September 2008 Archives

From the latest bit of Couric interview:

She took issue with news reports that one of [the churches she attends], The Wasilla Bible Church, sponsored a conference where gays could be made straight through prayer.

Palin: Well, it matters though, Katie, when the media gets it wrong. It frustrates Americans who are just trying to get the facts and … be able to make up their mind on, about a person's values. So it does matter.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Gov. Sarah Palin's church is promoting a conference that promises to convert gays into heterosexuals through the power of prayer.

"You'll be encouraged by the power of God's love and His desire to transform the lives of those impacted by homosexuality," according to the insert in the bulletin of the Wasilla Bible Church, where Palin has prayed for about six years.

Latest ABC/WaPo poll shows 47 percent of white Catholics for McCain, 46 percent for Obama.

Pat Oliphant's cartoon, printed last Wednesday on Washingtonpost.com, received criticism for being offensive, particularly from some 350 Pentecostals. Debra Howell, who appeased such responses in her column, continued the discussion with a more general piece on the politics of cartoons. In response, a Getreligion post by Mollie pointed out that not only is the cartoon offensive to Pentecostals, but that "Howell neglected to mention in her lengthy column was that Oliphant was so ignorant of Palin’s religious views that he didn’t even know that she is no longer Pentecostal." Actually, it's not entirely clear what Palin's religious views are at this point in time. In 2002, she did leave the Assemblies of God church that belonged to for almost all of her life and joined a nearby Bible church, but she remains a "friend' of her old church and is reported to attend an Assemblies of God church when she's in Juneau.

Looking through PPP's latest North Carolina poll, I came across the following. On the question of whether the choice of Biden made them more or less likely to vote for Obama, men said less by 32-29, while women said more by 32-24. On the question of whether the choice of Palin made them more or less likely to vote for McCain, men said more by 42-39, while women said less by 43-35. In each case, there's an 11-point "cross-gender" gender gap. I thought the Palin choice was supposed to appeal to women of the Walmart variety, of whom there is no shortage in North Carolina. In fact, it's the NASCAR men who go for her. Wonder why.

P.S. Oh, and of the 9 percent of Tar Heels who said the most important issue for them was "moral and family values," 86 percent preferred McCain; 9 percent, Obama.

GoM's got an interesting back-and-forth between Obama-supporting pro-life Catholic Doug Kmiec and National Right to Life Legislative Director Douglas Johnson. There's no shortage of careful parsing here--a bit of a heavy slog, but that's in the nature of the abortion debate between professionals.

So for comic relief, check out this screed from Randall Terry, "Founder, Operation Rescue" (as he now styles himself) who, having been booted out of that organization and his Protestant church for all manner of immoral activities, went over to Rome a couple of years ago. Terry claims that Kmiec's assertion that "it violates no aspect of Catholic teaching for a Catholic Voter to endorse, support, or vote for Barack Obama" is "theological [sic] and morally false." Terry asserts: No Catholic may in good conscience vote for Obama, because of his support for Roe vs. Wade." Top that, Donohue!

Terry evidently finds the U.S. Catholic bishops wanting in this regard, inasmuch as their 2007 document, Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship, supplies sufficient grounds for a Catholic like Kmiec to justify voting for Obama:

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

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

The Democratic National Committee has wasted little time putting together an attack ad on McCain and gambling. Brody thinks it could work with evangelicals, and on such matters his opinion is worth paying attention to. I have my doubts though. While It's generally believed that reports on George W. Bush's drunk driving hurt him with evangelicals in 2000, McCain is a much better known quantity, and most evangelicals have already made up their minds who they're voting for. But as always in a close election, a percentage point here or there in a swing state can make a big difference.

Jay Sekulow understands that the "remedy" for the IRS rule against political endorsements from the pulpit is legislative. Why doesn't the Alliance Defense Fund?

Update: Here's today's AP story on the initiative. Melissa Rogers is seriously on the case, and the best place I know for your one-stop shopping. What's odd about this whole exercise is that it comes at a time when the country, including religious conservatives, is growing more critical of mixing religion and politics.

OK, the touchstone of the narrative of John McCain and the religious right is his angry denunciation, following the 2000 South Carolina primary, of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as "agents of intolerance." But now, thanks to Jo Becker and Don Van Natta Jr.'s fascinating investigative piece on John McCain and the gambling industry in today's NYT, we learn the sequel--and something more about the underworld of Republican inside politics in the Bush-Delay years.

As anyone who has followed the Abramoff scandal even slightly knows, the Great Game had to do with playing one Indian tribe off against another. Tribes that wanted gaming licenses hired lobbyists to get them in, while other tribes, feeling their business threatened, hired lobbyists to keep them out. From the moral values standpoint, a politician could claim to be opposing gaming interests even as he was taking money to protect gaming interests. Sweet.

Now it seems--and truth to tell, the Times has the goods--that McCain has been playing his own version of the Great Game. As chairman of the key Senate committee, he learned what the Abramoff gang was up to from those it had ganged up on, and quickly adopted the stance of Senate Savonarola, investigating the corruption (I'm shocked, shocked!) even unto its innermost parts. And then, having gotten mad, came the chance to get really, really even.

That's because it turned out that right in the middle of the hanky-panky were Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed, paladins of the religious right and the guys who put the smear on him in South Carolina.

“It was like hitting pay dirt,” said one associate of Mr. McCain’s who had consulted with the senator’s office on the investigation. “And face it — McCain and Weaver [John Weaver, McCain's chief political strategist] were maniacal about Ralph Reed and Norquist. They were sticking little pins in dolls because those guys had cost him South Carolina.”

It now becomes clearer why the McCain campaign went so hysterically after the Times last week. The necessary response calls were being made, and the campaign knew what was coming down the pike. The last thing it needs is for the country to take another close look under the Abramoff rock, not with the Maverick as one of the creatures crawling around.

That McCain opened with offering our prayers for Ted Kennedy was about as far religion was brought into the debate last night. Beliefnet's Paul Raushenbush feels a little perturbed that both the candidates left religion out of foreign policy. For Raushenbush, neither candidate seemed to really acknowledge the influence of religion on global politics. But he considered the absence of the buzz term "Radical Islam" a refreshing change in campaign vocabulary.

The Gray Lady weighs in on Pulpit Freedom Sunday and, surprise of surprises, takes the dimmest of views. But while the editorial makes a couple of important points, it includes this odd statement: "The tax code mandate they are challenging has protected the separation of church and state by denying tax deductions for contributions to charitable organizations that engage in secular campaigning." But the mandate is not really about separation of church and state, and it does not prevent religious institutions from engaging in "secular" campaigning--if that means, say, advocating passage of this or that piece of legislation. Rather, it says that any tax-exempt (501 c 3) organization, secular or religious, cannot engage in partisan political activity--activity on behalf of a particular party or candidate for office. The principle at stake is what might be called the separation of non-profits and political partisanship.

As for the Alliance Defense Fund, it backs its position with the following bogus argument:

The bottom line is that no enforcement agency of the federal government should be telling a pastor what he can or cannot say from his pulpit about the Bible and his church's teaching on the issues of the hour--even if the pastor's sermon applies Screipture and church teaching to candidates and elections. Such agencies certainly cannot condition tax-exempt status--a status churches have always been constitutionally guaranteed since our founding--on the surrencder of cherished First Amendment rights.

ADF has the U.S. Constitution and the weight of American history on its side. Those who oppose the Pulpit Initiative have yet to make one constitutionally-derived argument against it. It is ironic that they laud the "separation of church and state" in opposition to the Pulpit Initiative, but by opposing the initiative, are asking for continued government control and censorshipo of a pastor's sermon. The pulpit is no place for government regulators.

Andrew Sullivan, who is not exactly mincing words these days, calls Sarah Palin an "unqualified fundamentalist liar." It's a commonplace that an atheist cannot be elected president of the United States. Can a fundamentalist be elected veep?

Rich Cizik is still carrying the torch for big-tent evangelicalism, in an interesting Q. and A. with GOM.

Melissa Rogers catches the Alliance Defense Fund in full blink mode on its forthcoming Pulpit Initiative.

The Anchorage Chabad rabbi thinks Obama would be as good for the Jews as Palin.

And last but anything but least, Bill Donohue is defending Palin from witchcraft charges. Well, nobody's charged Palin herself with being a witch, but she's been ridiculed for having received a prayer to protect her from the assaults of witches from that Kenyan pastor, who can, according to Donohue, be forgiven for laying on the protection. Why? Because "[w]itchcraft is a sad reality in many parts of Africa, resulting in scores of deaths in Kenya over the past two decades." Donohue believes witches are killing people in Kenya? Maybe the League should fedex some of its copies of the Malleus Maleficarum down to Nairobi.

God-o-Meter reported yesterday that Obama's faith folks had backed out of a scheduled lunchtime debate in DC with opposite numbers on the McCain side. (Hey, wasn't it the McCain side that was supposed to be suspending its campaign?) GOM quoted at length from a statement by the Family Research Council, which wanted everyone to know about this apparent act of bad faith by the Obamas. The scheduled moderator, Rev. Rob Schenck, was quoted as saying: "Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean assured me...that his party would do everything possible to constructively engage Evangelicals, traditional Catholics, and other moral conservatives... Barack Obama has made similar promises. They did a couple of high-profile media events, but it appears they were not serious at a grassroots level."

The Obama campaign did not deny that it had backed out, and I've got no inside poop on why it did so. But Schenck's a right-wing partisan and pro-life agitprop artist who has 1) sought to prove that Obama is a secret Muslim; and 2) called Obama's Christian faith "woefully deficient." Rick Warren was not quite the honest broker he held himself out to be at the Saddleback forum last month. If I'd been in the Obama camp, I wouldn't have showed up for this debate either, not with Schenck in the chair.

The latest CBS/NYT poll, which has Obama ahead 47-42, shows McCain leading among white Catholics 48-41. In 2004, Bush won them over Kerry by almost double that margin, 56-43. In 2000, Bush took white Catholics by seven points, 52-45. Obama's deficit is now identical to Gore's. It's worth noting as well that Obama trails McCain among all white voters by the nearly identical margin of 41-49. It increasingly seems to be the case that white Catholics are the normative group for whites as a whole nationwide.

The American Jewish Committee's annual survey of Jewish opinion, taken Sept. 8-21, has Obama up over McCain 57 percent to 30 percent. Apportioning the undecideds, that's 65-35--higher than I'm predicting but not by a lot. The survey period includes McCain's current high water mark; he'd be doing a few points worse if the entire survey were taken in the past few days. As expected, Jewish voters turn out to heartily approve Obama's choice of Joe Biden (73-15), and disapprove of John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin (54-37). Palin's numbers seem unlikely to get any better; I'd guess worse. The Orthodox love McCain, supporting him at a 78 percent clip; but they constitute only eight percent of the community. Just a bit more than a quarter of the others support him. Jewish question of the day: Will Sarah Silverman move the needle?

Max Blumenthal, scourge of the religious right, has come up with a Wasilla Assembly of God video of a Kenyan pastor, Thomas Murthee, laying hands on Sarah Palin prior to her gubernatorial run in 2005, praying that God make a way for her in politics on a number of fronts, including by protecting her from "every from of witchcraft" (which perhaps is more common in Kenya than in metro Anchorage, but who knows?). Blumenthal says he managed to videotape an appearance of Murthee at the church a few days ago, and promises a posting of it shortly. Meanwhile, Kos and Olbermann picked up on the old recording yesterday, and so it looks as though we're due for another round of speculation about the Faith of Palin.

Will Palin permit herself to be engaged in a discussion about her religious beliefs before the election? Such that someone could ask her, for example, whether she shares Pastor Murthee's wish that America's schools be filled with "tongue-talking, devil-casting" children rather than little followers of Buddha or Muhammad? Or why she (sort of) left the Wasilla Assembly of God after nearly 40 years? Or just what her views of the role of religion in public life are? I'm not holding my breath.

"THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from putting their country first; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and votes of man and woman. A credit crunch, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the worse the polls, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: Remember that, ye subprime lenders. It is dearness only that gives every thing its value: 700 billion? Why not 700 trillion? Heaven knows, not I, how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as THE PRESIDENCY should not be highly rated. My opponent, with the leadership of Congress to enforce his tyranny, has declared that he has a right not only to DEBATE but to FORCE me to do so; and if being bound in that manner, is not slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon earth. Even the expression is impious; for so unlimited a power can belong only to MYSELF."

The latest SUSA poll of Washington State serves as an excellent example of how having a big religiously indifferent population works for Obama. Regular worship attenders constitute 37 percent of the population and so do those who attend almost never. Occasional attenders weigh in at 25 percent. The latter divide evenly, 48-48, between McCain and Obama. The regulars break for McCain 54-43, while the almost-nevers break for Obama 68-28. Result: Obama leads in Washington State 54-43.

The news is beginning to sink in that Obama has not managed to change the voting preferences of the most religious white voters, evangelicals especially.To explain why Obama's "much vaunted religious outreach campaign...isn't working," pastordan has recourse to the idea that it's just very difficult to move socially conservative evangelicals. I agree with that, but it's also worth entertaining the possibility that "much vaunted" is not the same as "out there and effective." Go past the jump in Michelle Boorstein's WaPo story about politicking on Christian music stations and you see that the Obama folks have been well behind the McCain folks in that venue. And from what I can gather on my own, outside the orbit of religious progressives, the Obama religious ground game with white Christians has, going back to the primaries, just not been that good. Yes, it's hard to move values voters. But it's harder if you're relying mostly on smoke and mirrors.

According to the latest Post/ABC poll, over the past two weeks Obama has gone from two points down to 9 points up (47-49 to 52-43). The WaPo headline attributes the shift to the economy, which is now the top concern of 50 percent of respondents, up from 37 percent. And, indeed, Obama's edge on handling the economy has jumped nine points. But here's what I'd be most worried about if I were McCain. Two weeks ago, respondents thought he was more honest and trustworthy than Obama by a 44-38 margin. In the current poll, Obama leads 47-36. Straight talk has always been McCain's stock in trade. The stock's down, a lot.

Barry Kosmin has posted the preliminary profile of America's religious "Nones" from the new American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS II), including the finding that the proportion of Nones now identifying as Republicans has sunk to 12 percent.

The Interfaith Alliance is taking on the Alliance Defense Fund's Pulpit Freedom Initiative with a clergy petition drive swearing off endorsements from the pulpit.

As Congress ponders what to do to get the country out of its financial mess, and even considers some consequences to impose upon those malefactors of great wealth who brought us to this pretty pass, it may be instructive to consider the punishment that Dante imagined for the greedy--the avaricious on the one hand and the spendthrift on the other--whom he consigned to Hell's fourth circle.

Thus we descended into the fourth hollow, taking more of the
woeful bank that gathers in the evil of the whole universe. Ah,
Justice of God! Who heapeth up so many new travails and penalties
as I saw? And why doth our sin so waste us? As doth the wave,
yonder upon Charybdis, which is broken on that which it
encounters, so it behoves that here the people counterdance.

Here saw I people more than elsewhere many, and from one side and
the other with great howls rolling weights by force of chest.
They struck against each other, and then just there each turned,
rolling backward, crying, "Why keepest thou?" and "Why flingest
thou away?" Thus they turned through the dark circle on either
hand to the opposite point, still crying out their opprobrious
verse; then each, when he had come through his half circle,
wheeled round to the other joust.

And I, who had my heart well-nigh pierced through, said, "My
Master, now declare to me what folk is this, and if all these
tonsured ones on our left were clerks."

And he to me, "All of these were so asquint in mind in the first
life that they made no spending there with measure. Clearly
enough their voices bay it out, when they come to the two points
of the circle where the contrary sin divides them. These were
clerks who have no hairy covering on their head, and Popes and
Cardinals, in whom avarice practices its excess."

And I, "Master, among such as these I ought surely to recognize
some who were polluted with these evils."

And he to me, "Vain thought thou harborest; the undiscerning life
that made them foul, to all recognition now makes them dim.
Forever will they come to the two buttings; these will rise from
the sepulchre with closed fist, and these with shorn hair.
Ill-giving and ill-keeping have taken from them the fair world,
and set them to this scuffle; such as it is, I adorn not words
for it. Now canst thou, son, see the brief jest of the goods that
are committed unto Fortune, for which the human race so scramble;
for all the gold that is beneath the moon, or that ever was, of
these weary souls could not make a single one repose."

Last week's letter from Archbishop John Favalora turning thumbs down on the Alliance Defense Fund's Pulpit Freedom Initiative is getting some deserved attention from the likes of Melissa Rogers and Streetprophets. The letter is notable for the way it calls attention to the complexity of both public issues and the Catholic Church's approach to them. ADF's call for opposition to those candidates who "do not align themselves and their positions with the scriptural truth" harks back to the ancient Protestant claim of reliance on Scripture alone. Favalora makes short work of it.

Impressive numbers (51-45) for Obama out of Virginia, including those showing him trailing McCain by only 11 points among frequent worship attenders. Among the less frequent, the gap is over 20 points. This ain't your grandfather's Dominion.

As of today, some 400 rabbis have signed on with a new organization called Rabbis for Obama. Never before in American history have rabbis gotten together in this way to endorse a presidential candidate, according to Brandeis's Jonathan Sarma, and he should know. JTA's got the story.

What seems to have driven the rabbis to take this step is the campaign of viral anti-Obama emails targeted at Jewish voters. Their letter's penultimate paragraph reads:

We are fully aware that a smear campaign against Senator Obama has been waged in the Jewish community, and we feel it is our duty as Jewish leaders to fight for the truth and against Lashon Hara. Senator Obama has been viciously attacked using innuendoes, rumors, and guilt by association, and we urge our fellow American Jews to judge Senator Obama based on his own record and the clear statements he has made about his personal beliefs and principles. Continuing efforts to defame him and distort his record help perpetuate a deeply disturbing political process in our country.

In this regard, it's worth noting the complaint of Matt Brooks, executive director of the Republican Coalition, to JTA: “It's irresponsible and unprofessional as rabbis to give a hechsher in accusing us of Lashon Hara.” In fact, the rabbis made no such accusation; Brooks claimed the charge of "guilt by association" referred to the Coalition's linking of Obama to his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. But the emails have asserted far more noxious associations than Wright. And last week's quasi-push poll sponsored by the Coalition traded in half-truths and innuendo. So maybe it was Brooks' guilty conscience speaking.

In any event, the rabbis make a point of saying that they are speaking as individuals, not "from the pulpit"; they are identified by place of residence, not synagogue. Any synagogue member, of course, can easily go on line and find out if her rabbi has signed on. I doubt there'll be many surprises.

I've been thinking some more about the following passage from Nicholas Kristof's column this morning:

John Green, of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, says that about 10 percent of Americans believe we may be in the Book of Revelation’s “end times” and are on the lookout for the Antichrist. A constant barrage of e-mail and broadcasts suggest that Mr. Obama just may be it.

Nicholas Kristof argues in a sharp column in today's NYT that the underground campaign to make Barack Obama into a Muslim serves as a workaround:

What is happening, I think, is this: religious prejudice is becoming a proxy for racial prejudice. In public at least, it’s not acceptable to express reservations about a candidate’s skin color, so discomfort about race is sublimated into concerns about whether Mr. Obama is sufficiently Christian.

Is the underground campaign despicable? Absolutely. Does it serve to "otherize" Obama? No question. When it comes to black leaders, the stereotypical other is the angry reverend who stands up there trying to make you feel guilty for stuff that happened to his people a long time ago. Obama refuses to fit that mold.

The former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, gave (http://www.courant.com/news/education/hc-blair0920.artsep20,0,5756992.story) an introductory hello to a multitude at Yale's Woolsey Hall on Friday, initiating the beginning of a new chapter in his interdisciplinary career: now as "Professor Blair".

Blair is set to teach a course on "Faith and Globalization Initiative" to a mixture of carefully selected graduates and undergraduates at Yale Divinity School. The course stands, not only to grant Yale a little more prestige, but also as a step forward for Tony Blair's Faith Foundation (http://tonyblairfaithfoundation.org/).

Both Blair's course and his Foundation aim at acknowledging the importance of religion in public life and at improving an understanding of, and the positive interactions between, the major religions. With Globalization in mind, unlike Romney (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16981132) and the majority of presidential candidates, Blair refreshingly acknowledges the important presence of Non-Abrahamic religions within the global community.

But wait? I thought religion was supposed to be dead in Europe? And maybe that's why he's not teaching there. Whatever the case, this recently Catholicized household name is doing his part to blur the lines between religion and politics: just like his political counterparts in the American Presidential Campaigns.

Via Michael Paulson, John Green tells religion writers that the more things change (re: faith-based voting patterns), the more they've stayed the same.

Palin as the stealth candidate of America's fundamentalist elite--conspiracy theory or just connecting the dots?

Barry Kosmin of Trinity's Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture has been down in Washington at the Religion Newswriters Association talking about some of the preliminary results of our new American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS). Yes, the sample's bigger than Pew's big study, but who's counting?

Politically, the most interesting news is that the number of religious "Nones"--those who, when you ask them what is their religion if any, say none--has, since the 2001 ARIS, held steady or slightly increased, to 15 percent; and that the number of Nones identifying as Republicans has dropped from 19 percent to 12 percent. They've not gone to the Democrats, who hold steady at 30 percent, but to Independent status. But my guess, based on other polls, is that they're in fact voting Democratic.

Ambinder asks where Joe Lieberman is these days? Could it be that the disappointed McCain veep hopeful is so disgusted by the choice of Sarah Palin that he's fallen off the Straight-Talk Express?

God-o-meter reports that the Obama campaign is crowing about yesterday's Quinnipiac poll showing white Catholics breaking for Obama 51 percent to 42 percent. If it's true, it's an astonishing number. White Catholics haven't favored a Democratic presidential candidate by that margin in years. The Pew survey also released yesterday, with a polling window earlier by just a couple of days, had McCain up among white Catholics 48-41. Unless and until more evidence to the contrary comes along, I'm sticking with Pew on this one.

This morning in Slate, John Dickerson writes about how cool, calm, and collected the Obama campaign is, but from what I hear all is not so happy in the campaign's religious outreach department (notwithstanding its upcoming "faith tour"). The showdown at Saddleback, which was supposed to contrast "I'm comfortable talking about my faith" Obama favorably with the "I'm not comfortable" McCain, backfired. Rick Warren, despite his talk about civil discourse and wider agendas, turned out to have the familiar evangelical agenda, to say nothing of the familiar megachurch pastor's ego; the supposed co-sponsorship of the liberal outfit Faith in Public Life was nowhere to be seen, nor were issues like AIDS and poverty. To be sure, at the Democratic Convention, reporters could hardly avoid faith-based prayer breakfasts, programs, and other initiatives designed to show off the party's new religious sensibility. But whatever difference that might have made with faith-based voters was quickly eclipsed by the Palin nomination.

The larger point, however, is that while parties can change the mood music, it is not so easy to turn their large coalitions into something new. Just as McCain ultimately had to put his honor in a blind trust and abase himself before a religious right that had openly disrespected him, so Obama finds himself at the head of a party establishment that prefers to treat religion in public life as the province of African Americans. There was Leah Daughtry, the Pentecostal minister who ran the Convention; and Josh Dubois, in charge of the Obama campaign's religious outreach but not a member of its inner circle; and of course Obama himself, whose religiosity disturbs the secular wing of the party not at all because it can be bracketed off as a black thing.

Yes, an awesome God is worshiped by many people in the blue states, and many of them vote Democratic. Likewise, the GOP continues to pick up its share of those of little or no faith. But the God Gap between the parties has become structural, and effacing it will take a lot more effort than either side has so far shown it's interested in--or capable of--putting forth.

Update: Has Ambinder (via Brody) been spun? Or am I living in the past? Without a doubt, it's not conservative evangelicals but serious religious moderates that represent Obama's best target of opportunity. The real question is how effective his campaign's religious ground game has really been. Not as effective as it could be, is what I'm hearing. And a word to the wise: Just because Brody calls a story exclusive doesn't mean it's so. Sarah Pulliam at Christianity Today had the Obama faith tour story yesterday.

A little more than half of Americans think that at least half of all average Americans will go to heaven.

Here's what Pew has to say about religion in reporting its latest poll on the presidential race:

McCain's support among white evangelical Protestants, a key Republican voter group, has inched up to 71% (Obama is supported by 21% of evangelicals). Based only on voters who express a preference between the two candidates, McCain's lead among evangelicals (77%-23%) is comparable to Bush's final margin among this group (78%-21%). McCain has a small edge among white Catholic voters, 48% to 41%. He also holds a clear lead among white Catholics who attend Mass at least weekly (52% McCain vs. 36% Obama). Four years ago, Bush beat Kerry 61% to 39% among this group.

Specifically, the religion (or God) gap is back to previous levels. Among those who say they attended worship weekly or more, the Republican margin has risen from 10 points in August to 18 points in September. Meanwhile, among those who seldom or never attend, the Democratic margin jumped from 19 to 30. Not surprisingly, the Palin choice pulled all evangelicals toward McCain, and a few white Catholics; while the unaffiliated have shifted even more toward Obama. As in the past, frequent-attending white Mainline Protestants showed themselves less inclined to support GOP candidates who cozy up to evangelicals. Between August and September, McCain's margin among this group was cut nearly in half, from 25 points (57-32) to 14 (53-39).

One caveat, however. Pew's polling took place September 9-14--at the height of the GOP convention (or Palin) bounce. Since then, the polls seem to be showing a reversion to the August status quo ante. In other words, this snapshot may be more of a retrospective than a portrait of what's to come.

At Temple Beth El last night I was struck again by the bitterness and vituperation that Obama provokes in some people. Why should a candidate whose campaign has been built on a rhetoric of bringing people together, who engages in a minimum of personal attack, inspire such antipathy? Back during the primary campaign, the antipathy was evident among certain Clinton supporters. I put it down to the anger of disappointed hopes and to annoyance at Obama's more enthusiastic followers. But that hardly explains its presence on the GOP side. The deeper explanation has to do, I think, with the hostility that arises from the conviction that someone is a false prophet.

The discernment of false prophets is a small but important theme in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament; the need to make sure that the people are not led astray, particularly away from God, is acute. And so false prophets are treated in the harshest terms. As in:

That prophet or dreamer must be put to death, because he preached rebellion against the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt and redeemed you from the land of slavery; he has tried to turn you from the way the LORD your God commanded you to follow. You must purge the evil from among you. (Deut. 13:5)

Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. (Mat. 7:15)

Last night I attended a forum on the presidential election and the Jewish vote at Beth El Temple, one of two large Conservative synagogues in West Hartford, featuring representatives of the Republican Jewish Coalition and the National Democratic Jewish Council. Of the several hundred attendees, only a handful raised their hands when asked who was undecided, and nothing in the applause, boos, and overall atmosphere led me to reconsider my prediction that Obama will be getting a good 70 percent of the Jewish vote. Palin antipathy was palpable.

David Kirkpatrick's article on Scranton Catholics and the abortion issue in today's NYT has left me scratching my head. The premise, enunciated in the headline, is: "Abortion Issue Again Dividing Catholic Votes." But is it the abortion issue that's doing the dividing? Yes, some of the dozens of Catholics that Kirkpatrick talked to cite it as the reason they are intending to vote for McCain this time around. Here's one example:

Paul MacDonald, a retired social worker mingling over coffee after Mass at Holy Rosary, said he had voted for Mr. Kerry four years ago and Mrs. Clinton in the primary but now planned to vote for Mr. McCain because of “the life issue.”

I'd say it's race. Kirkpatrick doesn't avoid the race issue. One of his interviewees says he won't be voting for Obama just because he's black, and Franklin and Marshall political scientist Terry Madonna is quoted as saying, “This is a tough area for Obama and some of it is race.” More race than abortion? That question is not addressed. But it's a lot more comfortable to do a story about white working class Catholics voting for McCain on pro-life than racial grounds.

What are the fundamentals of the Catholic vote in Scranton? About half the people Lackawanna County belong to the Church--as opposed to 30 percent in Pennsylvania as a whole. In 2004, the county preferred Kerry to Bush by 56-43. (Statewide, Catholics preferred Kerry by 51-49--exactly the same margin by which Kerry carried the state--though Kerry lost the white Catholic vote 48-52.) Would Obama pick up some white Catholic votes in Scranton if he were as pro-life as, say, Pennsylvania's junior senator (and Scranton native) Bob Casey, Jr.? It seems commonsensical to say yes (though see here for why common sense may be wrong). But I dare say he'd pick up a lot more if he were white.

Good interview in Salon with the American Baptist pastor whose book seems to have inspired Sarah Palin's excellent book banning adventure.

“Governor Palin scares the hell out of me,” former New York mayor Ed Koch told the Jewish Week's James Besser this week. And as Besser reports, there seems little question that like Koch (who supported President Bush in 2004), a lot of Jewish voters feel the same way. Students of the subject agree that nothing has done more to keep Jews voting Democratic since the end of the Reagan era than the power of the religious right in the GOP, and Palin is the religious right incarnate.

Under the circumstances, it is no surprise to learn that anti-Obama push-polling is going forward in swing states with significant Jewish populations--push polling that makes various false claims to demonstrate that Obama is pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel. Will a goosed-up Obamaphobia trump a palintensified antipathy to political evangelicalism? That's the unlovely Jewish Question of the day.

Update: Politico's got the skinny on the anti-Obama telephoning--push-polling may not be le mot juste. Whatever you call it, it's coming from the Republican Jewish Coalition.

When he signed up Sarah Palin, John McCain committed his campaign to the tried and true moral values agenda of the religious right, but now he's gone it one better by denouncing Wall Street for the deadly sin of greed. I always thought that greed was the fairy dust that brought the magic of the market to life, so maybe the folks over at the Club for Growth are silently grinding their teeth. Or crying all the way to the Bank of America. Be that as it may, now that the Sedona Savonarola has hailed Greed before the bar of righteous Republican indignation, can Gluttony, Lust, Sloth, Envy, Pride, and (of course) Anger be far behind?

If you're interested, I'll be talking (presumably via a soundbite or two) about the impact of Sarah Palin on religious/geographic voting blocs on the CBS Evening News this evening at 6:30. Byron Pitts reporting.

Update: Wall Street 1, Palin religious impact, 0. Story to air later in the week.

It turns out that the collected words of Abraham Lincoln are on line and searchable, and indeed there is no evidence that Lincoln made that rather pompous statement about being on God's side so widely attributed to him--and recently alluded to by Sarah Palin. But my colleague Ron Spencer has called my attention to a relevant statement by Lincoln--one that shows, to my mind, just the way for a president to relate his decision making to divine intentions.

It came about on September 13, 1862, when Lincoln met with a group of Chicago clergy who were urging him to free the slaves. In his remarks, which were published ten days later in the Chicago Tribune, Lincoln made clear, in his characteristically shrewd and droll way, that the only way to discern the will of Providence in so difficult matter was to make the wisest secular judgment he could manage. On the issue of whose side God might be on, he notes that the religious on either side of the question couldn't both be right, and that both might be wrong; and suggested that the Southern troops seemed to be praying more earnestly than the Northern ones that God was on their side:

The subject presented in the memorial is one upon which I have thought much for weeks past, and I may even say for months. I am approached with the most opposite opinions and advice, and that by religious men, who are equally certain that they represent the Divine will. I am sure that either the one or the other class is mistaken in that belief, and perhaps in some respects both. I hope it will not be irreverent for me to say that if it is probable that God would reveal his will to others, on a point so connected with my duty, it might be supposed he would reveal it directly to me; for, unless I am more deceived in myself than I often am, it is my earnest desire to know the will of Providence in this matter. And if I can learn what it is I will do it! These are not, however, the days of miracles, and I suppose it will be granted that I am not to expect a direct revelation. I must study the plain physical facts of the case, ascertain what is possible and learn what appears to be wise and right. The subject is difficult, and good men do not agree. For instance, the other day four gentlemen of standing and intelligence (naming one or two of the number) from New York called, as a delegation, on business connected with the war; but, before leaving, two of them earnestly beset me to proclaim general emancipation, upon which the other two at once attacked them! You know, also, that the last session of Congress had a decided majority of anti-slavery men, yet they could not unite on this policy. And the same is true of the religious people. Why, the rebel soldiers are praying with a great deal more earnestness, I fear, than our own troops, and expecting God to favor their side; for one of our soldiers, who had been taken prisoner, told Senator Wilson, a few days since, that he met with nothing so discouraging as the evident sincerity of those he was among in their prayers.

How to assess the religious worldview of the Assemblies of God church that Sarah Palin grew up in, and how it may have shaped her own view of the world? The Religion News Service's Kimberly Winston offers a balanced view of the pedal-to-the-metal premillennialism that the church seems to embrace via a theology known variously as Third Wave, the New Apostolic Reformation, Latter Rain, and Kingdom Now. As Winston points out, Jeff Sharlet and others have been on the case for a while now, and it won't be long before the MSM begin pulling on this thread. For the moment, there's been only indirect information about what Sarah Palin's personal religious views are, apart from her religiously informed (one presumes) positions on abortion, homosexuality, and stem cell research.

But a picture of her governing style is emerging pretty clearly--see the comprehensive stories in today's WaPo here and NYT here--and it shows a person who sees the world as divided into good versus evil, us against them, you're with me or against me; with a certain inclination to demonize those on the other side and, if public officials, get rid of them. This bears a certain affinity with the Third Rain outlook, which emphasizes the presence of demons at work in
American society, and the need for Christians to defeat them. Here's a couple of paragraphs from the website of MorningStar Ministries, a South Carolina Third Rain parachurch organization headed by Rick Joyner with which Wasilla Assemblies of God has been closely connected:

In 1990, several prophetic friends and myself all received the same revelation that the very demonic powers that had seduced Germany had been sent to the United States to seduce our country. Because of this revelation, I have spent a considerable amount of time trying to understand what happened in Nazi Germany. I have been astonished by what I have learned and how true this revelation was. I will be writing a lot about this in the future, but it is my basic belief that when we are shown the schemes of the enemy, it is so we can thwart them. This will not be done just by writing articles or books. The church must begin to walk in the authority that we have been given over demonic forces on every level.

There is another great awakening coming to America. It is right at the door. With this outpouring of the Holy Spirit, the disguises of the evil one which are gripping so many in America and Europe, are going to be stripped away. As we read in the Book of Revelation, when the devil was cast out of heaven, his high place, he came to the earth with great wrath. This is going to stir up a lot of things we need to be prepared to deal with.

I have no idea if Sarah Palin shares such sentiments, and have no doubt that she would not own up to them if she did. But if you have been raised with this kind of a dualistic view of the world, in which Christians are supposed to act to cleanse society by defeating demons through the authority they possess in Jesus' name, it can shape the way you behave in secular leadership positions. By their deeds shall ye know them.

Abortion, homosexuality, stem cell research. Reaching out to those on the other side. Kind of.

In the new Newsweek poll, which has Obama and McCain in a dead heat at 46-46, McCain wins white evangelicals by 69-22--still short of Bush's 2004 margin (77-23) but heading in that direction. McCain wins white Catholics by 59-33, a margin 13 points larger than Bush's in 2004 (56-43). Whites as a whole split 55-37 for the Republican ticket, an 18-point difference virtually identical to Bush's 58-41 margin over Kerry. Non-whites back the Democratic ticket 75-17--a differential 14 points greater than the Democratic margin in 2004. The non-white electorate and the white Catholic electorate are roughly the same in size. My guess is that it will be harder for McCain to pick up non-white votes than for Obama to pick up white Catholic ones.

This story has the ring of truth. A very conservative church is upset about Pastor, I Am Gay, a book published in 1995 by a local American Baptist pastor dealing with his experiences with gay and lesbian parishioners, and advocating reconciliation. The mayor, a member of the church, looks for a way to get the town librarian to remove the book from the shelves. The librarian resists, threatening to call in the ACLU, and is fired by the mayor, who then reinstates her in the face of a popular firestorm. The town: Wasilla, AK. The mayor: who else?

As we hurtle towards the election, in a presidential campaign more chock-full of religion than (I'm prepared to say) any in American history, it's worth pondering how religion has operated in American public life during the administration of George W. Bush. To that end, I enthusiastically recommend God's Democracy: American Religion After September 11 by the distinguished Italian scholar Emilio Gentile. The book, the third volume in our Praeger series on Religion, Politics, and Public Life, represents for my money the shrewdest outsider's eye on religion in America since Tocqueville. Gentile knows the country well, and he brings to the subject a career studying political religions in Europe generally and Italian Fascism in particular. He is masterful in showing how, in the wake of 9/11, the Bush administration went some ways towards transforming the inclusive American civil religion into a political religion fit for partisan political combat. Order your copy today.

In her explanation to Charlie Gibson of what she meant when she talked about praying that America's plan in Iraq was God's plan, Sarah Palin said:

But the reference there is a repeat of Abraham Lincoln's words when he said -- first, he suggested never presume to know what God's will is, and I would never presume to know God's will or to speak God's words.

But what Abraham Lincoln had said, and that's a repeat in my comments, was let us not pray that God is on our side in a war or any other time, but let us pray that we are on God's side.

Brody's got a good story on how Sarah Palin has tried and failed to get away with just appearing by video at this weekend's Value Voters Summit. It seems she was scheduled to appear but now, uh, since she's in Alaska, kind of, for the weekend, can't I just mail it in? Tony Perkins, in keeping with the summit's "no videos" policy, said no way. The video dodge is one that George W. Bush has repeatedly used with anti-abortion gatherings and the like, and it seems clear that, seeing how she seems to have locked up the evangelical vote for the McCain ticket, the powers-that-be decided that it would be best for her not to appear before a crowd of screaming religious rightists. Will she show up in person after all? I'm betting no.

After sleeping on it, I'm inclined to think that Sarah Palin's prayer on Iraq is nothing very remarkable in the broad context of American Protestantism. To believe that God has a plan, and to pray that what we're doing is in line with it, and to talk about it in a church--well, that's pretty ordinary stuff. And given that this is a question of war and peace, it is not inappropriate to think it a good time to invoke the Deity. Just for comparison's sake, here's Woodrow Wilson in his speech presenting the Treaty of Versailles to the Senate:

The stage is set, the destiny disclosed. It has come about by no plan of our conceiving, but by the hand of God who led us into this way. We cannot turn back. We can only go forward, with lifted eyes and freshened spirit, to follow the vision. It was of this that we dreamed at our birth. America shall in truth show the way. The light streams upon the path ahead, and nowhere else.

One religious question about Palin that Waldman leaves out, however, has to do with her possible premillennialist worldview. We know that Wasilla Assemblies of God, where she was baptized and a member for a quarter-century, is firmly attached to premillennialist theology. Here's what its former pastor had to say to the Chicago Tribune a few days ago (I've quoted this before, but it bears repeating):

Rev. Tim McGraw, Palin's pastor when she became mayor of Wasilla, said believers look to Israel for signs of the coming end times and where they are in God's plan. That would undoubtedly influence Palin's approach to foreign policy, McGraw said.

"I believe Sarah would not live in a fragmented world," he said. "The idea that Sarah would take this huge influence of the worldview that really only the Bible and the relationship with Jesus opens up ... and suddenly marginalize it and put it over on the shelf somewhere and live apart from it—that would be entirely inconsistent."

The evangelical churches in this study were nearly the opposite of sectarian--they were aware of the fallen nature of humanity, but this seemed to mobilize them even more to transofrm it, though always with the notion that 'God is in control.' Most of these churches in their central belief statements are 'premillennialists,' believing that Christ's Second Coming sill prcede Christ's thousand-year reign on earth. Typically, premillennialists are less interested in transforming the world, and yet the evangelicals in this study maintained a strong passion for civic engagement and deep interest in the common good.

If Palin is a world-affirming premillennialist who believes that God is always in control--always has plans and tasks for us--she also seems to be pretty pragmatic about how her religious identity relates to her public one. I've caught some flak for suggesting that it was no coincidence that she left Wasilla Assemblies of God for the more conventional non-denominational Wasilla Bible Church the very year that she first ran for statewide office. But Patricia Killen of Pacific Lutheran University, who co-edited our volume on Religion in public life in the Pacific Northwest, and who knows the Alaska scene, believes that it's entirely likely that she wanted to make sure that Alaskans did not consider her too far out on the religious friend--as indeed, was implied to the New York Times by one of that church's musical directors. It's clear in any case, that she knows she's operating in public arena where a lot of people see things differently from the way she does.

In the portion of his interview that aired tonight, Charlie Gibson unfairly truncated Sarah Palin's now famous prayer regarding the war in Iraq:

GIBSON: You said recently, in your old church, "Our national leaders are sending U.S. soldiers on a task that is from God." Are we fighting a holy war?

PALIN: You know, I don't know if that was my exact quote.

GIBSON: Exact words.

Palin's explanation, which bears all the marks of pre-interview prep, was:

But the reference there is a repeat of Abraham Lincoln's words when he said -- first, he suggested never presume to know what God's will is, and I would never presume to know God's will or to speak God's words.

But what Abraham Lincoln had said, and that's a repeat in my comments, was let us not pray that God is on our side in a war or any other time, but let us pray that we are on God's side.

That's what that comment was all about, Charlie. And I do believe, though, that this war against extreme Islamic terrorists is the right thing.

Anyone interested in following our ongoing discussion of the bishops' position on abortion relative to Joe Biden's recent statement can follow the thread at Life Begins.

Christianity Today's Ted Olsen asks whether six points' worth of evangelicals should be considered a significant pickup for Obama, given the amount of outreach he's lavished on them. I guess it depends on what you mean by significant. In 2004, George W. Bush improved his performance among Jews by that amount and the general sense was that it wasn't much to show for his administration's record of devotion to Israel. On the other hand, swings of that magnitude in large voting blocs like white evangelicals can make a big difference in states like Ohio, Missouri, Minnesota, etc.

I guess the better way to put it is to note, as pastordan does, how far McCain's numbers fall short of Bush's--16 points. In recent elections, white evangelicals have tended to vote Republican 75 percent to 25 percent. Obama appears to have his quarter locked up. McCain has at this point failed to seal the deal with his entire three-quarters. The battle would appear to be for the 15 percent still undecided.

One final point. Just as the Palin "female" appeal appears to be not to Hillary voters but to Independent Walmart moms, so the Obama religious appeal seems to have made the biggest difference with semi-frequent worship attenders. White evangelicals, like Jews, are not a swing group; so peeling off five or six percentage points is, I would say, significant.

In comments on my Bishops v. Biden post below, Thomas Peters of the Americanpapist blog and others take me to task for failing to understand that the bishops are simply acknowledging what today's embryology textbooks teach; namely, that human life begins at conception. And since we all (should) believe that human life ought not be killed, therefore the bishops' position should not be considered confessional. Q.E.D.

But the beginning of something is not ontologically equivalent to being the thing. To take a humble example, if 18 boys gather to choose up teams for a baseball game, the first team "begins" when the first boy is chosen. That is to say, a process gets under way that, if not stopped, will result in a team. But there is no actual team until the ninth boy is chosen. Agreeing that "life begins" at conception does not clinch the anti-abortion argument, as the bishops claim.

Ontology aside, it is simply the case that many morally serious people and morally serious religious traditions (to say nothing of the American Constitution, as currently interpreted) do value life developing in the womb differently from life after birth. For example, Orthodox Judaism values the life of the mother more highly than the life of the fetus.The point is this: It's a matter of moral judgment, not "objective fact," to say, as the bishops do, that the fertilized egg which constitutes "the beginning of life" should have all the legal rights belonging to a newborn infant. That's a position based not on embryology but on an assessment of the worth of embryonic life. It is a moral judgment that many Catholics and non-Catholics share, and that many Catholics and non-Catholics do not. It bears the force of the bishops' authority only for Catholics. That is why it is, as Biden contends, confessional.

Today's Fox poll has McCain leading Obama among white evangelicals by 61 percent to 25 percent. Bush beat Kerry among white evangelicals by 77 percent to 23 percent. So in spite of Sarah Palin's selection, Obama remains ahead of Kerry's pace in this demographic. Should he win his share of the undecideds, he'd reach 29 percent--not as good as Bill Clinton but a significant pickup nonetheless.

As the scrutiny of Palin's religious views begins in earnest--here's CNN's take on Anderson Cooper last night--it's important to understand the Alaska context in which evangelicals like her operate. Alaskans may seem like rednecks in mukluks, but religiously they are a much better fit with the rest of the Pacific Northwest than with the redneck South. Their rate of religious affiliation is low. According to the North American Religion Atlas (data base developed by the Polis Center as part of the Greenberg Center's regions project), 60.2 percent of Alaskans are religiously unaffiliated or uncounted, putting them in close proximity to Washingtonians (62 percent) and Oregonians (65 percent) but far away from, say, Oklahomans (30 percent). And whereas over half the population of Oklahoma is affiliated with an evangelical church, in Alaska less than 15 percent are.

What this means is that Alaska's evangelicals constitute a distinct subculture if not the kind of self-conscious counterculture that characterizes them in the rest of the Northwest. Nowhere else in the country are evangelicals so skeptical of environmentalism, which in Oregon and Washington has acquired the status of a civil religion in and of itself. (For more on this, see chapter 10 of our new book, One Nation, Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics.) Under the circumstances, Palin has needed to be circumspect about translating her very conservative social views into either electoral politics or governance. She may have wanted to get immoral books removed from the Wasilla library shelves, but her tentative effort to do so failed. She'll ask fellow evangelicals to pray for a gas pipeline but not Alaskans at large. Wedge politics based on a religious right agenda requires considerable delicacy in Alaska.

Abortion, the premier religious right issue, is the most notable case in point. Alaska is a pro-choice state by a considerable margin; a 2005 state-by-state survey ranked it as the 32nd most pro-life state, with 58 percent of Alaskans describing themselves as pro-choice, as opposed to 37 percent pro-life. There's no question that Palin, who makes no bones about it, is about as pro-life as a politician can get, opposing abortion in all cases except to save the life of the mother. But open anti-abortion politics is not a winner in Alaska. In her gubernatorial campaign against pro-choice Tony Knowles two years ago, her campaign insisted that she would not advocate for her anti-abortion views, and in fact she's been very gingerly in pushing for anti-abortion legislation as governor.

No doubt, Palin will be asked about her views on abortion by ABC's Charlie Gibson on the road in Wasilla this week. My guess is that she will, as she did in Alaska, enunciate her pro-life position and then accuse her opponents of using abortion to divide Americans. ("Tony Knowles is working to divide Alaskans by making abortion an issue," her spokesman told the Juneau Empire in 2006.) It's called having your cake and eating it too, and it's pretty good politics in a country that's exactly as pro-choice as Alaska is.

Fan that I am, methinks pastordan doth protest too much my suggestion that Obama might do well to, well, wrap himself in the UCC's position on abortion. For starters, it seems unnecessarily legalistic to deny that Obama is a member of the United Church of Christ because he recently, under pressure one might say, resigned his membership in his Chicago church. After all, this was the denomination he was baptized into and in which he remained for a couple of decades. And that he shouldn't do so because it would bring back memories of Jeremiah Wright? It's not as if the UCC's pro-choice stance is an expression of black liberation theology.

My point, perhaps not clearly enough expressed the first time around, is that Americans tend to respect each other for abiding by the teachings of their religion. As the Detroit sportswriter put it when Hank Greenberg sat out Yom Kippur during a crucial pennant drive: "We will miss him in the field and we'll miss him at the bat, / but he's true to his religion and we honor him for that."

Religion derives from a Latin word having to do with binding; and the knowledge that a politician is bound by a religious teaching, even if they disagree with that teaching (assuming it is not too far out), has a positive value that makes it easier to accept the politician than if he just came up with the position on his own. pastordan thinks that abortion opponents are so dismissive of liberal denominations like the UCC that this wouldn't cut any ice with them. The question is subject to empirical testing, though I doubt Obama is going to give us a chance to test it in this case.

What really seems to concern pastordan, however, is not that citing UCC authority wouldn't work for Obama but that it shouldn't. In the grand old antinomian congregationalist tradition of Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, he writes, "Many many people live perfectly contented lives in UCC churches without a second thought as to what resolutions General Synod has or has not passed. We're just not that into authority." So be it. But it sort of assumes that Obama is still one of them, doesn't it?

The Catholic Bishops are cheesed with Joe Biden for, as they see it, claiming that abortion is just a "personal and private issue." Here's the relevant quote, from Biden's response on Meet the Press last Sunday:

I'd say, "Look, I know when it begins for me." It's a personal and private issue. For me, as a Roman Catholic, I'm prepared to accept the teachings of my church. But let me tell you. There are an awful lot of people of great confessional faiths--Protestants, Jews, Muslims and others--who have a different view.

Of course, Biden did not say that the Catholic Church teaches that abortion is a private matter. His position is that it is a confessional matter. The bishops can assert until they are blue in the face that what they profess is universally applicable because it's built into the nature of things; but at the end of the day they remain religious leaders asserting the doctrine of their church. And most American Catholics, like Biden, understand them as such.

After trailing McCain in Florida for the last two months, Obama may be pulling into the lead. On the heels of yesterday's Fox poll showing the race in the Sunshine State knotted at 48 percent, a USA Today poll released today shows Obama out in front 46-44 (within the margin of error). Does this reflect a post-Palin bounce with Jewish voters?
Update: Maybe not.

A little evidence that the God Gap has increased since Sarah Palin's nomination comes from the latest SUSA poll of Washington State. Compared to SUSA's last Washington State poll of a month ago, the gap among regular attenders has increased by three points, from 59-36 for McCain to 61-35. Among those who almost never attend, Obama's margin has grown very slightly, from 62-32 to 63-32. But the biggest shift has come among the occasional attenders, among whom Obama's margin has dropped from 57-39 to 49-41. As I noted a few days ago, that's the group that's in play, and if the addition of Palin to the ticket enables McCain to round up a significant number of them, Obama's in trouble. In Washington State, SUSA shows McCain gaining only two percent of them, while the undecides have doubled from two percent to four percent and those supporting other candidates have doubled from three percent to six percent. They're up for grabs.

Referring to Barack Obama's "above my pay grade" response to Rick Warren at the Saddleback forum last month, Tom Brokaw asked Joe Biden on Meet the Press yesterday how he would instruct his ticketmate on the question of when life begins. "I'd say," Biden said:

"Look, I know when it begins for me." It's a personal and private issue. For me, as a Roman Catholic, I'm prepared to accept the teachings of my church. But let me tell you. There are an awful lot of people of great confessional faiths--Protestants, Jews, Muslims and others--who have a different view. They believe in God as strongly as I do. They're intensely as religious as I am religious. They believe in their faith and they believe in human life, and they have differing views as to when life--I'm prepared as a matter of faith to accept that life begins at the moment of conception. But that is my judgment. For me to impose that judgment on everyone else who is equally and maybe even more devout than I am seems to me is inappropriate in a pluralistic society."

The JFK/Kerry contrast is easy enough to follow. A subtler situation is that of Virginia's Catholic Gov. Tim Kaine, who made it clear, in his 2005 race, that his opposition to the death penalty was rooted in his Catholicism; and that seemed a lot easier for the very pro-death penalty electorate to stomach than if he had simply declared that he was against the death penalty because he believed it was wrong. As Princeton's wise old scholar of American religious history John Wilson likes to point out, pointing to the teachings of one's religion is as likely to ease tension over policy differences among citizens as to exacerbate them.

So what I'm wondering is this. What if a Barack Obama, instead of flying solo on the deeply controverted moral issue of abortion, simply said that he embraced the position of his denomination--the United Church of Christ; to wit:

The United Church of Christ has affirmed and re-affirmed since 1971 that access to safe and legal abortion is consistent with a woman’s right to follow the dictates of her own faith and beliefs in determining when and if she should have children, and it has supported comprehensive sexuality education as one measure to prevent unwanted or unplanned pregnancies, and to create healthy and responsible sexual persons and relationships. (General Synods VIII, IX, XI, XII, XIII, XVI, XVII, and XVIII)
We have also supported that women with limited financial means should be able to receive public funding in order to exercise her legal right to the full range of reproductive health services. What is legally available to women must be accessible to all women.

The United Church of Christ is one of the founding faith groups of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, formed in 1973 as the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights. Over the years, RCRC has continued to bring a strong voice of faith on the moral and religious issues that swirl around public debate over abortion, contraception and pregnancy prevention. Because there are many religious and theological perspectives on when life and personhood begin, the UCC joins others in advocating that public policy must honor this rich religious diversity. Our position is not a pro-abortion position but a pro-faith, pro-family and pro-woman position.

As you may recall, the conservative Alliance Defense Fund is holding a "Pulpit Initiative" on Sunday, September 28, during which some number of chergy will endorse, oppose, or otherwise engage in partisan political activity from their pulpits in order to challenge the federal law forbidding non-profits from engaging in such activity on pain of losing their tax exemptions. Today's Washington Post quotes ADF attorney Erik Stanley (writing to a couple of UCC pastors on the other side) to the effect that clergy enjoy a "constitutional right to speak freely from the pulpit" and that IRS rules "stifle religious expression."

The simplest way to deal with the IRS rules would, of course, be to just change the law. But efforts to do that went nowhere when the Republicans were in charge of Congress, and they're certainly not going anywhere in the near future. So how plausible is the constitutional challenge? Not very. The IRS rules do not prevent pastors from exercising their right of free speech or from freely exercising their religion. What they say is that non-profits like churches don't get to play politics and at the same time take advantage of the state's willingness not to tax them. Non-profits, including religious institutions, have no constitutional right not to pay taxes; the state, by waiving their taxes, subsidizes what they do and say. And, as Marc Stern wrote in the last issue of Religion in the News, the Supreme Court "has repeatedly held that a failure to subsidize speech does not burden speech under either the speech, religion, or due process clauses of the Constitution."

The Pulpit Initiative is, in other words, legally vacuous. Whether it helps a little to mobilize the GOP's conservative base is another question.

If Sarah Palin left the church where she was baptized when she ran for statewide office lest people think her a Holy Roller while Barack Obama stayed at the church where he was baptized despite the risk of being considered a black liberationist until his presidential campaign was almost overwhelmed by it, then: 1) Who gets credit for greater political savvy? and 2) Who gets credit for greater spiritual integrity?

Obama admits to Stephanapoulos that his "above my pay grade" response to Rick Warren's abortion question was "too flip":

“What I intended to say is that, as a Christian, I have a lot of humility about understanding when does the soul enter into … It's a pretty tough question. And so, all I meant to communicate was that I don't presume to be able to answer these kinds of theological questions.”

In the ABC interview, Obama goes on to give the answer he wishes he’d given: “What I do know is that abortion is a moral issue, that it's one that families struggle with all the time. And that in wrestling with those issues, I don't think that the government criminalizing the choices that families make is the best answer for reducing abortions.

“I think the better answer — and this was reflected in the Democratic platform — is to figure out, how do we make sure the young mothers, or women who have a pregnancy that's unexpected or difficult, have the kind of support they need to make a whole range of choices, including adoption and keeping the child."

Nothing about the religious right has troubled its opponents over the years more than premillennial dispensationalism (or, if you prefer, dispensational premillennialism). The widespread belief among conservative evangelicals in a more or less imminent End Times comprising a Rapture of the Saints, the Antichrist, seven years of Tribulation, the return of Christ for a 1,000-year reign, and the Final Judgment has long conjured up nightmare scenarios of what someone who actually believed that stuff would do if elected to high national office. The late James Watt, Secretary of the Interior, is commonly (but falsely) believed to have favored the rapid exploitation of natural resources because, given his premillennialist beliefs, preserving the environment was really an inconsequential proposition. To the proposition that Jews should embrace the religious right because of its vigorous support of Israel, the counterargument has been that such support is not of Israel (and the Jews) per se, but merely part of a theological scenario that requires an ingathering of Israel in the Holy Land, after which only those Jews who convert to Christianity will be saved while the rest are consigned to the flames of Hell. (For the record, evangelical support for Israel is also based on God's covenant with Abraham in Genesis; call it overdetermined.)

Charges of crypto-depensationalism have occasionally been raised against the two presidents that have been most closely identified with the religious right, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush; but I've never seen anything like convincing evidence that either entertained the belief in any way that mattered. Bush, so far as I can see, is motivated by religious convictions far more akin to good old Protestant postmillennialism; God's "gift of liberty" enables us on earth to extend the benefits of democracy to all the world, preparing the way, etc. But now comes Sarah Palin, bidding fair to become a heartbeat away from being the most powerful person on earth, and her spiritual formation was in a premil church. Here's what her longtime pastor had to say on the subject, according to Manya Brachear's piece in the Chicago Tribune yesterday:

Rev. Tim McGraw, Palin's pastor when she became mayor of Wasilla, said believers look to Israel for signs of the coming end times and where they are in God's plan. That would undoubtedly influence Palin's approach to foreign policy, McGraw said.

"I believe Sarah would not live in a fragmented world," he said. "The idea that Sarah would take this huge influence of the worldview that really only the Bible and the relationship with Jesus opens up ... and suddenly marginalize it and put it over on the shelf somewhere and live apart from it—that would be entirely inconsistent."

With Kirk Johnson and Kim Severson's piece on Sarah Palin's religion in today's New York Times, the subject is officially on the front burner. The following excerpt does not dampen my interest in learning why Palin left the Pentecostal church where she was baptized as a teenager in the year she ran for lieutenant governor:

One of the musical directors at the church, Adele Morgan, who has known Ms. Palin since the third grade, said the Palins moved to the nondenominational Wasilla Bible Church in 2002, in part because its ministry is less “extreme” than Pentecostal churches like the Assemblies of God, which practice speaking in tongues and miraculous healings.

“A lot of churches are about music and media and having a big profile,” Ms. Morgan said. “We are against that. That is why it is so attractive to politicians because they can just sit there and be safe.”

“We’ve gotten a lot of their people when the other churches get too extreme,” Ms. Morgan continued. However, she added, “If you lift your hands when we’re singing, we’re not going to shoot you down.”

For the moment, the McCain campaign seems to have raptured her back to Alaska, so she can sit out the tribulation the elite media have in store. The idea, I guess, is that the great battle will turn out all right, and John McCain will be enthroned in glory with Sarah at his right hand, and the Final Reform will go forward.

According to a new Economist/YouGov poll, 17 percent of Americans would use the word "religious" to apply to Barack Obama and 17 percent of Americans would use the word "religious" to apply to John McCain.

In the Middle Ages, it was was conventional to divide society into three orders: those who toil (the peasants), those who fight (the lords), and those who pray (the monks). In today's Republican Party, there is also a tripartite division. Those who toil may be considered the evangelicals; those who fight, the bosses...er, the economic conservatives; and those who pray are the party's clerisy, let's call them its intellectual elite: the neocons.

A Fable
Once upon a time there was a man, a prince among men, a knight of the realm, a crusader. And he journeyed far and journeyed wide, in the service of his realm. And in time he was captured by the enemy, and imprisoned for many a year, and he suffered grievously, nigh unto the end of the conflict; and returned home a hero. And in time he became a great lord of the realm, and one who never, or rarely, permitted his honor to be besmirched. And sometime would he become wroth with his fellows, and often would joke with the scribes of the realm, and there were those who would eventually come to call him Maverick.

And hungering after his place in history, the Maverick came in time to seek the highest office in the land, and failed to achieve it. And then he sought it again, and came nigh unto the final test, and found he needed a helpmeet to achieve it. And fain would he have chosen a bosom bud, a comrade in arms, one of the guys.

Sarah Palin's choice has enraptured the toilers, and is just fine with the fighters. But it hasn't sat quite as well with the neocons. They had been hoping for one of their own, a Lieberman (Kristol), or at least someone with the gravitas and academic sitzfleish to manage to sit through an AEI seminar without, like, wanting to know where the moose lick is. Enraptured they are not.

Gallup has a terrific new survey out on the religious attendance gap--God Gap if you will--among non-Hispanic white registered voters in re: presidential preference. In a nutshell, McCain is rocking along at a better than 2-1 clip among those who say they attend worship at least weekly (33 percent), while Obama enjoys a 12 percentage point lead among those who attend seldom or never (47 percent). These margins are almost identical to the margins between Bush and Kerry in 2004. But there's a shift in the swing group of those who say they attend monthly or nearly weekly (19 percent). Where Bush led Kerry among them by 62 percent to 36 percent, Obama has cut the gap down by two-thirds, pulling to within 9 points of McCain, 41-50. That's where Obama's religious outreach is making its mark, for a pickup of 5 points in the entire non-Hispanic white electorate.

Thanks to the likes of AP's Eric Gorski and Rachel Zoll (here) and the Wall Street Journal's Suzanne Sataline (here), we now know that Sarah Palin was formed religiously in a pretty old-timey Pentecostal church. Here's the lede to Sataline's story in yesterday's paper:

At the Pentecostal church where Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin worshipped for more than two decades, congregants speak in tongues and are part of a faith that believes humanity is in its "end times" -- the days preceding a world-ending cataclysm bringing Christian redemption and the second coming of Jesus.

Will Sarah Palin get up close and personal about her "faith journey" sometime before the election? Will she say why she left the church that formed her spiritually? Is that any of our business? I confess that after reading any number of articles claiming that Obama joined Trinity UCC for the secular and political connections, I'm curious that, as she prepared for taking a place on a larger political stage, running unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor, Palin should have gone over to a church where they don't speak in tongues, where the teachings are, in the words of its pastor "so normal" (albeit welcoming of Jews for Jesus). And the fact that she and her biographer and the McCain campaign seem to be doing everything they can to gloss over her Pentecostal roots.

This is plainly a can of worms. But in a world where candidates get to reveal all kinds of positive things about their private lives, are the things they don't want to reveal necessarily out of bounds?

As the presidential race enters its final phase, where do things stand on the religion front?

The Democrats in general and the Obama campaign in particular have made a fair showing that they are not the anti-faith party. Given that Americans have grown a bit leery of mixing religion and politics, the party of Jefferson, Jackson, and Obama is pretty well attuned to the country's current mood: faith by all means, but nothing too intrusive. On the constituency front, African Americans, Latino Catholics, non-Judeo-Christians, and Seculars are fully locked up, while Jews are a less iffy proposition than they seemed to be a week ago. The big question mark has to do with Mainline Protestants.

As for the Republicans in general and the McCain campaign in particular, the evangelical base of the party now seems locked and loaded (though I'm still keeping my eye open for regional variations). As the NYT's David Kirkpatrick points out in a must-listen interview with Terry Gross on NPR's "Fresh Air" yesterday, McCain and company have been hard at work since June cultivating evangelical leaders; in this regard, the choice of Palin is the culmination of an ongoing effort than a bolt from the blue. And, as Kirkpatrick very importantly points out, McCain has never been the opponent of the religious right that the main narrative--based as it is on his "agents of intolerance" remark in South Carolina, holds. Otherwise, the Palin appointment weakens McCain's ability to peel off Jewish voters; when Christians are on the march, Jews run the other way.

What about non-Latino Catholics? My sense is not so much that they are nup for grabs as that they will simply mirror the electorate as a whole. The ordinary Americans.

NYT has a cool graphic this morning showing the number of times speakers at the two conventions used particular words. As it turns out, GOP speakers invoked the name of God ("God") nearly twice as often Democratic ones, 43 to 22. But when it came to the tickets themselves, the invocations were tied: Biden and McCain, 8 each; Obama and Palin, 2. In other words, those candidates most identified with religion mentioned God least.

Former Redskins coach Joe Gibbs: "I believe that electing John McCain and Sarah Palin will spark a return to God's Word and a spiritual revival that will bring our nation together." This strikes me as one of remoter possibilities of the next four years.

Sixty-six percent of white evangelicals are now backing McCain, up from 57 percent this weekend, according to a new CBS poll.

Christianity Today's Sarah Palin...oops, Pulliam (sorry, Sarah) has noted how easy it was to see all the religious outreach in Denver, and how hard it is to discover any in St. Paul. Likewise GetReligion's Mollie. The Dems clearly wanted to flaunt what people don't think they have. And the Repubs clearly want to hide their over-bright light under a bushel.

In the current New Yorker, Peter J. Boyer offers a portrait of the religious configuration of the presidential race that is at once out of date, worthwhile, and profoundly credulous. It's out of date because it's effectively pre-Palin. Yes, there's a paragraph about her selection sandwiched in near the end, but it hardly takes account of the change that has now been wrought in the race's religious politics. Of course, that's the way the chips fall when you try to do long-form journalism in a rapidly changing landscape. The worthwhile part is some good reporting on how Karl Rove and Deal Hudson sought to activate "traditional" Catholic voters in 2004. And then there's the credulous part.

Boyer, who's always been a soft touch for conservative religious spin, recounts as gospel how Rove and Hudson realized that while there is no longer a generic "Catholic vote," there was a traditional orthodox segment that were just waiting to be enlisted in the Republican cause. And so, they went out and mobilized traditionalist Catholics, turning the Catholic presidential vote from majority Gore in 2000 to majority Bush in 2004. It's a cool story, showing how these two boy geniuses managed to conjure up the long-awaited alliance of evangelicals and conservative Catholics. The only trouble is that it's a fairy tale.

Yes, in 2004 Bush did win the Catholic vote that he had lost in 2000. But he won it not because of GOP inroads among traditional Catholics, but among the non-traditional ones. Let's leave aside Latino Catholics, who always vote heavily Democratic regardless of whether they attend mass frequently or not. Dividing the other, mostly white, Catholics into those who attend at least weekly and those who attend less than weekly, we find that the former went for Bush 57-40 in 2000 and 59.9-40.1 in 2004. In other words, Bush increased his margin among those traditionalist Catholics by just 2.8 percent, or just below the 2.9 percent shift in the popular vote he achieved in the electorate as a whole. The infrequent Catholic attenders, by contrast, went for Gore in 2000 by 50-46, but shifted to Bush in 2004 by 51.4-48.6, for a swing of 6.8 percentage points, or better than twice the national rate. In sum, all of Rove and Hudson's careful targeting of traditionalist Catholics had, relative to the rest of electorate, less than zero effect.

Footnote: See John Green's book, The Faith Factor, p. 63, for the 2004 figures and this article by the two of us for the 2000 ones.

In her acceptance speech, Sarah Palin repeated the line from her Dayton announcement speech in which she signaled fellow evangelicals that she was one of them, to wit: "We are expected to govern with integrity and goodwill and clear convictions and a servant's heart." John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter explained the enthusiasm that greeted the final item the first time around as follows:

That reaction wasn't simply about approval of good government; the phrase "servant's heart" is a popular bit of Evangelical terminology, used as a short-hand for Christian humility. A quick web search reveals thousands of churches, ministries, and bands that use some variation of "servant's heart" in the title; there's even a residential cleaning service in Calgary called "Servant's Heart."

The term is so common, in fact, that Christian comedian Tim Hawkins has poked fun at it. "I hate it when somebody tells me I've got a servant's heart," Hawkins says. "It means they want me to start stacking chairs."

When Palin pledged to govern with a "servant's heart," Christians, especially those with an Evangelical background, had no trouble recognizing one of their own, even without the convenience of a denominational label on Palin's resume.

Premillennialists tend to give Jews the willies, but if there's anyone who drives them round the bend, it's Jews for Jesus, aka Messianic Jews. And as for the evangelicals who lionize these traitorous fifth columnists (so to speak), they are deeply distrusted and roundly condemned. So it's not really a good thing for the McCain campaign's Jewish outreach that his new ticket-mate was on hand when her church threw a little fete for David Brickner, executive director of Jews for Jesus, which her pastor called "a ministry that is out on the leading edge in a pressing, demanding area of witnessing and evangelism.” John Hagee, whatever else you might say about him, is on the opposite end of the evangelical spectrum when it comes to converting the Jews. Where does that leave Sarah Palin? Saying that she doesn't share Brickner's view that violence against Israelis is God's punishment for failing to accept Jesus. Well, that's good to hear.

Andrew Sullivan's on the case, giving the Jewish establishment hell for failing to express its usual distress at such manifestations; so far as he's concerned, it's curtains for McCain in Florida. In a less partisan mode, the Jewish Week runs the traps and finds that the Palin nomination is indeed a big McCain problem. My sense is that that's true not because of anything it says to Jews about McCain's own views but because 1) it's evidence that the GOP is still the party of Falwell, Robertson, and Dobson; and 2) it means there will be One of Them in the Oval Office should the old guy be gathered unto his fathers before his term is run. Revised prediction on the Jewish vote in November: Obama, 70 percent; McCain, 28 percent, Nader 2 percent.

Anyone interested in the place of religion in American public life owes a thoughtful read to Paul Vitello's fine piece on pastors' web electioneering and the IRS. In the old days, what was said in church more or less stayed in church; it was a semi-private space where pastors could speak to their congregants without concern that the outside world was listening in. Stuff about truth and who gets saved and, yes, who you might could vote for that was too uncivil or impolitic to say out loud in public was OK to utter in the sanctity of your own sanctuary. And if congregants learned about it in a newsletter or other piece of church-produced literature, well, that was pretty private too.

But in an age when everyone puts just about everything on the web, the private space of churches can become mass media in a twinkling. When the sermons of a James David Manning get picked up by a Rush Limbaugh, it's not just a question of how interested the IRS should become--or of what if anything to do about the requirement that non-profits eschew politicking if they want to keep their tax exemptions. The larger question has to do with a redefined public square in which whatever is said in church is readily available to the community at large.

Just after John McCain anointed Sarah Palin as his veep choice, the estimable Alan Wolfe was up on the New Republic website explaining how the Western evangelical world of which Palin seemed to be a part is a good deal more libertarian than the morally hard-edged and prescriptive evangelicalism of the East--thereby suggesting that liberals should chill out a little. As enthusiastic as I am for the making of regional religious distinctions, the evidence that's come to light in the succeeding days indicates that Palin's evangelical world is a far cry from the New Agenda evangelicalism of Rick Warren and Fuller Seminary. From the sermons of her pastors to the wedge politics she brought to her mayoralty, she represents the religious right approach to public life that the main media narrative--encouraged by the likes of E.J. Dionne, Amy Sullivan, and Jim Wallis--has represented as, well, sooo nineties. Whatever else it's done, Palin's ascendancy has reinvigorated an evangelical old guard that was grumpy and back on its heels. Richard Land and James Dobson can barely contain themselves, and are ready to party like it's 1994.

Indeed, Palin is the first movement evangelical ever to occupy a place on a GOP national ticket since the emergence of the religious right as an appanage of the Republican Party in 1980. By comparison, George Bush was a johnny-come-lately whose understanding of how to woo evangelicals derived from his experience doing so for his daddy's 1988 campaign. Tony Perkins is not just blowing smoke when he tells the NYT's David Kirkpatrick, “I am now more confident about a John McCain presidency than I am about a George Bush presidency.” Palin is truly one of them.

It's pretty clear that John McCain didn't want to run the kind of Rovian campaign that now lies before us. He'd have preferred one based on a secular neocon vision of a trans-partisan America on the march to defeat the bad guys of the world. That would have been the storyline had he been able to select Joe Lieberman as his running mate, and it's what made for the cognitive dissonance of Lieberman's speech to the Convention last night. A party activated by unreconstructed political evangelicalism is not one equipped to reach out to the other side. The question, of course, is whether the Palinized McCain campaign represents the last hurrah of the religious right--its Battle of the Bulge, as it were (sorry, Bristol)--or just the next chapter in the longest running social movement in American history.

McCain and Palin take it to the Springs. Will Jim Dobson lay on hands?

It turns out that America's leading African-American rabbi, Capers Funnye of Beth Shalom B’nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation on Chicago's South Side, is a first cousin once removed of Michelle Obama. On the case is the Forward, which describes him as "well-known in Jewish circles for acting as a bridge between mainstream Jewry and the much smaller, and largely separate, world of black Jewish congregations, sometimes known as black Hebrews or Israelites." I'm kind of astonished that Rav Capers hasn't been put on Obama's bagel-and-lox circuit long since. Yo, campaign!

Turns out the choice of Sarah Palin was not so courageous after all. According to today's NYT report by Elisabeth Bumiller, McCain really wanted to go with one of his old pro-choice buddies, Joe Lieberman or Tom Ridge, but then had to go eyeball-to-eyeball with James Dobson & Co. and blinked. It is tempting to see this as of a piece with other McCain performances: opposition to Bush taxes until the time comes to let them expire; opposition to torture until the time comes to carve out a loophole for the CIA. So faced with the threat of a floor fight, Bold John buckled: Agents of Intolerance 1, McCain 0. Or so I'd argue if I happened to be a partisan Democrat.

In all fairness, however, and contrary to the latest narratives, the fundamentals of American partisan politics remain pretty much as they gelled in the 1990s. White evangelicals are still the sine qua non Republican grassroots constituency. Even if you're John McCain, you don't mess with the Dobson. And that means sticking with an unreconstructed values agenda. Write all the stories you want about Rich Cizik and climate change, third-world debt, and AIDS in Africa. Globaloney! At the end of the day what counts is using abortion and the gay lifestyle and sex ed and evolution to draw a bright line between us and them.

From the standpoint of evangelical activism, Sarah Palin represents--or seemed to--the the next step in a rich tradition of female leadership, beginning with Anita Bryant in the 1970s and extending to Phyllis Schafly, Beverly LaHaye, and Roberta Combs, to name a few. Like the women volunteers who have kept Protestant churches going for a century and a half, activist women have been the crucial cogs in the GOP's evangelical machine. When push comes to shove, even a maverick among men like John McCain knows he can't do without them. Yes, Dear.

So what happens with evangelicals if McCain has to give Palin the heave-ho? Just asking.

Who would be so churlish to disagree with Obama's call for the media to step away from the Bristol Palin pregnancy story? And yet, and yet. Is it out of bounds to note, in the context of her teenaged daughter's pregnancy, that Sarah Palin declared herself unequivocally opposed to anything but abstinence-only sex education?

I presume it's OK to ask a candidate, "Would you oppose sex education in the public schools, including the use of condoms and other birth control measures, even if it resulted in your daughter getting pregnant?" Dick Cheney, you'll recall, angrily swatted away as an invasion of privacy a question relating his partnered lesbian daughter to the Republican Party's stance on gay marriage. But again, I see nothing wrong with asking a candidate, "Would you oppose same-sex marriage even if you had a gay son or lesbian daughter who wished to marry?" So the relevant question, so far as I can see, is only whether it is legitimate to use some actual fact about the candidate's children to give force to an otherwise hypothetical question about the candidate's position on an issue. It's got to be. Especially when the candidate signals her own opposition to abortion by calling attention to her decision to carry a pregnancy to term knowing the baby will have Down Syndrome.

The boys at Harpers have come up with some zippy quotes from the pastors that Sarah Palin has been listening to--and so she'll be subjected to questions like: "Do you agree with Juneau Christian Center senior pastor Mike Rose that "we are living in the last days"? And "Do you agree with senior pastor David Pepper of Church on the Rock in Wasilla that "this nation is a Christian nation"? And she'll say 1) that she doesn't know what times we're in but her faith teaches her always to be prepared; and 2) that this is a nation for Americans of all religious faiths; and 3) that she, like Barack Obama, does not agree with everything her pastors say. And everyone will know what kind of churches she goes to, if they didn't already. And it will make a difference in some quarters.

Update: And another.

Well, my little Jonah Scenario is sort of playing out, as the Ninevites--ah, Republicans--dial back on the partying and their leader kneels down in NOLA muck and calls--to be sure, in a not quite unselfserving way--for a moratorium on partisanship. You've got to figure, though, that as the GOP struggles to make lemonade out of this big lemon, there are wise guys in Washington, to say nothing of Baton Rouge, grinding their teeth that John McCain had not let his fickle veepstakes finger alight on Bobby Jindal--the Hindu-Catholic Rhodes Scholar governor of Louisiana. Think of the introduction to the American people that would have made possible--the photo-ops of this fair-haired scion of Republican theo-conservatism consulting with all and sundry federal officials, doing everything that his predecessor, the Democrat Blanco, had failed to do. The best Gustav talking point for Gov. Palin that I can think of is that Alaska, too, is a place of severe weather conditions. Knock yourself out, GOP.

Last week, I took Adele Oltman to task for her piece in the Nation arguing that Obama had more in common with Daddy King than his son, MLK, Jr. Oltman has now posted a long response that I find much less problematic, and which is worth a look. Her appreciation of King, Sr.'s contribution is fine; and in the wake of his nomination speech, she is a good deal kindlier toward Obama. She does remain highly dubious of his embrace of faith-based initiatives, and makes the perfectly valid point that policing all church-sponsored social service efforts for any sign of religious influence would effectively be impossible.

But my point was simply this: The engagement of black churches in such efforts has been a constant since the civil rights/Great Society era; and MLK, Jr. had no problem with it. The principle was always to establish separate non-profits--e.g. to build senior citizen housing. And just like the government-supported religiously affiliated family services that have been central to social welfare efforts in the Northeast and Midwest since the 19th century, this has worked pretty well. Beyond that issue, it seems to me essential to recognize the affinity between MLK, Jr.'s inclusive civil religious appeal and Obama's. In my view, this is far more important to what Obama is about than his nod toward the faith-based initiative.