NEW YORK (ABP) — In what is shaping up to be a faith-filled race for the presidency, Republican and Democratic candidates have pulled out all the stops — hiring religion gurus, conscientiously attending church, discussing the intimate details of their prayer lives on national TV and publicly admitting personal struggles with sin.
It's an effort to appeal to religious voters and — especially for Democratic candidates — dispel a perception that they don't take religion seriously. The latest effort came at a George Washington University forum sponsored by the progressive Christian group Sojourners.
At the event, Sens. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and John Edwards (D-N.C.) spoke at length about their faith. Some pundits called it an indication the left has stopped assuming religious voters automatically will vote for the Republican Party. Others claim Democrats are pandering.
But exactly who are the religious voters they hope to attract? Tony Campolo, noted author and sociologist, has coined a term that describes at least part of the movement: “Red-letter Christians.” These people, named after the red ink some Bible publishers use to denote the words of Jesus, hold to traditional Christian beliefs and believe the Holy Spirit inspired the Bible, which they view as authoritative and relevant for faith and practice.
But unlike many evangelicals, the red-letter Christians have broadened their agenda to include issues that, in the past, had seemed like the province of liberals: environmental protection, gun control and opposition to war and capital punishment. They also affirm a Christianity that sees Jesus as transcending partisan politics.
“We are people who want to assure that Jesus is neither defined as a Republican nor a Democrat,” Campolo said. “When asked about party affiliation, the red-letter Christian is prone to answer, ‘Please name the issue.'”
These evangelicals are fed up with “gay-bashing, anti-feminism, anti-environmentalism, pro-war, pro-gun, and Religious Right politics” and looking for candidates who take positions on issues that are “in harmony with the clear teachings of Jesus,” Campolo said.
“These Red-letter Christians are going to end the monologue wherein the Religious Right has been the overwhelmingly dominant voice that has been heard in the media.”
They're savvy to religious manipulation, too, Campolo noted.
“We don't want candidates playing games with us, wherein they quote Bible verses or refer to childhood spiritual experiences to validate their claim to being deeply religious people,” he said. “Any efforts to lure young evangelicals by phony displays of religiosity by candidates are likely to turn off the Gen-Xers. These young people want candidates who address issues.”
Campolo believes young people play a major role in the evangelical left. For those who have rejected the term “evangelical” because of its increasingly pejorative status in secular life, the “red-letter” term lets them recognize a significant evangelical minority with which to identify, he said.
It's a sizable group, to be sure, encompassing the “emergent church,” the house-church movement and “various other alternatives to traditional religiosity.” Sociologists estimate up to 35 percent of evangelicals fall into the “red-letter” category.
Melissa Rogers, a visiting professor of religion and public policy at Wake Forest University Divinity School, believes moderate evangelicals often take liberal stances politically but remain conservative theologically. Many African-American pastors remain conservative in their theology but liberal in their politics.
“Evangelical left” is a relative term, Rogers said. “It's just important to remember that there are these different categories. Even Jimmy Carter has a pretty moderate-to-conservative theological position, yet he's a Democrat and fairly liberal in politics.”
According to a 2007 report by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, just 44 percent of evangelicals say they approve of the job President Bush is doing. Catholics especially are a swing constituency; according to the New York Times, Bush won 52 percent of the Catholic vote in the 2004 elections against Kerry, who is Catholic. Bush received just 47 percent of their vote in 2000. But in the midterm elections last year, 55 percent of Catholics voted Democratic.
Becky Garrison, author of Red and Blue God, Black and Blue Church and senior contributing editor of the Christian satire magazine The Wittenburg Door, characterized the progressive evangelicals as a diverse group slowly gaining momentum but that hasn't quite “gelled” yet.
“It's simmering,” she said. “There are a lot of young people under the surface doing amazing things. Something is going on here. There is a seismic shift. There's something happening that is going on well beyond the institutional church that we see on TV.”
Along with the grass-roots current, several prominent voices have emerged in the middle ground between evangelical and progressive, including former President Carter, megachurch pastor and author Rick Warren and Richard Cizik, vice president for governmental affairs at the National Association of Evangelicals.
Cizik, a self-described “Ronald Reagan conservative,” has urged evangelicals to make environmental stewardship central to their political mission. He has been attacked for that stance by prominent old-guard evangelical leaders like James Dobson.
Warren, pastor of the Southern Baptist-affiliated Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif., has held conferences, including one with special guest Obama, about combating Third-World poverty, human trafficking and AIDS. Warren, like Cizik, dismissed criticism from far-right groups.
The movement of Warren and other evangelicals into seemingly uncharted territory for the Religious Right is not entirely new, experts say.
Carter didn't shy away from talking about his faith in office, Rogers pointed out. What is new is the attention the new evangelical field has received from politicos and the media.
“One of the things that has … [captured] our attention has been the findings about the correlation between the church attendance factor and one's voting factor — the God-gap,” said Rogers, who runs a blog about the intersection of religion and politics (melissarogers.typepad.com). “This area, which has always been somewhat sort of interesting and relevant, suddenly got white-hot.”
Now that these politically moderate evangelicals could play a possible role in deciding close elections, the mainstream media and political strategists have taken note.
“The media has realized they've given too much attention and fed the presumption that the evangelical community is monolithic, and they need to go back and revise that statement,” Rogers said. “Because we've come off of a lot of close elections, people are looking at all types of communities. They're looking for small shifts that can make a significant difference.”
But the rise of an evangelical middle isn't the same thing as the re-emergence of a “Religious Left” as powerful or unified as its counterpart on the right.
Indeed, a 2006 article in the Washington Post noted that although the mellowing of evangelical Christianity may be “the big American religious story of this decade,” that evolution should not be confused with a rise of the religious left.
Even though the Republican advantage among evangelicals most likely will decline from the high-water mark in 2004, “a substantial majority of white evangelicals will probably remain conservative and continue to vote Republican,” the Post said.
Rogers said one thing that unites so-called reformer evangelicals, regardless of their political commitments, is their willingness to question religious authorities and “pull back the curtain” to challenge the people calling the political shots.
And no matter what party they're voting for this election, evangelicals and their increasingly complex subgroups show no sign of fading from the public consciousness as a political force.
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— This story is part of a five-part series on religion and politics.