whatever his own position, the ministers said, his party leaders supported abortion on demand, and that was not acceptable.
Shows had been one of the most conservative Democrats in the House, and he often voted with Republicans. But he lost in an incumbent-to-incumbent matchup against Charles W. “Chip” Pickering Jr., a well-connected Republican first elected in 1996.

“In my part of the country,” he says now with a trace of bitterness, “all you have to say is you’re a Democrat, and they tune you out.”

It was plain to Shows how much ground his party has lost in the culture wars of the past decade and how estranged it has become from religious voters. In a nation of believers, Democrats have allowed the GOP to use religious and moral issues to portray them as a liberal secular elite out of touch with mainstream values — even hostile to traditional views of faith, family and morality.

As a result, in last year’s elections President Bush won not only the vast majority of evangelical Christians, a deeply Republican constituency: He also took the Roman Catholic vote, which traditionally favors Democrats. Across denominations, regular churchgoers were more likely than ever to vote Republican.

Using abortion and same-sex marriage as wedge issues, Bush even made headway among black Protestant voters, who although still a strong Democratic constituency often hold conservative views on cultural issues.

Making the Democrats’ predicament all the more confounding, many religious voters are sympathetic to the Democratic party’s core agenda on economic and social issues, and there even appears to be room for discussion on abortion. Surveys by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found wide support cutting across faiths and denominations for environmental regulation, expanded anti-poverty programs and aid for the disadvantaged — positions the party has championed for half a century.

But Democrats have failed to connect with religious voters or even to convey a sense of moral conviction behind their policies in the way Bush has. His victory last year and popularity among the faithful has now forced them to look for ways to recapture the values debate by reframing it in their own terms and strengths. What they’ve found, significantly, is a number of religious leaders who have been thinking along similar lines.

Perhaps the most prominent among them is Jim Wallis, a left-leaning evangelical activist who 35 years ago founded the organization Sojourners and who has recently gained prominence through his best-selling book, “God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It.” Wallis has long argued for a broader “faith-based” agenda focused on ending poverty and promoting social justice. In the process, he has challenged both the religious right and the secular left. And suddenly, he’s a star in Democratic circles.

Many Democrats on Capitol Hill are avidly reading his book. He has met with lawmakers and their aides to discuss the faith dimensions of the federal budget and other issues that he believes could be taken out of the abstract and given a moral context. The Sojourners Web site declares that “Budgets are Moral Documents!” and urges people to write a form letter to members of Congress telling them to consider the impact of budget decisions on poor people.
That is not to say that Wallis is a political strategist or wants to be — his goal is to change the public discourse on economic and social issues. If what Democrats want is “some Bible verses and a short course in God talk,” he says, he’s not interested. They need to be unafraid to show the religious or moral underpinnings of their policy positions, he says. “If you’re motivated by moral values, let those shine through,” he says he tells Democrats. “If you are a person of faith, don’t be apologetic about that.”

Democrats might not have to move far to gain the kind of support they need from middle-of-the-road churchgoers. The country remains almost evenly divided between the parties, so it would not take much to nudge the balance toward Democrats. At the same time, many congregations already are debating among themselves the relationship between their faith and politics on a broad range of issues: war and peace, the environment, poverty. That suggests they would be open to hearing what Democrats have to say.

First, Democrats will have to shed their image as an irreligious party, and in a way that does not alienate their secular supporters.

Democrats have believed that just speaking about policies and programs, particularly on economic issues, was enough to settle questions about their values, says John White, a political scientist at The Catholic University of America. But over the past generation, voters have come to think about the question of values separately from economic policies and their own economic well-being, he says.

The key is speaking clearly about one’s own values and demonstrating respect for the values of others, he says. “A lot of people just want to know that you believe in something,” White says. “And that you respect their own values position.”

“When you make the values connection,” he says, “you get a hearing on everything else. And I think it’s that simple.”

Painful Education

In one sense, it’s easy to overstate the Democrats’ problem. Polling by the Pew Forum, a nonpartisan research center, found that for most Americans, religion is not the dominant factor in their political thinking, just one of many. Both parties receive most of their support from people who say they believe in God and consider themselves religious. And Bush’s victory last year was no landslide.

At the same time, most Americans want religious faith to have a strong presence in public life, according to the Pew Forum, even though they support a clear separation between church and state. In polls last year, nearly seven of 10 respondents said the president should have strong religious beliefs. Only a quarter of respondents told Pew there is too much discussion of prayer or faith in politics.

Republicans and some other religious leaders say that the Democratic Party doesn’t have a corner on compassion. To imply that Democratic policies are somehow truer to Biblical precepts is wrong and even offensive, they say.

Republicans and their supporters on the religious right have fed and nurtured the Democratic Party’s image problems. They have been remarkably adept at defining both the terms of the values agenda and the party’s own positions.

That’s particularly true on abortion, where the GOP has managed to maneuver Democrats into debates over politically explosive issues, such as legislation in 2003 to ban a late-term procedure that opponents call “partial birth” abortion.

Republicans also have stoked the debate over same-sex marriage to put Democrats on the defensive and portray them as a threat to traditional families.

But Democrats have at times walked right into those traps by, for example, engaging on issues such as partial-birth abortion that seemed designed solely to make them appear out of the mainstream.

“When Democrats let others define us on social issues, such as abortion, and we can’t pivot to bread-and-butter issues, we lose campaigns,”says former Rep. Tim Roemer of Indiana, who recently lost a bid to become the new party chairman to former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean.

Democrats have been painfully slow to realize the importance of speaking about values, says White, who has written a book about the debate called “The Values Divide: American Politics and Culture in Transition.” Now that the truth is starting to hit home, they have too often been skittish about the subject.

“We live in an uncertain age, where people long for certainty,” White says. “I think that was one of the things that appealed to people about Bush.”

On same-sex marriage, for example, Democrats seemed to be avoiding the subject rather than facing the issue head-on. Or they have framed cultural issues clumsily, White says. In the debate over federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, the party presented the choice as an either-or, between progress or no progress, he says. In supporting funding, Democrats seemed to brush past the ethical concerns of many religious voters who might have supported the party’s positions if they were assured that Democrats would respect their views and take them into account as research proceeded.

The party has had leaders — most recently President Bill Clinton — who knew how to speak to religious people. But too often, Democrats have a tin ear for the language of faith, which Bush speaks so naturally. Dean, the party’s new chairman, is the man who once named the Old Testament Book of Job as his favorite New Testament book.

Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, who seemed uncomfortable last year talking about his faith or speaking out on moral issues, embodied the problems of the larger party.

At a party fundraiser during the campaign, Kerry kept quiet when comedian Whoopi Goldberg let loose with a profanity-laced diatribe against Bush. His silence was a stark contrast to Clinton’s denunciation of rap singer Sister Souljah during the 1992 campaign, after an incendiary comment she made following the Los Angeles riots that seemed to condone the killing of whites. Clinton showed his willingness to anger an important party constituency on a matter of principle. By not denouncing Goldberg’s comments, Kerry only reinforced the view of religious voters that Democrats do not share their values, says political strategist Dan Gerstein, who is the former spokesman for Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, a Democrat who does have a good reputation in many religious circles.

Religious voters “are not going to listen to us if they think we don’t share their values,” Gerstein says, “or at a bare minimum, respect their values.”

Roemer says his party also has hurt its case by being intolerant of those, like him, who oppose abortion or hold other more conservative views on cultural issues. Roemer’s race for chairman of the Democratic National Committee became at least in part a very public debate about the party’s position on abortion, with abortion rights groups campaigning for Dean, who supports abortion rights.
The party, Roemer says, has let interest groups in its left wing define it and prevent it from reaching a middle ground.
What Shows found campaigning in Mississippi was that voters see “liberal Democrats for abortion, for gay rights and for taking your guns away.”
Liberals and secular voters are an indispensable element of the Democratic party, of course, and leaders cannot afford to alienate them as they reach out to more conservative voters, says political scientist John C. Green of the University of Akron, a leading expert on the relationship between religion and politics.
And there are already voices criticizing Democrats for injecting more religion into the public discourse. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, says that in a pluralistic, secular democracy both parties are on dangerous ground when they start trying to, as he sees it, out-religion each other.
“If your reason for supporting a particular policy is based on a Bible verse, you ought to be a minister rather than a politician,” he says.
By the same token, Green says, party leaders cannot let liberals and secular voters hold them back from connecting with a religious constituency. “The Democrats have a classic coalition problem,” Green says. “How do you keep your secular base happy while also reaching out to religious voters?”
Ferment in the Churches
The party may not need to make big changes in its core agenda to attract religious centrists, Green says. Polling that he and others did last year for the Pew Forum found broad sympathy, cutting across faiths and denominations, with a number of traditional Democratic positions. Pew found strong backing for environmental regulation and considerable support for expanded anti-poverty programs and aid for the disadvantaged. It also found widespread skepticism about free trade — a core Republican position.

What Democrats must do, Green says, is ease the minds of religious centrists on culturally divisive issues, particularly abortion, that have driven them toward the GOP.

“Whether it’s modifying the way the Democrats discuss the issues or moderating their issue positions, there are a lot of votes to be gained among centrist Christians,” he says.

There’s also a great deal of energy and ideas flowing through religious circles, if Democrats can tap into it. Wallis’ book, for one thing, was well timed, although he has been shaping and honing its ideas for years. Sojourners, a network of liberal or “progressive” Christians working for social causes, grew out of the anti-Vietnam War movement of the 1970s. Wallis’ message now: Many liberals misunderstand and dismiss religious faith as irrelevant to public life, while the right ignores the Biblical call to promote peace and justice, particularly for the poor.
“We contend today with both religious and secular fundamentalists, neither of whom must have their way,” Wallis writes. “One group would impose the doctrines of political theocracy on their fellow citizens, while the other would deprive the public square of needed moral and spiritual values often shaped by faith.”
He calls for believers to engage on a wider agenda than the issues traditionally associated with the religious right. And in that, he is echoed by other religious leaders.
Mainline Protestant churches, which have struggled for years to mount an effective response to the religious right, have been particularly vocal on this score. “Social justice and poverty are issues that have vanished from the public conversation,” said the Rev. John M. Buchanan, pastor of Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago and a past leader of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the largest of several branches of Presbyterianism in the United States.
Bob Edgar, a United Methodist minister and former Democratic congressman who now is a leader of the National Council of Churches, says the religious left was particularly galvanized by the war in Iraq, which Edgar and other religious leaders have strongly opposed.
And like Democrats, mainline Protestant leaders have been wrestling with how to reach to the center. Many of their churches have been riven by the same cultural issues that divide the rest of America. Same-sex marriage and abortion are important issues, says Edgar, but “the key moral values we talk about are peace, poverty and the planet Earth.”

Rather than just dismissing the right out of hand, as they have in the past, mainline leaders have begun to fight on the right’s terms, making a Biblical case for their own social and economic agenda, says Green. He’s been struck by the “sheer volume of chatter” on the religious left.

“They’re talking up a storm,” he says. “And they’re making a real effort to reach out to Democratic leaders.”
Some are dubious of talk about a revival among liberal or progressive Christians. Too often mainline ministers prove to be generals with no troops, says James. L. Guth, a political scientist at Furman University who worked with Green on the Pew Forum polling. Every so often, there’s been talk of a new revival, he says, but it invariably sputters out.
“If I had a dime for every time I’ve seen that story in The New York Times over the past 20 years, I’d be rich,” Guth says.
Green takes a different view. Post-election polling showed that liberals — or as he calls them, “modernists” — across faiths and denominations turned out in large numbers for Kerry.
“It may come to nothing in the end, but it does suggest that there’s something out there for progressives to take advantage of,” he says.

In evangelical circles also, “there is an increasingly sophisticated wrestling with what is a faith-filled political life,” says Ron Sider, a longtime evangelical activist and leader.

Last fall, just before the election, the National Association of Evangelicals approved a “call to civic responsibility” urging evangelicals to use their growing influence to fight for environmental quality and the poor, as well as the sanctity of life and traditional families. The group said the document, “For the Health of the Nation,” was a milestone in the emergence of evangelicals as a force in public life.

There’s still a great deal of debate inside the organization, even among the drafters themselves, about how that document ought to be applied and what role government should play in addressing the issues that concern evangelicals. Members of the association will hold meetings in Washington this week to discuss the document’s political implications, including one session on Capitol Hill with Democratic and Republican lawmakers and aides.

But they’ve already begun to act: In January, 77 leaders of evangelical ministries, churches, seminaries and colleges signed a letter demanding that Bush put more emphasis on fighting hunger and poverty. They wrote, they said, out of their “commitment to moral values,” including the sanctity of human life.
Catholics, meanwhile, are struggling to define their own political positions at a time when the agendas of both major parties conflict with some church teachings. In the run-up to last fall’s elections, Catholic thinkers and even some bishops clashed publicly over abortion and other issues — and which party a faithful Catholic should support.
“There is enormous ferment going on,” says Sider, one of the drafters of the evangelical statement of principles. “And it offers opportunity and risk for both parties.”
Another evangelical, Randy Brinson, has been encouraging Democrats to reach out to religious groups. Brinson, a Southern Baptist from Montgomery, Ala., is the founder of “Redeem the Vote,” a Christian rock road show that crisscrossed electoral swing states last year urging young believers to register and vote.
Brinson’s group claims to have registered nearly 78,000 voters, and it is safe to assume that most went for Bush and other Republican candidates. But since the election, he has been telling Democrats in the House and elsewhere that they can speak both to the faith of religious voters and their healthy self-interest on issues that have always been a strong suit for Democrats: Social Security and Medicare, the environment, health care, the poor.
Democrats have to get past powerful wedge issues first, particularly abortion and same-sex marriage. But even there, Brinson and others see room for dialogue if the party is prepared for a real exchange of ideas.
“The door is open,” he says.
Searching for Opportunity
Democratic leaders aren’t trying to convert the religious right. Most of the religious leaders they are consulting, like Wallis, lean left.
Wallis is also a minority voice among evangelicals, who are one of the most conservative of constituencies. Nearly eight out of 10 voted for Bush last year. The fact that evangelicals are focusing on issues the Democratic Party has owned in the past does not mean they are necessarily looking for new alliances with Democrats. One of the leading advocates of a new evangelical environmentalism talks about co-opting the traditional environmental movement, not joining it.

At the other end of the political-religious spectrum are Jewish voters, most of whom vote Democratic.

But other religious groups, particularly Catholics and mainline Protestants, are split between the parties, with substantial numbers of centrists who could go either way. With the electorate as a whole still closely divided, there are enough votes in the center to tip the balance the Democrats’ way.

That’s the party’s aim now: to widen its base of support as far as it can toward the center of the religious spectrum.
The staff at the Democratic National Committee has been talking about how to connect with religious congregations, and they are now looking for a director of religious outreach.

In the House, Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California has formed a “faith-based working group,” chaired by Rep. James E. Clyburn, a minister’s son from South Carolina, to reach out to religious leaders and help the party better speak the language of faith.

Besides Wallis and Brinson, the religious leaders that Democrats are consulting with include Edgar of the National Council of Churches and James A. Forbes Jr., senior minister of the historic Riverside Church in New York City.

Where these discussions will lead is not clear. One member of Pelosi’s working group, Rep. David E. Price of North Carolina, says that all concerned ought to be open to rethinking the substance of issues.
“I think our democratic dialogue — small ‘d’ democratic — can only be enriched by our faith,” says Price, who holds graduate degrees in theology and political science from Yale University. “All I’m saying is, we shouldn’t expect to remain unchanged in the process.”

Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, in a January speech in New York, agitated abortion rights groups when she called abortion a tragedy and urged all concerned to work together to reduce its rate. In other recent speeches, she has talked about the nexus between religion and public life, and said people ought to “live out their faith in the public square.”

Democratic leaders, in fact, have not called for any fundamental changes in the party’s platform. They speak of their problem mostly in terms of communication and outreach. Pelosi says Democrats have failed in the past because they have let Republicans define them, rather than defining themselves.

“I know you won’t see any change in our platform or the views that many of us hold,” Pelosi says.
On Social Security and the budget, the main issues now consuming Congress, Democrats have begun to express their opposition to Republican proposals in Biblical terms, for instance calling Bush’s budget “immoral” because, they contend, it shortchanges the needy, the disadvantaged and children.

Mike McCurry, a former press secretary for President Clinton who is now advising Pelosi and others on this issue, says Democrats need to do more than add a few scriptural quotes to their speeches. The party will be mistaken, he says, if it thinks of this problem as special-interest politics, where a slice of the electorate can be addressed separately. “The reality is it’s everybody,” he says. “The vast majority of people who vote claim to be believers.”
Democratic positions on help for the poor and other issues have a religious dimension, he says, and the party needs to find people who can speak authentically and clearly to it.

“Above all, we shouldn’t cede the moral high ground to Republicans because they think they have a corner on the faith market,” he says.

This is how Clyburn puts it: “Democrats gave the country Social Security, Medicare. That was our way of taking care of the widows and orphans, taking care of the ‘least of these.’ We’ve walked the walk.”

Mountains to Cross

Some religious leaders say that in any religious-political alliance they would want a chance to help shape the party’s agenda.

“We’ve certainly seen that on the right,” says O. Wesley Allen Jr., a Methodist minister who teaches preaching at a seminary in Lexington, Ky., affiliated with the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). “Look at the way the religious right has reshaped the Republican Party.”

Richard Cizik, lobbyist for the National Association of Evangelicals and another of the drafters of “For the Health of the Nation,” is skeptical that Democratic leaders really want a dialogue with religious groups. They “just seem to want to finesse the problem” he says, by talking differently about the same old programs and positions.

Moreover, just because evangelicals and other religious groups want to help the poor, the sick and the environment does not mean they will support Democratic policies. Many evangelical Christians believe that changes in society begin with personal salvation, with an emphasis on taking personal responsibility for sin. Democrats often see the world the other way around, with an emphasis on governmental solutions, not individual responsibility, Cizik and others say.

“Unless you acknowledge as Democrats that individual responsibility is first, evangelicals aren’t going to hearken to governmental action,” Cizik says.

Cizik hopes to get evangelicals involved in environmental causes. He marched in a recent anti-abortion rally in Washington carrying a sign that read, “Stop mercury poisoning of the unborn.” But he wants evangelicals to co-opt the traditional environmental movement, which he says has gone wrong by putting too much emphasis on big-government solutions and embracing the “population control movement.”

Conservative Christian leader Gary L. Bauer says that liberals do not own the moral high ground on poverty, the environment and the needs of the less fortunate. “Those of us who support free markets, economic stimulus and faith-based problems are helping the poor in a way that will be a more effective way,” he says.
Bauer and others also are dubious that Democrats can get past cultural issues, particularly abortion, without fundamentally rethinking their positions. One conservative Catholic bishop last year called abortion a “foundational” issue — meaning that no good Catholic can vote for any candidate who supports abortion rights, no matter what the other issues in a campaign.
But Brinson, who says he personally favors a ban on abortion, says it is possible for Democrats to get past the cultural issues to speak to those other concerns. So do others who oppose abortion. Sen. Clinton, they say, took a big step toward doing that with her speech in New York in January urging that both sides focus on preventing abortions. Some Democrats quote former President Clinton’s dictum that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare.”
The party also would help its case, Brinson says, by accepting restrictions on the procedure, such as parental notification for minors who want an abortion.

In fact, the Pew Center’s polling suggests there may be middle ground to be had on abortion. There was not a plurality in any religious group for either banning abortion outright or leaving it entirely up to women to decide. Most respondents — 50 percent — chose one of two middle options, saying that abortion should be “legal in few circumstances” or “legal in many circumstances.”

There’s middle ground to be had on same-sex marriage, too, says White. The right approach is for Democrats to stress clearly that they respect the sanctity of traditional marriage but also want to be sure everyone is treated fairly, he says. The key to that issue and many more is speaking clearly about values — your own and those of others.

Allen, who leans left, says he also is convinced that many people in church pews every Sunday would rally around a broader message of social and economic justice, focused on the poor and the dispossessed.

He says he sometimes wonders what motivates the centrists in his own congregation. But he says Democrats have a chance to move them. “I don’t know that the people in the pews are clamoring for that, but they need to hear it,” he says. “And I do think, if approached correctly, they will listen. I do have faith in that.”


FOR FURTHER READING
Abortion debate, CQ Weekly, p. 282; “For the Health of the Nation” by the National Association of Evangelicals is at www.nae.net. Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life has more on this subject at pewforum.org.
Source: CQ Weekly

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