Render unto Howard
Jay Bryant (archive)
December 30, 2003 | Print | Send
One of the things ye of little faith regularly berate ye of much faith about is how ye should not be so intent on imposing thy religious beliefs on others who do not share them.
Now comes Dr. Howard Dean, announcing, among other grand preachings that he is going to put Jesus into his campaign.
I cannot prove the following assertion, but you can paint me yellow and call me a Hummer if it is not true: that his vast and vaunted Internet congregation is composed principally of little faith types.
After all, according to a Pew Research study, people who attend church more than once a week vote Republican by a 63 - 37 percent margin, while people who seldom or never attend vote Democratic 62 - 38. And Dean's followers, given everything we know about them, seem unlikely to be more religious than even the average Democrat voter.
Nonetheless, the Deanistas will doubtless forgive Howard for trespassing from the secular straight and narrow onto the sinuous bike path of religion.
Now it may be that Dean's confession of faith – made in a Christmas week interview with the Boston Globe – was nothing more than a random moment of seasonal inspiration, but it may also be a political tactic. Dean, after all, has a history of bending his religion to his politics.
In the early 80's, he left the Episcopal Church in which he had been raised over a political issue, whether or not to build a bicycle path along the shores of Lake Champlain in Burlington. The taint of insincerity regarding his Globe statement is reinforced by his having said therein that while he probably wouldn't air his religious beliefs in New Hampshire, he would do so in the southern states.
Perhaps he feels southerners are more in need of redemption than New Englanders, but redemption from what sin? Voting increasingly Republican?
Perhaps. But the whole thing smells a lot more like political triangulation than anything else, at least to this observer. Religion simply doesn't sell as well in New Hampshire, which the late Senator George Aiken once described to me as being different from its northern New England states in that, as he put it, "they have more sin in New Hampshire."
New Hampshire also has very few African-Americans, and it is these voters Dean especially needs if he is to build on his existing base. The South, one notes on the other hand, has many African-American voters, who constitute a substantial percentage of both the 37 percent of churchgoers who regularly vote Democratic.
Thus, Dean's affirmation of faith would appear to be just another expostulation of a "Southern Strategy," the moral equivalent of, and racial balance to, his earlier promise to campaign for the votes of people driving pickup trucks bearing Confederate flag decals.
No one confused that statement with a sincere belief, on Dean's part, in the virtues of fellow Democrat Jefferson Davis. Neither should one confuse his newfound need to wear his Christianity on his political sleeve with anything resembling heartfelt religious commitment.
''Christ was someone who sought out people who were disenfranchised, people who were left behind,'' Dean told the Globe. ''He fought against self-righteousness of people who had everything . . . He was a person who set an extraordinary example that has lasted 2000 years, which is pretty inspiring when you think about it.''
Few politicians strike me as more self-righteous than Dean, and as one born to wealth and privilege, growing up on Park Avenue and in the Hamptons, he may fairly be described as one who has "had everything."
How will he expand on his theme? What, exactly, will he be saying about Jesus as he travels through the South? Here are a few guesses.
"Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's," will perhaps be interpreted as justifying his promise to repeal all of President Bush's tax cuts.
"Blessed are the peacemakers," can certainly be construed as justifying his opposition to the Iraq War.
And as for "Suffer the little children to come to me…" why certainly, and how shall they come? On their bicycles, no doubt, riding along pork-barrel trails to be built in every city in South Carolina.
Veteran GOP media consultant Jay Bryant's regular columns are available at www.theoptimate.com, and his commentaries may be heard on NPR's 'All Things Considered.'
©2003 Jay Bryant |
