Hey, Democrats! Christians Aren’t That Bad!

Beliefnet‘s Steven Waldman is, as usual, full of good sense:

Let’s be clear about who these “values voters” were in 2004. Somewhere between 30 percent and 40 percent of Americans are born-again Christians. About 15 percent of the population is religious conservatives of the sort we used to call the “religious right.” The other born-agains consist of a group that Beliefnet has labeled “freestyle evangelicals”—Bible-centered, religious, church-going, and politically moderate.

How could Democrats reach freestyle evangelicals? Bob Wright nailed one way: cultural pollution. Violence and sexual explicitness in the media are something on which red-state and blue-state parents can agree.

But it wasn’t just evangelical Protestants who gave Bush the margin, it was also moderate Catholics. Last time, Gore won Catholics; this time, Bush did. In fact, with the exception of the 1984 Reagan landslide, John Kerry did worse among Catholics than any Democrat since the Gallup organization start measuring such things in 1952. And the most ominous trend in the election for Democrats was Bush’s strong performance among Hispanic Catholics.

For that reason, I think the Democrats must swallow hard and reassess their approach to abortion. No, Catholics are not all pro-life, but even the ones who are pro-choice are uncomfortable with partial-birth abortion. On that issue, Bush came off as the sensible, moral moderate. Kerry, on the other hand, came off as an amoral extremist.[…]

Democratic politicians should never forget something simple: Most Republicans and most Democrats are religious. Using faith language is not just about sucking up to their voters, it’s about talking to your own base, too—and those Catholics who abandoned the party this year.

On some level, the hardest thing that Democratic leaders, activists, and journalists have to do is honestly ask themselves this: Do you hold very religious people in contempt? If you do, religious people will sense it—and will vote against you. And there are more of them than there are of you.

I think Waldman correctly identifies two things that Democrats would do well to keep in mind. First, winning “red-state” voters isn’t just a matter of dressing up liberal positions in religious language. Many religious people disagree with liberal Democrats on substantive matters of policy, not just on the language used to convey those policies. Secondly (and this works to the Dems’ advantage), apart from the hard-core members of the “religious right,” whom Waldman identifies as about 15% of the electorate, many theologically conservative Christians are open to liberal political positions on a host of issues.

Here’s evangelical Ron Sider from an article in this Sunday’s Inquirer:

Sider notes that 55 percent of U.S. evangelicals – who number about 50 million – favor strict environmental regulations, and 45 percent think homosexuals should have the same civil rights as others. Forty-three percent say the middle class should be taxed to fight poverty, and 29 percent support more government spending.[…]

The National Association of Evangelicals adopted a landmark statement last month calling its 30 million members to have “a biblically balanced concern that reflects the full range of God’s concerns for the well-being of marriage, the family, the sanctity of human life, justice for the poor, care for creation, peace, freedom and racial justice.”

The statement, which Sider helped draft, said that “no longer dare one accuse evangelicals of being ‘one-issue’ voters focused exclusively on one or two issues.”

Moreover, it’s not good for Christians to be (or to be seen as) wedded to one party. The temptation there is to identify the positions of that party as the Christian position.