By David Gushee
Credit for most of the material in today’s column goes to Faith in Public Life, which Nov. 13 released the results of a nationwide telephone poll of almost 1,300 voters. Key findings of their poll are in bold; my comments follow.
Religious voters want a broad agenda. Only 20% of evangelicals and 12% of Catholics say an agenda focused primarily on abortion and same-sex marriage best reflects their values.
The narrow understanding of a “family values” agenda may remain popular enough to keep Christian Right organizations alive for awhile, but it does not represent anything close to a majority of evangelical or Catholic voters. I have been among those arguing for a broader values agenda for some time, just because that broader agenda is more fully biblical.
A common-ground approach to reducing abortion is overwhelmingly popular. Over 80 percent of white evangelicals and Catholics believe elected officials should work together to find ways to reduce abortions by helping prevent unwanted pregnancies, expanding adoption and increasing economic support for women who want to carry their pregnancies to term.
The election of Barack Obama and a Democratic Congress means that Roe v. Wade will not be overturned any time soon, if ever. Those who have placed all of their pro-life hopes on that goal remain sorely disappointed. But there is an actual opportunity now to take empirically grounded policy measures that can actually reduce abortion on the demand side. The best scholars, activists, and legislative minds need to get together to work on private and public initiatives that are proven to reduce the demand for abortion. Then the new Obama administration should set an aggressive abortion reduction goal (say, 25% in four years) and expend significant efforts to meet it during the next four years.
Twice as many Catholics believe diplomacy rather than military strength is the best way to ensure peace; evangelicals are split.
After World War II, the United States led the world not just because we were the strongest nation militarily, but also because we were the most effective diplomatically. The political structure of the postwar world was the result of our diplomatic leadership. As the Cold War ended and the Soviet bloc disintegrated, skillful diplomacy by the first President Bush and his team helped those events occur with as little bloodshed as they did.
Christians are required to be peacemakers. Diplomacy at its best is international peacemaking. That so many Christians have lost any sense whatsoever of the tragedy of war and the value of skillful diplomacy is a great scandal. But we are a nation weary of war after the long slog in Iraq and the deepening problems in Afghanistan. Let us hope that skillful problem-solving over the next few years will renew both a national and a Christian valuing of diplomacy.
All religious groups rank the economy as the top issue and blame institutions rather than individuals for our economic crisis. Asked who they think is responsible for the current economic crisis, 38 percent say corporations, 31 percent say negligent government and 25 percent say individuals who were careless.
Yes, it was all of the above. Greed and carelessness in the private sector, aided and abetted by negligent government oversight, contributed to the collapse of our economic house of cards. Free-market capitalism is a powerful engine of wealth creation, but one that devours itself without careful self-restraint, far-sighted corporate leadership and vigilant government regulation and oversight. We dare not look entirely to government for the answer to this crisis, which is as much a cultural problem as an economic or policy concern.
The Sarah Palin nomination resulted in a net loss for the GOP ticket. Her nomination increased support among fewer than one-third of white evangelicals, and decreased support among every other religious group and political independents.
This number may be the single best confirmation of my thesis that there is a (white) evangelical right, center, and left, with the center and left together being at least as large as the right, and often looking at politics and policy in very different ways than the right. Whatever else one may say about Gov. Palin, her nomination did not mobilize “evangelical” voters universally for the GOP. It mobilized one-third of them — basically, a majority of the Christian Right. Everyone else was mobilized away from the GOP by her performance as nominee.
There is no evangelical vote, no single evangelical politics. Even just within the white population of the broader evangelical family, we are politically divided. No single person, group, or party can speak for all evangelicals. This election has once again confirmed this basic but important observation.