BOSTON (ABP) — Borrowing back a page they say Republicans stole from them, some Democrats are urging their party to talk more about faith and public policy.
“We can no longer cede the religious stage and microphone and television cameras to the Christian Right,” said Brenda Peterson, the Democratic National Committee's newly hired senior advisor for religious outreach.
Peterson — an ordained minister who previously was director of the Clergy Leadership Network — spoke to an Associated Baptist Press reporter immediately following a July 28 “People of Faith Luncheon,” held in conjunction with the Democratic National Convention in Boston.
The luncheon featured speakers from Christian, Jewish and Islamic traditions urging Democrats to better integrate discussion of moral and religious values when talking about their party's policies and positions.
The luncheon — and Peterson's position — are a new direction for Democrats' official political apparatus.
“I think it signifies how serious [Democratic presidential nominee] John Kerry and the Democratic National Committee are about reaching out to people of faith and letting them know that all faiths are included under the big umbrella known as the Democratic National Convention,” Peterson said.
For instance, Peterson and many of the speakers noted, Republicans often discuss abortion-rights and sexuality issues as if they are the most significant moral issues for religious people to consider when voting. But, she noted, the federal budget is “a moral document” too. “The basic tenet of all faiths is [to] love your neighbor and care about your neighbor,” she said. “The Democratic Party has done that very well.”
Featured speaker Jim Wallis — a longtime evangelical advocate for social policies that benefit the poor — said Christians and other religious people need a broader view that acknowledges political issues are also moral issues.
“Poverty is a religious issue,” Wallis said to applause and shouts of “amen” from the crowd of about 100 invited religious leaders. Wallis is the director of the Christian anti-poverty group Call to Renewal and founder of Sojourners magazine.
“I think the old time of the dominance by the Religious Right over faith and politics is coming to an end,” Wallis continued. “And a new time of progressive — and, I would add, prophetic — faith has arrived.”
Wallis said that some progressive evangelicals and other progressive Christians “feel, in fact, that our faith has been stolen from us in the public arena. And we are here to steal it back.”
Wallis criticized religious conservatives and their political allies for attempting to narrow the range of issues that the public perceives as important moral questions. “Some want us to believe that the only religious issues in this election year are abortion and gay marriage,” Wallis said. But he emphasized the importance in the Christian and Jewish traditions of economic and social justice.
“Somehow [because of the influence of religious conservatives], the faith of Jesus has become pro-rich, pro-war and somehow pro-American,” Wallis said.
Wallis also criticized the war in Iraq in moral terms. “Fighting pre-emptive and unilateral wars on false pretenses is a religious issue,” he said.
Wallis criticized Democrats for often being too afraid of talking about the religious passions that motivate their policies for fear of offending someone. “Some [progressives] say, 'I've got faith — but don't worry, it won't affect anything,” he said. “What kind of faith is that?
“When Democrats retreat into secularism,” he continued, “we cede the religious issues to the Republican Party to define it however they want to.”
He also warned Democrats against misusing the “religious left” the same way he said the GOP has manipulated religious conservatives for political ends. “The Republican Party has misstepped in co-opting religious leaders,” Wallis said. “The Democratic Party should not make the same mistake.”
Interviewed following his speech, Wallis said his appearance doesn't mean he was endorsing the Democratic Party. “If I was invited to speak at the Republican [National] Convention, I'd go there too,” he told ABP. “But I'm grateful Democrats are beginning to have an open forum when the voice of progressive religion can be heard.”
The Democratic convention has featured several speeches that, at times, sounded as much like revival sermons as political stem-winders. In his opening-night speech July 26, former President Bill Clinton, a Baptist, reminded delegates of the biblical admonition to “be not afraid” in the face of the war on terrorism.
Another famous Baptist former president, Jimmy Carter, had already warned delegates that he believed the stakes in the presidential election involved “nothing less than our nation's soul.”
And African-American Baptist minister Al Sharpton, adopting the cadences of a sermon, ridiculed President Bush for his recent suggestion that black Americans should reconsider their overwhelming support for the Democratic Party.
“We got the Civil Rights Act under a Democrat. We got the Voting Rights Act under a Democrat,” Sharpton said, to loud applause. “Our right to vote was soaked in the blood of martyrs…. This vote is sacred to us. This vote can't be bargained away.”
But at least one speaker criticized the idea that a religious opinion should hold political sway on an issue important to many religious people. Ron Reagan, son of the late Republican president, spoke to Democratic delegates July 27 to argue for embryonic stem-cell research, which advocates say promises cures for terminal and debilitating diseases.
Reagan acknowledged that many people take it as “an article of faith” that the research is wrong because it requires destroying fertilized embryos. “But it does not follow that the theology of a few should be allowed to forestall the health and well being of the many,” he said.
Nonetheless, longtime Democratic observers said that they have seen more of an emphasis on faith during this convention than any in recent memory. Former Missouri Sen. Jean Carnahan, herself a Baptist, said the emphasis on faith “is a good sign for the future.”
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