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"
And that's a disturbing thought. It's especially disturbing that some Democratic commentators have bought into the notion. "Kerry's Democrats" have been acting "like the Party of Secularists," wrote Beliefnet.com editor and former Clinton staffer Steve Waldman in Slate. "Most folks in national Democratic politics are completely tone-deaf when it comes to religion," said Amy Sullivan, who writes for the liberal Washington Monthly. Nick Confessore on the website of the even more liberal American Prospect noted "Kerry's unwillingness to reach out to religious constituencies in a meaningful and respectful way." What is going on here?
