WASHINGTON (ABP)—With many Republicans concerned their party's leading presidential candidates are not sufficiently conservative on social issues, Democrats have what may be their most faith-friendly crop of candidates in recent years.
According to experts in politics and religion, faith-savvy Democrats may be able to woo religious voters in ways previous Democratic nominees did not.
Barry Hankins, a professor of history and church-state studies at Baylor University, and Laura Olson, a political science professor at Clemson University in South Carolina, analyzed the 2008 presidential candidates in terms of faith issues and faith-motivated voters.
New York Sen. Hillary Clinton is a cradle-roll Methodist who—despite her caricature among religious conservatives as a rabid secularist—has maintained her faith throughout her adult life.
Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, has been received warmly in recent months by evangelical audiences. Obama, an African-American, is a Congregation-alist raised in an essentially secular environment in exotic locales around the world. He came to faith as an adult after working with churches on Chicago's South Side and seeing Christianity transform lives and communities.
Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards is a Methodist raised and baptized as a Southern Baptist who has talked about how his faith “came roaring back” after his firstborn son was killed. He has said his Christianity motivates his relentless focus on poverty and economic justice.
Establishment Democrats began realizing in 2000 and 2004 they had a religion problem. Polls showed large majorities of religiously committed people—Catholics and Protestants alike—voted for Republicans. The pro-GOP majorities were even more overwhelming among conservative evangelicals and Catholics. Meanwhile, people with low or no religious commitment voted overwhelmingly Democratic.
Worried the party would be tarred as a bulwark of secularism, Democratic leaders began rehabilitating the party's image with faith-motivated voters.
Simultaneously, some evangelical leaders have tried to broaden the movement's political agenda beyond its traditional rallying points of abortion and sexuality. Evangelical leaders are pushing political leaders to apply moral language to supporting environmentalism, fighting poverty and preventing the spread of AIDS, among other causes.
Obama already has reached out to evangelical audiences. Last year, he drew rave reviews as the keynote speaker at the Pentecost 2006 anti-poverty conference, sponsored by the progressive evangelical groups Sojourners and Call to Renewal. In his speech, he called on fellow Democrats and progressives not to cede the mantle of morality to conservatives when fighting for social and economic justice.
Obama also highlighted a conference on AIDS hosted last year by evangelical pastor Rick Warren. Several conservative evangelical leaders publicly criticized Warren for allowing the pro-choice senator to speak at the conference, held at Saddleback Church in Orange County, Calif. But both Warren and Obama rejected their criticism.
“While we will never see eye to eye on all issues, surely we can come together with one voice to honor the entirety of Christ's teachings by working to eradicate the scourge of AIDS, poverty and other challenges we all can agree must be met,” Obama said in a statement responding to the criticism.
Such comfort with discussing faith may help both Obama and Edwards, who has been similarly candid about his Christianity. In an interview earlier this year, Edwards said it “is important in my case to have a personal relationship with the Lord.”
Edwards focuses campaign rhetoric on poverty and health-care coverage for the poor because “if you took every reference to taking care of ‘the least of these' out of the Bible, there would be a pretty skinny Bible. And I think I as a Christian, and we as a nation, have a moral responsibility to do something about this,” he said.
Such a comfort with faith may cause Obama—or perhaps Edwards—to “siphon off” more evangelicals than Democrats have been able to do in years, experts say.
“You've got Sen. Obama and Sen. Edwards, and both of them … are able to speak ‘evangelical-ese,'” Olson said. “I think one of the things that American voters seem to want—and part of why George W. Bush was able to do so well in both of the elections when he was a candidate—is that Americans want someone who seems genuine.”
Clinton may have more difficulty in that regard. She increasingly makes public reference to her lifelong Methodism and gave a highly publicized speech last year in which she tried to open a dialogue with abortion opponents. However, many conservative religious voters retain a strong dislike for her and her husband.
Nominating Clinton could do more to mobilize the conservative Republican base than any of Republican candidates could, Hankins said.
“If you have Hillary Rodham Clinton getting the Democratic nomination, that could solidify conservatives because they'll have something to run against,” he said. With “any person who identifies with the Christian right, the opposition to the Clintons is so strong, I don't think there's anything that can be done to overcome it.”
It appears the evangelical right's dominance in GOP politics is up for grabs, particularly in the long run. In coming decades, conservative religious voices may no longer have the kind of dominance over GOP presidential politics they have enjoyed in recent years, Olson said. “For it to make a really big difference now is less likely than making a big difference 10, 15, 20 years from now,” she said.