Democratic religious debates and the Newer Political Math
By Moe Lane Posted in Democrats — Comments (12) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Thanks to James Joyner over at Outside the Beltway (which is by the way a good Center-Right blog and a regular read) we can still get good seats for the latest installment of the How Should Democrats Handle Religion? debate. This one is being hosted by The American Prospect; Matthew Yglesias is arguing religion isn't the determining factor that conventional wisdom says it to be: Ayelish McGarvey is politely enough disagreeing.
This is a topic that both writers have been known to expand upon in the past, and at some length. Ms. McGarvey's been arguing for some time that Democrats need to be more engaged in religious issues, explicitly including evangelicals (click on her name for a link of recent articles), and a perusal of Mr Yglesias' website... reveals that he's switched websites again, apparently losing archives in the process, but I do remember him as being a bit of a religious skeptic. At any rate, it looks like this is going to shape up to be an interesting three-part debate.
As for who's going to win it, well, I think that McGarvey's closer to being correct than Yglesias, but I suspect that Matthew's position is going to be closer to the final Democratic policy. The elephant in the room that neither writer has gotten around to mentioning yet (and, to be fair, this is only part one of the debate: I expect it to be addressed at the appropriate time) is that while the anti-religious element in the Democratic Party may be small, it is also very loud and very activist, which allows it to make life interesting out of proportion to its numbers. The analysis of whether they can make life interesting enough is just what makes political calculations and decisions to shift platforms so exciting. If a shift gains you X votes but loses you Y votes, and the X votes have Z political zeal attached to them and the Y votes have A political zeal, at what point does X become more than Y? In this case, I don't know the answer, and I'm sure that nobody over at the DNC knows, either, and I'm pretty sure that the question is helping to keep somebody over there up at night.
In any event, I don't expect a resolution this election: it's a bit late for Sen. Kerry to start modulating his message. Whether or not it ever gets resolved depends on whether he wins or loses: if the former, this goes back in the box for another four years; if the latter, it'll be just one more complaint added to the pile. Either way, tune into TAP Monday to see how the debate's going.
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Democratic religious debates and the Newer Political Math 12 Comments (0 topical, 12 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
Any anti-religious element that may exist would consist of no more than a few wingnuts.
Just going on anecdotal evidence, here -- anecdotal being everything I've ever seen or experienced about the Democratic Party -- but I strongly suspect it's more than just a few.
Which is not to say there's not a religious component to the American left -- see liberal Catholics, see liberal Jews, both driven to their politics by their faith -- but it is to say that inasmuch as the Democratic party is natural home to the aggressive secularizers of American life and politics, it will ipso facto attract the anti-religious.
And it does.
I agree with Tacitus, and I have no doubt that many Democrats are devout followers of a religious faith.
However, some of the fiercest activists in the Democratic Party seem hostile to religion. These activists are out of step with many, if not most, Democratic voters. An example is Robert Reich. For example see the following articles:
Robert Reich's Religion Problem, by Ramesh Ponnuru (on National Review Online)
Former Labor Secretary Predicts Religious War in America, available via Christianity Today's site
Make sure to check out the article by Mara Vanderslice, Kerry's director of religion outreach, in Sojourners.
Tacitus,
I don't like you. I don't like your style, your veiled threats, or your arrogance, which surpasses my own arrogance by an alarming degree. I have decided that if I am going to avoid using profanity on this website then I will have to generally ignore you.
I do enjoy dissecting the issues with the other co-founders and the other guests.
It is not anti-religious to be opposed to rule by biblical doctrine. Reich and others like him are playing defense against the war being waged on the secular-type government we have been enjoying for over 200 years.
That is not to say that the values of our Founding Fathers, and my own values, and probably Reich's own values don't have Christianity at their core. It is to say that to indoctrinate a particular religion into our government destroys freedom. And so we play defense.
That thing being "veiled threats." My threats are explicit and clear. For example, banning. Et voila.
It's for the best, sparks -- you'd find it immensely difficult to avoid me around here.
Religion is not an easy topic to develop a party-wide strategy for. On the level of the Presidential campaign the matter is different; it is possible to develop a strategy, but the starting point has to be the candidate's own faith. Any profession he does not really believe is apt to sound fake to many voters, and American voters take authenticity in this area seriously.
The last two Democratic Presidents, as it happens, used religion quite effectively. Jimmy Carter used it to connect to religious southern whites and delay their switch to the Republican Party, and also to underscore his personal honesty. Bill Clinton used Christian imagery masterfully to connect with black voters whose enthusiastic support he needed. For John Kerry, for whom religion is not as important as it obviously was to Carter and who is not nearly as talented as Clinton was in using religious themes, this is one of the many areas in which he will likely try to please everyone and thereby come off looking like, well, like someone who is trying to please everyone. This is not inevitable, but he is clearly starting from a weaker position than Carter or Clinton.
A guy gets banned for something as minor as that post? What kind of joint is this?
I don't think I like you either.
You just have to follow the rules.
Sparks has a history, Mark. That post was the last straw, not the sole reason.
My theory is that conservative religious voters are willing to vote for a candidate who is not deeply religious. All in all, Reagan was less overtly religious than Bush or even Carter -- but evangelicals loved him.
Just read through sparks prior comments. Looks as if I went off half cocked. Sorry about that, and about making a personal remark.
I don't believe there is a relevant anti-religious element of the democratic party. There is probably a majority of the democratic party that would rather leave religion to the various religions and deal with secular issues but that is not anti-religious. That strategy will not gain votes from the evangelical sect but that is not what the dems are pursuing.
Any anti-religious element that may exist would consist of no more than a few wingnuts. On the other hand, the Republican Party is inundated with a group that wants government to be run based on biblical teaching. To oppose that is not to be anti-religious. It is simply supporting the 1st Amendment.