Why religion is a losing issue for today's Democrats
By Jonah Goldberg
CNN's Lou Dobbs asked House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., the other night, "I'm just a simple fellow, secular as I can be. Are we going to hear every politician now, because of exit polls, start couching every issue in moral or religious terms?"
She responded, "I believe that you will see more of that, but we have to get to the issues that are the role of government. I think on the values side, the so-called religious-issues side, we have to enlarge that issue, because what we're in danger of now in our country is the blurring of the issue of church and state. Our own Constitution is at stake."
Pelosi's dilemma is instructive. She desperately wants to be more accommodating to "so-called religious issues," but she can't put down her ACLU talking points about how dangerous religion is.
Since Nov. 2, Democrats have been trying to cope with the power of "values voters." More than 1 out of 5 voters cited "moral issues" as their primary reason for voting, and 80% of them chose President Bush.
Now, it's true that much of the media overplayed the values issue at first because it took them by surprise (and because they didn't expect or want Bush to win). Blaming the religious right is a default position for all disappointments, despite the fact that "moral issues" have always been a motivator at the polls.
Democrats in a box
But at the end of the day, Democrats still have a problem. Regular churchgoers, pro-lifers, traditionalists: These folks vote Republican now in staggering proportions. Bush increased his share among Orthodox Jews by huge margins over 2000, capturing 69% of their votes. He also captured a few more blacks and a lot more Hispanics this year by talking about faith and morality.
Meanwhile, the Democrats are in a box. Of course, many Democratic politicians are religious. But politicians comfortable discussing religion are overwhelmingly Republican. Democrats get their money from Hollywood and their shock troops from college campuses. Both constituencies get the heebie-jeebies from God talk. And yet, if the Democrats can't win over churchgoers, they are destined to be a minority party for a long time.
Former Clinton staffer Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., explained to The New York Times, "People aren't going to hear what we say until they know that we don't approach them as Margaret Mead would an anthropological experiment."
Most national Democrats sound silly talking about religion and faith. Like Pelosi, they can't resist offering applause lines to the Alec Baldwin wing of their party. And when they fake piety, it's even worse.
Kerry's faith pitch
In the final presidential debate, John Kerry, a Catholic, did his level-best to talk about his faith. It is, he explained, "why I fight against poverty. That's why I fight to clean up the environment and protect this Earth. That's why I fight for equality and justice. All of those things come out of that fundamental teaching and belief of faith."
But, at the same time, Kerry said he could not "transfer" his faith onto other people by legislating it. This struck many as a political and theological dodge. Why is it OK to brag about imposing the minimum wage and affirmative action — issues his faith is largely silent on — based on God's will, but it's wrong to do the same thing on abortion when his church's views there are clear and ironclad? Kerry wanted it both ways: to claim he was guided by faith on the easy stuff but that he couldn't impose his religion when it wasn't politically advantageous.
The larger problem for the Democrats is that liberalism itself, or what we erroneously call liberalism today, is in a crisis. It recognizes that politics must have an underlying morality to it, but it is antagonistic to traditional morality. This is foolish since our greatest political movements — abolitionism, civil rights, etc. — were religious before they were political. Moreover, attempts to construct new, secular, moralities have been failures, even at the seminar level. At the national level (think feminism, Hillary Clinton's "Politics of Meaning," socialism, etc.), they've been non-starters.
Conservatives, and the GOP, are not without their problems. But they're not embarrassed by traditional authority and religion. Democrats, meanwhile, don't need to get religion, but they do need to "get" religion if they're going to climb out of their hole.
Jonah Goldberg is editor at large of National Review Online, and he is a syndicated columnist.
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