June 2008 Archives

He's back in play. Crank up those LDS machines.

Brody's hawking his interview with Gov. Tim Pawlenty and a couple of the clips are worth a perusal.

I. If John McCain needs to do as much work rounding up evangelicals at this point in the election cycle as Pawlenty suggests (and he sure seems to), then the presumptive GOP nominee is farther out of the evangelical loop than any presidential candidate of his party since the religious right emerged into national politics in 1980. The only real explanation is that his campaign was so much on life support from late last summer through this spring that it had no capacity to do the work of rounding up evangelical leaders that even such non-evangelical characters as Geo. H.W. Bush and Bob Dole managed to do in their 1988 and 1996 races.

2. Asked by Brody to talk a little about his "faith walk," the would-be GOP veepster gives as lame a response as has been seen this election season since Fred Thompson talked about only going to church when he visited his momma. It could be that since Pawlenty's particular walk involved a defection from Rome, he doesn't want to alienate those oh-so-critical Catholic swing voters. But if he can't do better than this, he's going to have big trouble making up for the deficiencies in the testimony department of the guy he calls "somebody that I think is probably less comfortable being overt about that than perhaps some others might be."

The Denver Post's Karen Crummy has a series of articles (here, here, here, here, and here) showing why Obama may do better than his Democratic predecessors in a number of Western states (Montana, Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico). But among the various factors she looks into, the prevalence of religious categories favorable to the Democrats eludes her attention. Key in Montana, Colorado, and Nevada are the high rates of the religiously unaffiliated (respectively 53 percent, 55 percent, and 61 percent, according to the North American Religion Atlas). The national average is 40 percent. New Mexico is below the average, at 37 percent, but makes up for it by its large number of heavily Democratic Latino Catholics. (Catholics weigh in at 37 percent in NM, as compared to the high teens for the other three states.) At the risk of sounding like a GetReligionista, I will permit myself this whine: Religious affiliation rates really do need to be on journalistic radar screens this year.

Now Virginia. I continue to be struck with the consistency with which SUSA's state polls show McCain leading strongly among regular worship attenders, Obama among those who attend occasionally and almost never. John Green and I have always measured what we call the religion gap by the differential in the votes for Republican and Democratic candidates among those who tell exit pollsters that they attend worship once a week or more. In the 2006 midterms, this gap dropped seven points, from 20 to 13. If SUSA's regulars are taken as something akin to that (they doubtless include at least some of those who say they attend a few times a month), then the 13-point gap in Virginia (now a swing state) suggests things remain close to where they were two years ago--which would be just fine for Democrats.

Update: See Mass. Same pattern, mutatis mutandis.

Did McCain get what he wanted out of Franklin and Billy?

“My father and I were pleased to have an opportunity to meet and visit with Sen. John McCain today,” Franklin Graham said in a statement. “The senator and I both have sons currently serving in the military, and also have a common interest in aviation. I was impressed by his personal faith and his moral clarity on important social issues facing America today.”

Once upon a time, in a country far away, what the president cared most about, and what most exercised public debate, was something called a faith-based initiative. The idea was that religiously inspired organizations could do a better job delivering social services than mere secular or, God knows, governmental agencies. Or at least could do just as good a job but were being discriminated against because of unreasonable and even illegal secularist prejudices. So an office was set up in the White House to foster the faith-based, with legislation supposed to go with it. But then came Terror, and the faith-based business of the nation turned out to lie elsewhere, and the legislation died in Congress, and just about everybody forgot about that White House office, except just before the last election, when one of the people who used to work there wrote a book revealing it all to be a politics-driven fraud and that was one one more straw that broke the back of the Republican control of Congress.

Last week, though, presumably because the president is toting up whatever pluses he can tote about his administration for the historians, a conference on the whole faith-based thing was held at the White House, which spawned an op-ed piece in the Washington Post by the former director of the office, Jim Towey. Towey would like the presumptive presidential candidates of their respective parties to talk about the old initiative, and to that end poses a series of questions for them to address. Most are innocuous enough, in a way that suggests that no fair-minded person could possibly oppose what the president has had in mind.

Being a professor, I don't get to write just anything, but one of the touching things about Hunter Thompson epigones like Matt Taibbi is how they like upholding gospel truth against the contemporary prosperity gospel. As in:

McCain's transformation is so complete that at a recent town-hall meeting in Nashville, when asked to name an author who inspired him, the candidate — who once described televangelists of the Jerry Falwell genus as "agents of intolerance" — put none other than Joel Osteen at the top of his list. "He's inspirational," McCain said.

Standing at the meeting, I didn't write Osteen's name down in my notebook — apparently because my brain refused on some level to accept that McCain had actually said it. Of all the vile, fake, lying-ass, money-grubbing shyster scumbags on the face of this planet, there is perhaps none more loathsome than Osteen, a human haircut with plastic baseball-size teeth who has made a fortune selling the appalling only-in-America idea that terrestrial greed is actually a form of Christian devotion. "God wants us to prosper financially, to have plenty of money, to fulfill the destiny He has laid out for us," Osteen once wrote. This is the revolting, snake-oil-selling dickhead that John McCain actually chose to pimp as number one on his list of inspirational authors. So much for "go, sell everything you have and give to the poor," and all that other hippie crap from the New Testament.

Dobson lays an egg with former Bush White House apparatchik Peter Wehner. The jamesdobsondoesntspeakforme petition is up to 10,000 and counting. The beginning of a movement?

Cf. Sam Freedman pushing from this end.

Unfortunately, the powers that be at the New Yorker have not seen fit to put Frances Fitzgerald's Annals of Religion piece up on the web--the latest effort to answer the question: Is the old religious right giving way to a new, broader, more moderate engaged evangelicalism? Fitzgerald, who's been on the beat off and on since she investigated Jerry Falwell and his church for her Cities on a Hill back in 1981, thinks she does see a turning of the tide, though she doesn't omit notes of caution. The article revolves around Joel Hunter, the Orlando megachurch pastor who deserves to be considered one of the leading figures in the movement, if movement it be. Hunter's religious identity was formed in an Ohio Methodist church, and even as he found his way to a conservative evangelical theology, he has clearly retained the inclusive, community-building strain of Midwestern Methodism. (For more on this, see Andrew Walsh and my One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics, forthcoming from Rowman and Littlefield in a few weeks.)

At the end of the article, Hunter says that in the Florida primary he voted for Mike Huckabee as

"the first iteration" of a new type of evangelical leader--someone who cared about climate change and the plight of the poor, and didn't take himself all that seriously. "When I am looking for a candidate, I am looking for a person who doesn't have his wallet or his gun where his heart should be," he said at the time.

Interesting, as shaggy dogs go.

...and Ohio.

The appointment of St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke to head the Vatican's highest court, effective at 5 p.m. today, has prompted the following assessment from Thomas Reese, S.J. of Georgetown University's Woodstock Center (via a press release emailed around by Fr. Reese himself):

“The appointment should make pro-choice Catholic politicians very nervous,” said Reese. “He will be a strong voice in the Vatican for cracking down on pro-choice politicians.”

More bad karma for McCain:

Despite all the drama over Obama's church and his former pastor's inflammatory remarks, 40% said they felt he was more comfortable talking about his religious beliefs versus 34% for McCain. And in evidence that McCain has some work to do shoring up social conservative voters, when asked which of the candidates "is closest to your views on so-called values issues, such as abortion and gay marriage," McCain edged out Obama by just a single percentage point 40% to 39%, even though 51% of respondents opposed gay marriage.

In Unity. My Lord.

Brother Greenfield explains. But there's starting to be a little evidence that O may be making some actual inroads.

But at least he's meeting with Franklin Graham.

After yesterday's Supreme Court decision determining that the Second Amendment guarantees individuals the right to bear arms, John McCain seized on the moment to, ah, reference Barack Obama's notorious remark about economically pressed white folks bitterly clinging to guns and religion:

Unlike Senator Obama, who refused to join me in signing a bipartisan amicus brief, I was pleased to express my support and call for the ruling issued today. Today's ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller makes clear that other municipalities like Chicago that have banned handguns have infringed on the constitutional rights of Americans. Unlike the elitist view that believes Americans cling to guns out of bitterness, today's ruling recognizes that gun ownership is an important right- sacred, just as the right to free speech and assembly.

Brody has learned that John McCain has decided to put his straight shoulder to the wheel for the California ballot initiative that would disallow same-sex marriage in that state. Yesterday he issued a statement to that effect, saying, "I support the efforts of the people of California to recognize marriage as a unique institution between a man and a woman, just as we did in my home state of Arizona. I do not believe judges should be making these decisions."

But soft, wasn't it McCain's failure to weigh in on the pending constitutional (as opposed to mere legislative) ban on gay marriage in Arizona that got James Dobson so annoyed? And yesterday as well, didn't the Arizona state senate fail by one vote to pass that amendment? And isn't it possible that by raising his voice, Arizona's senior senator might get that amendment off life support for a successful re-vote before the legislature adjourns?

But also, didn't the June 24 Cronkite-Eight poll show McCain leading Obama in Arizona by only 38 percent to 28 percent, with 34 percent undecided? In Arizona! And isn't Arizona the only state in the nation where the citizenry actually voted down a gay marriage amendment to the constitution? In 2006? O Dear O Dear O Dear.

David Kurtz thinks Joe Lieberman played the Wright card in an audio interview with ABC's Jake Tapper. Yeah, there was the more-in-sadness-than-in-anger schtick that Lieberman connoisseurs have come to treasure. But Tapper invited it and so the onus fell on him to follow up with a little Hagee. Such as why Joe's man McCain decided to disavow the endorsement of the guy Lieberman has called a Moses-like Man of God, and why Joe isn't heeding the many calls--including from the Hartford Courant--not to headline Hagee's third annual Christians United For Israel summit next month. No such thing.

And now, a word of more than passing interest from today's Franklin and Marshall national survey. Those identified as "born again or fundamentalist" favor McCain over Obama by only 41 percent to 33 percent, with eight percent backing other candidates and 18 percent in the "don't know" category. That presumably includes African Americans but even so, it's way too narrow a differential for the McCain campaign to feel anything but the willies. In the broad generics, McCain leads Obama 41-36 among Protestants and 42-36 among Catholics. For those of other religions, it's 44-35 for Obama. The religiously unaffiliated are overwhelmingly for Obama, 60-20. Overall, it's 42-36 for Obama.

Fr. Pfleger sticks by the substance of his remarks from Tinity UCC's pulpit, as opposed to the manner of delivery. Did Hillary Clinton feel entitled to the Democratic presidential nomination. It's hard not to think so. Does this express a more general feeling among whites that we're entitled to be at the front of the line? Without pronouncing on the merits of that proposition, my feeling is that any feeling of entitlement on Hillary's part transcended considerations of race. A youngish white newcomer (of either gender) would, I'm guessing, have been regarded in much the same way as Obama was by the Clintonistas. So maybe not a very accurate homily on Fr. Pfleger's part.

Quinnipiac's latest swing state poll shows Obama leading in Colorado (49-44), Michigan (57-36), Minnesota (54-37), and Wisconsin (52-39). On the religion front, white evangelicals show considerable consistency: CO: 65-29; MI: 60-31; MN: 55-38; and WI: 59-32. This is not good news for McCain, because it shows Obama attracting a greater proportion of the white evangelical vote than John Kerry received in 2004. As in, CO: 74-26 and MI: 71-29. (The evangelical question was not asked in MN and WI; "conservative Christians" in those states went for Bush by 91-9 and 91-8 respectively.) If Obama picks up some of the undecideds, he'll can cut the Republican margin among white evangelicals roughly from 4-1 to 3-1--no small difference in many states.

As for Catholics, there the picture is a bit more mixed. In Colorado, it's 52-38 for McCain among white Catholics, as compared to 52-46 for Bush in 2004--but the latter is for all Catholics, not just white ones. If Latino Catholics are excluded from the Quinnipiac survey, then Obama is probably running ahead of Kerry among all Catholics, given the large proportion of Latinos among Colorado Catholics. In Michigan, it's 54-38 for McCain among white Catholics; it was 50-49 among all Catholics for Kerry. In Minnesota, white Catholics are breaking 50-40 for Obama, whereas in 2004 all Catholics only tipped slightly for Kerry, 50-49. And in Wisconsin, it's Obama ahead among white Catholics 49-44--just about the same margin by which Kerry prevailed over Bush (52-48). (For the 2004 exit polls see here.)

Altogether, the Obama people would seem to be well positioned to make inroads among both white evangelicals and white Catholics.

James Dobson seems to have done Obama a big favor by taking after him the way he did. This was not another Wright-centric assault but an attack on the only speech I can recall an American politician giving that at once lays out his own spiritual bona fides and seeks to be precise about how religion should and should not function in the political arena. More important than Obama's own off-the-cuff response is the web page/petition organized by Kirbyjon Caldwell (Houston megachurch pastor, Friend of Bush, endorser of Obama) called www.jamesdobsondoesn'tspeakforme.com. Between the petition's own words and the side-by-side quotes from Dobson and Obama, the Focus on the Family founder comes off looking like a narrow-minded bigot and a bearer of false witness. And this time the charge comes not from the left but from what passes today for the American religious center, and in the person of someone with plenty of street cred in the wide evangelical world. Now let's see who signs up.

It's worth noting that Dobson's conversation-with-sidekicks about Obama, reminiscent of the kind of thing Pat Robertson has always done on the 700 Club, is a departure for him. Indeed, he specifically invites listeners to let him know if they like that sort of thing. (It would be interesting to learn the answer to that.) Meanwhile, David Brody's reporting on national politics on the 700 Club itself is a good deal more fair and balanced than what you'll find on Fox News. As the tectonic plates of the Religious Right move, how much of an opening is there for a Mike Huckabee, or some new rough beast, or something else entirely?

Google News has asked for a comment from me on the Pew Forum's U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, so for those of you who might be interested, it is here.

Here's the summary paragraph on religion from today's L.A. Times/Bloomberg poll:

McCain has had his troubles with the very conservative voters, as well as the very religious. They haven’t trusted him since he ran for president in 2000 against Bush and they are having a hard time this time around as well. Just over half of voters who consider themselves part of the religious right said they would vote for McCain, 17% would vote for another candidate, while a fifth of them are still undecided. Half of white evangelicals said they would endorse McCain, while 21% would vote for Obama, 12% for another candidate and 17% are undecided. What helped Bush get elected twice was his conservative, evangelical base, which to this day is still probably his only loyal and dedicated constituency. But McCain cannot depend on the conservative nor religious groups to win in November. To illustrate this problem -- among those who attend weekly religious services or more are voting for Obama by 43% to 37% and those who go to houses of worship less than that are also supporting Obama but by an even wider margin – 47% to 32%.

What's odd about this survey is that it does in fact show frequent attenders backing Obama--when in state after state, SUSA shows McCain winning them, and often by hefty margins. This can't be explained, I don't think, by assuming that this gap is overcome by pro-Obama margins in big Democratic states, because in, for example, California, McCain carries the regular attenders by 20 points. So color me puzzled.

Update: Swing state Missouri likewise, in spades.

Jeepers! SUSA has Obama up by a point in Indiana. Don't mean to keep harping on this but, it's the same pattern as elsewhere: regular worship attenders for McCain, occasionals and almost nevers for Obama. But, you say, Indiana's a big churchgoing state. You're right, 52 percent of SUSA's sample are in the regular category. But while they break for McCain by 16 points, the almost nevers, at 22 percent, break for Obama by 33 points--canceling out McCain's advantage with the help of a four-point lead among the occasionals.

P.S. Same pattern in N.M.

OK, you can now listen to James Dobson's chat with his sidekicks Tim Minnery and Bill Maier about Obama's views on the proper role of religion in the public square. Here's the extended direct quote, with elipses to indicate interpolated soundbites from Obama's 2007 speech to the UCC:

He's trying to make the case that it is anti-democratic to believe or fight for moral principles in the Bible that are not supported by people of all faiths. Or presumably by those of no faith....What the senator is saying there in essence is that I can't seek to pass legislation for example that bans partial-birth abortion because there are people in the culture who don't see that as a moral issue. And if I can't get everyone to agree with me, it is undemocratic to try to pass legislation that I find offensive to the Scripture. Now that is a fruitcake interpretation of the Constitution. This is why we have elections, to support what we believe to be wise and moral. We don't have to go to the lowest common denominator of morality, which is what he is suggesting....What he is trying to say here is unless everybody agrees we have no right to fight for what we believe. I thank God that that is not what the Constitution says.

By the way, at the very end of the conversation, he and his pals take a poke at John McCain for failing to support an anti-same-sex marriage bill stuck in the GOP-controlled Arizona state senate. Sez Dobson: "That is very disappointing. So this is a year when we have a lot of frustration with both political parties...They don't give a hoot about the family." I suspect the frustration will only be mounting.

In his radio broadcast today, James Dobson will unload on Barack Obama's views on religion in the public square, according to a report by AP's Eric Gorski, who has got hold of a copy. While we await the full text, here's the most interesting of the reported portions:

Dobson reserved some of his harshest criticism for Obama's argument that the religiously motivated must frame debates over issues like abortion not just in their own religion's terms but in arguments accessible to all people.He said Obama, who supports abortion rights, is trying to govern by the "lowest common denominator of morality," labeling it "a fruitcake interpretation of the Constitution."

The Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, premiere institution for social science research on the Catholic Church, has some bad news for the Catholic right. Simply put, its new survey of Catholic political identification shows support for the Republican Party dropping like a stone. That's old Catholics, young Catholics, white Catholics, Hispanic Catholics. (Among the whites, the margin is 57-40; among the Hispanics, 69-29.) Most striking, however, is the Democratic margin among the most "faithful" (by hierarchical standards) Catholics--those who agree with the statement: "In deciding what is morally acceptable, I look to Catholic Church teachings and statements made by the Pope and Bishops to form my conscience." Among them, 54 percent are Democrats or identify with them, as opposed to 44 percent who do the same with the Republicans. In a word, it's not just Catholics of the cafeteria persuasion who are turning away from the GOP.

Ambinder has a post on the survey that's worth checking out.

Today, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life released the second installment of its Landscape Survey, this one on religious beliefs and practices. I haven't had a chance to pick through it carefully, but here are a couple of items worth noting, derived from today's conference call with the press.

First, as longtime readers of this blog may recall, the first installment of the survey caught my attention for not disclosing the proportion of Muslims turned up in this 35,000-strong interview screen, but rather using the number employed in the 2007 Pew report on Muslims in America. That number was .6 percent of the American population. In the course of the phone call, Pew Forum head Luis Lugo mentioned that the Landscape Survey turned up 116 Muslims, which amounts to only .3 percent of the survey. In response to a query from me, the Pew folks said that the adjusted number turned out to be .4 percent.

Why didn't they report that? They said they decided that their earlier estimate was better because it included questioning in Arabic, Urdu, and Farsee. I don't think this quite computes. It suggests that fully one-third of the American Muslim population can't or won't communicate in English, and given that over one-third of American Muslims are African Americans, that would mean that over half the non-black Muslim population doesn't do English. Given their high levels of education and income, this seems improbable to say the least. Maybe there's another explanation, and perhaps it's the one hinted at by Lugo, who noted in the phone call that they are "still pulling out the arrows" from the barrage they received from national Muslim organizations, which have preferred much higher numbers, after the 2007 report. Whatever the merits of the .6 percent estimate, there's no excuse for Pew not to have included a long footnote or appendix giving the actual number and explaining why they chose to go a different route. So saith I, anyway.

As for campaign-related news, the most important takeaway is that Pew is inclined to see some opening for the Democrats when it comes to evangelicals. On very first blush, the finding that members of evangelical churches only favor Republicans by 50 percent to 34 percent suggests as much. However, there are various caveats. "Evangelicals" are not here identified by how individuals answer the question "do you consider yourself a born-again or evangelical Christian," which is how most surveys identify evangelicals. So members include Latinos and African Americans, who are normally treated separately, and do not include "born-again" members of mainline Protestant denominations, who are often very Republican-leaning. At least we can hope that Pew will soon release the cross-tabs for members of those denominations by race and ethnicity. I trust John Green's nose on this one, but am eager to see the verification.

Otherwise, while the survey broadly tells us lots of things we already know (and it's always good to have what we know confirmed), there seem to be many interesting new tidbits. Intriguingly, if oddly, whole states are looked at for levels of religious intensity--i.e. (as the Hartford Courant will report tomorrow), the distinct lukewarmness of the faithful in Connecticut. Elsewhere, there's the array of views among faith traditions on whether "Religion causes more problems in society than it solves." Leading the list of those who "completely disagree" are Mormons (54 percent), followed by members of evangelical churches (50 percent), Muslims (47 percent), and members of historically black churches (45 percent). The lowest outside of the non-believing, non-belonging types are the Buddhists (12 percent), Hindus (15 percent), and Jews (18 percent). In other words, except for the evangelicals, small and/or persecuted minority groups are clustered at both ends of the spectrum. Social circumstances, historical memory, and theology vary, o ye social scientists eager for explanations based on one or two variables.

What should Obama do about the continuing ill-intended rumors that he is a Muslim? Probably just about what he's doing. This is anything but a problem of his own making. The Wall Street Journal's Amy Chozick in on the case.

Update: NYT weighs in.

SUSA's latest Oregon poll shows a narrow three point lead for Obama (48-45). Its Washington State poll, taken almost simultaneously, shows Obama at 55-40 while California is at 53-41. Oregon is a bit more Republican than the other two states, but what really seems to explain the difference is that the poll reckons regular worship attenders there at 39 percent. Now, Oregon has the lowest church affiliation rate of any state in the nation. Our North American Religion Atlas has 65 percent of Oregonians either unchurched or uncounted. Which means that just about every member of a religious organization would have to be a regular attender for SUSA's portrait of the Oregon electorate to be accurate. That's, shall we say, highly unlikely. So I'm guessing that Obama's doing better in the Beaver State than Dr. SUSA's pulse-taking indicates.

This is a news story? McCain goes to his church? On Sunday?

Eli Saslow's WaPo piece on the bump Obama's rise has given to white supremacist groups and websites is worth a read and a ponder. Naturally this is not anything for the non-white supremacists among us to feel happy about, but compared to underground anti-Catholicism in 1960 it doesn't seem to amount to very much. Nowadays, of course, cyberspace declares for all to see the enormity of every prejudice, and one can indulge one's paranoia no end. So if you must, check out this site to listen in to the conversations ongoing in Aryanland. For our little bailiwick, the threads that unspool under "Theology" show what's on offer in the realm of faith--"traditional" Christian, Christian Identity, pagan/Indo-European, and atheist/agnostic. It's the religious pluralism, or spiritual multiculturalism of the dark side. Even the supremacists are not immune.

Peter Steinfels pops the National Right to Life Committee for making Karl Rove the featured speaker at its annual convention July 4. The title of Rove's remarks? “Renewing Life in America — An Old-Fashioned Political Rally.”

Steinfels thinks this is too partisan by half for an organization that claims to be non-partisan--and, though he doesn't say so explicitly, has the tax exemption to show for it. The philosophical problem, if one can put it that way, is that if you're in the business of trying to get anti-abortion laws passed and anti-abortion judges appointed, then your best bet is to throw the weight of your organization behind the GOP. Steinfels' argument, a bit on the implicit side, is that if your goal is to decrease the number of abortions, you might be better off working in a truly bi-partisan manner to foster a culture of life. Especially since, 35 years after Roe v. Wade, the American public shows no sign of wanting to ban abortion. This is an argument that thus far seems to have made little headway in the Right-to-Life community, however.

So what about that pesky tax exemption? The simple solution would be for National Right to Life to just give it up. The likely one is that, should the IRS come knocking, the organization will insist that Rove is no longer a Republican operator but a card-carrying member of the fair-and-balanced commentariat. And in the absence of an overt endorsement of John McCain, his down-ticket mates, or the GOP party platform, the organization will probably get away with it.

As the SurveyUSA state polls continue to roll in the pattern remains the same: The regular worship attenders break strongly for McCain, the occasionals and the almost nevers break strongly for Obama. Here's California. At the margin--and, as the economists know, the margin is where it's at--what Obama can do to attract more religious voters will matter. But the God Gap is alive and living all across America.

Another GOP Mike stands up for the presumptive Democratic nominee, this time NY Mayor Bloomberg, and not in a brief aside either, in a speech to Jews in Palm Beach. If McCain won't tap the Bloomster for veep, how about post-partisan Barack? Fugedaboudit.

Not that Mke Huckabee's gone all soft and squishy on the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate or anything. Evidently the Huck has caught some serious flak for his "don't demonize Obama" exhortation.

Americans United (AU), the intrepid watchdog of the Wall of Separation, has emailed a fund raising appeal to help it stop "the Religious Right" from "coercing religious leaders to break the law!" (Exclamation point not added) What's up? Well, the conservative Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) has designated September 28 as a day for pastors to speak really politically from their pupits, such as by maybe endorsing a candidate. As Suzanne Sataline reported in the Wall Street Journal May 9, the ADF "is hoping at least one sermon will prompt the Internal Revenue Service to investigate, sparking a court battle that could get the tax provision declared unconstitutional. Alliance lawyers represent churches in disputes with the IRS over alleged partisan activity."

The playacting character of this enterprise, on both sides, is impressive. First, it is beyond silly for the ADF to imply that it will take some concerted effort like this to interest the IRS in opening an investigation. All you need do is drop a line to AU, which more or less single-handedly has, over the past decade, pushed the IRS into its current serious enforcement mode regarding political activity by not-for-profit organizations. Hell, you don't even need to do that. All you have to do is arrange for someone you know to write a letter of complaint to the IRS along with, say, a recording of, or a YouTube link to the offending sermon.

As to the question of the ban's unconstitutionality, the Supreme Court has been there and done that twice, in 1972 and 2000. it's settled law that, as Marc Stern points out in the forthcoming issue of Religion in the News, "a failure to subsidize speech does not burden speech under either the speech, religion, or due process clauses of the Constitution." Carving out special exceptions for religious free exercise is not exactly the path the Court has been treading since its 1990 Smith decision.

Congress, of course, could change the law and permit not-for-profits, secular as well as religious, to engage in politics as much as they want. But that's not about to happen. So the most that's likely to happen is that some pastors will say some things that cross the line, some churches will provoke investigations, and some case will go forward that, in the fullness of time, the Roberts Court will decline to hear. And meanwhile, AU will raise some money.

Obama apologizes for the head scarf ban.

In laying out the GOP veepstakes appeal of Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty in his WaPo blog, Chris Cillizza relies on former Minn. GOP congressman Vin Weber for the view that Pawlenty's wife Mary will get the evangelicals right with McCain. Mary Pawlenty, a judge, is apparently close to her pastor, Leith Anderson, the past and present president of the National Association of Evangelicals. "If [Pawlenty] were chosen it would reverberate with the 30 million members of those churches almost instantaneously and very publicly," said Weber. So let's get this straight. Evangelicals will flock to McCain because many of their churches belong to an organization headed by the pastor of the wife of his vice presidential choice. I'll believe it when I see it.

Anyone interested in assessing the importance of religion in the campaign needs to keep in mind the country's evolving issues agenda. Last election, you'll recall, "Moral Values" topped the list in the exit polls, which set the stage for the current Democratic interest in pumping up religious outreach. To be sure, some journalistic snoots were cocked regarding the actual meaning of the "Moral Values" preference, especially since only about a quarter of the voting public chose it. But it did count for something, particularly among the important evangelical Protestant Republican base. (For an analysis of this subject by John Green and me, see here.)

In this week's ABC/Washington Post poll (pp. 13-14), "Morals/Family Values" ranks seventh as the most important issue issue for people, and hasn't moved out of the 2-3 percent range for a year. But it's not only the decreased salience of this issue that points to decreased salience "values voting" in this election cycle. The war in Iraq, terrorism, and ethics/corruption have all declined. The most important issue by far is the economy, and the economy is not understood as a "values" issue in the way the former are. Religious voting blocs will continue to behave in much the same way they always have, but the issues that have motivated them in the past--especially the evangelical "values voters"--simply don't have the oomph they had four years ago. Doubtless the smart guys in the GOP know this, and have determined that they've got to find a way to persuade voters that they can handle economic issues better than the other side. Whitch tends to push Mitt Romney to the head of the vice presidential line.

r-PSen. Gordon Smith (R-Or.), no enemy of gay rights, has apologized for comparing same-sex marriage to the polygamy practiced by his Mormon forebears. Last week he walked into this minefield for reasons of the heart, not the head.

The reaction from the GLBT community was not positive. As the Portland Oregonian reported:

"Talking about polygamy and same-sex unions in the same breath -- on the face it's offensive," said Frank Dixon, a Democratic Party and gay rights activist. "Maybe he can explain his way out of it."

No, not in Turkey. But from the audience behind the podium at Obama's speech in Detroit. I'm shocked, shocked.

O the wastage of ink and electrons over Barack Obama's alleged Catholic problem! As usual for Democrats in general elections, it's white evangelicals, not Catholics, that are the problem, but maybe this year not so much. The latest evidence? Quinnipiac polls showing Obama with modest leads in the swing states of Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

In Florida, he's leading McCain in Florida 47-43 on the strength of 95 percent of the black vote. McCain leads him among white evangelicals 66-22, among white Catholics, 52-38. (The numbers for whites as a whole is 50-40.) In Ohio, where Obama leads McCain by 48-42, white evangelicals break 55-35 for McCain, white Catholics 47-45. Overall, whites prefer McCain 47-44. In Pennsylvania, where Obama leads McCain 52-40, white evangelicals break for McCain 58-34 and white Catholics split evenly, 45-45. Whites there split for Obama 47-44. White Catholics, in short, prefer Obama at just slightly under the rate at which whites as a whole prefer him.

As for the white evangelicals, it's no surprise that they go strongly for McCain. But the numbers in Ohio and Pennsylvania are interesting--and particularly in Ohio, where these voters are more plentiful than in the Keystone State, and in recent elections have been a lot more active thanks to the efforts of people like the Rev. Rod Parsley. That 35 percent of them now say they favor Obama points to a swing of roughly 20 percentage points towards the Democratic presidential candidate from 2004. If that holds, McCain can kiss Ohio, and the election, goodbye. Obama may not want to talk about peeling off white evangelicals, but...

In an interview with Brody, Barack Obama gives his version of the meeting he had with religious leaders in Chicago last week--who ran the gamut, he notes, from UCC president John H. Thomas to Franklin Graham. Obama says he began by quoting Ronald Reagan's famous remark at the 1980 National Affairs Briefing in Dallas, to the effect that I know you can't endorse me but I endorse you.

The irony, here, is that the National Affairs Briefing was the occasion when the nascent religious right, heretofore a miscellaneous collection of local battles and fledgling organizations, coalesced into a national movement allied (one might say, joined at the hip) to the Republican Party. The briefing brought together party apparatchiks with leading evangelical pastors like Jerry Falwell and James Robison (whose press relations guy was the young Mike Huckabee). The explicit business of the three-day event was to turn politically disengaged white evangelicals into engaged voters and party activists, working to advance a conservative family values agenda on behalf of the GOP. So in fact, the event was all about endorsing Ronald Reagan and his fellow Republicans--and Reagan knew it.

In his remarks to Brody, Obama expatiates eloquently on the importance of the work that pastors do in the world, disdaining the perception that "so much of the political dialogue" is "entirely tactical." As in: "John McCain is going to try to peel off women, or I'm going to try and peel of evangelicals."

None of these folks may vote for me, but I want them to know that there's a possibility of me working with them to advance common goals, like reducing teen pregnancies, or making sure that we're dealing with the homeless population, or dealing with the tragedy of Darfur. Those are all issues where I think we can come together, and that's what I want to focus on.

I've been looking at the presidential match-up in recent Survey USA state polls, which divide up respondents by worship attendance into "regularly," "occasionally," and "almost never." In just about every case, John McCain wins the regularlies, while Obama wins the occasionalies and almost nevers. (Alabama, where all three categories go equally strongly for McCain., is an exception) What this means, effectively, is that the higher the proportion of regular attenders there is in a state, the more likely McCain is to win it; the lower the proportion, Obama. So while the large proportion of African-Americans in the South enable Obama to push the envelope there, the strong message for him is, "Go West, young man!" There be lotsa Nones in them thar hills.

In a communication to me, reader B. DelMonico writes, "I appreciate this forum, but could I ask you to please not post comments that use the term "Papal Bull S***", or at least edit the term out. It is flat-out offensive and has no place in civil discourse." Being offensive I do not consider grounds for refusing to post comments--and anyway, one never knows what will offend whom. Ditto with sacrilege. But the comment in question is vulgar, and I'll request that those who wish to have their comments posted avoid vulgarity, which most of us recognize when, to paraphrase Justice Stewart, we see it.

For connoisseurs of religion in congressional races, Virginia's fifth district offers an interesting prospect this year. The fifth extends from liberal Charlottesville out into the state's southern hinterland, known instate as Southside).

The incumbent is Virgil Goode, a Richmond native and Baptist who lives in Rocky Mountain, deep in the southwest corner of the district. Goode is a Democrat-turned-Republican who once upon a time was an enthusiastic backer of Doug Wilder, the first black governor of a Southern state since Reconstruction. In late 2006, however, he had his own special macaca moment, when he wrote his constituents a letter attacking Keith Ellison, the first Muslim ever elected to Congress, for choosing to do his private swearing-in ceremony by putting his hand on a Koran. Goode spun his remarks in anti-immigrant terms, contending that without immigration restriction, there would be many more Muslims in Congress. It read in part:

I do not subscribe to using the Koran in any way. The Muslim Representative from Minnesota was elected by the voters of that district and if American citizens don't wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran...

The Ten Commandments and "In God We Trust" are on the wall in my office. A Muslim student came by the office and asked why I did not have anything on my wall about the Koran. My response was clear, "As long as I have the honor of representing the citizens of the 5th District of Virginia in the United States House of Representatives, The Koran is not going to be on the wall of my office." Thank you again for your email and thoughts.

Challenging Goode is Tom Perriello, a native of the Charlottesville area and a social justice Catholic in the tradition of Maryland's Sargent Shriver. With undergraduate and law degrees from Yale, he co-founded Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good and Faithful America, organizations dedicated to putting religious folks together to work on a range of progressive causes, national and international. In the brave new world of faith-based Democratic politics, Perriello is one of the freshest faces.

My friend Marc Stern, general counsel of the American Jewish Congress, has an op-ed in today's Los Angeles Times worrying about the implications of gay rights for religious liberty. What concerns him is that any religiously based objection to gay rights--such as a devout physician's desire not to be compelled by law to inseminate a member of a lesbian couple--seems to be increasingly likely to be disallowed by courts moving to treat anti-gay convictions with as little regard as they now treat racist ones.

Knowing Marc as well as I do, I know that what he's looking for are reasonable accommodations that recognize the interest of both GLBT and religious people to pursue their lives according to their lights. (Keep an eye out for his balanced approach to the issue of IRS scrutiny of the political involvement of religious institutions in the forthcoming issue of Religion in the News.) In practice, it shouldn't be too difficult to come up with at least some such accommodations. The difficulty is that many of the partisans in this arena are sufficiently unsympathetic to the claims of the other side as to be uninterested in solving even the easy cases. Especially in an election year.

As his op-ed in today's Chicago Tribune makes clear, Douglas Kmiec has no intention of dialing back his support of Obama. By arguing, publicly and repeatedly, why a staunch opponent of abortion like himself can, as a matter of moral principle, vote for the presumptive Democratic nominee, he is becoming the most important national voice against the argument that opposing legalized abortion is so imperative that it trumps all other issues when it comes to casting one's vote. Nor has it hurt his stature that he does so as the victim of a priest's decision to deny him communion as the result of his endorsement. (Note that this is now featured in his op-ed i.d.)

The U.S. Catholic bishops have, of course, not said that it is forbidden to vote for a candidate who supports abortion rights. What they have said is this:

Catholics often face difficult choices about how to vote. This is why it is so important to vote according to a well-formed conscience that perceives the proper relationship among moral goods. A Catholic cannot vote for a candidate who takes a position in favor of an intrinsic evil, such as abortion or racism, if the voter’s intent is to support that position. In such cases a Catholic would be guilty of formal cooperation in grave evil. At the same time, a voter should not use a candidate’s opposition to an intrinsic evil to justify indifference or inattentiveness to other important moral issues involving human life and dignity.

There may be times when a Catholic who rejects a candidate’s unacceptable position may decide to vote for that candidate for other morally grave reasons. Voting in this way would
be permissible only for truly grave moral reasons, not to advance narrow interests or partisan preferences or to ignore a fundamental moral evil.

If you want to know what gives the Religious Right old guard fits, it's this kind of Democrat love from the likes of CBN's Brody and Stephen (The Faith of George W. Bush) Mansfield. Jerry Falwell's widow, on voting for McCain: "I think you don't have much of a choice. It has to be one or the other, and I would prefer him." Ouch.

Reporting on Barack Obama's sermon at Chicago's Apostolic Church of God yesterday, the Chicago Tribune's Jeff Long and Christi Parsons write, "The theme of fatherly responsibility is important for Obama, especially now that he is the presumed Democratic nominee for the White House. While his dogma is decidedly liberal, his talk about personal responsibility crafts an appeal to religious conservatives and political centrists." But it's important to recognize the extent to which this is not only not a newly crafted message for Obama (see this reader's comment to Andrew Sullivan) but also an absolutely characteristic expression of the black church.

The sociologist Stephen Warner, in an article in the forthcoming (in a couple of weeks) issue of Religion in the News, puts it this way:

In February, the Chicago Sun-Times found it worth a headline that Obama should tell a mostly African-American crowd that parents need to help their kids do better in school: “Obama to Blacks: Shape Up.” That’s something you will hear from black church pulpits every Sunday. It’s in the ideologically polarized climate of white America that a black politician who argues that black families have responsibilities for the educational chances of their children is typed as a conservative.

In his March 18 speech on race in Philadelphia, Obama insisted not only that parents bear responsibility for their children’s welfare but also that society help them do that by providing jobs and good schools. In the view of the conservative syndicated columnist Jonah Goldberg, that amounted to the “same old baggage” of reliance on “big government.” In the white world, calls for individual responsibility or collective obligation tend to be mutually exclusive.

Some secularists hear otherworldly fatalism in God talk and calls for prayer, but in the black church tradition, people both expect miracles and know that God needs their help. A motto above the choir loft in the black Baptist church I researched a few years ago reads P.U.S.H. (Pray Until Something Happens), but another motto facing the congregation sits on the pulpit and reads “If It Is To Be It Is Up To Me.”

The black church works in this world but is convinced there is also a better world.

If there's a consensus on how a candidate's religion ought to be relevant to the electoral process, it's that voters deserve to know how the person's public values have been shaped by his or her faith. For Obama, it seems to me, this is where the action is.

Tim Russert's death has been so big a story because he was one of those fixed stars in American public life--a journalistic personality who you expected to be there, shining away, as presidents came and went. Usually those stars just grow dim, like Chronkite or Brokaw, reappearing as hosts or commentators for this or that special occasion or documentary, in a reassuring sort of way. They're not supposed to blink out permanently at the height of their powers, as Russert did.

A particularly nice tribute comes from Time's Joe Klein, who was a Russert comrade in arms for 30 years. Klein emphasizes his friend's Catholicism, stemming from the kind of postwar urban parochial school upbringing that shaped a lot more baby boomers than standard accounts of our storied generation generally recognize. And it is to the nuns who schooled Russert in Buffalo that Klein attributes what he considers his excessively censorious view of the Clintons:

Tim was boggled by Clinton, impressed and appalled by him. The only real differences we had in 30 years of friendship were over his treatment of both Clintons, which I thought was occasionally too sharp — and had its roots, I believed, in the strict lessons about sex and probity he'd learned from the nuns (which he often joked about). Our last conversation, sadly, was an argument over that.

Russert was the quintessential member of Washington's political-journalistic complex, which never had much use for the Clintons and recoiled in special horror and dismay at the Lewinsky and other mini- and pseudo-scandals (remember the Lincoln bedroom overnights?) that came in their train. You would think that the the insiders would have been more worldly wise, but no, they are the acolytes of the American civil religion, and for them, the Clintons were guilty of sacrilege. (If you're interested in my extended take on this, see here.)

Klein, to his credit, spent a lot more time thinking a lot more deeply about the Clintons than his Washington colleagues--see Primary Colors, book and movie--and as a result has managed to achieve a more subtle and dispassionate view. However much Russert owed his moral formation to the nuns, his anti-Clinton attitude seems to me to have been just part of the conventional belief system of his other faith, the cult of Washington.

Disarmed v. stiff-armed. At least I think "stiff-armed" is what the founder of Charisma magazine meant to write in characterizing evangelicals' treatment thus far by John McCain. Anyway, color Steven Strang impressed and worried after participating in last week's meeting with Obama.

John Hagee and Abraham Foxman have kissed and made up. In a "Dear Abe" letter, Hagee apologizes for causing offense in re: his theological musings on the Holocaust (from 1999, he clarifies). In a "Dear Pastor Hagee" response, Foxman declares himself satisfied--though not without a smack at Hagee's eschatological presumption: "We mortals sometimes get into trouble fathoming God's ways." I figured Foxman would not be out of sorts with the good pastor for too long, but there's no doubt that Hagee comes crawling out of this encounter with his tail between his legs.

Speaking of Gov. Jindal, it seems he will soon have the latest species of anti-evolution bill on his desk. That will happen once the Louisiana House and Senate work out a minor difference in SB 733, which "would allow science teachers, upon a request by a local school board and approval by state education officials, to use supplemental materials when teaching subjects such as evolution, global warming, cloning and the origin of life," to quote Bill Barrow's story in yesterday's New Orleans Times-Picayune. Barrow goes on to note:

Jindal, who holds a Brown University degree in biology, has not taken a specific position on the bill. But he has stated during multiple campaigns his openness to allow "intelligent design" into public school science classrooms.

Bobby Jindal's excellent exorcism adventure is making the rounds. You figure that what's no problemo in the bayous is big problemo in the veepstakes.

At its just concluded annual meeting in Indianapolis, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution that at first glance seems utterly un-noteworthy. All but one of the nine "resolved" paragraphs encourage the kind of political engagement that has been a normal part of the evangelical world for nearly three decades. But buried two-thirds of the way down there's this:

RESOLVED, That we ask all Christians, and particularly those in leadership positions, to prayerfully seek God’s mind and will and strongly to consider the potential problems of politicizing the church and the pulpit before endorsing candidates;

Maybe the SBC is merely being prudential, quietly warning pastors to go light on politics at a time when the IRS is doing more serious policing of churches' tax exemptions than ever before. Or maybe Richard Land and company really think the politicization of American evangelicalism has gone a bit too far.

The latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll has Obama leading McCain among Catholics by 47 percent to 40 percent, almost exactly the same figure as the 47-41 percent lead he enjoys among the entire sample. Inasmuch as Obama is leading McCain among Hispanics 62-28, however, that means he has his work cut out for him when it comes to white Catholics. Using the Henry Institutes's numbers, Latino Catholics now weigh in at 30 percent of the Catholic voting public, and Latino Catholics are considerably more likely to vote Democratic than Latino Protestants--which means that more than 62 percent of the former are supporting Obama. My rough estimate is that McCain is ahead among white Catholics by 10-15 percentage points--say 48-35--with the rest undecided. By the same token, Obama's "Hispanic problem" seems to be a figment of the primary season.

As Saint Sabina's awaits the return of its pastor Sunday, Chicago Sun Times religion columnist Cathleen Falsani (on a brief leave to finish up a book on religion and the Coen bros.) has written a brief profile of Chicago's most notorious priest. The mot du jour for the likes of Michael Pfleger (and Jeremiah Wright) is "incendiary." What's abundantly clear, however, is that in addition to setting fires they also have built remarkable religious institutions--in Pfleger's case (according to Falsani) "one of the most vibrant parishes in the Chicago archdiocese." What I'd like to see from those who loathe characters like Pfleger and Wright (hey, Donohue!) is some small effort to wrestle with the institution-building side of their ministries. The inner-city prophet-priest is not the rarest of birds. And it's no wonder that a cautious character like the cardinal archbishop of Chicago is sufficiently appreciative of the priestly side to let Fr. Mike return after only a brief forced retreat.

In New York City a couple of days ago, John McCain called on Greek Orthodox Archbishop Demetrios, and got a bit more Balkan religious politics than he bargained for. As reported by Newsweek's Erik German:

While McCain was posing with Archbishop Demetrios, a reporter with a Greek-language media outlet fired a question at the senator, asking why he did not sign a letter a year and a half ago in which 73 other senators -- including Obama -- urged President George W. Bush to publicly support religious freedom for a Greek Orthodox minority living in Istanbul, Turkey.

McCain declined to answer directly, saying the matter was under discussion. "Obviously we are in favor of religious freedom all over the world, especially those places where it seems to be about to disappear," he said, before declining further questions.

In any event, McCain looks like he'd much rather be, say, chatting with Imus, or chewing on a lemon, or anything else. The fact is, the Turks have made life pretty miserable for Demetrios' boss Bartholomew, patriarch of Constantinople. And yet Turkish good will is important, not to be squandered by standing up for the Orthodox of Istanbul or mentioning that pesky Armenian genocide. Religion is such a pain.

HuckPac announces what it will do with the results of its two online polls, to wit: "take the top four issues (two from each poll" and ask each of the candidates who Huck PAC is supporting to blog about the issues on our website." The issues are: Sanctity of Life, Second Amendment, Education, Health Care, Fighting Terrorism, Protecting Marriage in States, Fair Tax, Border Security, Controlling Spending, Energy Reform.

There is, you'll notice, no mention of the single issue that has been most cited as reflecting a broadened policy agenda among evangelicals: the environment/climate change. Nor of other such broadening issues as worldwide AIDS, Third World Debt, or Darfur. And it's "border security," not "immigration reform." In other words, if Huck's evangelical base is concerned about any, ah, non-traditional GOP issues, Huck PAC doesn't want to know about it. I'm afraid ol' Huck has been beaten into submission, whether by his own ambition or other forces I wouldn't presume to say.

A couple of days ago, the New York Catholic Conference, eight bishops strong, issued a pronunciamento on same-sex marriage in response to Gov. David Paterson's announcement that the Empire State would recognize any such marriage conducted in another jurisdiction. In expressing their unhappiness, the bishops made plain that they were not arguing on behalf of their own parochial theological or religious convictions:

Numerous theological and religious arguments could be advanced as to why same-sex unions should be rejected. However, this is not simply a matter of theology, and religious values are not the sole source of opposition to this plan.

Marriage always has been, is now and always will be a union of one man and one woman in an enduring bond. This is consistent with biology and natural law, and should be obvious to all, no matter what their religion, or even if they have no religion at all. It is a mutual personal gift between the two that serves the individual couple in many ways, allowing them to grow in love and, through that love, to bring forth children.

Just as importantly, this union also serves the larger society. Marriage provides a stable family structure for the rearing of children and is the ultimate safeguard so that civil society can exist and flourish. That is why civil society through the ages has recognized its duty to foster and respect marriage between a man and a woman.

To be clear, the state’s historic recognition of marriage is based on the biological fact that the physical union of a man and a woman tends to lead to children. Common sense and empirical evidence tell us that children’s welfare is best served in most cases by their being reared in a stable home with their mother and father. This fact has been recognized and intuited by societies for millennia. Encouraging marriage between a man and a woman, therefore, serves the state’s interests, as well-reared children who live with their mother and father are much more likely to grow to be good citizens, thereby, creating wealth, stability and security for the members of the society.

The Obamaites are ramping up religious outreach for the general. Yesterday, in a Chicago law office, Obama met with a group of 30 religious leaders, featuring African-American denominational officials, the Catholic law professor Douglas Kmiec, and such evangelical luminaries as Franklin Graham and Richard Cizik. Oh and T.D. Jakes. This seems to have been a meet-and-greet, not without prayer and testimony from the candidate. For students of American religion, the group (all of whose names have not been released) provides an interesting take on centrist religious oomph in early 21st-century American public life. No hard-right types, of course, nor (so far as has been reported) leading white mainline Protestant figures nor Catholic hierarchs. That Candidate Obama has succeeded in pressing the flesh with Billy Graham's successor and heir, on his own Chicago turf, at a time when Candidate McCain still seems to be finding his campaign religious feet, as it were, has got to be unsettling to the GOP apparat.

Meanwhile, Mara Vanderslice's Matthew 25 Committee, a Pac dedicated to supporting Obama, held its first fundraiser last night. Vanderslice ran religion for Kerry-Edwards in 2004 (a short, unhappy experience for her) and then did impressive work on the Stickland, Sebelius, and Casey campaigns. It's interesting that this fundraiser has proceeded in the face of last month's well publicizied instructions from Obama's money guys for their people not to support Obama-supporting 527s. Either they didn't really mean it, or there's now a First Amendment to the Obama Fundraising Constitution guaranteeing the free exercise of 527 religion.

Update: According to Kim Lawton of Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, the presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (the largest Lutheran church in America, and the mainline one) was present at the meeting with Obama. The bishop in question is Mark S. Hanson of St. Paul.

I'm posting this interesting piece of correspondence from Premil Cindy so it doesn't get missed.

A few observations: the FairTax was a fairly close second in poll #1; the questions were framed in terms of "grassroots" issues; and perhaps most importantly, since this is a poll for HuckPac, as opposed to Mike Huckabee for President, though HuckPac does have as part of its mission supporting McCain, it seems to be primarily focused on supporting other GOP candidates that don't have "commander-in-chief" duties, which in combination of use of the "grassroots" word in the question could account for the low showing for fighting terrorism. Oh, and finally, many of us former Huckabee supporters do not support HuckPac (because we don't support McCain) and so have actually asked to be removed from the email mailing list that notifies us of these polls, and so with those defections that skews results. (I stayed on the mailing list only for purposes of staying informed, and told HuckPac I could not support them at this time b/c of their support for McCain.)

For what it's worth, I just took a peek at the results of a couple of readers' polls on Mike Huckabee's blog, asking what issues HuckPac should focus on. "Protecting marriage in the states" won the first poll handily. "Sanctity of Life" is winning the second poll overwhelmingly. Surprised?

Check out Brody for the latest in the twisting tale of a putative McCain-Graham meeting.

What's up with Obama's National Catholic Advisory Council? From what I hear, the members believe it's still on, but just a word to GOM from a campaign aide--certainly nothing like the pushback that we've come to expect from the control room when assaults are made. This only tends to strengthen the view that religion is not front and center for the Obamapparat.

In the Henry Institute survey discussed at length below, there's an agree/disagree question that reads:

Local communities should be allowed to post the Ten Commandments and other religious symbols in public buildings if the majority agrees.

Here's the thing: Almost all religious groups are now in agreement with this proposition, including unaffiliated believers and, now, those of other faiths--i.e. those for whom the account of the Ten Commandments is not Holy Writ. (Let's leave aside the question of the status of the Ten Commandments for Muslims.) The exceptions are the Seculars and the Atheists/Agnostics. Oh yes, and the Jews. Indeed only the Atheists/Agnostics, at 65 percent, are more opposed to the posting of the Commandments than the Jews, at 61 percent.

Why do the Jews, to whom the Ten Commandments were actually given, oppose their public posting? Two explanations, not mutually exclusive, suggest themselves. One, Jews are just super devoted to church-state separation. Two, they're our Commandments, damn it. If you want to see them posted, go to a shul.

By the way, Happy Shavuot, the major holiday (hag) traditionally understood as the anniversary of the day the Ten Commandments (along with the rest of the Torah--don't ask) were given on Mount Sinai.

The quadrennial survey on religion and public life of the Henry Institute at Calvin College is out, and it's got a wealth of interesting data. Unlike the exit polls, it sorts folks into levels of religiosity not by (asserted) frequency of worship attendance but on a kind of orthodoxy scale. In the large categories (evangelical and mainline Protestants and white Catholics), you can be either traditionalist, centrist, or modernist. Among the unaffiliated you can be either a believer, secular (whatever that means), and atheist/agnostic. So here, following the tables, are the highlights, according to me.

1. In terms of partisan identification, evangelicals have in the aggregate shifted barely at all since 2004: the differential between Democratic and Republican is still 29 percentage points, with both losing a couple of points to independents. Most of that shift comes from traditionalist evangelicals, who outnumber the other two categories combined. In a word, and I'm sorry if I keep harping on this, there's still no sign of Democratwards movement among this critical GOP voting bloc (27.4 percent of the population, according to Henry).

2. Over the past two decades, the biggest shifts have come among mainline Protestants and Jews. Most strikingly--though in line with exit poll results from the past few elections--mainliners have moved from a solid Republican voting bloc to (as of this year) to identifying Democratic by nine points. The net shift among them since 1992 is a whopping 27 percentage points. Jews have gotten much more Democratic. In both cases, most of the movement has come during the Bush presidency. Although Jews are somewhat less likely to identify as Democrats this year than in 2004, they are no more likely to identify as Republicans.

3. Since 2004, support for environmental regulation has slipped a bit. This might seem to be counterintuitive, at least given the ratcheting up of green concerns over the past few years. The explanation has to do, I think, with the way the question is asked: "Strict rules to protect the environment are necessary even if they cost jobs or result in higher prices." In other words, less support for environmental regulation may simply reflect higher economic anxieties. That said, not all groups show this tendency. Jews, Blacks, and Latinos all have become more environmentalist, by modest amounts, and the unaffilated, by a hefty amount. Atheists and Agnostics are not the most pro-environment group in the country, at 81 percent. Environmentalism is their religion.

4. Legalized abortion that's solely up to the woman to decide is supported by 53 percent of the entire sample, as opposed to 40 percent against. And by a margin of 47 percent to 41 percent, respondents do not agree that gays and lesbians should be permitted to marry legally. Catholics support abortion rights 51-43, and are almost evenly split on gay marriage, 43 percent against and 45 percent for. These numbers are not good news for social conservatives.

5. Only one aggregate group now thinks the U.S. did the right thing in taking military action against Iraq: evangelicals, 57 percent to 35 percent. Among them, the traditionalists support our having gone to war 64-27, while centrist and modernist evangelicals are just slightly in favor. Among subgroups, the evangelicals are joined in their support only traditionalist mainliners (57-40) and traditionalist Catholics (56-36). All other groups are opposed. In a word, Iraq as a proposition has become a religious question, with only conservative Christians (and possibly Orthodox Jews, but the sample is too small for them to be broken out separately) prepared to answer in the affirmative. For John McCain the news is mixed: He can win religious conservatives on the strength of Iraq alone, without having to sound the trumpet for "moral values." But the vast "centrist" middle where the election will be won or lost is not with him.

6. One addition fact, too interesting to bury at the end of this long post.

Bill Donohue believes that he has single-handedly squashed Barack Obama's National Catholic Advisory Council like a bug. That's because, having called for the dissolution of the Council, he hasn't been able to find any mention of it on the Obama website, and can't get anyone from the campaign to say him aye or nay. Ergo, it doesn't it exist. Q.E.D. Does it?

By the way, would such a campaign qualify as engaging in partisan politics, such that the IRS might be interested in opening an inquiry into the the 501 (c) (3) Catholic League's tax status? Just asking.

So maybe Obama was not unadvised or guilty of "misspeaking" when he told AIPAC that he stands for an "undivided" Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Here's Bernard Avishai's interpretation of the comments:

But even the most apparently contentious thing he said—contentious, at least, outside the room—was carefully worded. Obama said that in any two-state solution Israel would have an “undivided” Jerusalem as its capital. He did not—note well—say a “united” Jerusalem, which would have pushed him from the Democratic Party to the Likud.

Indeed, let’s be clear about this, since some (including Mahmud Abbas, alas) have interpreted his phrase to mean exclusive Israeli sovereignty in the city. Again, when Israeli rightists say that Jerusalem should be exclusively theirs they say the city should be Israel’s capital and united. “Undivided” is the Labor Party euphemism for a city whose Arab and Jewish quarters are not separated by a wall, as before 1967 (and—though this is not usually mentioned in this context—the wall Israel has more recently thrown up).

“Undivided” does not prejudice the question of who is awarded formal sovereignty where. The Geneva Initiative, for example, proposes an undivided Jerusalem with international forces helping to keep the place an administrative whole.

The questions then become: Why did Mahmoud Abbas express great distress at Obama's remark, and why rightwingers at AIPAC express great distress at the subsequent clarification of Oama's remark? Maybe they both thought the rookie didn't really know what he was saying, and that they could they could roll him in their direction. In retrospect, it probably would have been better for Obama to say exactly what he meant the first time around, instead of throwing in a one-sentence coded-language applause line. On the other hand, if anybody could have been expected to understand the code, the good folks of AIPAC should have.

The New York Times' Michael Luo sums of the state of play in re: McCain and the evangelicals. Not much to write home about: some outreach plans here, some watch-and-wait there. Oddly, there's no mention of the veepstakes and its possible significance for ginning up evangelical enthusiasm for the GOP ticket.

Here's what I think. There's no evidence other than the anecdotal that white evangelicals are jumping ship this year. And voters tend to turn out in presidential election years (in off-year elections, not so much). So to the extent we're talking about the evangelical voting bloc, I expect it will look pretty much the way it's looked over the past few election cycles. That is, I'd be astonished if McCain gets less than 70 percent of the white evangelical vote. McCain's real trouble is with evangelical political leaders--with the Religious Right, understood as an organized movement. Those guys don't like him for much the same reason they don't like all this "broadening the agenda" stuff: He, like it, tends to dull the sharp end of the wedge in the culture wars. For that matter, Mike Huckabee threatened to do the same--which is why they didn't much care for him either. Over the years, the leadership of the Religious Right has always thrived on candidates who feed off the hostility of the Other Side--and John McCain just isn't one of them.

Update: I just noticed today's Novak column, which (mutatis mutandis) tends to support the above assessment. With the usual dollop of inside baseball, possibly even true.

I'm a little behind the news on this, but a few days ago Fr. Jim Lisante, who took a dig at Obama and endorsed McCain amidst an invocation at a GOP fundraiser in Manhattan, said he had made a mistake. The mistake was not in endorsing McCain, which he claimed the right to do as a citizen: "I do not as a priest forfeit my right as a citizen to a point of view, even when it comes to standing by a particular candidate." He just shouldn't have incorporated an endorsement message as part of a prayer: "In hindsight I would have separated out the invocation, the prayer, from my commentary."

Newsday quotes one of Lisante's fellow Long Island priests as saying that the Diocese of Rockville Center instructs its priests annually not to endorse candidates for political office. A 2004 diocesan press release declares: "Pastors should not endorse any candidates, nor honor or invite anyone to speak who holds views contrary to Catholic teachings." On strict grammatical grounds, this would seem to prohibit a pastor's endorsement of political candidates whether or not they hold such contrary views. I've not been able to locate the complete guidelines that the press release mentions. But it does seem that Lisante's insistence on his undoubted civil right to endorse candidates for office is at odds with the regulations of his diocese.

Apart from that, the distinction he draws between endorsing and endorsing in public prayer is worth pondering. Is the latter not OK in his view because 1) it's in bad taste; 2) it's wrong to, in effect, ask God to intervene in an election campaign; 3) it represents the priest acting in his ecclesiastical capacity; or what?

Brody has a good story on a forthcoming religious youth outreach effort by the Obama campaign called the Joshua Generation Project. (It's Joshua who brought the Children of Israel into the Promised Land, get it?). Newsweek has a chatty little story on a weekly prayer phone call among Obama-supporting clergy--which Mark Stricherz over at GetReligion thinks should have been harder hitting. So far as I can see, the question regarding religion and the Obama campaign going forward is where it's going to fit into the overall organizational structure. For all the publicized Obamattention to religion, religious outreach was more centrally located in the Clinton campaign during the primary, and similarly, it's not been such easy sledding at the DNC either. What I want to see is the new Table of Organization.

My mistake. Obama's Jerusalem comment does not seem to have been vetted by his Middle East brains trust. All he meant to say, er, was, well, as the Jerusalem Post has it:

But a campaign adviser clarified Thursday that Obama believes "Jerusalem is a final status issue, which means it has to be negotiated between the two parties" as part of "an agreement that they both can live with."

"Two principles should apply to any outcome," which the adviser gave as: "Jerusalem remains Israel's capital and it's not going to be divided by barbed wire and checkpoints as it was in 1948-1967."

Jeff Sharlet has a response to my earlier "Jejeune?" post that I'll respond to here. He begins as follows:

We don't really have the data to say whether the public reacted to Wright as the media did. Here's what we know: the story began as the youtube adventure of a group of conservatives, less interested in understanding the black church than in wounding a charismatic Democrat. At which point the press could have swept in and said, Ok, we'll take these charges seriously, and investigate them. Instead, it said -- Look at that Angry Black Man! Hey, everybody, look! It said this so insistantly that "the public" began to rebel. Certainly that part of "the public" familiar with the black church was not well-served by this narrative.

As for the "hall monitor" designation, I didn't define my terms clearly enough (not surprising, since I just made them up). A hall monitor is not one who says, I think you should learn this. A hall monitor is one who enforces the ideas of others. If there's someone else out there whose ideas I'm enforcing -- someone saying that there's a powerful religious movement that belongs to neither the right wing nor the left wing but the empire wing -- let me know so I can curtsy to this mastermind of my unwitting days.

But would it have made any difference had the New York Times, the Washington Post, the newsweeklies, etc. run the kind of thoughtful, insightful contextualizing stories that Jeff's looking for? I doubt it--in part because they would have disclosed that Wright is indeed a pretty radical guy who says things that a parishioner in the midst of a heated presidential campaign was going to have to answer for. But more importantly, because in the present media environment, which includes ideologically driven talk radio and cable TV, the old MSM gatekeeping function is pretty much moribund. What happened re: Wright is what happened re: Hagee. Partisan investigators operating on their own found stuff, and got it into play with the help of partisan online media. I've argued here 1) that Hagee's anti-Catholicism has more to do with the on-the-ground story of his church than with his End Times prophesying; and 2) that his Hitler/Holocaust comments should not be construed as anti-Semitic. No one's been interested in looking into the former, and people I respect (including Jeff) differ on the latter. So it goes. I try to call it as I see it, whether the idea is mine or someone else's, whether it's tossing a bomb a monitoring a hall, whether anyone's paying attention or not.

Does Musgrave speak for Colorado Springs?

OK, Gallup has a road map poll for the general election (conducted through May, which is to say prior to Obama sewing up the nomination) that gives us a good baseline going forward. Yes, Virginia, there's still a big religion gap--19 percentage points among those who say they attend worship services at least weekly. That's par for the course in presidential voting since 1992. The reverse gap among those who seldom or never attend is 16 points, while those in between divide perfectly evenly.

On the choice by tradition, Protestants (i.e. non Catholic Christians) are all lumped together, and they are McCain's best group, splitting for him 51 percent to 41 percent. Given that this includes African Americans, it signals the usual big white evangelical numbers for the GOP candidate. Catholics divide evenly, 46-45 for McCain--which suggests that white Catholics are moderately strongly pro-McCain and Latino Catholics very strongly pro-Obama: no surprise. Jews split 57-35 for Obama--down double digits for the Democratic candidate in the Clinton-Gore-Kerry elections, in Reagan territory. Finally, there are those of no religion, the Nones; they prefer Obama by a whopping 40 points, 66 percent to 26 percent. That's 15 percent of the electorate, folks, and Obama's ace in the hole.

The big story out of Obama's speech to AIPAC yesterday was the following sentence: "And Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided." It is, among other things, the headline in Haaretz's prominently featured story. The comment should be seen in the context of a statement made three weeks ago by Obama's top adviser on Israel/Palestine, former ambassador Daniel Kurtzer, to the effect that the status of Jerusalem has to be on the table in peace negotiations between the two sides. Naturally, this elicited strong antipathy from Jewish hardliners. No less surprisingly, Obama's statement elicited strong antipathy from Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas.

No question, this was a calculated move on Obama's part--one that, it seems to me, is likely to cause him some trouble after November (assuming he's elected). For the nonce, however, it puts him safely to the right of McCain on Israel/Palestine even as he continues to fight the GOP nominee over U.S. policy toward Iran. It might cost him some American Muslim/Arab votes, and that could matter in Michigan, which will matter. But I would be very surprised to see American Muslim voters (many of whom are African American) lining up behind McCain. Arab states will, not without justice, put this down to typical American electioneering.

Of course, a fair number of Jews will retain their Obama-skepticism. But the statement certainly will provide some reassurance, and there are a good number of Jewish voters who matter in Pennsylvania, Florida, and Ohio who need to be reassured. And in the end, I don't think "undivided Jerusalem" is going to prove to be Obama's "read my lips: no new taxes" moment--should the time come for getting a real Israeli/Palestinian deal done.

Jeff Sharlet has a long response to my unsolicited slap at him--a friendly, thoughtful response, which deserves the same. Here's the money quote:

Those are my sour grapes, yes, but they grow along a fence dividing two very broad camps of journalists: bomb throwers and hall monitors. Both camps contain all kinds of good and bad, but it's the second, the hall monitors, who drove the Wright story and who are now busy burying the evidence. They do so without an untoward thought in their happy heads; indeed, they believe, deeply, that the press is a great, self-correcting organism, always, if slowly, moving toward truth.

Elsewhere in the post, Jeff takes me to task for suggesting that "we" (what do you mean we, kemo sabe?) are all in this media thing together. I have to say that, as a participant-observer in daily journalism for 10 years I was always struck with how responsive we were to popular prejudices and attitudes. So that's my prejudice--that the media and the vox pop share far more attitudes and postures than they don't. Should professional journalists do a better job? Of course. Do they deserve to be smacked when they get it wrong? Absolutely. But, to come down to specifics, the media reacted to Wright the way the public reacted to Wright. And in the midst of a hot political campaign, it's just very difficult to create a nuanced, contextualized, differentiated picture and to suggest that the real story lies somewhere else. But that's not because of ignorant hall monitoring, in my view. It's because the Grand Guignol of ideologues and yakkers and bloggers and the MSM and ordinary YouTubers that constitute what is now an electronic public square had their carnival, in which Wright himself donned cap and bells for a time.

One final thing. It could be argued that Jeff's saying, "don't look at that sideshow, look HERE, at the man behind the curtain," he's not throwing a bomb, but trying (albeit unsuccessfully) to monitor the hall, to get the kids to behave and attend to their lessons. That's fine. It's just that it's hard to police a riot.

In her non-concession speech last night, Hillary Clinton said:

I often felt that each of your votes was a prayer for our nation, a declaration of your dreams for your children, a reflection of your desire to chart a new course in this new century. And, in the end, while this primary was long, I am so proud we stayed the course together.

The first-take exit polls show Obama winning all attendance categories except weekly (more-than-weekly not large enough to register)--which is to say, he got the less religiously observant. He lost the Protestants sans Other Christians by a few points, but when combined, won them. He did much better among Catholics and Other Christians than among Protestants alone. He did best by far among those with no religion--19 percent of the voters--pulling 72 percent to Clinton's 22 percent. Montana has nearly twice as many of these religious "Nones" as South Dakota, and in South Dakota he won that group by only eight percentage points, not 50. That's a big part of the difference in the two primary results right there.

It's becoming clear to me that one of the reasons Obama is doing as well as he is in the West is that it is that region of the country with the lowest rates of religious affiliation and identity. From the vantage point of, say, Connecticut, Montana and South Dakota might seem almost of a piece, contiguous and oblong and up there as they are. But whereas (according to the North American Religion Atlas) Montana has one of the country's higher rates of religiously unaffiliated and uncounted at 53 percent of the population, South Dakota has one the lowest, at 30 percent. In this respect, Montana is a true Western state, while South Dakota is upper Midwest all the way

There's been some recent journalism about the fight for the West between Obama and McCain, and McCain here has the advantage of coming from Arizona. But he's got the GOP-evangelical alliance wrapped around his neck. And the more he tries to nail down his lukewarm evangelical base, the more he stands to alienate his secular fellow Westerners.

The early version of the S.D. exit polls show Clinton with moderately large margins in all religion categories, doing slightly better among Catholics than Protestants. Obama won only the non-religious, by 54 percent to 46 percent--exactly the same figures by which Clinton won Protestants.

Jeff Sharlet is guest-blogging on Beliefnet, and at the end of his most recent post writes:

The new media narrative, in which the Wright controversy will go down as a speed bump on the path to power, is evidence that they believe they have rid the candidate of his demons. But all they really did was banish any serious conversation about relationship between religion and politics – the good, the bad, and the ugly -- from the public square.

Now it may be that, for those of us in the religion-and-public-life business, it's not particularly pleasant (in a self-interested sort of way) to contemplate the rise of a new controlling media narrative in which religion is re-consigned to politicians' private lives and good riddance. And ok, so maybe Jeff's book would be doing a lot better if journalists only realized that The Family is a very much more consequential religion-and-politics story than Hagee or Wright. Maybe it is. And, if Hillary were about to become the Democratic nominee and not Barack, then probably they would, sooner or later. So curse the darkness if you will, but don't blame "the media." We're all in this together, now more than ever.

A couple of rather poignant passages from Chicago Sun-Times religion writer Cathleen Falsani's 2004 interview with Barack Obama.

OBAMA:
… It’s interesting, the most powerful political moments for me come when I feel like my actions are aligned with a certain truth. I can feel it. When I’m talking to a group and I’m saying something truthful, I can feel a power that comes out of those statements that is different than when I’m just being glib or clever.

GG:
What’s that power? Is it the holy spirit? God?

OBAMA:
Well, I think it’s the power of the recognition of God, or the recognition of a larger truth that is being shared between me and an audience.

That’s something you learn watching ministers, quite a bit. What they call the Holy Spirit. They want the Holy Spirit to come down before they’re preaching, right? Not to try to intellectualize it but what I see is there are moments that happen within a sermon where the minister gets out of his ego and is speaking from a deeper source. And it’s powerful.

There are also times when you can see the ego getting in the way. Where the minister is performing and clearly straining for applause or an Amen. And those are distinct moments. I think those former moments are sacred.
...

GG:
Do you have people in your life that you look to for guidance?

OBAMA:
Well, my pastor is certainly someone who I have an enormous amount of respect for.
I have a number of friends who are ministers. Reverend Meeks is a close friend and colleague of mine in the state Senate. Father Michael Pfleger is a dear friend, and somebody I interact with closely.

GG:
Those two will keep you on your toes.

OBAMA:
And theyr’e good friends. Because both of them are in the public eye, there are ways we can all reflect on what’s happening to each of us in ways that are useful.

I think they can help me, they can appreciate certain specific challenges that I go through as a public figure.

Update: Falsani talks with Pfleger in today's Sun-Times. Also poignant. Politics, as John Mitchell said, ain't beanbag.

A referendum to ban gay marriage will definitely be on the ballot in California in November. What will the presidential candidates say? My guess: McCain will say he believes it's good for voters in each state to decide, and that personally he's against it. Obama? In his why-I-left-Trinity press conference, he cited his potential problem with a pastor who expressed an "aversion" to gays and lesbians. But I can't imagine him coming out four-square personally in favor of same-sex marriage.

I'll be in Boulder Thursday to deliver a keynote speech, "Think Locally, Act Globally," at a conference on Media, Spiritualities and Social Change" sponsored by Naropa University and the journalistic components of the University of Colorado and the University of Nevada, among others. I'll be speaking at UC's University Memorial Center at 3:30. The campaign will probably rear its head.

In today's episode, E.J. Dionne turns to the story of Obamican law professor Douglas Kmiec, who was denied communion by an overzealous priest at a mass held for a group of Catholic businessmen he was addressing. Along with an argument that such denial violated the U.S. Catholic Bishops' recent statement on how the faithful may cast their ballots ("Forming Consciences for Faith Citizenship"), Dionne raises the possibility of a major outcry within the Church against acts of this kind. The geographical locus of excommunicatory threat runs through the heartland, with Archbishop Burke of St. Louis at the eastern end and Archbishop Chaput of Denver at the western. Missouri and Colorado are among the swingiest of swing states this year.

Over the past few days, there's been something of a dawning sense that it would be a good idea to dial back the religion-in-politics thing: for the Protestants, fewer inflammatory preachers; for the Catholics, less cracking of the hierarchical whip; for the Jews, less of a party line on Israel. On the cusp of the general election campaign, the time may be right. But I'm not putting down any bets just yet.

For a little perspective on Fr. Pfleger, this from the New Republic's blog. From Pfleger and Wright to Hagree and Parsley, it's clear that the traditional role of religion in American electoral politics has been profoundly unsettled. It used to be that the object of the exercise was for the candidate to be seen receiving the priestly blessing, the Good Churchgoing Seal of Approval, from some appropriately benign clerical figure, often named Billy Graham.

Now, the Republican Party has led us into the Land of Prophets, when associations and endorsements are supposed to come down from those who want to deliver the prophetic afflatus. But by tradition, the prophet sits uneasily with those who would hold the reins of power. Just ask Saul about Samuel, or David about Nathan. One thing worth noting about George W. Bush: He's pretty much kept his distance from the hortatory characters on the religious right, preferring instead to cultivate the T.D. Jakeses and Kirbyjon Caldwells of this world, at least in public. Perhaps he figured this out while working the religion angle for his pop during the 1988 campaign. I never thought I'd say it, but in this regard the president's approach may be worth a little emulation.

Thus pronounceth David Brody:

Look, McCain, Obama and Clinton aren’t going to pay attention to an online petition. That’s not the point here. There is a larger issue to consider. Evangelicals, for the most part, are lukewarm on McCain. They may vote for him…they may not but one thing is for sure; they’re not energized at all. So that’s why this VP pick is SO important for McCain. A center-right moderate will be disastrous for McCain with Evangelicals and social conservatives. Many Evangelicals are waiting to see who McCain picks as his VP. A solid social conservative who has fought for their causes would be a winner. If he’s a professed, Bible believing Christian, well, that’s the daily double.

Yesterday, Terry Mattingly was beating his familiar drum on the uncertain ontology of evangelicals. What is an evangelical? Why do journalists seize on a character like pastor Rod Parsley and imagine that he somehow speaks for all of them? Why tmatt, religion reporter since the dawn of time, doesn't even hardly know who Parsley is!

Enough already. Yes, evangelicals are a more amorphous group than, say, Catholics. But for purposes of political discussion, they are simply those people who identify themselves as "evangelical or born-again Christians." For all their differences, denominational and otherwise, they in fact constitute a coherent voting bloc; indeed, white evangelicals are a far more coherent voting bloc than white Catholics are. They tend to vote as Republican as Jews vote Democratic. And their leaders are as worth paying attention to as Catholic bishops and the likes of Bill Donohue.

As for Parsley, he's not just one of any number of megachurch pastors who have notably conservative views on abortion, gay marriage, and Islam, as Mattingly would have it. He's been the leading figure on the religion right in Ohio, a not inconsequential state in recent years, politically speaking. For enlightenment in this regard, take a look at this 1986 [correction:: er, make the 2006] New Yorker piece by Frances Fitzgerald. When John McCain solicited and received Parsley's support (before rejecting it), he wasn't just picking some pastor out of the crowd.

Let me call your attention to the comments posted to my previous entry by my colleague Juhem Navarro. Juhem taxes the exit pollsters with assuming that Puerto Ricans are more or less all Catholics--a fair charge, since why else suppress the usual primary poll questions on religious affiliation? He points out that, according to the 2001 World Values Survey, only about two-thirds of religious adherents in Puerto Rico are Catholic (as opposed to, for example, 78 percent in Rhode Island and 71 percent in Massachusetts). Juhem's jdugment is that most of the others ('Protestants" and "Others") are Pentecostals and neo-Pentecostals. These folks, who tend to favor the pro-statehood party, probably went more heavily for Clinton than other Puerto Ricans, given that (according to the poll) she won a disproportionately large share of the pro-statehood vote. So by this logic Obama would have done a bit better among Puerto Rican Catholics than Protestants. For what it's worth.

The only religion questions on the Puerto Rico exit poll had to do with attendance, and the differences among the groupings were not notable. For what it's worth, Clinton did best among weekly attenders, beating out Obama 73-27; worst among monthly attenders, outpolling Obama 62-38. If anyone thinks this means anything, I'd be be happy to hear from you.

For those who, for partisan or non-partisan reasons, have been most critical of Barack Obama's religious affiliation, the refrain has been, "Why did he stay in that church so long?" The implication being that he either believes the worst that Jeremiah Wright had to offer, or is too morally obtuse not to have been offended enough to leave. So the fact that he's left now will cut no ice with them. There will also be those who give Obama bad marks for doing a purely political thing, ridding himself of an association that at any moment (e.g. Fr. Pfleger) could cause him trouble.

So far as I know, never has a presidential candidate's particular house of worship--as opposed to his religion--received the kind of attention that Trinity UCC has. Obama himself invited the scrutiny, by writing about the importance of the church in his life, by giving his second book a title taken from his pastor. As much as for any candidate in history, personal biography has been central to Obama's electoral pitch, and that biography put the religion he found at Trinity front and center.

That said, no one who has not been through a presidential campaign can have any idea what the full blast of media attention is like. At the outset, Obama knew enough to put a little distance between himself and Jeremiah Wright, by keeping him away from the announcement of his candidacy. And perhaps, in a pre-Internet, pre-YouTube age, that would have been enough. Reports of Wright's more radical views would have bubbled up from time to time, but would hardly have been able to dominate the primary campaign for weeks.

Obama's press conference account of his separation from Trinity is, on its face, an acknowledgment of the realities--a recognition that as long as he remained a member of the church, nothing that happened there would pass without his being linked to it. The remarks are notable for Obama's readiness to talk about what he'll be looking for in a new church: socially engaged, African-American worship style, accepting of gays and lesbians--like Trinity, in short, but led by a different kind of pastor:

I would expect that I would have a pastor who would not shy away from speaking out on those issues when he or she saw fit. Now, but I also think that it’s got to be – you know, it’s a very personal decision for Michelle and I to find somebody who reflects a wisdom that ultimately is about reconciliation and unifying people and expressing a spirit of mercy along with a spirit of justice, a spirit of understanding along with a sense of righteous indignation about injustice. You know, hopefully we will find something that approximates that.