August 2008 Archives

First thought: Gilgoff's right to draw attention to Richard Land's enthusiasm for Palin as Veep in his CBS interview of a few weeks ago. So she's the ticket's energizer bunny: activated evangelicals plus Alaska oil. See Sarah run.

Second thought: Palin gives religious right leaders--real, supposed, or would-be--all the grounds they need to jump on board McCain's bus. But for them it's the old dodge of pushing for all you can get, knowing that at the end of the day you'll be there for your seat. What rank-and-file evangelicals will think is another question. They flocked to Huckabee even though the putative leaders were very lukewarm. They are not, in a word, easy to command. Even though the religious right has had women in leadership positions going all the way back to the 1970s, traditional gender roles are part of its stock in trade, and having a youngish, inexperienced Mom a heartbeat away...well, we'll see.

Third thought: McCain's choice of Palin shows how undead the religious right remains in the American political system. The Republican Party birthed it, and to this day cannot disown it. Abortion politics will be as big as ever this fall; the culture wars will continue apace. The game will only be changed by a substantial Obama victory.

Fourth thought: This choice will weaken McCain's appeal to Jewish voters. Over the past two decades, nothing has kept Jews in the Democratic camp more than the GOP's embrace of the religious right in particular and evangelicals in general. One of the appealing things about McCain to Jews has been his uncomfortable relationship with both. Palin is not only a strong values-voting evangelical, she's got a Buchananite past--and there's no one in the Republican Party more noxious to Jews than Pat Buchanan.

For connoisseurs of religion in American public life, last night's stadium extravaganza offered a couple of tasty morsels. Let me begin with Rev. Joel Hunter's benediction, which ended with the novelty of asking all attendees to pray in the name of whatever they pray in the name of. Or as he put it:

Now I interrupt this prayer for a closing instruction. I want to personalize this. I want this to be a participatory prayer. And so therefore, because we are in a country that is still welcoming all faiths, I would like all of us to close this prayer in the way your faith tradition would close your prayer.

So on the count of three, I want all of you to end this prayer, your prayer, the way you usually end prayer. You ready? One, two, three.

In Jesus' name, Amen.

Let's go change the world for good.

Then there was Barack Obama's adaptation of two passages from the New Testament in the peroration of his acceptance speech. What counts about the United States, he said, was not our wealth or military might or educational institutions:

Instead, it is that American spirit, that American promise, that pushes us forward even when the path is uncertain; that binds us together in spite of our differences; that makes us fix our eye not on what is seen, but what is unseen, that better place around the bend.

At this moment, in this election, we must pledge once more to march into the future. Let us keep that promise, that American promise, and in the words of scripture hold firmly, without wavering, to the hope that we confess.

These appropriations have caught some flak, including on the CT election blog, where Collin Hansen points out that the entire passage from Hebrews "explains something far more beautiful than the American promise"--namely, how Jesus' sacrifice has enabled humanity to be cleansed of sin and draw near to God. But was Obama really substituting the American promise for the divine one? I don't think so.

In the first passage, his claim is that the American promise, by pushing us forward and binding us together, makes us look at the "place around the bend," the eternal. In the second, he urges Americans to keep that promise and to hold firmly to "the hope that we confess." What is that hope? He doesn't say. For some it may be life eternal through Christ Jesus. For others it may lie in some other unseen dimension of life, religious or secular. It is, in short, what each of us sees when we look around the bend. It is, in other words, the classic, ambiguously inclusive American Civil Religion, delicately and daringly expanded. In sum, there was Hunter, pushing in one direction, and Obama, pushing in the other.

Sarah Pulliam, who's blogging up a storm from the Democratic Convention for Christianity Today's election blog, has a good q and a with Focus on the Family's Tom Minnery. Minnery's officially an unhappy camper, with no use for the Dems and little use for McCain. Grumble grumble.

In a phone call with 40 Chabad rabbis from around the country, John McCain asks for their support by emphasizing that he will "put my country first. And I want to promise you that. I will put my country first." That's in contrast to Obama? Then McCain assures them, "I will do everything in my power to make sure that the United States of America and our closest friend and ally remain secure and peaceful and prosperous." America first. Israel a close second.

Update: I wonder if it's inappropriate to contextualize this phone call by noting the combined criticism of the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa, by Iowa governor Chet Culver and Barack Obama. Agri, which has been working hard to clean up, and to be seen to have cleaned up, its act since the immigration raid earlier this summer, has been the dominant purveyor of kosher meat in America and is owned by a Chabad family. Not that either Culver or Obama made so much as the slightest mention of the Jewish dimension of this story. But it is roiling the American Jewish world, in which Chabad is both loved and loathed. Will Postville turn into another front in the partisan religion wars?

Over at the Revealer, Jeff Sharlet is puffing Adele Oltman's Nation piece on Obama and the Martin Luther Kings, Sr. and Jr. Read it if you must, but I wouldn't take seriously its claim that Barack Obama is more like Daddy than Dr. King. The suggestion that Obama is advocating some kind of throwback to the days when black churches dominated their communities is just silly, and the suggestion that he is some kind of crypto-theocrat is nonsense. No American politician running for national office has spoken more clearly about the the importance of maintaining the principle of church-state separation.

Ottman goes seriously astray in portraying Obama's support for faith-based initiatives as contrary to the civil right's leader's view of things:

I'm not sure King would have been comfortable with Obama's expanded view of faith-based initiatives, which allows for churches to design social programs and make decisions about who has access to them.

A better read is Ryan Lizza's article on the shifting politics of the West in the current New Yorker. Lizza's focus is on Colorado and its rumpled Democratic governor, Bill Ritter, Jr. Lizza points out that Ritter's a pro-life Catholic--which fits into the pro-life sub-theme of Democratic Party coverage these days, e.g. here . Ritter lays out his portrait of his state's electorate. These include the two die-hard GOP groupings: "Fox News conservatives" (16 percent) and "moral conservatives (13 percent). On the other end of the spectrum are the 20 percent who are "very liberal." And, according to Ritter, the way Democrats can win the West is by picking up the plurality group, "government pragmatists" (37 percent) and picking up some of the "moral pragmatists" (14 percent). The latter are the ones susceptible to the Democratic Party's campaign to assure voters that it feels their faith.

The counterpoise to Ritter in the article is Gary Hart, who urges a strategy more attuned to the Western libertarian tradition.

Hart’s approach for deëmphasizing the culture wars is different from Ritter’s. Whereas Ritter appealed to the religious convictions of voters, Hart suggests a more laissez-faire approach. “Westerners are individualists who do not like the beliefs of others imposed on us,” he wrote. “We are people who believe in principles: integrity, honor, courage, accountability. The religious right preaches values. Democrats, regionally and nationally, should espouse principles, for ourselves and for our country.” He argues that while “values” have religious connotations, “principles” are secular.

OK, hurricanes are unpredictable things, but as you can see, the National Hurricane Center is predicting that Gustav will be hitting New Orleans, oh, just about the time the gavel comes down to open the Republican National Convention up there at the other end of the Mississippi. If I believed in that sort of thing, I'd say it was one of those divine punishments that is being visited upon the GOP by an angry God set on reminding voters what that Party's still sitting Administration accomplished three years ago to the day.

But believing as I do in a more merciful Deity, I'd prefer to believe that a Jonah, say maybe Streetprophets' pastordan, is being dispatched posthaste to St. Paul, to call upon the assembling delegates and hangers-on to repent forthwith. And perhaps they will don sackcloth, from the most magnificent senatorial Pooh-Bah down to the least intern amongst them; and they shall refrain from the shrimps and the filets mignon and every other bespoke foodstuff; and the Anointed McCain will sit in ashes; and the Assemblage will turn from its evil ways. Whereupon God will stop Gustav in his tracks, and cause him to peter out, thereby of course angering the Jonah. But the Lord shall teach the prophet a lesson, saying, "And should not I spare the GOP, that Grand Old Party, wherein are more than threescore million persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left; and also many lobbyists?"

As Joe Biden prepares for his self-introduction as Barack Obama's ticket-mate, it's a good time to think a little about what he brings to the table in re: the abortion issue, and how this may matter with respect to his Catholic co-religionists. The first thing to say is that, by Democratic Party standards, Biden is center-right on abortion. (Here's an outline.) His NARAL rating is only 36 percent, the result of his opposition to public funding for abortions and his support of the ban on the "partial-birth" abortion procedure. He accepts as part of his faith his church's teaching that life begins at conception, but strongly supports Roe v. Wade on the grounds that he doesn't want to impose his religious views on those who do not share them. That is to say, he declines to go along with the Catholic Church's position that, inasmuch as its position on abortion is derived from Natural Law rather than Revelation, it may be imposed by law on non-Catholics.

Naturally, this position is beyond the pale for Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput, who sua sponte informed the AP by email that Biden ought not present himself for Holy Communion. But among rank-and-file Catholics, it's a very common position. According to the American National Election Studies, 1980-2000, 42 percent of white Catholics are either completely pro-choice or believe that abortion should be permitted for reasons of rape, incest, or danger to the woman's life, or if the need for it has been clearly established. The plurality position (38 percent) is to permit abortion only in cases of rape, incest, or to protect the woman's life. Only 19 percent follow their church's teaching that abortion should never be permitted. Latino Catholics are more pro-life than whites, but not by much.

So what does this mean? In a recent study of the political behavior of white Catholics--that crucial swing voting bloc--University of Cincinnati political scientist Stephen Mockabee performs the magic of multivariate factor analysis (in the 2007 volume, From Pews to Polling Places, edited by J. Matthew Wilson) and discovers that, in fact, abortion had no statistically significant effect on Catholic presidential vote choice in 2004. That's right, none. How could this be? Well, one way to help understand it is that while older white Catholics are much more pro-life than younger ones, they are also far more loyal Democratic voters. "Post Vatican II" Catholics--those born after 1960--trend Republican but only seven percent share their Church's position on abortion. When it came to issues, what pushed white Catholics toward George Bush was their support for capital punishment and their opposition to gay marriage, not John Kerry's pro-choice position.

After PA Sen. Bob Casey, Jr.'s brief agree-to-disagree mention of his and Barack Obama's differences over abortion last night, the Catholic League's Bill Donohue thundered, "CASEY BLOWS IT BIG TIME." But the sound and fury emanating from him and Chaput really, when it comes to the Catholic vote for president, signify nothing.

Pew's got its new religion-and-politics survey up, and its lede is the not-so-new news that Americans are less enthusiastic about mixing religion and politics than they were a couple of years ago. Gallup had a bead on this story two years ago. As John Green and I put it in a story in Religion in the News last year:

Throughout President Bush’s first term, annual Gallup surveys found that more Americans believed organized religion should have greater influence in the nation than believed it should have less. For the past three years, however, it’s been the other way around.

Nonetheless, Pew finds that evangelicals are showing no sign of swinging to Obama. When it comes to presidential preferences, the main difference is that they are far less enthusiastic about John McCain this year than they were about George Bush four years ago. I remain persuaded that it is important to keep an eye on possible regional variations in the evangelical vote this year. My hypothesis is that on the West Coast and (most importantly) in the Midwest, a significant fraction of evangelicals are attracted to Obama. The most recent evidence of this comes from the latest Humphrey poll, which shows evangelicals in Minnesota favoring McCain by only 57-32 percent. If Obama ends up getting upwards of 30 percent of the evangelical vote in Ohio, Michigan, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, he's in good shape.

Now, back to Frenchman's Bay.

As I head off for another week's R&R (with at most intermittent blogging) before the semester kicks in, one last reflection on Saddleback. Even for congenital skeptics, it has been hard to resist the prevailing storyline about the expansion and transformation of white evangelicals from footsoldiers of the religious right to a many-splendored faith community of varied policy commitments. That more than anything else, accounts for the media reaction to John McCain's rolling into Rick Warren's den and laying down a couple of boilerplate pronouncements about the beginning of life and Supreme Court justices who legislate from the bench, and win a big hand. Golly, evangelicals are pro-life after all.

It will be more than a little interesting to see how Warren handles his emergence as a truly national media figure. As is clear from his post-forum interview with Dan Gilgoff, he is not going to permit himself to read out of the conservative evangelical world as squishy on abortion. At the same time, he will continue to insist on civility and advance the big-tent view of evangelicalism. As the tectonic plates of American religion shift, big-tent evangelicalism is becoming the normative form of American Protestantism. And Warren is making a bid to be its main man.

Have a good week!

One more thing from Saddleback. In the first segment of each interview, Warren asked for an example where the candidate had provided leadership against his party's interest, and even his own best interest, for the good of the country. Obama cited ethics and campaign finance reform, tipping his hat to his opponent for being out in front on that as well. But did McCain mention this signature issue of his? He did not. Quickly citing "climate change, out-of-control spending, torture," he went on to tell how as a freshly minted senator he had made so bold as to oppose Ronald Reagan on the invasion of Lebanon. Now there's an issue that won't come up to bite him this year.

But for those who have been paying attention, nothing about McCain has stuck in the craw of the leaders of the religious right more than McCain-Feingold, the landmark campaign finance law significant parts of which McCain's favorite Supreme Court justices have successfully struck down. For him, it's become The Great Unmentionable.

There's no shortage of commentary on John and Barack's excellent Saddleback adventure, so I'll content myself with just a few day-after reflections.

1. McCain said enough in the way of magic words to enable pro-lifers to profess themselves satisfied that he's one of them. In no uncertain terms he asserted that he believes that life begins at conception. He named the four pro-choice Supreme Court justices as the ones he wouldn't have appointed, and used GOP boilerplate about their "legislating from the bench" to justify why. As long as he doesn't tap a pro-choicer for VP, he's probably got the serious pro-life vote in hand and prepared to turn out for him. A weakness of Warren's approach was that he chose not to engage in serious follow-up. He might have asked McCain to square his "life begins at conception" stance with his support for embryonic stem cell research; or whether, under the circumstances, he supports abortion in or cases of rape, incest, or the health of the mother.

2. Obama seemed less than fully prepared to put his best foot forward on abortion. While he mentioned the ideal of seeking the "common ground" of reducing abortions, and noted that he had pushed the Democratic platform in that direction, there was an opportunity to discourse of the kinds of programs the platform envisages, and to summon the pro-life community (well represented in the audience) to join him. The opportunity was missed. Beyond that, Obama did just fine.

3. Will Warren's call for civility and an end to "demonization" have any kind of an impact? Warren has signaled that he's prepared to call out the demonizers, if not quite by name yet. Other evangelical heavyweights of a similar establishmentarian bent include Joel Hunter and Kirbyjon Caldwell. The anti-Obama zealots don't want those guys on the warpath.

Warren is very cheery, tieless as usual. Separation of church and state we believe in, he says, but not separation of faith and politics. Both these guys are my friends, he says. What's a friend? We've got to learn to disagree without demonizing each other, he say. Uh oh. Demonization is what the religious right's been all about. Obama up first.

First name basis. Personal life up front. Barack relies on Michelle, his grandmother, he says. His administration: Sam Nunn and Dick Lugar. Ted Kennedy and Tom Coburn. Huh? Wants a lot of different points of view represented.

Greatest moral failure in your own life? Let's call it narcissism. Warren says he likes that. Trying to protect myself instead of doing God's work. America's? Greatest moral failure in his lifetime, don't abide by Matthew to do the most for the least of us.

So much for the first quarter.

The Rev. Susan K. Smith, senior pastor of Advent United Church of Christ in Columbus, Ohio and one of WaPo's regular On Faith contributors, is bummed out by the forthcoming Saddleback confab. Addressing Mssrs. McCain and Obama in an On Faith post, she takes the position that politicians should just stay away from churches during campaign season, ending her screed:

I just do not understand why you are doing it. I do not know how much your doing it muddies the waters of church-state separation. I do think that if you are having such an interview in an evangelical church, then you ought to spread the love, and do the same kind of interview in a synagogue and a mosque.

After all, the evangelicals are not the only religious voting bloc. The last thing they need is another reason to boast of their so-called superiority over everyone else. I think you are sending a dangerous message.

And I don't like it.

Establishmentarian religion serves to bless, convene, and otherwise hold a sacred umbrella over the community at large. When consensus has to be built, it is there to build it; when a common goal has to be achieved, it is there to hallow it. Nationally, in the first part of the 20th century, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopalians or the Bishop of the Methodists or the Stated Clerk of the Presbyterians were there to do the job. After World War II, a more interfaith approach came to the fore. Perhaps the greatest contribution of establishmentarianism in American history was to set its seal on the civil rights movement.

But the lesson mainstream religion took away from that era was not of its own role but of the prophetic one, incarnated in Martin Luther King, Jr. And ever since, it is the image of the prophet, not the priest, that has mesmerized the imaginations of American religious leaders. That goes, of course, for those evangelical leaders who, modeling themselves on the black civil rights clergy they had once reviled, created the religious right a generation ago.

As Time's David Van Biema makes clear in last week's cover story, Rick Warren flirted as recently as four years ago with religious right leadership. But with a personality that doesn't quite fit the job description, and the nose of the successful entrepreneur who can tell where there's a market opening, he has since moved powerfully into the role of American Establishmentarian-in-Chief. Here, from Van Biema's piece, is how he puts it:

He says he is more interested in questions that he feels are "uniting," such as "poverty, HIV/AIDS, climate change and human rights," and still more in civics-class topics like the candidates' understanding of the role of the Constitution. There will be no "Christian religion test," Warren insists. "I want what's good for everybody, not just what's good for me. Who's the best for the nation right now?"

Are we really going to go there? Buckle your seatbelts.

Brody has it:

The most surprising thing to me is that some leaders that I think are spiritually mature leaders value political loyalty over family loyalty. We are members of the body of Christ. Christ shed his blood for us. We’re going to live in Heaven together. And yet if you don’t hold the party line, all of a sudden for these people politics trumps faith.

"I think Rick is in an unenviable position in that he stands to get attacked from the right and the left, based on what direction he takes," said Mark DeMoss, an evangelical public relations specialist who had supported former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in the GOP primary. "As an evangelical, I am much more interested in his list of questions than in either of their answers."

My proposed linkage between anti-Mormon prejudice among evangelicals and the persistent flip-flop charge against Romney has drawn some interest, and raised the question of how one might go about demonstrating it. In a comment, Lowell Brown, who posts over at Article6, expressed the wish for some empirical evidence: "Now, did Romney make some Christians distrust him because he claimed to have very similar beliefs? Maybe, but I sure haven't seen any data to support that hypothesis." While I don't know of any survey of the subject, there is some anecdotage that points strongly in that direction, and in mine.

To wit: Late last year, the Corner's Jonah Goldberg quoted a number of responses to his thoughts about evangelical anti-Mormonism. One evangelical respondent wrote:

The sharper the contrast between Mormon and orthodox Christian doctrine, the better....To address one obvious objection, voting for a Jewish, Muslim, or even atheist candidate does not carry the same set of concerns. Unlike Mormonism, none of these other belief systems attempt to position themselves within the Christian faith.

Speaking for myself, there is no policy that I think a Mormon would pursue that I find objectionable. I will not vote for a Mormon because they claim to be Christian, when they are not Christians. Electing, or even nominating, a Mormon continues to send the message to Americans that Mormons are fine and dandy, Christians like everyone else. Thousands of Christians are converted to Mormonism each year, and it is done under false pretenses. From what I have read, Mormons are very good at appearing to be orthodox Christians with new recruits. It's only later that the blatantly non-orthodox views come out. So, I rule out voting for a Mormon not because of actual policies they might pursue, but because of the message their election would send to Americans.

Let me make a couple more quick comments. I would vote for a Jew. I would vote for a Hindu, an atheist, etc.

Hat tip to Premil Cindy for calling my attention to this video, which has so far been viewed over half a million times. It was created by Ph For America, an outfit that says it's "hoping to become the "Swiftboat" 527 organization of 2008." After clipping the sentences on the Bible from Obama's 2006 Call to Renewal speech, it has a voice-over assert that Obama "arrogantly mocked and ridiculed the Bible" and charge him with taking those passages "so painfully out of context." Here's what Obama said, in its context:

Moreover, given the increasing diversity of America's population, the dangers of sectarianism have never been greater. Whatever we once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.

And even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? Would we go with James Dobson's, or Al Sharpton's? Which passages of Scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is ok and that eating shellfish is abomination? How about Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount - a passage that is so radical that it's doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application? So before we get carried away, let's read our bibles. Folks haven't been reading their bibles.

This brings me to my second point. Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God's will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.

Of course, there's nothing out of context about quoting specific legal provisions in Leviticus and Deuteronomy--in which regard it's interesting to note that the clip leaves out the reference to eating shellfish. Yep, there are some heirs of the Judeo-Christian tradition who to this day take that deal seriously. As for the Sermon on the Mount, there's no question that some Christians have taken the following passage as a mandate for pacifism (i.e. "turning the other cheek to terrorists," as the narrator puts it):

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;

The narrator takes Obama to task for "condescendingly" suggesting that Americans aren't reading their Bible, "as if the American people don't know what's in there." That Americans don't know what's in the Bible has been amply demonstrated in survey after survey (see, for example, here and here). If some of those half-million viewers are inspired to crack open Scripture, maybe Ph For America will have done some good. In the meantime, I'd like to know a little something about whose those would-be Swiftboaters are.

"Left Behind" Author: Obama Probably Not The Antichrist

Huck tells Fox that the Mittster would be a bad choice for VP because of his flip-flopping, but not because he's a Mormon: “I think there are better choices for Sen. McCain that have the approval of value voters.” It's time to connect the flip-flop charge to the anti-Mormon thing.

Many values voters--i.e. evangelicals-- distrust Mormons. Why? Because, in evangelical eyes, Mormons claim to be something they're not; to wit, Christians. People who change positions are not trustworthy because they claim to be something they didn't use to be. The suspicion is they're sailing under false pretenses, pretending to be something they aren't. So what I'd say is that by so vigorously embracing all the values values voters embrace--rather than maintaining a certain distance--Romney actually reinforced anti-Mormon sentiment among evangelicals. (As in: "He says he's just like us? What else would you expect from a Mormon?") Just the opposite of what he intended. And at this point irremediable.

As the eyes of the religion-and-politics crowd turn Saddlebrookwards, it may be worth keeping in mind the fundamentals of partisanship on the faith front. As shown by poll after poll, both presidential and down-ticket, asserted worship attendance is an absolutely consistent indicator of how Americans in the aggregate are going to vote. In a nutshell, the more frequent, the more Republican; the less frequent, the more Democratic. That's true nationwide and state by state. But since the electoral college system still rules, it's the state-by-state numbers that matter in the presidential race. It's therefore important to be aware of the differences among states when it comes to attendance.

The simplest way to do this is to look at the polls by Survey USA (SUSA), which divide voters into regular, occasional and "almost never" attenders. Consider the most recent of these, of the presidential and gubernatorial races in Washington State. Washington is one of the lowest attendance states in the nation: 35 percent regular, 27 percent occasional, and 39 percent almost never. Among the Regulars, John McCain and the GOP gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi lead their opponents 59-36 and 65-32 respectively. Among the Almost Nevers, Barack Obama and Democratic incumbent governor Christine Gregoire are ahead 62-32 and 62-36 respectively. And among the Occasionals, it's 57-39 for Obama and 56-42 for Gregoire. Overall, Obama is ahead of McCain by seven points; Gregoire, ahead of Rossi by two. Most of the difference comes from Obama's success among the regular attenders, with whom his (losing) margin is 10 points better than Gregoire's--testimony, perhaps, to Obama's ability to appeal to religious voters. But the main point is that if Washington were like Kentucky, where nearly six in ten voters say they attend worship regularly, both Obama and Gregoire would be trailing.

The rule of thumb for all voting groups is that it's the most closely divided ones that are easiest to move from one candidate to the other. So while a marginal shift of Regulars to Obama or of Almost Nevers to McCain would be just fine, the easiest voters on the faith spectrum to flip are the Occasionals. How do you appeal to the religiously lukewarm? I suppose it's by making clear that you care about religion but aren't a zealot. Here's a video showing Obama doing just that, debating Alan Keyes in the 2004 Illinois senatorial race. For his part, McCain's done a pretty good job acting like he's lukewarm about religion, but he hasn't exactly made the case for it.

Update: For the attendance breakdown nationally, take a look at this new IBD/TIPP poll. While the pattern is exactly as indicated, there seems to be some movement towards Obama among regular attenders and toward McCain among irregular ones. That bears watching.

I'm no lawyer, but I don't see how anyone can read the Catholic League's latest press releases, BOB CASEY, JR. TO SPEAK AT CONVENTION; MEDIA MISLABEL HIM PRO-LIFE and RELIGION HAUNTS DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION and see them as anything but partisan political attacks. Maybe someone can explain to me why the League deserves to keep its 501 (c) (3) tax exemption.

The latest Pew poll, showing a three-point lead for Obama (down from five points in June), has McCain increasing his margin among Protestants from one point to seven--entirely from evangelicals, since he's lost three points off his margin among mainliners. Obama, meanwhile, has gained ground among Catholics, increasing his margin from two points to five. That's thanks to a shift among white Catholics who in June were supporting McCain by six points and now just by one. Nationwide, white evangelicals support McCain 68-24 (hello, Barna?) and white mainliners 50-39. In 2004, John Kerry lost the Protestant vote to George Bush by 19 points and the Catholic vote by five. So Obama is currently running ahead of Kerry in both cases by the nearly identical margins of 12 and 10 points respectively. White mainline Protestants are moving away from McCain and white Catholics are headed in Obama's direction. I'd say it's time to start writing stories about McCain's Catholic problem.

The latest Franklin and Marshall Pennsylvania poll, which has Obama over McCain by eight points, 44-36 (likely voters by five, 46-41), gives the lie to the idea that Obama has a particular problem with Catholics in the Keystone State and its ilk. Specifically, Obama leads McCain among Catholics 44-37, whereas among Protestants (who include most of the state's 11 percent non-white population), he trails McCain 37-45. Here it's worth being aware that white Protestants in western Pennsylvania are for the most part mainliners but far more conservative than the norm. Protestants outnumber Catholics in the state; in the poll they show up at 38 percent and 31 percent of the population respectively. So the difference for Obama comes from those of other religions (13 percent of the population) and those with no religious affiliation (18 percent), among whom he leads 41-32 and 61-19 respectively.

The other key religious finding is that among those Pennsylvanians who identify as "born again or fundamentalist" (28 percent of the population), McCain leads Obama by only 48-31. This supports the Quinnipiac number on PA evangelicals, and strengthens my hypothesis that it's evangelicals outside the South who are swinging to Obama. Yes, it's our hobby horse around here, but most commentators on religion and politics are really not tuned into the regional dimension of religious voting patterns.

Steve Waldman thinks Obama messed up by not making sure that his pro-life religious supporters got more out of the platform committee abortion plank. I'm not so sure. Like it or not, Obama is firmly pro-choice. His opponents are pulling out all the stops to demonstrate that he is not just your run-of-the-mill pro-choice politician, but a true believer--and, indeed, Obama's got some tough explaining to do to prove otherwise. So rather than engage in a lot of hypocritical talk about the tragedy of abortion, he might be better advised to say:

Look, I believe in choice, real choice, for all women. So abortions should be freely available for those who feel compelled to have them, but also and no less important, there must be material support for those who want to carry their pregnancies to term. And I believe that if all of us, pro-choice and pro-life, can join together to ensure that support, we will have done more to reduce the number of abortions in this country than the Republicans have done with their lip service to constitutional amendments and their legislation to require parental consent and to ban abortion procedures. For too long, the conflict over abortion has prevented us from moving forward in a bipartisan way on a host of critical issues. What I'm proposing is a new way forward, which maintains the right to abortion while reducing its incidence. And I firmly believe that this is what most Americans want to be the case.

In an interview with John Green last week, former Romney campaign adviser Mark DeMoss (and one time chief of staff to Jerry Falwell) said pretty much straight out that it was Mike Huckabee who sunk the Romney campaign:

Would I like the president to share my faith? Sure. Would I like Mitt Romney’s credentials and intellect and character and competence and experience combined with an evangelical Southern Baptist faith? I’d love it. But I didn’t have it, so I liked everything else. But there’re still a lot of folks saying in this country, I vote on this. I heard repeatedly from people who said, how can you support a Mormon when we have one of our own running for president? We should support one of our own, a fellow Southern Baptist.

I think there are some other things that ought to be part of a president, like competence and experience and so on. These are interesting times.

I’d like to really change the – one of my missions, I think, is to change the debate from religion to values. Values should play a huge role in a campaign. Religion, I think, should play a secondary role.

And that, to some of my friends and colleagues, is probably a little heretical. But I really believe it. After all, we really don’t know as voters a very great deal about most or any of these candidates’ or past presidents’ personal faith anyway. We know what they tell us. But we don’t know. And a lot of times, particularly religious conservatives have put great stock in a candidate who they thought was a fellow evangelical only to find out, gee, maybe they weren’t, were disappointed. Well, if your interest had been in common values rather than common theology, you might have been less disappointed.

As you may not have noticed, in making his pitch today that "we are all Georgians," John McCain called the invaded Caucasian state "one of the first nations on earth to convert to Christianity...it's been part of the grand sweep that compromises Western civilization." Well, I suppose that's one way to look at Christianity. But seriously, as long as we're choosing allies based on their priority in embracing Jesus, can I put in a good word for Armenia, the very first nation to adopt Christianity as its official religion? On the other hand, the Armenian Apostolic Church is mired in monophysitism--you know, it's non-Chalcedonian, which means those folks didn't join in the condemnation of those who rejected Christ's two natures. So to hell with them. While the Georgians are good old autocephalous Orthodox Christians, or at least since departing from the patriarchate of Antioch they've always wanted to be autocephalous, but the Russian Orthodox Church has in modern times kept butting in, although the Georgians were recognized as such by the Patriarch of Constantinople after the end of the Russian Empire, ah Soviet Union, in 1990. So maybe McCain thinks we need to speak up on behalf of Georgian autocephaly. Or maybe, in the grand sweep of things, we're too compromised to do that. I dunno.

The conference call (see immediately below) has come and gone, with much in the way of testimonials to the effect that the Democrats' new abortion language is "a real step forward" (Wallis), "a historic and courageous step" (Hunter), "an excellent example of the art of the possible" (Cahill), "most significant" (Kmiec), "Catholics United is very happy about this new language" (Korzen), and "Those of us who have pro-life commitment are pleased" (Campolo).

Does that mean that they actually support the plank? Well, not exactly. When I put the question, there was dancing around from some and silence from others. What they've got via the language is reassurance that the Democrats are sensitive to pro-life concerns and prepared to undertake policies that overtly aim at abortion reduction. My colleague Renny Fulco points out that abortion reduction via contraception has always been the goal of Planned Parenthood, but on this the 40th anniversary of Humanae Vitae, that remains an unacceptable approach in certain quarters.

Hunter, a self-described Republican, seemed to be struggling with his vote. The others will clearly be voting for Obama (Campolo's on the Platform Committee), but now with an easier conscience and good talking points for dealing with their censorious co-religionists. A key point is to challenge Republicans to join them in a bipartisan ("common ground") effort to support funding for programs that make it easier for pregnant women contemplating abortions to choose to carry to term. Look for Obama to make that point when Rick Warren asks him about abortion at Saddleback on Saturday.

In their proposed new platform language, the Democrats toss a bone to the pro-life community by spelling out ways to make abortion rarer:

We also recognize that such health care and education help reduce the number of unintended pregnancies and thereby also reduce the need for abortions. The Democratic Party also strongly supports a woman's decision to have a child by ensuring access to and availability of programs for pre and post natal health care, parenting skills, income support, and caring adoption programs.

The abortion battle between Democrats and Republicans has always involved a complicated dance of absolutes and increments. The party platforms have historically been the place for the absolutes, with the Republicans declared in opposition to abortion under all circumstances and the Democrats in absolute support of a woman's right to choose. But the real abortion game has always been played in the middle--up to and including Roe v. Wade, which never guaranteed choice in any and all circumstances.

Partisans love the absolutes, but the public at large doesn't. Americans' predominant view is that abortion is a bad thing that under some circumstances is preferable to the alternative. In 1996, Ralph Reed (then executive director of the Christian Coalition) proposed helping Bob Dole's presidential candidacy by making the GOP's abortion plank less rigid via language acknowledging that the American public was not ready for an absolute abortion ban. And while the pro-life corps handed him his head for his pains, that's the position George W. Bush articulated in 2000 and never abandoned, his party platform notwithstanding. Moreover, the pro-life agenda became purely incrementalist--ranging from parental notification to banning the "partial-birth" abortion procedure.

What the Democrats are now signaling is that they are prepared to undertake policies that do more to reduce the number of abortions than the Republicans' incrementalist measures. For pro-lifers willing to sacrifice principle for results, it's a pretty good argument. Especially when they consider how little the Republican increments have achieved. This a.m. at 11, a conference call with the media will be held by the group of Catholics and evangelicals most supportive of the new language. Here they are:

§ Rev. Tony Campolo, Eastern University, author of The Red Letter Christians, and member on the Democratic Platform Committee

§ Rev. Joel Hunter, Senior Pastor, Northland Church (Orlando, FL), author of A New Kind of Conservative and former President of the Christian Coalition

§ Dr. Lisa Cahill, J. Donald Monan, S.J., Professor of Theology at Boston College

§ Douglas Kmiec, Chair & Professor of Law at Pepperdine University, and the former Dean of the The Catholic University Law School

§ Chris Korzen, Executive Director of Catholics United and author of A Nation For All

§ Rev. Jim Wallis, Founder and CEO of Sojourners, the largest network of progressive Christians in the United States, and best-selling author of God’s Politics and The Great Awakening (HarperOne 2008)

Barna has a new survey of likely presidential voters, and one arresting take-away is that evangelicals only support McCain over Obama by 39 percent to 37 percent. Before getting all amazed, be aware that Barna has Obama up by nine percentage points overall (43-34), twice the margin of other non-tracking polls but smaller than the 50-35 Barna had in June. Still, the evangelical numbers are striking.

That said, what Barna wants us to understand is that the people most pollsters consider to be evangelicals (those who self-identify as "evangelicals") are a whole lot more numerous than the people Barna considers evangelicals (those who take a bunch of positions on Jesus and Scripture--you can check them out at the link above). And while the former comprise 40 percent of the population, the latter comprise only eight percent. And the latter support McCain over Obama by 61 percent to 17 percent.

Frankly, I don't know exactly what to make of this. It's no surprise that what we might call the hard-core evangelical vote is going to McCain by a Bushian margin. But other surveys, using the other standard, show nothing like an even split among evangelicals. Barna's an evangelical who always looks at the evangelical glass as half-empty; and so may be making some assumptions that pump up the amount of (what he considers) pseudo-evangelical support for Obama--such as a very, very big turnout among African Americans. It would be nice if the folks at Pollster took a close look at how he operates.

Readers of this blog will know that it has taken a rather dyspeptic view of Mike Huckabee's incarnation as Republican Party shill. When Alaska Rep. Don ("Bridge to Nowhere")Young is one of your designated faves, you've got a lot to answer for, in my book. Equally, there's been nothing on Huckabee's blog to indicate any interest in promoting the mildly progressive, anti-Club For Growth point of view that distinguished his presidential candidacy last Fall.

Now comes an interview with Sojourners' Jim Wallis in which Huck talks the progressive talk again, including a straight-up smackdown of the GOP's anti-tax, anti-government wing--which he terms "libertarian." As in:

One of the things I’m frustrated about is that Republicans have been infiltrated by hardcore libertarians. Traditional Republicans don’t hate all forms of government. They just want it to be efficient and effective. They recognize that it has a place and a role.

Growing numbers of people in the Republican Party are just short of anarchists in the sense that they basically say, “Just cut government and cut taxes.” They don’t understand that if you do that, there are certain consequences that do not help problems. It exacerbates them...

One of the most refreshing things beginning to happen is that there’s movement within the evangelical world, that people are accepting social responsibility as a vital part of the gospel presentation. I find that delightful! The old days of “get saved, go to church, go to Heaven, and that’s it” have become eclipsed by “get your hands dirty, this is a world of hurt, you’ve got to help it.” That’s a much healthier assessment of the gospel and how it relates to us.

Presumably setting his sights on 2012, Huck just seems to want to have it both ways.

As the McCain spin machine continues to beat up on Obama for his alleged messianic or prophetic pretensions (I say prophetic, Waldman says undeserved), the worry in a number of black quarters is that Obama is not prophetic enough--or more precisely, that his candidacy threatens to undermine the ability of black America to lift up its voice in that way. Writing about Tavis Smiley in last week's New Yorker, Kalefa Sanneh offers up this comment of Glenn Loury's (made in a TPM post after Obama's speech on race):

My fear is that, should Obama succeed with his effort to renegotiate the implicit American racial contract, then the prophetic African-American voice—which is occasionally strident and necessarily a dissident, outsider’s voice—could be lost to us forever.

“If Obama is president, it will no longer be tenable to go to the white community and say you’ve been victimized,” Artur Davis told me. “And I understand the poverty and the condition of black America and the 39 percent unemployment rate in some communities. I understand that. But if you go out to the country and say you’ve been victimized by the white community, while Barack Obama and Michelle and their kids are living in the White House, you will be shut off from having any influence.”

I was always deaf to the Edwards music--Gail Collins seems to me to have it about right. But I'm grateful that, in the Woodruff interview, he at least kept the religion down to the bare minimum: "In 2006 I told Elizabeth about the mistake, asked her for her forgiveness, asked God for his forgiveness." Sufficient unto the day.

Brody has interrupted his vacation to share the news flash that the McCain campaign is distributing a letter on his faith to "conservative grassroots groups" around the country. The letter consists of excerpts from his book, Faith of My Fathers. So what's the news? Other than the fact that the McCain campaign is revealed as feeling the need to be in touch with conservative religious folks on the subject of McCain's religion, I guess it's the introductory sentence:

Many of you have asked about John McCain's faith. John McCain is a strong Christian, but he believes that, in the context of the campaign, his faith is a personal issue.

CBS' Brian Goldsmith's interview of Southern Baptist Convention public affairs meister Richard Land is worth a read. Land's a political junkie, and loves the ins and outs of a campaign almost as much as that senator's son, Pat Robertson. Take-aways from the interview include: 1) a huge lack of excitement about John McCain; 2) only tepid support for the vice presidential chances of his fellow Southern Baptist, Mike Huckabee; 3) preoccupation with abortion over all other issues; 4) nary a mention of gay marriage; 5) a prediction that Obama will make no inroads in the evangelical vote; and last but not least, 6) an estimate that 15-20 percent of evangelicals would have a problem with Mitt Romeny as McCain's veep because of his Mormonism. Land likes Romney a lot, so far as I can tell. Last Fall, he proposed thinking of Mormonism as the Fourth Abrahamic Religion (after Judaism, Christianity, and Islam)--clearly as a way of reconciling evangelicals to Romney's candidacy. So if he thinks as many as one fifth of them would object to having Romney on the GOP ticket, that's a real estimate, and probably a pretty good one, as opposed to sneaky poor-mouthing of a guy he has no use for.

Rep. Steve Cohen's overwhelming 79-19 victory in Tennessee's ninth congressional district Democratic primary has got to warm the cockles of even the most cynical journalistic heart. Nikki Tinker's race- and Jew-baiting ads, designed to encourage voters in the majority-black district to choose one of their own, backfired with a vengeance, as Americans' rosiest accounts of ourselves say they should have.

It did seem that Cohen was headed for a big win regardless. A native Memphian who served many years in the state senate before being elected to Congress, he ran by all accounts an excellent campaign, and was well funded. Tinker was something of an outsider, born and raised in Alabama, and her ads were considered acts of desperation. Still, she had the support of black clergy in the district and money from EMILY's List. You never know what's going to happen.

So it's hard to avoid thinking that any inclination black voters in the district may have felt to base their choice solely on the importance of being represented by an African American was undermined by this year's spectacle of millions of white Democrats all over the country voting for the black guy. Lest anyone miss the point, there were the statements condemning the ads and the racial divisiveness they represented from both Barack Obama and the district's former congressman and sometime TN senatorial candidate, Harold Ford, Jr. In his victory remarks, Cohen himself pushed the point forward: "Memphis, Tennessee has shown CNN and The New York Times and MSNBC and everyone else that we are united, we are moving forward and we are a bellwether for what is going to happen in America when Barack Obama is elected president."

I remember spending a few days in Memphis just after the 1992 election reporting for the Atlanta Journal Constitution on a biracial grass roots organizing effort similar to the one Obama worked for in Chicago. While it had achieved some traction, there was no question that race relations remained a much tougher slog in Memphis than in Atlanta. The operative contrast was between the city that gave birth to Martin Luther King, Jr. and preserved his dream versus the city where he was assassinated and the dream seemed to gutter out. That's why I like this comment, affixed last night to the Commercial Appeal's story on Cohen's victory:

Congratulations Cohen and as a lifelong Memphian and 9th district resident everyone in Memphis made me proud tonight. This proves that Memphians will not be fooled again by the racial politics that was played by some of our pimp pastors and Tinker supporters and that sought to destroy Cohen's character and mischaracterize his votes. This election clearly brought out the worst in the Tinker camp but residents and fellow citizens you brought out the best and showed what can happen when out city and district learn to work together and undestand each other. Cohen has been very responsive in his first term and deserved to be reelected the only compelling reason that was ever given to vote for Tinker was because she was black . A few people vote that way and are convinced skin is what matter not what a person will or have done. I hope as an African American that this is a new day in politics and King's dream becomes a reality

Over at GOM, Dan Gilgoff has a nice dissection of Barack Obama's short pre-Saddleback "on Faith" essay for Time, showing how well calculated it is to appeal to evangelicals. I agree that it hits a lot of evangelical buttons, though not, perhaps, the most important one. It says nothing about his personal born-again experience--something he has written and talked about elsewhere. Perhaps that would remind people too much of that pesky Trinity church he used to belong to. Or perhaps it would strike non-evangelicals as, well, just a little too evangelical. And then there's this remark: "The next President will have to lead Americans of all religious and secular backgrounds and will navigate a range of tough values issues." The evangelicals Dan thinks Obama is directing his appeal to don't tend to regard the values issues as in themselves tough, but rather see the tough part as actually treading the straight and narrow. So I think we should at least entertain the possibility that this is what Obama actually believes.

As for John McCain, his essay sticks almost exclusively to a vision of faith as something that sustains a person in extremis. He tells the story he always tells about the Christian guard who loosened his bonds when he was a prisoner of war, and throws in one about his father praying for him at the time. There's a short paragraph about caring for the least among us (with a little pro-life pitch), but it's sandwiched in, in a kind of obligatory way. Then he returns to the importance of religion in the "dark" and "solitary" places. I'm inclined to think that that's the real deal when it comes to McCain and religion, and why shouldn't it be? Being a prisoner of war seems to have been the defining experience of his life. That the McCain faith has real resonance for many people I don't doubt. But it's far from the guiding of one's choices in daily affairs that tends to be what Americans are looking for when they seek to know how a candidate's faith will inform his conduct in office. The contrast with Obama couldn't be greater.

Today's Quinnipiac poll of New Yorkers has McCain winning Catholics by the relatively hefty margin of 54-40 and trailing Obama among Jews by the relatively small margin of 37-60. In 2004, Bush carried the Catholic vote in the Empire State by only 51-48, while Kerry carried the Jewish vote by a whopping 80-18. Yet for all that, Obama actually leads overall by a slightly larger margin, 57-36, than Kerry carried the state (59-40). Quinnipiac doesn't give numbers for other religious groupings, but there aren't a lot of options: Obama makes up the difference by outpolling Kerry among Protestants (including African-American ones), religious "others" (Muslims, Hindus, etc.), and those who when asked "What is your religion, if any?" say, "None."

The latest CBS poll has white evangelicals choosing McCain over Obama 58 percent to 24 percent, with 15 percent undecided. If the undecided break 50-50, that would give Obama nearly one-third of the white evangelical vote--a big improvement over Kerry's performance in 2004. For him, opportunity knocks. McCain, by contrast, has got to ratchet up his evangelical outreach. By the Republican Convention he should have locked up this part of the GOP base, and as of now he hasn't.

Today's NYT article on abortion and the Catholic vote by John Broder is pretty inadequate. The back-and-forth on abortion in Democratic presidential politics is OK, but the account of Catholic electoral behavior leaves a good deal to be desired. For starters, Broder does not differentiate between Latino and white Catholics, the former as solid a Democratic constituency as exists, the latter the swingiest of swing ones. This would help make some sense of the table of swing states (unfortunately not included in the online version), which shows the vote differential among Catholics in the 2004 presidential election ranging from a 27-point margin for Bush in Virginia to a 25-point margin for Kerry in Washington state. Not that the white-Latino difference accounts for everything. Indeed, white Catholics dominate the Catholic vote in both Virginia and Washington state. If mostly white Catholic constituencies can vary by as much as 52 points from one state to another, there's a real question of whether there's such a thing as even a "white Catholic vote" in any meaningful sense.

Region counts for a lot here. Survey data shows, for example, that white Catholics in the South are a lot more conservative than white Catholics in the Pacific Northwest. (For those interested in the intersection of religion, region, and politics, I have to plug our new book, One Nation, Divisible.) But even within regions, the white Catholic vote can vary a good deal. In Michigan, John Kerry carried Catholics by one percentage point whereas next door in Ohio, Bush carried them by 11 points. Why? Because white Catholics in Michigan include a lot of East Europeans with union backgrounds in the auto industry, whereas Catholicism in Ohio is dominated by conservative small business types who trace their roots to Germany. Speaking of the Midwest, Broder quotes Brookings' William Galston as saying that while Catholics constitute a quarter of the voting population nationally, they live "in disproportionate numbers in the swing states of the Midwest." Well, no. The swing states of the Midwest, as the Times' chart shows, feature Catholics in numbers exactly proportional to the country as a whole. OK, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota are a few points above average, Missouri and Iowa a few points below, and Ohio just average. (It's in the Northeast and the Southwest where Catholics constitute a disproportionately large share of the population.) Um, and in those Midwestern states where Catholics have the biggest demographic hand to play, Kerry won.

So yes, Virginia, showing a more pro-life-friendly side may help Democrats peel off some Catholic votes here, there, and the next place. And in a close election, a few percentage points worth of Catholics in a swing state could well make the difference. But there's no religious grouping in the country--not evangelical or mainline Protestants, not Jews or Mormons, more subject to the vagaries of geography and ethnicity than Catholics.

Amidst this year's charges and countercharges of whether or not someone's playing the race card, it's worth being reminded, I suppose, of what open bigotry in electioneering looks like. And so we have Tennessee's ninth congressional district in Memphis, where Nikki Tinker is challenging first termer Steve Cohen, who happens to be Jewish. And very liberal. TN 9 is the only majority black district in the country that is currently represented by a white person. In the past week Tinker has put up ads seeking to tie Cohen to the Ku Klux Klan (for opposing a plan to remove the remains of Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forest from a Memphis park) and charging him with hostility to Christianity ("While he's in our churches, clapping his hands and tapping his feet ... he's the only senator who thought our kids shouldn't be allowed to pray in school."). A pamphlet circulating in the district earlier was overtly anti-Semitic. Charging a Jew with supporting the rabidly anti-Semitic Klan is pretty funny, really.

The Commercial Appeal, which has been on the case, condemned the Ku Klux ad. Politico has led the way on the Christian ad, which was taken off YouTube by the Tinker campaign after the story blew up yesterday. EMILY's List, the liberal feminist PAC that was supporting Tinker, has dialed back its support. Tinker was far behind in a May poll, but I can find nothing more recent. The vote's today.

Update: Obama weighs in, calling ads "incendiary." That's not a good thing.

According to the latest Time poll, 40 percent of Americans rate "so-called 'values issues,' such as abortion and gay marriage" as "extremely" or "very" important in voting for president. As opposed to 95 percent for the nation's economy, 85 percent for Iraq, 79 percent for terrorism, 78 percent for health care, 76 percent for gas prices at the pump, 72 percent for taxes, 57 percent for immigration, 51 percent for global warming, 50 percent for reducing world poverty, and 41 percent for the AIDS epidemic in Africa. In other words, among all the issues inquired about, "values" comes in last. Meanwhile, on whether gay and lesbian couples should be allowed to marry, the split is 47 percent for and 47 percent against. On a federal constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, it's 58 percent against, 35 percent for.

WSJ's got the story on the resignation of Mazen Asbahi as Obama's coordinator for Muslims and Arab-Americans. The problem?

In 2000, Mr. Asbahi briefly served on the board of Allied Assets Advisors Fund, a Delaware-registered trust. Its other board members at the time included Jamal Said, the imam at a fundamentalist-controlled mosque in Illinois.

"I served on that board for only a few weeks before resigning as soon as I became aware of public allegations against another member of the board," Mr. Asbahi said in his resignation letter. "Since concerns have been raised about that brief time, I am stepping down...to avoid distracting from Barack Obama's message of change."

OK, it's old news, but since Ted Olson over at Christianity Today's political blog wants to keep up the chatter about the McCain campaign's "He is the One" videoswipe at Obama, here's my two cents. Yes, the Matrix reference and the opening do suggest messiahship, and since the ad is anti-Obama, it can be interpreted as saying that since he's not the real Messiah, he's a false messiah, ergo (for Christians) the Antichrist. But I don't buy it. This is not about Obama as Messiah but Obama as Moses, the prophet who led the Israelites to the Promised Land. And it doesn't claim that he's a false prophet (allowing as how he "may be" the One), but only that he's "not ready to lead." Even prophets have to grow up and mature, right?

Is it funny? To paraphrase Obama on Hillary Clinton, I'd say it's funny enough. Does it hit its mark? Sure. There's no question that Obama sometimes sounds as though he's come down from the mountain, and for sure he's got the throngs of followers. Does trafficking in this kind of ridicule reflect well on John McCain? I don't think so. It's the sort of mashup that ought to have come from somewhere other than the McCain campaign. As a bona fide ad, with the candidate's approval affixed to it, it would proclaim even more loudly than it already does: Gravitas Deficit.

A few days ago, the Washington Times took out after white evangelicals for "old-fashioned bigotry" in opposing Mitt Romney as John McCain's running mate.

White evangelicals need a history lesson. Protestants began to flee religious persecution in England in droves in the 16th and 17th centuries; they were especially victimized by the provision that there was a religious test in order to hold office. Evangelicals in America would do well to rise above the same kind of discrimination their ancestors were once victimized by.

Mr. Romney has a long record of serving America. If his service has been good enough for Massachusetts, why is it not good enough for white evangelicals across America? Also, in the battle to win more and more adherents to the social conservative causes they hold dear, it is in the interest of white evangelicals to recruit as many allies as possible - regardless of their religious convictions. Thus, these evangelicals would do well to be tolerant and work toward broadening the conservative base, rather than upholding barriers based on religious bigotry.

Be not decieved; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.

The Chicago Sun-Times' Cathleen Falsani, who's covered the Obama religion beat more thoroughly than anyone, responds to Cal Thomas' two-month-old argument (based on comments by Obama in an interview with Falsani) that Obama is not a true Christian. Yes he is, Falsani says. This is the kind of debate that will make most Americans squeamish, falling as it does squarely into the penumbra cast by the constitutional ban on religious tests for office. Thomas begins by noting that the Obama campaign "plans to strike at the heart of the Republican base by attempting to woo Evangelical Christians and Roman Catholics to his side." And concludes with this:

Obama can call himself anything he likes, but there is a clear requirement for one to qualify as a Christian and Obama doesn’t meet that requirement. One cannot deny central tenets of the Christian faith, including the deity and uniqueness of Christ as the sole mediator between God and Man and be a Christian. Such people do have a label applied to them in Scripture. They are called “false prophets.”

The Obama campaign has appointed its national coordinator for Muslim affairs and it's not (as originally reported) Hiam Nawas, but a Chicago lawyer named Mazen Asbahi. Asbahi graduated from Northwestern Law School a dozen years ago, and has acquired his legal chops at some of the toniest law firms in the Second City. He's also a practicing Muslim (see August 30, 2007 article in Chicago Daily Herald) and a player in the American Muslim community. (See his service on the board of directors of the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding.) He has been involved with the Nawawi Foundation, founded in Chicago in 2000, which describes itself as "born out of a need to provide relevant, meaningful Islamic teachings to America’s growing first and second generation Muslims – teachings firmly rooted in authentic scholarship and taught in a way that is dynamic and applicable to the modern world." He's fluent in Arabic.

In the Obama campaign, Mazen will have the job of coordinating with the Arab as well as the Muslim communities. Politico's Ben Smith calls this "a tricky double portfolio, as most American Muslims aren't Arabs, and many Arab Americans aren't Muslim." This, however, fails to grasp the crucial political point, which is Michigan. Asbahi went to the University of Michigan (graduating summa) and has good connections with the Arab/Muslim community in that state. In 2006 he eulogized a pillar of that community, Syed Salman (in a publication that also includes a tribute from the Michigan area director of the American Jewish Committee).

Michigan is the critical swing state that also happens to be the one state where the Arab-American vote could make a difference. The epicenter of that community is Dearborn, which comprises many Muslim Arabs but even more Christian Arabs. Look for Asbahi to be spending a lot of time in Dearborn.

From the fourth draft of the Anglican bishops' Reflections:

103. The ordination of an openly partnered homosexual bishop and the open blessing of same sex relationships has had many negative results including:...In some places the church is ridiculed as the "gay church", so membership is lost.

Last week's Quinnipiac survey of Floridians, Ohians, and Pennsylvanians, provides some confirmation of my hypothesis that evangelicals may be dividing along regional lines. In Florida, McCain runs ahead of Obama by the usual GOP margin of three-to-one (71 percent to 23 percent), whereas in Ohio and Pennsylvania, the margins are only two-to-one (62-31 and 60-32 respectively). Meanwhile, Jews in Florida--the one state where they're likely to make a difference and the state where they're considered most likely to trend McCainwards--show stronger than (I would have) suspected support for Obama: 65 percent to 29 percent.

Update: The Forward on McCain's Jewish outreach. Therein, Eric Cantor, the only Jewish Republican in the House of Representatives, makes a less than true statement; to wit: “The polls are also showing that more than 32% of Jewish voters support McCain. We know that for the Democrats, they never had a president who got less than 70% of the Jewish vote.” In fact they did have such a president. Once. In 1916, Woodrow Wilson was re-elected with 55 percent of the Jewish vote.

I'm still catching up from last week, and in the process this piece by the Washington Times' Ralph Z. Hallow caught my eye. The questions it raises have to do with the extent of evangelical antipathy to Mitt Romney, and the degree to which it is based on anti-Mormonism or concerns about Romney's less than consistent record on abortion and gay rights. The answer may be that the alternatives are mutually reinforcing: Conservative evangelicals don't trust Romney because 1) they don't trust Mormons and 2) they think he's a flipflopper. The latest poop on the GOP Veepstakes (from Politico's Jonathan Martin) pairs Romney with MN Gov. Pawlenty as McCain's two "conventional" choices. (The alternative is to do something wacky like picking Joe Lieberman.) My sense is that, in the end, McCain will go conventional and steer clear of Romney. The evangelical base really matters a lot, and it really doesn't like Romney. Making him McCain's running mate and Republican presidential heir apparent will seem like the GOP white shoe establishment doubling down against religious conservatives.

Update: On the other hand, Friday's Zogby poll of likely voters by religion reports that whereas 46 percent of white evangelicals say that a Huckabee veep nod would make them more likely to vote for McCain (as opposed to 4 percent less likely), 34 percent say they would be more likely to vote for him if he choose Romney (as opposed to 10 percent who would be less likely. Not much of a differential, all things considered. If Lieberman were the guy, however, only 20 percent of white evangelicals would be more likely to vote for McCain, and 23 percent would be less likely. Fuggetaboutit, Joe.

Hal Lindsey, whose The Late Great Planet Earth was the premillennialist tract for the Jesus Freak generation, is still selling his premil patent medicine, and not very surprisingly the latest Sign of the Times is Barack Obama. Obama's not the Antichrist, according to Lindsey, but rather a sort of harbinger, maybe an antichristical John the Baptist, or perhaps just evidence that the World is Ready.

Latest from SUSA on Missouri: Regular attenders for McCain, 60-35. Occasionals for Obama, 57-35. Almost Nevers for Obama, 56-38. Since 55 percent of Show Me Staters claim to be regular attenders, that translates into a McCain lead of 49-44.

Note how the General Secretary of the National Council of Churches doesn't even make it into the top of the press release. O how the mighty have fallen.

David Gibson's speculation on John McCain's meeting with Denver archbishop Charles Chaput is worth a ponder. McCain may have his problems with evangelicals, but not conservative Catholics have, so far as I've seen, so much as cocked a snoot at him. To the contrary, they seem unfazed by his less than orthodox positions on stem cell research, for example. And through the primary season, he did very well among Catholic Republicans, who much preferred him to Mike Huckabee. With national elections continuing to turn very much on the voting behavior of white Catholics, there's every reason for McCain to make himself super agreeable to the up-and-coming Chaput.

Tom Perriello, the "common good" Catholic running for Congress in Virginia 5, succeeded in picking up one of the handful of endorsements that J Street is handing out in its maiden run. In response, Perriello made with the right phrase when dealing with a progressive Jewish endorsement:

As a national security consultant with experience in conflict resolution, I understand the importance of rededicating the U.S. to solutions in the Middle East that will ensure security for America and for our great partner, Israel. I also strongly believe that our foreign policy should reflect the traditional Jewish doctrine of tikkun olam – repairing the world – by working to stop genocide and establish justice around the world. I welcome the efforts of JStreetPAC and all those working to strengthen American diplomacy in achieving a two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinians, looking for comprehensive regional solutions, and achieving a global community that reflects the rule of law and the highest ideals of these two great nations.

Catching up a little but on the week's news, I note that Brody's hawked his Lieberman interview in a series of posts. In one, Connecticut's junior senator, in the course of defending his "dear friend" Pastor Hagee's Holocaust remarks (and I'm not going to criticize the defense), rather astonishingly declares:

I don't agree with everything that John Hagee has ever said or done. I can safely say that Pastor Hagee doesn't agree with everything I've said or done. But we agree on some big things. We agree on our basic religious beliefs. We believe in the God of the Bible. We believe the Bible is the inspired truth from God and all that comes with it, the God of creation, the God of revelation, the god of redemption and salvation.