By David Sanders
For years, Democrats and secular leftists accused the religious right and their friends in the Republican Party of blurring the lines between church and state and using God to achieve a political advantage.
But more recently, Democrats have tried to get religion and instead of eschewing evangelical voters, the party has tried wooing them.
What prompted the change?
After John Kerry’s defeat in 2004 at the hands of evangelical voters, the Democratic Party had had enough and decided to begin making inroads into what historically has been one of the Republican Party’s most reliable voting blocs. That year, 50 percent of white evangelicals identified themselves as Republicans.
So, in 2005, chairman of the Democratic National Committee and former presidential candidate Howard Dean launched the “Faith in Action” initiative in an attempt to lure evangelical voters into the party’s ranks. In addition to the party’s new strategy, then-U.S. Rep. Rahm Emanuel, who led the House Democrats’ campaign committee, began recruiting candidates from culturally conservative areas of the country who not only professed faith, but were comfortable talking about it.
At the same time, liberal religious leaders and faith-based political activists began communicating a left-leaning political agenda in terms of faith. Asking “What would Jesus do?” they argued that increasing the government’s role in the fight against global warming, poverty and economic inequality was a biblical imperative. Part of their strategy included downplaying abortion and marriage, so as not to offend the Democratic Party’s secular sensibilities.
But this wasn’t the party’s first attempt to attract religious voters. Long before the culture wars of the past 30 years, its leaders evoked the name of the Almighty to push an agenda. In his book Faith and the Presidency, Gary Scott Smith, points out that President Franklin D. Roosevelt offered scriptural justification for the New Deal.
Speaking to the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America, in 1933, FDR explained that the “object of all our striving … should be to help citizens realize the abundant life Christ said he came to bring.” According to Smith, “Roosevelt wanted to ensure that ‘all elements of the community’ had an equitable share of the nation’s resources. The federal government’s social planning, he contended, was ‘wholly in accord with the social teachings of Christianity.'”
But what about the party’s most recent attempt at using faith to achieve more fruitful elections?
When Democrats captured majorities in both houses of Congress, they did so by relying in part on socially conservative candidates. A 2007 Pew poll showed that the percentage of Americans who viewed the Democratic Party as friendly to religion had increased to 30 percent from 26 percent since 2006.
In the 2008 presidential election, candidate Barack Obama, who often used the language of faith on the campaign trail, performed better with every religious group when compared to Kerry in 2004. Obama performed slightly better among self-identified “Evangelical/Born-again” voters and exit-polling showed that Obama bettered Kerry by 5 percent (26 percent vs. 21 percent) with white evangelicals.
More recently, faith leaders of a more liberal persuasion, bolstered by a unified Democratic government at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, have lobbied Congress hard by urging members to act on the party’s agenda. Their efforts have been an all out left-wing, faith-based offensive, ranging from meeting with members one-on-one to holding prayer vigils in halls of Congressional Office buildings. They’ve pushed for “Employee Free Choice Act,” a labor-backed measure that would make it easier for labor unions to organize, and a cap-and-trade scheme, which is the environmentalists answer for reducing carbon emissions and, in turn, global warming.
But, with the Democratic Congress poised to pass a new government-sponsored insurance plan — which pays for abortion — and left-wing interest groups pushing for a more socially liberal agenda, evangelicals do not like what they are seeing.
According to a new Pew poll, the party’s gains with evangelical voters between 2004 and 2008 are now gone. Now only 20 percent of white evangelicals — an all-time low — identify with the Democratic Party.
So were their efforts all in vain? Perhaps not. They achieved their desired result, and have control of the executive and legislative branches. But now that Democrats are cozy in Washington, will their once anathematic attitude towards evangelical voters reemerge? Some say it already has.