July 2008 Archives

The religious right may or may not be moribund, but so far as I can see, there's little sign that the Republican Party is interested in doing any other than returning to the glory days of the old alliance of small government conservatism with a dollop of family values disengaged from any responsibility as the party in power--make that 1993-94. In Washington, the defection of most House Republicans from the housing bill harks back to those days. And here's a piece of the press release from the Arkansas Republican Party on the occasion of its convention.

Among reaffirming the Republican Party of Arkansas’ support of pro-life legislation, protection of the 2nd Amendment, lowering taxes, and protection of private property rights, convention delegates considered and affirmed the following changes to the to the 2008 RPA Party Platform: support of a super majority requirement to raise taxes, eliminating the remainder of the sales tax on groceries, greater restrictions on the use of general improvement funds, an increase in the exemption on retirement income from state income tax, reformation of the Grand Jury system that allows voters to petition the Circuit Courts for convening a grand jury, and permitting the Arkansas State Police to be trained in immigration enforcement practices allowed under current Federal law.

I'm off for a week's vacation. Prediction: sunny skies with intermittent blogging.

John McCain's meeting with the Dalai Lama this afternoon in Aspen poses some interesting political questions.

1. After the March disturbances in Tibet, McCain called on President Bush to boycott the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. Bush declined to do so. The Dalai Lama himself has rejected the idea of a wholesale boycott of the Olympics, but of leaders' boycotting the opening ceremonies said, "That's up to them." Will McCain stick to his guns?

2. If he does, what of the presence of the Rescuer of the 2002 Salt Lake Winter Olympics, would-be McCain running mate Mitt Romney?

3. AHN leads its story with the assertion that McCain will show his support "for a free Tibet." But what does "free" mean to him? The Dalai Lama insists that he only favors autonomy. Other Tibetans--including monks allegedly obedient to the Dalai Lama inside Tibet--want independence. What position will McCain stake out, if any?

Update: The initial report suggests that McCain got into none of the above, contenting himself simply with calling on the Chinese to release Tibetans taken prisoner during the uprising. That's called supporting a free Tibet in a very limited sense. Very.

Later Update: Okay, McCain's for autonomy. WaPo has this video clip, in which, reading from a prepared text, he urges the Chinese to engage in talks with the Dalai Lama's representatives "to address the just grievances of the Tibetan people," and emphasized that the suppression of rights in China "does, will, and must concern us." No mention of boycotts. The Dalai Lama, with a bit of a twinkle, did refer to his "old friend," and it was certainly quite the tableau of two old guys holding hands.

And from the belly of the Street of Fleet, lo there cometh the Scorn of the Times.

Not that this has anything to do with religion, but I couldn't help being struck a few days ago by the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showing that whereas Obama led McCain 47-41 in a head-to-head, when Ralph Nader (5) and Bob Barr (2) were added in, Obama went up one point and McCain went down six. In other words, Nader's votes unexpectedly all came out of McCain's hide. An anomaly, I figured. Now comes a new Fox poll showing Obama leading McCain 41-40 head-to-head, but 40-37 when Nader (2) and Barr (0) are added--again suggesting that the Nader votes come mostly from McCain. I suppose the conclusion is that Obama's support is significantly solider than McCain's, which includes people who don't like the Arizonan so much as are looking for anyone but Obama.

Israelis now favor Obama over McCain. Will there be any blowback on American Jews?

The latest Quinnipiac poll on the presidential race in Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin suggests that there may be a regional aspect to the evangelical vote worth keeping an eye on. In Colorado, evangelicals are backing McCain over Obama by a whopping 78 percent to 16 percent. That's substantially better than the 74-24 margin by which Bush beat Kerry in 2004. But in the Upper Midwest, McCain's margin is much lower: 60-27 in Michigan, 62-30 in Minnesota, and just 54-34 in Wisconsin. Unfortunately, the 2004 exit polls failed to ask the evangelical question in Minnesota and Wisconsin, but in Michigan Bush's margin was 76-24--which means that Obama is running well ahead of Kerry there at this point. The hypothesis, then, is that Obama the Born Again Midwesterner has a greater appeal to Midwestern evangelicals than he does to evangelicals in other parts of the country--or at least than to the Dobsonian evangelicals of the Mountain West. Let's see whether future polls bear this out.

In a brief screed inspired by Joe Lieberman's appearance at Tuesday's Christians United for Israel banquet, Joe Klein assails Lieberman for allying himself with someone--Pastor John Hagee--who bases his support for Israel on an End Times scenario that postulates the damnation of all Jews who don't acknowledge Jesus as their Lord and Savior:

Hagee's flagrant support for Israel has its basis in Scripture, to be sure, but in weird Scripture--namely Revelation, the strangest book of the New Testament. Revelation is the source of the phantasmagoria known as the Rapture, in which the battle of Armageddon is fought (against the Arabs, one expects), Israel triumphs, Jesus returns in celebration, lifts all Believers to heaven...and everyone who doesn't believe in Jesus is incinerated.

The simple and straightforward basis of evangelical support of Israel lies in Abraham's covenant with God in Genesis 15:

On that day the LORD made a covenant with Abram and said, "To your descendants I give this land, from the river [a] of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates--the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaites, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites and Jebusites."

As for the rest of his theology of the Jews, there Hagee verges on Christian heterodoxy--or, depending on your point of view, strays over into it. He explicitly rejects what he calls Replacement Theology--the idea that "Israel has been rejected and replaced by the church to carry out the work one entrusted to Israel...[that the] Jewish people have ceased to be God's people, and the church is now spiritual Israel." That view, he claims, is a "misconception...rooted in the theological anti-Semitism that began in the first century." (In Defense of Israel, p. 145.) When that book came out a year ago, he claimed it would "shake Christian theology," and indeed, he has drawn considerable fire from evangelicals attacking him for contending that Christianity did not supersede Judaism and that Jews did not err in failing to accept Jesus as their Savior. (See here and here and--from a Messianic Jew--here.) In fact, Hagee is, at least to my eye, a little slippery about what he believes regarding the availability of salvation to the Jewish people. In an article by Abe Levy in the December 13, 2007 San Antonio Express-News (not generally available online, see Nexis), he insisted that his views were orthodox but promised a yet undelivered clarification. What couldn't be clearer, however, is that he does not believe in evangelizing the Jews. As he wrote, "It is time for Christians everywhere to recognize that the nation of Israel will never convert to Christianity..." (p. 148)

The point, then, is that if there's any evangelical leader whose support for Israel can be taken as theologically non-offensive to Jews, Hagee's the guy. Whether that justifies making a close alliance with him and his organization is another question. His Mideast politics are, from a J Street perspective, problematic to say the least. And, as I've written in this space before (here and here), his anti-Catholic credentials are very substantial. But unless someone's got evidence that Hagee secretly believes things different from what he's written most recently, it's time to put the End Times club away.

From a chat with reporters on the plane to Germany:

Q. Do you want to tell us what your prayer was?

BO. Uh, no.

Update: The Israeli paper Maariv got hold of the prayer and published it. Bad journalistic form. Nice prayer.

GOM's Dan Gilgoff advances the proposition that Mara Vanderslice's Matthew 25 Network, the Christian pro-Obama PAC, represents the religious left's getting up to speed a lot faster than the religious right took. Nothing like having someone else break the trail.

The relevant comparison is between the Moral Majority's press release approach and Christian Coalition's grass roots work, and Dan sees Matthew 25 as more on the CC model even as he acknowledges that it is tiny compared to CC in its heyday. But apart from resources, the challenge for the religious left is that the kind of grassroots mobilization-by-congregation that the CC specialized in is effectively impossible, not only because the IRS is a lot readier to pounce than it used to be but also--and even more--because the Catholic and mainline Protestant congregations where those susceptible to Matthew 25's appeal hang out are much more ideologically mixed entities than the conservative white evangelical churches that CC brought into the Republican fold.

CC's weapon of choice was the voter guide. So far, Matthew 25's favored instruments appear to be the radio ad and--that great new engine of lefty mobilization--the web. It is proudest at this point of its Put Away Falsehood page designed to set the record straight on "false and misleading information about Senator Obama’s record on a number of vital issues" that "some in the faith community have been promoting." Know the Truth and the Truth Will Set You on the Path to Obama.

A new Monmouth University/Gannett poll, showing New Jersey voters preferring Obama over McCain 48-34, offers a few religious tidbits. Fifty-one percent of New Jerseyites think Obama is some kind of Protestant Christian and 39 percent don't know what he is; the numbers for McCain are 48 percent and 40 percent respectively. Those who think religion is important to Obama outnumber those who think it isn't by 40 percent to 37 percent; in McCain's case it's the other way around: 28 percent to 38 percent. Probably the most important question has to do with whether voters are comfortable with the candidates' religious views. In both cases, they are, by almost identical margins (Obama, 46-21; McCain, 39-15). The only marked advantage McCain has lies in the realm of religious associations. Those who are comfortable with the views of "those religious leaders who have been close to John McCain or support his campaign" outnumber those who are uncomfortable 28 percent to 25 percent. In Obama's case, the reverse is ttrue, 22 percent to 50 percent. The Wright legacy.

No surprise, of course. Joe Lieberman showed up at Christian United for Israel's annual Night to Honor Israel banquet, despite the 42,000-signature "Don't Go, Joe" petition presented to him by J Street. The Hartford Courant led the paper with Jesse Hamilton's story, and posted the senator's prepared remarks. Therein the junior senator from Connecticut acknowledges that his host, Pastor John Hagee, said some things that got peoples' noses out of joint and with which even he, Lieberman, could not go along. But he hastens to say that Hagee "has expressed his regrets about each of the most controversial statements he has made." Whereupon the senator continues in his former vein of associating Hagee with Moses:

The political controversy that has swirled around Pastor Hagee reminds me of one of the unique lessons in the Bible about leadership. In Greek mythology, the leaders were flawless and virtual demi-gods. It was impossible for mere mortals to try to emulate them. The heroes of the Bible, however, are humans, great humans, but with human failings.

Even Moses fell short of God's expectations. He made a mistake and hit the rock rather than speaking to it as God commanded. His sister, the prophetess Miriam, sinned too when she spoke badly about Moses. But this didn't make Moses and Miriam bad people or failed leaders. Their shortcomings were only part of the larger fabric of their remarkable lives of faith and service. And that's the way the Bible and those who read it view them.

And that's why I would say Moses and Miriam were fortunate that they did not live in the merciless attack-counterattack political culture of our time which would undoubtedly have stressed their shortcomings and ignored their great deeds. I can only imagine what the bloggers of their day would have had to say about Moses and Miriam.

Ye take too much upon you, seeing all the congregation are holy, every one of them, and the Lord is among them: wherefore then lift ye up yourselves above the congregation of the Lord?

Anyway, Lieberman has done the CUFI thing, demonstrating that however attached he is to John McCain, he's more attached to Israel. The best line of the night, reported in the Washington Post, belonged to the man whose dabbling in endorsement politics brought down on his head his own personal holocaust of unfriendly fire. "What will I say when I'm asked to endorse a presidential candidate?" asked the good pastor rhetorically. "Never again!"

"YOUNG. EVANGELICAL. FOR OBAMA."

The best. The Obama campaign. Can Manage. Since. The Joshua Generation. Crashed and burned. See Brody. For details. I say. Keep trying.

The Daily Show has the last word on Obama's Jewish problem.

It's a bit of a slow day on the religion-and-the-campaign news front, so why not take a ride on my favorite hobby horse? The object of this exercise is to make clear (once again, sorry folks) the importance of aggregate worship attendance figures in determining partisan political preferences from state to state. Consider the following results from recent surveys done by SUSA in Oregon (June) and North Carolina (July). Regular attenders backed McCain over Obama 59-31 in Oregon and in NC 56-40. Occasional attenders split their vote in Oregon, 48 percent for McCain and 47 percent for Obama, but went for Obama in North Carolina 50-44. And those who said they almost never attend worship went for Obama 64-31 in Oregon and 55-43 in North Carolina. Now if each of these three groups were identical in size, the two candidates would have just about divided the respondents in half (in both cases fractionally preferring Obama). But in fact, the percentages of the groups in Oregon are, respectively, 39-25-36 but in NC 57-28-16. As a result, Obama's particular strength in Oregon with the large group of non-attenders was enough to give him a three-point lead in the Beaver State (48-45), whereas even though McCain was weaker among frequent attenders in NC than in Oregon, the huge proportion of frequent-attending Tar Heels pushed him to a five-point lead (50-45). And these differentials extend beyond the presidential; for example, take a look at this late SUSA poll of voter preferences in Kentucky's third congressional district.

A couple of points are worth taking away. First, the new strength of Democrats in the West is in no small measure to be explained by the increasing tendency of the less religious to vote Democratic. That's because the West has significantly lower religious affiliation rates than the rest of the country. Second, in order to pick off red seats in Congress, Democrats need to find ways to appeal to more religious voters. Consider Virginia's fifth congressional district, where (as we've noted before, here and here), Democrat Tom Perriello is trying to unseat incumbent Virgil Goode with a faith-based campaign of community service and "the common good." In a sign that this may be working, the Cook Political Report earlier this month changed its assessment of the district from "Solid Republican" to "Likely Republican."

In one sense, Barack Obama's trip to the Middle East could give him a chance to strut his religious stuff. His life experience has afforded him a certain personal insight into religion and society abroad: He spent a couple of years of his childhood living in largely Muslim Indonesia, and is acquainted with Kenya, a predominantly Christian country with a significant Muslim minority that includes some of his relatives. But Islam is a touchier than ever subject in the Obama camp, as witness the campaign's inability to find a place on the plane for Ryan Lizza, who works for the notorious-cover-producing New Yorker. And then there's the odd instruction to the Obama entourage not to don green apparel, for this might suggest an identification with the Islamist organization Hamas. (That is the more or less official color of Islam, but there doesn't seem to be any Muslim equivalent to the Hibernian Wearin' o' the Green.) And so, I suppose, it should come as no surprise that there have been no reported meetings between Obama and Shiite or Sunni religious leaders in Afghanistan or Iraq. Color this trip secular.

Early this afternoon, Politico's Ben Smith posted a report that the Obama campaign had decided to hire a Muslim liaison and that the person likely to be tapped for the position was Hiam Nawas, a Jordanian-American who held that position in the Wesley Clark campaign four years ago. Smith proceeded to quote from (and link to) an article Nawas wrote in 1985, saying that he had advocated that the Bush administration take "a more nuanced approach to public diplomacy directed at Muslim women." And he quoted the following:

"We need to recognise that the social structure in the Muslim world is very different from America's," she [sic] wrote. "American women need to understand that what is best for them is not necessarily what is best for Muslim women. Advocacy of women’s rights in the Muslim world must show sensitivity to local political realities."

Moreover, while Muslim Americans do not always agree with US foreign policy, they are virtually unanimous in their high regard for American values. It would therefore behoove American women’s organisations to involve more Muslim American women in their efforts.

Finally, the message must be clear that there can be no real democracy in the Muslim world without the full participation of women in society.

Check out this smart post by Time's Michael Scherer on the latest McCain ad, which (Scherer observes) briefly and subtly paints Obama as a False Messiah--or at least as the head of an alien cult. I'd say that the ad picks up on an element in the Hillary Clinton campaign; namely, an intense dislike of Obama that really seemed to be about a dislike of his enthusiastic minions. I'm less persuaded than Scherer seems to be that this can work for McCain. Hillary had her own minions, driven by a passion if not for her personally than for the First Woman. I've seen no evidence yet that McCain's followers--lower in commitment and intensity--have conceived anything like a similar resentment. There's also a little bit of cognitive dissonance in the ad. A False Messiah is, presumably, someone who promises a salvation he can't deliver. Here, McCain isn't charging Obama with promising anything, but rather with doing nothing.

Tomorrow will be Double Down on Israel day. Barack Obama will fly in from Amman to meet with scandal-ridden Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and otherwise show that he's down with the Jewish State. Meanwhile, back in Washington, McCain Surrogate-in-Chief Joe Lieberman is slated to keynote the annual Night to Honor Israel banquet of Pastor John Hagee's organization, Christians United for Israel. McCain, you will recall, disavowed, foreswore and otherwise trashed Hagee's endorsement, after exposure of the pastor's eschatological musings on the Holocaust. But Lieberman, who at last year's banquet compared Hagee to Moses, has not come close to following suit, thereby providing an opening for J Street to collect signatures on a "Don't Go, Joe" petition. The petition will be presented to Lieberman at his Washington office shortly. He'll go.

Update: It now seems that Obama will be arriving in Israel Wednesday, a few hours after Lieberman's keynoter.

James Dobson's near endorsement is now up on the web, and if anyone's surprised by it, I've got a temple in Jerusalem to sell them. The conversation in which it occurs, however, is worth listening to. Dobson's interlocutor is Al Mohler, the president of Southern Seminary in Louisville and a Southern Baptist of many parts. They devote most of their energy to Barack Obama, and there's little question that he's got them worried. By them he's very charismatic, very intelligent, very seductive, and very very liberal--more liberal than Bill and Hillary, more liberal than any Democratic presidential candidate in history. And he's got evangelical Christians all confused. Mohler signs on to the view that there's a generational thing going on here, and cites his own position in the world as evidence. My goodness, it seems there may even be an Obama underground at Southern! If you detect a whiff of the AntiChrist in their portrayal of the Illinois senator, I won't say you nay.

Dobson and Mohler take the view that there's a new wind blowing though contemporary evangelicalism, and Mohler in particular thinks it's necessary for the movement to do some rethinking, but what that rethinking might look like he doesn't say. It's still the same old abortion-and-homosexuality agenda, to hear them talk; if Al's got anything up his sleeve other than a denunciation of climate change advocacy, there's no evidence of it here.

Meanwhile, the real repositioning of evangelicalism is coming from the now increasingly familiar persona of Rick Warren, who, NYT's Jim Rutenberg reports, has successfully managed to sign up both Obama and McCain for a forum at his megachurch prior to their respective nominating conventions:

“I just got to thinking, you know what? These guys have never been together on the same stage, it would be a neat way to cap the primary season before they both go to the conventions and things go dark for a couple of weeks,” he said. “I’ve known both the guys for a long time, they’re both friends of mine, and I knew them before they ran for office, so I just called them up.”

Such legitimization of Obama by the likes of Warren is no small barrier to Dobson/Mohler demonization.

Update: Melissa Rogers usefully recalls Warren's 2004 "five non-negotiable issues" email that he now, apparently, regrets sending. Those were the days when he was a man of the orthodox religious right cloth.

Update: Warren meets Blitzer.

James Dobson tips the AP that, ah, well, after all, he just might could hold his nose and, all things considered, as it were: "While I am not endorsing Senator John McCain, the possibility is there that I might."

Steve Waldman has a bit of a Valentine for Mike Huckabee and his veep prospects, wherein he writes:

Huckabee is a transitional figure in the evangelical world, and possibly a transformational one. As a strong pro-life politician and former Baptist preacher, he is a familiar and not-loathed figure among the evangelical old guard. Beyond that, his emphasis on Christianity as an uplifting rather than judgmental faith taps into the zeitgeist of the New Envagelicals. Younger evangelicals in particular have become convinced that leading a Bible-based, Christ-centered life might involve helping the poor and the environment, in addition to battling abortion. In tone and substance, Huckabee fits these evangelicals better than any Religious Right leader ever has.

The news from the latest Pew poll on religious affiliation and presidential voting is that there's not much news, beyond small shifts across the board from Bush-Kerry to McCain-Obama. Going back to Bush-Gore, what's most striking is the degree to which the religiously unaffiliated have turned solidly Democratic. One finding that's worth paying attention to is the preference of white mainline Protestants for the Republican this year and in 2004, compared to the even split in 2000. It's been notable how mainline Protestants having been shifting Democratic in recent elections, but what this survey suggests is that that shift has to do with an increase in non-white members of mainline denominations. Otherwise, the overall religion (or God) gap has shrunk, if measured only by the GOP preference of those attending worship weekly or more; but it has remained roughly constant if measure by comparing the weeklies-or-more to the less-than-weeklies.

J Street, the new dovish Israel lobby, has a big new survey of Jewish voters. That's the good news. The bad news is that, typical of surveys by ideologically driven organizations, far too many of the questions are posed in so ideologically skewed a way as to render many of the results if not worthless than highly problematic.

On the non-worthless side, the survey shows support for Barack Obama over John McCain at 62 percent to 32 percent, which is consistent with other findings. It asks for favorability ratings on a range of figures and organizations, and finds that, for example, that Obama (57.8 percent) rates higher than Joe Lieberman (41.7). Indeed, Obama rates higher than any other item on the list (including AIPAC) except for the respondent's local Jewish federation--but it can be no accident that Hillary Clinton's name is left off. So there can be no stories about Jews (still) preferring Clinton to Obama.

On the problematic side, many of the questions on peace are worded in such a way as to maximize the J Street agenda. For example, by nearly two to one, respondents agreed with the following statement:

Israel's recent cease fire with Hamas has resulted in Hamas ending its rocket attacks from Gaza into southern Israel. This agreement between Israel and Hamas demonstrates that the best path for Israel requires non-military solutions and negotiations to resolve the disputes with the Palestinians.

Jane Lampman of the Christian Science Monitor had nice profile profile of Leah Daughtry, the Pentecostal pastor who is CEO of the Democratic National Convention, a few days ago. It does, however, trade heavily in what has now become narrative orthodoxy: that not until two years ago did the Democrats take faith-based campaigning seriously, and only this election cycle have the doubters been convinced. The only recognized exception to this formula is the longstanding habit of Democratic candidates' appearing in black churches.

The narrative is not quite as true as it sometimes seems. (I've made this point before, but it bears repeating.) To be sure, the Democrats have not tied their wagon to a religious cohort the way the Republicans did to white evangelicals in the 1980s. But telling the story of the party's awkwardness with religion usually means referring to Michael Dukakis in 1988 and John Kerry in 2004--two candidates from a part of the country where religion does not play a part in political campaigning. Read out of the story are Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton and Al Gore, Southern Baptists all, who had no difficulty doing the religion thing. Carter was notoriously born again and Clinton was a very churchly guy whose difficulties with religious voters had nothing to do with an inability to relate to people of faith. Presidential candidates do not, of course, constitute a whole party. But they are disproportionately the political figures whose religious stance matters to American voters.

One other thing. Reports that all Democratic insiders are now cool with religious outreach seem to be exaggerated. All campaigns are about the allocation of scarce resources, and there are plenty of power centers within both the DNC and the Obama campaign that want no truck with religion. So far as I know, the Joshua Generation is still wandering nameless in the wilderness.

I'll be taking a few days off, and may or may not be off the grid. The Greenberg Center's trusty administrator, Christine McMorris, may be finding some things to post; and I may find a way to squeeze something in as well. But if not, I'll be back on Monday at the latest.

Go here to pick up the thread of a discussion between GOM's Dan Gilgoff and John Schmalzbauer in re: whether evangelical voters are a monolithic voting bloc. I'm with Dan on this one. The problem, simply, is that shorthand versions of white evangelical voting behavior sometimes suggest that every last white evangelical votes Republican, and it's been the case for a couple of decades that between a third and a quarter of them vote Democratic. Dan is right to make the point that, in a closely divided state like Ohio in 2004, just a small shift of white evangelicals would have made a big difference.

But there's another even more important point to emphasize. As with any dependable voting bloc, the issue is less how its vote breaks down than what the turnout is--i.e. mobilization. The importance of white evangelicals in recent elections, especially where they are thick on the ground, is that they have been highly mobilized via church-based organizing. In 2002, when the Republicans took over control of the Georgia statehouse, frequent-attending white evangelicals turned out at higher rates across the South than they did in the rest of the country. In Ohio in 2004, they were definitely on the march. The reason the GOP has reason to be concerned about them this year, then, is that between their lukewarmness toward McCain and their sense that Obama may be kind of OK, they'll stay at home.

Here, courtesy of Brody, is Heidi Hess Saxton, the Founder of the adoption services group "Extraordinary Moms Network," on The Great McCain Same-Sex Adoption Waffle:

[S]aying a child is better off in a same-sex household than to continue waiting for placement in a traditional home is like saying an unborn child is better off if the mother aborts him than if she makes an adoption plan. It may seem an expedient solution in the short-term ... but the long-term consequences are grave indeed.

In responding to the viral charges that he's some kind of Muslim, Barack Obama has caught some flak for, in his insistence that he is not and never has been, seeming to acknowledge that there might be something wrong with that. On Larry King last night, he took the occasion of commenting on the notorious New Yorker fist-bump cover (about which he was a good deal more relaxed than a lot of other people) to address the issue:

One last point I want to — I do want to make about these e-mails, though. And I think this has an impact on this “New Yorker” cover.

You know, this is actually an insult against Muslim-Americans, something that we don’t spend a lot of time talking about. And sometimes I’ve been derelict in pointing that out.

You know, there are wonderful Muslim-Americans all across the country who are doing wonderful things. And for this to be used as sort of an insult, or to raise suspicions about me, I think is unfortunate. And it’s not what America’s all about.

"Poll Finds Obama Candidacy Isn't Closing Divide on Race" goes today's NYT headline, but looking at the actual poll, I'd say Adam Nagourney and Megan Thee have missed the story. Sure, black Americans are big supporters of the first major party black candidate in history. And sure, his candidacy has not altered the way they, as opposed to whites, see the state of race relations in the country.

But consider these findings: Exactly equal percentages of whites and blacks (69 percent) say they think most of the people they know would vote for a presidential candidate who was black. More whites (91 percent) than blacks (88 percent) say they would personally vote for such a candidate, while only five and six percent respectively said they would not--down from 25 percent in the aggregate in December of 2007. And both groups are in close agreement (whites 70 percent, blacks 65 percent) that the country is ready to elect a black president.

The story's implicit idea that Obama, by his successful candidacy, ought to have altered blacks' understanding of race relations is based on the assumption that that understanding is just in their heads. As if to say: "You see, race relations are fine in this country because the Democrats are about to nominate the black guy." You might go so far as to call that assumption racist. On the other hand, on its own terms, Obama's candidacy does seem to have made a difference. Because of it, lots more Americans--presumably mostly white--now say they would vote for a black presidential candidate. And there is no racial divide in their views of how people they know and their fellow citizens generally would vote in this regard. Ain't that the story?

For the record, the poll has Hispanics favoring Obama over McCain 62 percent to 23 percent. That's a gap 30 percentage points larger than the margin by which Kerry carried the Latino vote in 2004. More evidence that, for the general as opposed to the primaries, Hispanics are, for Obama, no problemo.

Update: Not surprisingly, the Obama campaign was also unimpressed with the Times' reading of its own poll.

Over at MyDD, Todd Beeton surmises that the way to understand the Obama campaign is not in terms of lining up supporters ideologically (i.e. capturing the middle) but demographically (i.e. the young, the black, and the female). This makes sense to me. But what of the religious divide? As this blog has repeatedly emphasized, the less religiously observant consistently favor Obama; the more observant, McCain.

Young people are less observant than the old, but African Americans and women are more observant, respectively, than whites and men. Without benefit of regression analysis, I'd say that in the presidential race, the God gap intensifies the age gap, somewhat suppresses the gender gap, and has little effect on the race gap (more and less observant African Americans being equally supportive of Obama). Or, conversely, the God gap is intensified by the age gap, and weakened by the gender and race gaps. As you like.

Update: For the latest example of the religious divide, there's SUSA's North Carolina poll.

Former independent Minn. governor Jesse Ventura told Larry King last night that he wasn't about to joint the Franken-Coleman senatorial smackdown--though he left open the possibility that he might vault into the ring at the last minute if "God comes and speaks." Since Ventura holds himself out as an atheist, however, you figure he rates that possibility as pretty low.

A new Quinnipiac national poll, showing Obama up over McCain 50-41, has McCain leading 61-29 among evangelicals and 54-39 among Catholics. As with the recent Newsweek poll, this says that Obama is weaker among Catholics than his immediate Democratic predecessors. It also suggests that it may not matter.

Pew is out with a content analysis of news (and opinion) coverage of religion in the primary portion of the presidential campaign. It's worth a perusal, even though most of the findings will surprise no one who has been paying even a modest amount of attention to, well, the campaign. For example, big chunks of said coverage were devoted to Mitt Romney's religion speech last December and to the Jeremiah Wright affair. One of the problems with this kind of analysis, in fact, is that the aggregate results tend to be skewed by the big events. The Romney speech is a perfect example of this. Coverage of it constituted 35 percent of all religion coverage of the former Massachusetts governor, and fully two-thirds of all religion coverage of him as a candidate took place in that month.

How much religion coverage is enough? And what's the right kind? Pew always likes to assume a just-the-facts-ma'am stance, shunning explicit positions on evaluative questions like these; but the language of the report makes clear that Pew's answers are: There can't really be too much, and it should focus on the faith of the candidates. For example:

A close look at the coverage, though, suggests that the press was still shy about tackling questions of faith and putting them in the front of the campaign coverage.

Although Obama received the majority of the religion-related coverage in the first part of 2008, the bulk of his overall press coverage was not about religion. When the study broke down the data and looked at each candidate individually, it found that religion made up only about 2% of Obama’s stories in early 2008, while the bulk of his coverage was focused on strategy and the horse race, as well as policy issues and other personal topics. This was more than any other candidate still in the race but just a sliver of what the media covered overall.

As an editor who enjoys perpetrating satirical imagery, I can't work up any outrage at the cover of the current New Yorker showing Barack and Michelle fistbumping. Nor can I understand Howie Kurtz's judgment of it as "incendiary." Provocative, of course, but so obviously over the top--especially considering the source--that it's hard to imagine anyone taking it seriously as the magazine's considered opinion of the Obamas' true worldview.

It's good publicity for the New Yorker, though. I only wish someone would take equal umbrage at the comparable if subtler effort of our own Religion in the News along these lines.

In his interview with NYT's Adam Nagourney and Michael Cooper last week, John McCain almost revealed a religious belief. Here's the relevant exchange.

Q: Do you consider yourself an evangelical Christian?

Mr. McCain: I consider myself a Christian. I attend church, my faith has sustained me in very difficult times. But I think it depends on what you call a quote evangelical Christian. Because there are some people who may not share my views on – I mean, that covers a lot of ground. But I certainly consider myself a Christian.

Q: How often do you go to church?

Mr. McCain: Um, not as often as I should. When Cindy and I are in Phoenix, we attend. We’ve been fortunate enough the last few weeks to be in Phoenix. During the primary before that we were not back in Phoenix much so – again, not as frequently as I would like. I do appreciate the pastor of the North Phoenix Baptist Church, his name is Dan Neary (SP) [sic, actually Yeary], and I talk to him frequently on the phone and I appreciate his spiritual guidance. He’s a great believer in redemption.

Lisa Miller and Richard Wollfe's cover story on Barack Obama's religion in this week's Newsweek is a pretty disappointing performance. There's little more than what you can find, better written, in Obama's memoir, Dreams From My Father. The closest the authors got to the candidate seems to have been a brief interview last week on the campaign plane. In it, he did respond to a question that has troubled some evangelicals in particular; namely, whether he shares their view that Jesus Christ is the one and only Way, or adheres to a species of universalism, believing that salvation is open to all, or at least to some who do not acknowledge Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior. There's no question that Obama falls into the latter camp, as this passage from the article (where he retells what he told Franklin Graham at his meeting with religious leaders in Chicago last month) makes clear:

"It is a precept of my Christian faith that my redemption comes through Christ, but I am also a big believer in the Golden Rule, which I think is an essential pillar not only of my faith but of my values and my ideals and my experience here on Earth. I've said this before, and I know this raises questions in the minds of some evangelicals. I do not believe that my mother, who never formally embraced Christianity as far as I know … I do not believe she went to hell." Graham, he said, was very gracious in reply. Should Obama beat John McCain, he has history on his side. Presidents such as Lincoln and Jefferson were unorthodox Christians; and, according to a Pew Forum survey, 70 percent of Americans agree with the statement that "many religions can lead to eternal life." "My particular set of beliefs," Obama says, "may not be perfectly consistent with the beliefs of other Christians."

A new Newsweek poll, which has Obama leading McCain overall by 44 percent to 41 percent, has McCain leading Obama among white evangelicals 60 percent to 23 percent, and among white Catholics 49 percent to 33 percent. That's pretty good news for Obama on the evangelical front, and for McCain on the Catholic one, comparatively speaking. In 2000, white evangelicals preferred Bush over Gore 68-30 and in 2004, Bush over Kerry 78-21. So the Newsweek numbers put Obama in Gore territory. In 2000, white (non-Hispanic) Catholics went for Bush over Gore 52-45 and in 2004, Bush over Kerry 56-43. There, the Newsweek numbers make out McCain as slightly stronger than the 2004 Bush. Bottom line, McCain is indeed in a bit of trouble with the GOP evangelical base and Obama's got something of a white Catholic problem.

There's the faith-based initiative issue. There's the immigration issue. And then there's Sam Freedman's religion piece in today's NYT, about what a little Catholic Church in Postville, Iowa is doing to help the families of illegal Hispanic immigrants arrested in the INS' massive raid on the Agriprocessors kosher-meat plant. Iowa's kind of an important swing state. John McCain says he considers Hispanics to be Children of God. Obama wants comprehensive immigration reform. Who will be the first to make it to St. Bridget's?

Message: Unlike Tom Tancredo, who believes they are Children of the Devil, John McCain believes Hispanics are Children of God.

John Schmalzbauer's essay on today's Social Science Research Council blog The Immanent Frame provides useful context for the Dobson-Obama kerfuffle. I do think it's possible to get carried away by all the talk of diversity within the evangelical world. All such groupings--mainline Protestants and Jews, for example--embrace lots of differences. But often these appear a lot bigger from the inside than from without.

Auto-correction: I seem to have been laboring under the misapprehension that it was Obama's 2007 speech to the U.C.C. that Dobson criticized, whereas in fact it was his 2006 speech at the Call to Renewal.

Three months ago, Tom Perriello, the Democratic challenger in Viriginia's fifth congressional district, announced that his campaign workers would be required to spend a tenth of their time doing volunteer work.
Previous campaigns have done the odd bit of community service, but this appears to be the first to make it an integral part of the enterprise, and to couch it in religious terms as a form of tithing. By the end of this weekend, the campaign expects to have logged 300 hours of tithed volunteer work.

In line with the ancient and pretty honorable principle of doing well by doing good, the effort has gotten a lot of positive attention from the press, most recently in a Christian Science Monitor article by Gail Russell Craddock. To be sure, Craddock doesn't omit to include a snide swipe from David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report; to wit: "Perriello has a great profile in a very liberal district in Boulder, Colo., but that's not Virginia's Fifth." But the campaign couldn't have asked for more than it got by way of a quote from Larry Campbell, assistant pastor at Bible Way Cathedral in Danville:

"I've had many political candidates come through, but I've never had any work along with us in the area of social-action changes," he says, citing ongoing help from Perriello volunteers. "Most candidates who are running for national office have more programs just getting people out voting for them, but to give back to the community is a heavy statement for social change."

Christianity Today's monthly online presidential poll shows Barack Obama leading John McCain for the first time, 51 percent to 41 percent. A month ago, the positions were reversed, with McCain ahead of Obama by 50-33. Online polls are dubious creatures, the product of self-selection and subject to manipulation. Still, given that the total number of votes has increased only slightly since last time (from 3,007 to 3,189), this one may mean something. Such as that mainstream evangelicals of the CT-reading variety are shifting toward Obama.

Over at GetReligion, Mark Stricherz has been perusing the obits for Sir John Templeton, the investment genius and philanthropist whose wallet singlehandedly (who singlewalletedly?) revived the Victorian enterprise of reconciling science and religion. Mark is upset that while a number of them note that Sir John's grantmaking drew some sharp criticism, not to say secularist contempt, no effort was made to say what exactly was wrong with it. Wrapping up his post, he writes:

Don’t get me wrong. Maybe Templeton’s awards and prizes were hokum, although I doubt it given the roster of its past winners. But these obituaries needed to explain why it was so.

While the Obama campaign is trying to figure out what to rename its Joshua Generation, the Generation's Catholic Wing has started up an organization called 10,000 Catholics for Obama. Brody's got the story, which my own sources confirm: This is a genuine grassroots thing, started on Facebook by "apoliticos," smiled upon by the Obama campaign. Let 10,000 flowers bloom, as they used to say.

James Dobson has evidently decided, at least for the moment, to assume the mantle of the prophet, for the purpose of warning evangelicals against the Seductions of Obama. Having become apprised of the Matthew 25 Network's ad defending Obama against his criticism on his own Christian radio home turf, Dobson prefaced Monday's broadcast with a riposte laying out Obama's sins as a supporter of abortion rights. Brody, who's got a press release response from the Network (doesn't it have its own website?), concludes his post with the (Rodney) Kingian wish that we could just get along. But of course, if Dobsonian lions lie down with the Obamian lambs, it's curtains for the GOP. Unsurprisingly, Dobson fails to respond to the criticism he got for his earlier remarks, which were widely regarded, including in this blog, as a fundamental misapprehension of what Obama was saying. Also unsurprisingly, Dobson does not mention the jamesdobsondoesntspeakforme petition, which has accumulated 12,000 signatures.

It's always perilous to take Fox News at its word, but whether or not Jesse Jackson was caught whispering about personally wanting to deprive Barack Obama of part of his anatomy, it's clear that he is no fan of the Illinois senator's "faith-based." Why? In the taped remarks, he says he believes Obama was "talking down to black people" on the subject, but as Bill O'Reilly himself remarked, Obama's support of faith-based social service provision "doesn't seem to have any condescending quality to it."

The issue clearly has to do with Obama's habit of urging African Americans generally and black men in particular to shoulder personal responsibility for themselves and their children, to not use victimhood as an excuse for life's hardships. Apologizing on CNN, Jackson explained himself by claiming that Obama was hurting himself with black voters by giving "moral" lectures, adding:

I said he comes down as speaking down to black people. The moral message must be a much broader message. What we need really is racial justice and urban policy and jobs and health care. That's a range of issues on the menu.

It may be that, to Jackson's ears, Obama's embrace of faith-based language smacks of the old pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die black church tradition that civil rights activists had to combat. But really, both Obama's preaching of personal responsibility and faith-based enthusiasm are hardly alien to contemporary black activism. Jackson himself has not shied away from preaching responsibility and no institutions have embraced government-funded programs more avidly than the black churches since the days of the Great Society.

Underneath it all, I'd say, is Jackson's unreconstructed belief in the liberal domestic policy agenda of the 1960s versus Obama's far more modest, post-Reagan-era approach. Today, WaPo's Dan Balz conjures with the latter in an article headlined Obama's "Ideology Proving Difficult to Pinpoint." Whatever that ideology is, it's a far cry from Great Society liberalism. And that's what's gotten Jackson's goat. For Obama, Jackson's vulgarity must be counted a Godsend. Black voters show no sign of being anything but swept away by his campaign, and nothing can do more to cement him as a "moderate" in the eyes of white voters than to be thus scorned by Jesse.

From GOM interview with organizer of the Denver conclave of evangelical leaders rallying to John McCain: "Staver said in an interview yesterday that much of the Denver meeting was focused on building a long term strategy for the Christian Right to avoid getting stuck with another figure like McCain..." That's lesser-of-two-evils with a vengeance.

In the wake of yesterday's LULAC meeting, the Obama campaign was on the phone with 30 Hispanic evangelical pastors this a.m., and Brody's got the story. Hispanic evangelicals have been an interesting swing vote over the past few election cycles, going to the GOP in the early part of the decade and then edging back into the Democratic column in the 2006 congressional vote. They are not, in a word, the solid Democratic constituency that their Catholic brethren are. They represent 2.7 percent of the population (as opposed to Latino Catholics' 4.2 percent), and it looks like Obama's well on his way to locking them up.

On NBC's "Today," Obama sought to counter charges that he is triangulating himself into the center by pointing out, among other things, that he has consistently supported faith-based initiatives. This may be an area, however, where he has made an adjustment to the left. In The Audacity of Hope, he writes:

[O]ne can envision certain faith-based programs--targeting ex-offenders or substance abusers--that offer a uniquely powerful way of solving problems and hence merit carefully tailored support. (p. 221)

For the past three decades, Jewish conservatives (call them neocons if you will) have been grinding their teeth at the stubborn insistence of their co-religionists on voting Democratic. Now, for the first time since Jimmy Carter, they see an opportunity to wean at least a sizable portion of them away to the GOP, and they are doing their best to seize it. Obama is the new Carter, only this time tricked out with a Muslim name and some associations that any friend of the Jews should feel guilty about having. Hence the viral emails, most recently (to my knowledge) this column (reprinted after the jump) by Jennifer Rubin from last week's Jerusalem Post. Note that for all the antipathy to Obama, the rage is reserved for all those (willfully ignorant and/or self-hating) Jews who will vote for him.

On the other side, the lead is now being taken by a new organization called J Street, which aims to serve as an ideological counterweight to the famed pro-Israel lobby AIPAC. J Street is pro-Israel too, but in a dovish pro-peace way, as opposed to AIPAC's hawkish, bomb-Iran way. And if the neocon crowd has Obama in its sights, J Steeters have fixed on Joe Lieberman, the sometime Democratic senator from Connecticut now campaigning his heart out for John McCain. The angle of attack on Lieberman is his keynoting of the annual Washington banquet of Christians United for Israel, John Hagee's fund-raising behemoth, July 22. McCain, of course, had to disavow the support of the Catholic-bashing, Holocaust-theologizing, End Times-anticipating Hagee last month. J Street has collected 20k signatures or so on a petition calling on Lieberman not to appear at the CUFI event (Israel's ambassador to the U.S. is also slated to), which petition will be presented to Lieberman's Hartford office with some fanfare before the 22nd. Joe, I'm sure, could care less.

In a rather odd, presumably tongue-in-cheek post on WaPo's On Faith, Tony Stevens-Arroyo proposes, in a positive sense, a "secret" connection between Barack Obama and Catholicism. He suggests that Obama may have been influenced by Catholic social thought when he was working as an organizer in Chicago--and although the influence is not so much as hinted at in Obama's account of that experience in Dreams from My Father, it's not utterly impossible.

But the actual evidence of connection is, shall we say, curious. For example, Stevens-Arroyo claims that James Dobson criticized Obama for his 2006 keynote address to "the Catholic organization, Call to Renewal." But Call to Renewal is not a Catholic organization at all, but a liberal evangelical one. And it was Obama's speech at the 2007 U.C.C. convention that Dobson was attacking. "That same day," Stevens-Arroyo writes, "Obama articulated the Catholic ethical principle of proportionality, modified his stance about abortion and confessed admiration for the saintly Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker organization." In neither speech did Obama do anything of the sort. Hardly anyone of the numerous commenters on the post have noted the counterfactuals. To the extent that it was intended in a spirit of fun, nobody got it.

Obama, speaking to LULAC today:

I was reminded of this a few years ago when I attended a naturalization workshop at St. Pius Church in Pilsen. As I was walking down the aisle, I saw people clutching small American flags, waiting for their turn to be called up so they could begin the long process to become U.S. citizens.

OK, by no stretch is this about religion and the campaign but I couldn't resist.

JULY 8--Lured by $1 beer and the prospect of "hot chicks" and "hardcore fights," thousands of Arkansans were duped last month into appearing as extras in comedian Sacha Baron Cohen's latest staged mayhem. Cohen and his confederates organized cage fighting programs on consecutive days in Texarkana and Fort Smith. Both cards ended with two male grapplers (one was identified as "Straight Dave" and wore camouflage) tearing each other's clothes off and, while in underwear, kissing down their opponent's chest. This man-on-man action triggered Fort Smith fans to throw chairs and beer at the ring, according to one cop present at the city's Convention Center.

You think Bruno maybe's been reading Huck Finn? As in:

Well, that night we had OUR show; but there warn't only about twelve people there -- just enough to pay expenses. And they laughed all the time, and that made the duke mad; and everybody left, anyway, before the show was over, but one boy which was asleep. So the duke said these Arkansaw lunkheads couldn't come up to Shakespeare; what they wanted was low comedy -- and maybe something ruther worse than low comedy, he reckoned. He said he could size their style. So next morning he got some big sheets of wrapping paper and some black paint, and drawed off some handbills, and stuck them up all over the village. The bills said:

AT THE COURT HOUSE!
FOR 3 NIGHTS ONLY!
The World-Renowned Tragedians
DAVID GARRICK THE YOUNGER!
AND
EDMUND KEAN THE ELDER!
Of the London and Continental
Theatres,
In their Thrilling Tragedy of
THE KING'S CAMELEOPARD,
OR
THE ROYAL NONESUCH ! ! !
Admission 50 cents.

Then at the bottom was the biggest line of all, which said:

LADIES AND CHILDREN NOT ADMITTED.

"There," says he, "if that line don't fetch them, I don't know Arkansaw!"

There'll always be an Arkansas.

Lest you think Obama is unaware of the religion gap, here's a passage, from page 201 of his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope:

The single biggest gap in party affiliation among white Americans is not between men and women, or between those who reside in so-called red states and those who reside in blue states, but between those who attend church regularly and those who don't. Democrats, meanwhile, are scrambling to "get religion," even as a core segment of our constituency remains stubbornly secular in orientation, and fears--rightly, no doubt--that the agenda of an assertively Christian nation may not make room for them or their life choices.

Gallup's out with a new poll that shows that yes, Virginia, there is a religion (or, if you prefer, a God) gap. The issue at hand is not, as in the exit polls, frequency of worship attendance but whether religion is or is not "important in my life." In the aggregate, McCain leads 50-40 among the "importants," Obama 55-36 among the "non-importants." The biggest margin is to be found among non-Hispanic, non-Catholic white Christian importants, who favor McCain 63-27; the not importants in that demographic break even. No surprise there. Non-Hispanic white Catholics break similarly, but the margin among the importants for McCain is 20 points smaller. Among Hispanics and blacks, the difference in preference between the two religious categories is negligible. There's a result for Jews, of interest in part because the exit polls don't turn up enough of them for the relevant cross-tabs. Jewish importants break even between McCain and Obama, while Jewish not importants favor Obama 68 percent to 26 percent. Apart from showing an expected religiosity divide, these numbers indicate a level of Jewish support for the Republican presidential candidate higher than anything seen since Ronald Reagan: just 55-33 for the Democrat. (Importants are 39 percent, not importants 61 percent of the Jewish population.)

Update: I'm not an expert in these things, but it seems to me that there may be a bit of a problem with Gallup's numbers because the sample results from summing up surveys done from March through June. Not only did a lot happen on the religion front during that period (including the whole Wright affair), but for most of it Obama was not the Democratic nominee. So although they ended up with a sample of nearly 95,000, which in normal circumstances means a tiny margin of error (plus or minus one), I wonder if the results are somewhat skewed in McCain's favor, at least compared to what they would be if the entire survey had been taken in the past few weeks. Maybe Pollster will have something to say about this.

For a generation, abortion has been the central front in the culture wars, the issue on which the two parties most clearly divide. The GOP party platform cleaves to the most rigorous of pro-life positions, supporting a constitutional amendment and legislation that would guarantee full rights, including Fourteenth Amendment protections, to the unborn. There's no mention of exceptions for rape, incest, or the health of the mother. The only softness in the GOP position is a shying away from declaring an intention to prosecute women who have abortions. Prosecution seems to be reserved for abortion providers. As for the Democratic party platform, it stands "proudly for a woman's right to choose, consistent with Roe v. Wade, and regardless of her ability to pay."

Besides the lawsuit, did the Obama really want its faith-based youth army to be marching under nearly the same banner as the Home-schooled Children's Crusade? Not bloody likely. So the Joshua Generation is searching for a new name. "Obamolescents" seems like something the Catholic Church would just as soon forget. "The Young and the Faithful"? Nah. "Spiritual But Not Republican"? I don't think so. Well, we'll see what they come up with.

Update: After a postprandial promenade, my nominee is "Nehemiah's Children." Nehemiah, you'll recall, returns to the Promised Land from Babylon (i.e. Iraq) to find Jerusalem in a sad state of disrepair. He sets about restoring the city in record time, then governs well and wisely for 13 years. He seems to have been a eunuch, and thus had no children of his own. So the summons would be for young followers of Obama to volunteer to be Nehemiah's Children. (N.B. "Children of Nehemiah" would quickly be seized upon acronymically by the other side as "CON" to indicate what Obama's appeal to religious voters amounts to.) Are you with me?

Zev Chafets' soft-edged profile of Rush Limbaugh in yesterday's NYT prompts the question: Which part of the Republican Party does Limbaugh represent? Here's what he told Chafets his own presidential agenda would seek to accomplish:

1. Open the continental shelf to drilling. Ditto the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

2. Establish a 17 percent flat tax.

3. Privatize Social Security.

4. Give parents school vouchers to break the monopoly of public education.

5. Revoke Jimmy Carter’s passport while he is out of the country.

6. Abandon all government policies based on the hoax of man-made global warming.

In other words, both the social agenda of the religious right and the international agenda of the neocons are not his priorities. Those he speaks for are the descendants of the old America First small businessmen of small-town America--not surprising for a scion of the elite of Cape Girardeau, Mo. Anti-government economic conservatism is his stock in trade; the rest is decoration. It's the Club for Growth Republicanism that Mike Huckabee once lampooned as the "Club for Greed," but then cuddled up to via his embrace of the flat tax. Limbaugh, in short, represents the hard nut at the core of the GOP, and so cannot be discounted in party politics. But in the electorate as a whole, it counts for less and less.

Now up on YouTube, Obama's speech to the African Methodist Episcopal Convention in St. Louis Saturday continues the theme of service that he spoke of in his earlier addresses last week. The Fourth of July could not be, he said a "passive celebration," but had to involve "service, and sacrifice and each of us doing our part to leave our children a world that is kinder and more just." And just as that could not be "an idle celebration," so "our faith cannot be an idle faith...It must be an active faith."

Beginning with the importance of helping those in need with the right domestic policies and programs, Obama went on to stress the need for African Americans not to be content with blaming its troubles on racism: "I'm not interested us in adopted the posture of victim.... [W]e cannot use injustice as an excuse. We cannot use poverty as an excuse." His support for faith-based institutions was, he said, "how we match societal responsibility with individual responsibility."

In the current issue of Religion in the News, Steve Warner nicely elucidates this classic black-church synthesis of collective and personal obligation, which cuts across conventional American political categories of left and right. Here Obama makes clear not only how faith-based programs express this synthesis but why they represent the moral core of his campaign.

One might add that the synthesis is not only classically black but also classically Methodist. And it can be found not only in Methodist denominations like the AME Church but also, as a kind of moral undertone, in the public culture of the Midwest. A tip of the hat to Mark Noll for this insight, which he discusses in his chapter in Religion in Public Life in the Midwest and we discuss in the Midwest chapter in One Nation, Divisible.

Huckabee on Helms.

Yesterday, Obama had the following to say about appealing to white evangelicals (according to Jonathan Weisman's dispatch in today's WaPo:

"If we show up," Obama told reporters aboard his campaign plane as he left Montana on Saturday, "if we let folks know that we're interested in them and we share a lot of common values, then we're not going to win 100 percent of the evangelical vote. We might not even win 50 percent of the evangelical vote. But we will at least take some of the sharp edges off this divide that's existed in our politics. And that hopefully will allow people to listen to each other, and that will help me govern over the long term."

But the focus on evangelicals should not obscure the fact that Obama is consistently running behind McCain among frequent worship attenders as a whole. (See the SUSA polls.) So even as he answers questions from reporters about evangelicals, there's the familiar old God Gap to address, which is the more important "divide that's existed in our our politics." So appearances before any religious bodies, including his address to the African Methodist Episcopal home crowd yesterday (no transcript or video yet), and his discussion of religious issues like the faith-based initiative, look well beyond the evangelical vote.

Regarding the AME address, it did not violate IRS rules on 501 (c) (3) political endorsements because the denomination extended an invitation to McCain as well. That McCain should choose not to appear is understandable, but why not even reply with regrets?

Steinfels is in a bit of a twist over the separationist language on hiring in Obama's faith-based initiative speech. No doubt, as Marc Stern told the Christian Science Monitor a few days ago, Obama will need to get more specific about what he means by non-discrimination in hiring for publicly funded programs run by faith-based organizations. But the principle ought to be clear: The public should not fund programs intended to advance the cause of a religion, as opposed to furthering public goals (such as helping the poor) that a religion holds dear. And the best way to insure that the faith-based organization observes the distinction is to require it to hire on a religiously non-discriminatory basis.

If Strom Thurmond represented the old seg South, Jesse Helms embodied its transition to the "values voting" South of today. He never gave up appealing to race: His 1990 ad showing white hands crumpling a rejection letter (“You needed that job,” the narrator said, “but they had to give it to a minority.”) was the lineal descendant of the traditional, and almost always successful, Southern Bourbon warnings that the biggest threat to poor whites came from blacks eager to take their places in the mills.

But his special gift was for the social issues that came to define and shape post-civil rights Southern conservatism. In 1973, the very year of the Roe v. Wade decision and years before abortion became the defining issue of a national religious right, he sponsored an amendment denying federal funds for international family planning agencies that supported abortion. He was also quick to recognize the political efficacy of anti-homosexuality, that other pillar of social conservatism, and only at the end of his career was he willing to support AIDS research. (He wrote to one constituent, who had asked him not to judge her son who had died of AIDS, "I know that Mark's death was devastating to you. As for homosexuality, the Bible judges it, I do not.… As for Mark, I wish he had not played Russian roulette with his sexual activity.")

Helms anticipated the era of conservative talk radio. He started out as a radio sports announcer, and it was as a radio opinionator that he made himself known to North Carolinians. His senatorial campaigns invented the kind of precisely targeted appeals that Karl Rove later specialized in, making it possible to win victories, albeit narrow ones, without blunting the sharp edges or "moving to the center." The obits make a point of emphasizing Helms' courtliness to colleagues, his personal generosity to individuals in need. He wasn't the first demagogue to be kindly in private, vile in public.

Michael Gerson, who's sort of an unreconstructed pre-9/11 compassionate conservative, likes the Obama faith-based plan. He elides the hiring issue with this probably willfully ignorant sentence: "Obama is characteristically opaque on the issue of hiring -- seeming to promise that religious parent institutions can select employees based on their beliefs, while denying this right (depending on local law) to their social service adjuncts." (The parent institutions have always gotten to hire employees based on their beliefs. Their publicly funded service adjuncts always, pre-Bush, didn't get to do so.) Obama has put faith-based back on the table, and the reaction thus far is right where he should want it to be.

The latest issue of Religion in the News is now up on our website. Just click on the cover with Obama on it. Yes, it's an Obamarama issue, and just as we had sympathetic pieces on those religiously distinctive presidential aspirants Huckabee and Romney, so two articles out of Chicago smile on the Illinois senator and his spiritual connections.

Just in time for July 4, there's Steve Warner's analysis of Obama's potential for reviving the American civil religion. In a related vein, there's Dwight Hopkins' portrait of Jeremiah Wright and Trinity UCC. Along the way, Ron Kiener does a number on Obama and the Jews and Marc Stern sets the record straight on IRS investigations of politicking in religious institutions.

The issue also features my take on the pope's visit, Andrew Walsh's account of WaPo's stylification of religion coverage, and explorations of Christian websites, Turkish head scarves, and Dr. House. Enjoy!

The easily impressed Brody is impressed by the Denver conclave. Beliefnet's Michele McGinty not so much.

Update: Eric Zimmerman's post from the floor of the National Right to Life Convention probably gives the best temperature reading for rank-and-file "Values" activists. Lukewarm. Very very lukewarm.

Last week I suggested that St. Louis archbishop Raymond Burke's quick promotion to head the Vatican's highest court might be a kick upstairs for a prelate whose determination to fight communion wars with politicians could be problematic for the Church this election season. Here's John Allen's considered take on the question. The bottom line: maybe.

Steve Waldman pooh-poohs the real, on-the-ground significance of the hiring discrimination issue in the new Faith-Based Debate, but in my view he misses the crux of the matter. What the president has always loved about faith-based programming is its promise of transforming lives (and thereby society) by bringing suffering and troubled people to Christ. That's what happened to him. It's the traditional Methodist/evangelical idea of changing the world by changing peoples' hearts.

But of course you can't transform people in this way if the publicly funded social service providers are just anyone hired according to federal non-discrimination rules. So for the evangelicals who decided to buy into the initiative, getting rid of the hiring rules has always been key. Now, traditional big faith-based providers like Catholic Charities and Lutheran Family Services have never had a problem with this, in large part because evangelization has never been their priority in helping the poor. Mother Theresa, for example, was not interested in converting the dying Hindus her order cared for; the spiritual benefits accrued primarily to the sisters. Skillful lawyering has nothing to do with this.

What happens when you change the hiring rules is that you encourage providers to add proselytizing to the mix--and now the government truly is in the business of underwriting--establishing--religion. Thus, for example, the Salvation Army, which is a church and not just a social service provider, is liberated to spread the Salvationist evangel. Sure, there's always been an element of religious outreach in taxpayer-supported faith-based social service provision. You see a devoted nun, a cadre of committed church volunteers, a caring rabbi or imam, and maybe you decide to follow their example into their faith. And, sure, some quiet witnessing takes place that some church-state police would rule out of bounds. But this is a far cry from publicly supporting, say, a drug treatment program in which Christ is central to the treatment.

Pace Waldman, but the Obama folks are perfectly in line with longstanding tradition to calmly tell religious organizations that don't like the rules not to take the money. Then they can evangelize to their hearts' content.

Swinging through Mexico on his Latin American jaunt, John McCain is paying an early morning call on Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mexico's patron saint. The AP sees this as more or less a straight pander for Catholic--especially Hispanic Catholic--votes: "The Basilica de Guadalupe is Mexico's holiest site for Roman Catholics, and Catholic and Hispanic voters are expected to be key swing voters in the November election." It's a bit more complicated than that, I think.

Beginning before and ending after the presidential election four years ago, a torch relay honoring the Virgin proceeded from Mexico City to New York City in order to demand respect for the rights of Mexican and other Hispanic immigrants to the U.S. This was designed to send a message to President Bush, whose position on immigration during that campaign was considered inferior to John Kerry's, as well as to protest Arizona's adoption of Proposition 200, which demanded proof of legal residence in order to gain access to public services. As this protest indicates, Our Lady of Guadalupe is more than just the Catholic emblem of Mexico; she's the emblem of Mexico's dispossessed and poor, and above all the Indios personified in Juan Diego, the peasant to whom she (according to the legend) appeared in 1531.

McCain will reportedly ask Mexican president Felipe Calderon to help out with illegal immigration--an especially tricky subject for the Arizona senator, inasmuch as his position has, ah, evolved from Lou Dobbsian "amnesty" to more conventional GOP "keep 'em out." The early morning visit to the basilica takes the edge off that a bit. After all, whereas four years ago the Virgin came to America, now America comes to the Virgin. Even as he works on tightening the screws, John feels Juan's pain.

Update: Pool report of the visit.

The old guard of the religious right hath assembled in Denver, even as the hated Obama was taking in the sights in Colorado Springs, and announced its support of the hitherto loathed John McCain. Have they changed their minds, and discovered hitherto unknown Virtue in the GOP Standard Bearer Presumptive. Not quite.

"None of these people want to meet their maker knowing that they didn't do everything they could to keep Barack Obama from being president," one attendee told Time's Michael Scherer. "You've got these two people running for president. One of them is going to become president. That's the perspective. That that's the whole discussion."

It seems to me that Obama's Zanesville and Colorado Springs speeches of the past two days have to be read together as constituting the core of his campaign's general election appeal. It's the Kennedy Inaugural message updated for a more faith-based, less government-centric age.

Yesterday: "The fact is, the challenges we face today – from saving our planet to ending poverty – are simply too big for government to solve alone. We need all hands on deck...I'll establish a new Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. The new name will reflect a new commitment. This Council will not just be another name on the White House organization chart – it will be a critical part of my administration."

Today: "As President, I will launch a new Social Investment Fund Network. It’s time to get the grass roots, the foundations, the faith-based organizations, the private sector and the government at the table so that we can learn from our own success stories....This will not be a call issued in one speech or one program – this will be a central cause of my presidency. We will ask Americans to serve. We will create new opportunities for Americans to serve. And we will direct that service to our most pressing national challenges."

Now let's see if they salute.

The latest Quinnipiac Poll shows Obama ahead of McCain 56-35. (In 2004, Kerry beat Bush 54-44 in the Nutmeg State.) Among Catholics, Obama leads 47-44. In 2004, Kerry lost the CT Catholic vote to Bush 47-53. In this year's Democratic primary, Obama lost the CT Catholic vote to Clinton 39-59. What this suggests is that all that chatter about Obama being in trouble with Northeast Catholics was not worth a fig. In Connecticut, Catholics preferred Clinton, but are showing no inclination to move to McCain in the general. They like Obama more than they liked their co-religionist Kerry. Got it?

Update: Ditto Hispanics, nationwide, churchgoing and otherwise. Totals: Obama 59, McCain 29. (Latinos 2004: Kerry 53, Bush 44)

Yes, Brody's pretty much in the tank for Obama, but it's hard to argue with his judgment that when it comes to religion, the presumptive Democratic nominee always seems a step ahead of the presumptive Republican one. While McCain trudges up the mountain to get the official Graham seal of approval, Obama outflanks him on both faith-based sides, at once pledging to expand the Bush initiative and hewing to the separationist straight and narrow. And then, before the ink on that proposal is dry, Mara Vanderslice's "independent" (527) Matthew 25 Network is out with an ad for Christian radio that, for all that it smacks of Saturday Night Live's "Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey," packs a punch. From the "with all these stones being cast at Senator Obama" to Obama's own "I submitted myself to His will" to "because we think it's time for a better Christian witness in politics."

Brody calls the ad "EXTREMELY strong." How much does offering a compelling witness to one's faith matter to evangelicals, as compared with enunciating the right positions on abortion and gay marriage? For quite a few, maybe quite a lot.

And today, it's Obama in the Belly of the Beast--Colorado Springs--from whence those stones are cast.

Not to beat a dead horse, but what may have happened to misdirect the AP on Obama's faith-based proposal was that an unnamed senior campaign adviser told reporter Jennifer Loven: "Obama proposes allowing religious institutions to hire and fire based on religion only in the non-taxpayer-funded portions of their activities." This is a backwards way of saying that Obama proposes not to permit religious institutions to hire and fire based on religion for the publicly funded portions. It's simply the law that a church can hire, say, its pastor based on religion. What sent up the red flag was Loven's declaration, in her story's lede, that "to support [religious institutions'] ability to hire and fire based on faith" was a "move sure to cause controversy."

Here's how publicly funded faith-based social service provision has been organized since the Great Society programs of the 1960s. If a religious institution wants to do a publicly funded program—say elder housing—it sets up a separate 501 (c)(3) and operates it under the prevailing non-discrimination rules. Or if your church takes public funds to do an after-school education program, then the people you hire to staff it cannot be hired on religious grounds. You can certainly imagine situations where, for example, a relatively small church wants to hire a youth pastor but can only afford one half time, so wants to be able to make that a full-time position and so supplements it by making him head of the publicly funded after-school program. That’s not allowed (unless, of course, you open the youth pastor position to people of any religious persuasion). What Bush tried to do was change longstanding rules. What Obama’s proposing is to adhere to them. Zeleny and Luo have this just right in today's New York Times. The evangelical supporters of the Bush program are unhappy, as they should be.

Copies of our new book arrived today, and if you order right away you can get it for 25 percent off. You can think of it as kind of the Cliff's Notes version of the Greenberg Center's Religion by Region project--cheap at three times the price--but more importantly, it offers a new way of understanding the history of religion in contemporary American public life that integrates religious demography and regional culture into the narrative of national politics. In more ways than I can think, this blog has been informed and shaped by what we learned from the project of which One Nation, Divisible is the culmination.

Here's the Obama faith-based proposal. On first blush, it looks like a pretty modest thing, mostly directed toward building capacity among grass-roots religious (and secular) organizations: training, partnering, evaluation. The only actual program initiative is a $500 million summer learning program for 1 million children--with the money to come, in the usual campaign promise way, from "cutting wasteful spending in government procurement and management." Of course, summer programs for that many kids will cost a lot more; organizations wanting to run such programs will be helped to apply for grants from community foundations. Bottom line: some useful management, half a billion more dollars than the Bush program, a determination to avoid sticky church-state wickets, and a bit of bully pulpiteering. No reason for Barry Lynn to get all huffy--and he doesn't, so much.

In response to my little excursus on President Bush's faith-based initiative, I've received an extended comment from Bob Wineburg, a professor at UNC-Greensboro who knows a whole lot more about the subject than I do. I've posted his comments after the jump below, and would only make a couple of remarks proleptically in response.

First, in saying that the initiative started out as "a bi-partisan, motherhood-and-apple-pie exercise," I meant to point as much to the spin as to the underlying reality. Pace Wineburg, though, I remain persuaded that the enterprise was not the exercise in culture-war politics that it later became. The religious right was never very enthusiastic about the thing. As my former colleague Dennis Hoover always emphasizes, this was a center-right initiative that raised almost as many hackles to the right as to the left. That's not to say that DiIulio didn't have has conservative pals. But he was certainly not on board with the the politics that emerged in the course of the spring of 2001 and gave him the heave-ho.

Second, I agree that Towey is still trying to shape the discourse in an intellectually unimpressive if not disreputable way. The claims of government bias against faith-based providers were always overblown, and at least Melissa Rogers sees the administration (in the person of Attorney General Mukasey) retreating from them. My own view is that the problem stems, quite simply, from the fact that certain faith-based providers (white evangelicals preeminently) are committed to the view that the best way to help people is to bring them to Christ, and there are real establishment-clause problems with the government subsidizing such an evangelistic approach).

Which brings us to yesterday's announcement that Barack Obama will be giving a speech on religion today in which he will support permitting faith-based organizations to discriminate religiously in hiring people to do social service provision with public funds. We'll have to wait and see to what extent he'll nuance this position, but there's no question it's going to raise some serious separationist antipathy. And, for reasons noted above, it may well not win him much support on the other side. If Obama, building on his hard experience organizing in Chicago, is really concerned about doing something about inner-city poverty and social dislocation, as opposed to making an ideologicaly demarche into the middle, then the idea of relaxing the hiring rules makes little sense. The faith-based programs that have always done important work in this area have not hurt for faith-based staff, they've hurt for material resources. The fundamental problem with the Bush initiative was that it never proposed more resources for the providers. I would expect Obama to do that. The hiring business, however, is both a can of worms and a red herring.

Update: Well, GOM's got the Obama morning email briefing, and it seems that yesterday's initial AP report got it completely wrong: the proposal will not permit faith-based hiring and firing decisions for government-funded programs. The email could not be more explicit about the proposed President's Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships adhering to the anti-discrimination provisions of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Now either AP was woefully misinformed or something happened between yesterday evening and this morning. I'm betting on the latter. Somebody like Rep. Bobby Scott of Virginia, who led the charge against the Bush employment-waiver legislation, got to Obama and read him the riot act. And a volte-face ensued. Good thing too.

Further update: The word on the street is that AP just messed up. For sure, there's no sourcing of the claim that Obama was going to go with permitting discriminatory hiring. Pretty out of character for the AP to put an unverified, unsourced rumor in the lede. If so, bad job.

Last Saturday, I offered up a short post that consisted mostly of a little diatribe by Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi against the prosperity gospel preacher Joel Osteen. But because I stuck a photo of Osteen at the top, it was not hard to mistake the indented words for my own--and over at Beliefnet's Chuch Basement Roadshow blog, Tony Jones did make that mistake yesterday. So as appreciative as I am of the shout out, I want to be clear that all that stuff about Osteen ("a human haircut with plastic baseball-size teeth") subverting Jesus' preferential option for the poor was Taibbi's, not mine. This blog, of course, keeps its opinions to itself. Sort of.