How Did Faith Help or Hurt the Democrats?
At Politics Daily David Gibson looks at the religious left and how they may have played a role in the Democrats’ defeat last week: Of the many reasons cited for the Election Day “shellacking” administered by Republicans to President Obama and the Democrats, perhaps none is as puzzling to political analysts — or as maddening to religious progressives who put so much faith and work into Obama’s success — than the Democrats’ failure to mobilize the Religious Left and reach out to conservative believers. To be sure, little was going the Democrats’ way this fall, and it would have taken something on the order of an Old Testament miracle — say, the sun standing still until employment numbers improved — to forestall serious midterm losses last week. But the reality is that after making great strides since 2004 in mobilizing religious progressives and convincing some Republican-leaning evangelical and Catholic churchgoers that they could safely vote Democratic, the party punted on faith-based outreach after the 2008 vote. It came back to haunt them this year as religious voters abandoned Democrats at a rate higher than that of the rest of the electorate and many of the religious progressives who turned out in force in 2008 stayed home. “Unfortunately, once Democrats took power, instead of building on our success, we went back to the political strategies that had failed us in the past,” Eric Sapp, a partner at Eleison Group, a consulting firm that worked on religious outreach for dozens of Democratic campaigns in 2006 and 2008, wrote in a post-mortem at The Huffington Post. “Funding and staff were routed away from faith and values work and directly almost exclusively into base turnout. And the results were disastrous.” Exactly who lost the “God vote” is becoming a matter of some dispute within Democratic circles, and whether this schism widens or heals could make a key difference in 2012 as well. Some point to the administration, and wonder how a party led by a committed Christian who is as religiously fluent as Barack Obama could allow itself to be outflanked on faith outreach. You know, I can be fluent in Spanish and still not be a “committed Mexican”. Just saying. The problem with the religious left is their politics really had nothing to do with religion, but instead focused on “social justice”, whatever that means. They’re essentially indistinguishable from any other liberal. The religious right, on the other hand, has very special principles regarding government policies such as abortion that are based on their religious beliefs, and at times they conflict with the broader policy goals of some more moderate Republicans. Gibson ends his piece this way: Some critics do argue that it wasn’t just a failure in the Democratic political operation that led to the defection of so many faith-based voters on Election Day. Rather, they say, it was also a failure to shape a narrative in which the biblical values of social justice preached by Democrats would resonate with the economic anxieties that were driving voter decisions. Instead, Christian conservatives had the field to themselves, framing the faith-based solution to economic problems as one that promoted the “biblical virtues” of less government, lower taxes, and reduced spending. “Social justice” was the slippery slope to Nazism or Communism, in Glenn Beck’s catechism. And that populist theology blended perfectly with the tea party zeitgeist of the campaign, and inevitably carried the day for the GOP. “It’s a lot deeper than outreach,” the Rev. Jim Wallis, a progressive evangelical who is close to Democratic leaders, told Religion News Service. “They haven’t connected with many Americans in terms of their daily lives and values. As Proverbs says, ‘Where there is no vision, the people perish.’ And people are perishing.” Whether the Democrats’ political fortune will perish along with them may depend on whether the party gets religion — again. Unfortunately, for a lot of the “religious left” their real religion is government, not God. They look at government as a sort of god on earth dispensing goodies to his people and providing the sustenance they are not required to provide for themselves.
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on November 9, 2010. Filed under