Democrats need old-time religion
Clarence Page
WASHINGTON ?- Sen. Barack Obama's call for Democrats to close the religion gap with Republicans shows a keen grasp of the obvious.
As Obama noted in his much-talked-about speech last month at the Call to Renewal's conference of religious liberals in Washington, the biggest gap in party affiliation among white Americans today is "between those who attend church regularly and those who don't."
Right-wing voices such as Pat Robertson, Rev. Jerry Falwell and Alan Keyes, Obama's GOP opponent in the 2004 U.S. Senate race, will continue to hold sway, Obama said, "if we don't reach out to evangelical Christians and other religious Americans and tell them what we stand for."
Other leading Democrats, such as party chairman Howard Dean, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Rev. Al Sharpton, have called for similar outreach to those evangelicals who are openminded enough to be reached.
The prospect of evangelicals returning to the Democratic Party is openly ridiculed by conservatives, but in private, it probably worries them as much as Democrats are hauntthose ed by the possibility of black voters returning to the party of Abe Lincoln.
During the 2004 presidential race, black voters, particularly black evangelicals, helped give President Bush a winning edge in Ohio and in other states, spurred in part by concerns over gay marriage.
In a similar over-the-top distortion, Keyes declared during his 2004 Senate race that "Christ would not vote for Barack Obama." Obama's refusal to respond made sense under the unwritten political rule: Never interrupt your adversary when he is 40 points behind you in the polls. But Obama says he wishes he had spoken up anyway.
"Because," he said, "when we discuss religion only in the negative sense of where or how it should not be practiced, rather than in the positive sense of what it tells us about our obligations toward one another . . . others will fill the vacuum, with the most insular views of faith, or those who cynically use religion to justify partisan ends."
At the Columbus, Ohio, convention of ACORN, the nation's largest grass-roots community group coalition, Sharpton called on progressives Monday to put bread-and-butter issues such as a minimumwage increase on ballots to counter the "bedroom issues" such as abortion and gay marriage. That's fine as a strategic move. It's always better to fight on your home-turf issues than on someone else's, and Democrats have high credibility on wage issues.
But, Obama says, Democrats need to address the bedroom concerns too. He's not alone in his viewpoint. The conference at which he spoke is part of a national conversation that liberals and progressives are holding to bridge the religion gap. It's about time.
Nevertheless, Democrats should avoid appearing to be too desperate.
They should not, for example, start waving Bibles with the desperate choreography of the 1988 Democratic National Convention delegates waving American flags to close their Old Glory gap.
Instead, they need to frame their issues in ways that speak not only to the bread-and-butter concerns of ordinary voters, but also to their moral and spiritual concerns about the direction in which the country is going.
There always has been a moral component to politics. It has only been in the past three decades that morality has become identified so closely with conservative politics. No one would have said that conservatives had a lock on religious voters in the era of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The divide began to open up when liberal secularism and concern for religious tolerance became widely misperceived as anti-religious.
Jimmy Carter's successful presidential run in 1976 brought many religious voters back, partly because he spoke with the genuine conviction of a Sunday school teacher from Plains, Ga. That's the conviction with which Obama spoke in his 2004 Democratic National Convention speech, which still has people buzzing about his presidential prospects.
After years of polarized politics, the public is hungering for voices that can bring the nation together, even in matters as divisive as faith and politics. Democrats can do it, if they can bring themselves together first.
Clarence Page is a member of the Tribune's editorial board. E-mail:
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