Just one election cycle ago, the Democratic Party hung its godless head, beaten into submission by the religious right and a small group of Democratic activists. Democrats, the mythology went, were anti-religion or, at best, clumsy when talking to religious people. The religious right embraced that myth and sought to reinforce it, to cement its own monopoly on the newly-minted electoral prize of the “values voter.” The Democratic activists, many of whom were evangelical and resented both being lumped in with the religious right and feeling ignored by the Democrats, sought to remedy what they believed to be a persistently losing campaign strategy by refashioning how their party did religion.
No longer, proclaimed one member of Congress at a fundraiser for the Christian political action committee the Matthew 25 Network this summer. No longer do Democrats look down at their shoes when they talk about their faith.
The Making of the “Religious Industrial Complex”
Eyes aimed upward, the loudly faithful Democrats have achieved a lot in four short years. The party launched a Faith in Action initiative and hosted, for the first time, a faith caucus at its convention. Under the leadership of then-Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic caucus organized a Democratic Faith Working Group, which meets regularly with religious constituencies to craft policy.
Operatives and advocates sprang up to offer advice on how to win over religious voters. Amy Sullivan, an editor at Time magazine, published The Party Faithful, both a castigation of Democratic elites for allegedly failing to understand or connect with religious voters and a blueprint for electoral outreach. Mara Vanderslice, the former director (and critic) of John Kerry’s religious outreach opened Common Good Strategies to advise Democratic candidates on faith outreach, before founding the Matthew 25 Network, which supported Barack Obama. Burns Strider, the Pelosi aide who helped launch the Faith Working Group, went on to become the religious outreach strategist for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and runs his own consulting firm, the Eleison Group. In 2007, Religion News Service named him, Sullivan, and Vanderslice among the “twelve most influential Democrats in the nation on faith and values politics and issues.”
While the Democrats have come a long way in four years, Strider said, those efforts cannot match decades of organizing. “We’re going to see continued ‘bringing into the fold’ faith organizing within campaigns and within the party,” he told an audience at the National Press Club last month.
In the think tank world, the liberal Center for American Progress set up a Faith and Progressive Policy Initiative, which for a time housed what later became the nonprofit Faith in Public Life (FIPL). With former Democratic party staffer Katie Paris leading its media outreach, FIPL is in the forefront of those shaping the media narrative about the new religious landscape: religious voters are no longer shackled to a “narrow agenda” of abortion and gay marriage, and are voting on a “broader agenda,” including poverty, the environment, and global HIV/AIDS. The Take Back America conference, the annual policy confab sponsored by the progressive think tank Campaign for America’s Future, began regularly featuring a faith in public life panel, often showcasing the political talent that had lambasted the Democrats for allegedly ignoring them.
By 2008, the constellation of organizations and initiatives that had cropped up inside the Beltway began cultivating the public personae of a new generation of religious leaders. Pastor Dan Schultz of the Street Prophets blog calls this constellation the “religious industrial complex.” Within this constellation, many believe, is the new generation of “broader agenda” religious leaders who hold the key to electoral success: swing Catholic voters, weekly churchgoers, and evangelicals.
Still, despite post-election cheerleading from FIPL and others that Democrats had narrowed the “God gap,” it is not at all clear from polling data that the new “faith-friendly” Democrats were responsible or whether it was simply the longing of the electorate as a whole for, well, change. As Mark Silk, director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College, wrote on his blog, the bump in support for Democrats among frequent, and less-frequent, church attenders dated back to the 2006 midterms and has remained steady ever since. In other words, both groups trended Democratic in a period when the popularity of George W. Bush and his party had plummeted.
The frequent church attenders and the heretics could have been reacting to the same Obama quality: his facility for framing morally complex issues in an ecumenically spiritual way. Who’s to say that the frequent churchgoers responded to “God-talk” or religious outreach, as opposed to the candidate’s way of speaking which so clearly distinguished him from the hairsplitting, technocratic Kerry, whose defeat was frequently blamed on a reluctance to talk about his Catholicism?
Regardless of the unproven electoral benefits of Democrats flaunting faith, all these efforts have had another outcome: elevating the profiles of a “new generation” of “centrist” religious leaders.
Is the Religious Left Getting Left Behind by the Beltway Constellation?
We live, of course, in the age of the celebrity preacher. In this world there is no better measure of a man of God than his book sales and pew attendance. When I’ve asked insiders like Strider or Jennifer Butler, FIPL’s executive director, who the prominent figures in new face of religious America are (and, moreover, in the wake of Obama’s election, who will get their phone calls returned from the White House) certain names keep cropping up. Pastor Rick Warren, who sees no daylight between his views and James Dobson’s, but who, according to Sullivan’s book, former-DNC-chair Terry McAuliffe blasphemously didn’t know; Jim Wallis, best-selling author and activist who lambasts the religious right for its petty intolerance and the left for “not getting it”; and Joel Hunter, the Florida megachurch pastor who infamously turned down a stint as the president of the Christian Coalition, and author of A New Kind of Conservative.
FIPL has taken a lead role in promoting the “broader agenda” of some of these evangelical leaders. No longer interested in fighting the so-called “culture wars,” these leaders say they will de-emphasize their opposition to abortion or gay marriage and work to alleviate the suffering of HIV/AIDS in Africa (Warren), combat poverty (Wallis), and fight global warming (Hunter). Obama has embraced these leaders, too, praying with Hunter on election night, visiting Warren’s church and praising him, and making pivotal appearances at events with Wallis.
Tags: center for the study of religion in public life, civil rights, democrats, faith in public life, god gap, lgbt, progressive, religious left, sarah posner, voting blocks
His 'collection of essays' book is outstanding! I scan Talk2Action nearly every day to learn about the battle against the radicals in the religious right. As an atheist, I am of a small minority that see the Christian left as our true warriors fighting to protect the wall of separation and the rights of gays/women everywhere. They can have a voice still denied us nonbelievers.
When looked upon from other democracies, European in particular, the religious politics of the US look very much 19th century.
Spending time of the valueless "value voters" is a wasteful.
What a waste of moral energy and neglect of serious issues.
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