The Democrats, battered by the “values voters” in last November’s elections, are getting religion. But as party leaders cast about for a way to inject faith into their platform, they’d better pray they get it right.
The perception that the Democrats are anti-religion — eagerly fanned by Republicans and reinforced by Christian conservatives who equate church-state separation with a “war on religion” — may help cement the Republicans’ dominance in national politics if it isn’t countered.
But talking about religion and “values” won’t help the Democrats if it sounds like mere political posturing. Moreover, a thin veneer of religiosity risks alienating moderate swing voters who take their faith just as seriously as the politically ascendant evangelicals.
Instead, the Democrats must effectively argue that values are also about the things their party has long stood for — including caring for the needy and protecting the vulnerable.
They can’t afford to concede the moral high ground to groups that have convinced many voters that “values” begin and end with the simplistic pronouncements of the television preachers.
The role of the so-called values voter last November is still a subject of robust debate among political scientists. What is less debatable is that the nation is becoming more polarized along religious and political lines.
Recently, a study by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life showed that President Bush and the Republicans scored heavily with “traditionalist Christians,” while challenger Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) depended on a coalition that included religious minorities, “modernist” Christians and the religiously unaffiliated.
That Democratic base includes avowed secularists who dislike any effort to use the government to advance religious values, but also African-American Christians, still overwhelmingly Democratic but with a deep religious commitment and a growing interest in various “faith-based” education and social welfare proposals.
It includes many Reform, Reconstructionist and Conservative Jews, as well as liberal Catholics and Protestants, who take their religious faith seriously — and whose religious views lead them to conclusions about public policy radically different from those of the Evangelicals.
It also includes some Orthodox Jews, although that’s the one segment of the Jewish community moving to the GOP.
Distilled universe
When the Republicans talk about values, their committed voters know exactly what they mean. They have done a superb job of distilling the moral universe to a handful of highly charged issues like opposition to gay rights and abortion, and they are appealing to voters who are highly unified on those issues.
In the last election, the Democrats seemed to be playing “me, too” on religion, without defining a clear message for religious people who have a different perspective on politics and policy and a different view of the top moral imperatives of the day.
Hence the dilemma: how to convince the public that Democrats aren’t anti-religious, while not aping the style of the religious conservatives or resorting to bromides about faith.
The Democrats have to make a case that the things they have traditionally stood for — including an extensive social safety net, social and economic justice, civil rights and environmental protection — are core religious values not for a minority, but for a substantial proportion of Americans, possibly a silent majority.
The Democrats have to argue successfully that those values, moral in the broadest sense, religious to many, are more important for the nation than the handful of issues the conservatives have successfully defined as the moral agenda.
If the Democrats’ sudden interest in religion comes across as a transparent political ploy, it will offend many seriously religious people in the center, while doing nothing to win the voters who regard the Christian Coalition as the last word in political wisdom.
Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.), an Orthodox Jew, impressed voters in his 2000 vice-presidential run with the genuineness of his faith and the way it seemed to inform his politics.
Other Democrats — including those from the party’s liberal wing — can do the same by saying what many believe: that their religious views are a part of why they are progressives.
The Democrats have a strong values argument to make without compromising their core positions and without treating religion as another campaign gimmick.
They have a strong critique to make of those Republicans who are whipping up the idea that gay marriage is the ultimate outrage, but who don’t seem to care much about the soaring number of children living in poverty or the widening gap between rich and poor.
A sober, well-though-out pitch along those lines may even accelerate a trend pointed out by last week’s Pew study — the drift of some “country club Republicans,” affluent mainline Protestants who were once were reliably Republican, to the Democratic side of the aisle.
Centrist Jewish leaders have been linking religious values and progressive public policy for years. The Democrats should listen and learn from them.
The Democrats do have to counter the charge that they are hostile to religion. But they won’t do it by adding a few hallelujahs to their speeches, by using the word “values” at every opportunity, or by blurring their views on emotional issues like gay marriage and abortion.
Former Madisonian James D. Besser has been Washington correspondent for the New York Jewish Week, the Cleveland Jewish News and other leading Anglo-Jewish newspapers for more than 15 years.
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