The Politics of Piety

CHICAGO — A herd of independent minds has come forth in recent months with a theory. On the Op-Ed pages of newspapers, pixelated across the blogosphere and in prestigious political journals, pundits have decreed that John F. Kerry will lose unless he joins mainstream America and gets more religious. It's not so surprising that Republicans, like the New York Times' David Brooks, are raising the holy cry, but lately, liberal Democrats have joined the choir too.

They're all wrong.

For one thing, the electoral numbers don't add up. As Ruy Teixeira and John Judis concluded in their statistical study, "The Emerging Democratic Majority": "Trends among the religious do not favor Republicans over Democrats. If anything, they favor Democrats." Americans who attend church one or more times a week indeed favored George W. Bush in 2000. But the Americans who don't -- a clear majority -- favored Al Gore. The vaunted "Christian right" is, demographically speaking, a stagnant pool: 17% of voters in 1996 and shrinking. The really dynamic voting bloc is made up of those who darken a church's doorstep once a year or less. In 1972, they were 18% of voters; in 1998, 30%. And they don't like Bush.

Does that make Kerry/Edwards the Ticket of the Damned? Because some less-religious Americans prefer Democrats, does that mean that the Democratic candidate is insufficiently religious? That's what Republicans would like you to believe. But it's a fantasy.

The day in which any major-party presidential nominee is not a professing person of faith is not likely to come in our lifetimes. That's just a fact of political life. It's certainly a fact of Kerry's political life. God-talk peppers his speeches: "We are all God's children" ... "Our prayers are with their families" ... "All of us fighting under the same flag, praying to the same God." But apparently Kerry is supposed to be something more: more than a former altar boy who once considered the priesthood, more than a weekly churchgoer (Bush rarely goes to church), more than a man possessed by the deeply Catholic conviction that actively supporting political programs that advance compassion count as much in God's eyes as the faith one holds in one's heart.