December 2008 Archives

A few days ago, Ed Kilgore over at Beliefnet's Progressive Revival lamented that the old-time creedal beliefs no longer define the body of the faithful the way they used to. These days, a "conventionally orthodox Protestant" like himself is likely to considered a bad Christian in many conservative Protestant circles because he supports abortion rights and favors gay marriage. No doubt he's right.

This is not the first time in American history that social issues have become the dividing line among believers. Slavery split many a denomination prior to the Civil War. But in our time, the genital issues really do seem to be substituting for theological ones. As revealed in the latest Pew survey of religious exclusivity, two-thirds of Americans with a religious commitment believe that many religions can get you to heaven. That's down from three-quarters six years ago, but still shows a quite remarkable commitment to what some call universalism.

Not that the odium theologicum has entirely disappeared. Focus on the Family recently removed an interview with Mormon author Glen Beck from its website, evidently because it failed to supply the necessary warning label that Beck's faith might be dangerous to your evangelical health. And of course, prominent conservative Christians of various persuasions periodically cause a certain amount of Jewish heartburn by noting that Jews won't be going to heaven. Why in God's name the Jews should care is a question to which the only sensible answer is that the belief somehow leads to hostility or discrimination. These days, there's not much evidence of that.

The downside of the impetus towards widespread embrace of a "My Father's House Has Many Mansions" ideology," it seems to me, is that it makes it harder to differentiate the sacred from the secular spheres of life. There are real public benefits in having a robust understanding that there are certain doctrines and practices (extending beyond the means of salvation to marriage and divorce and abortion and drinking and dancing) that we have in our religious communities that are not the same as what applies in secular society. In the aftermath of 9/11, there was a ratcheting up of that sacral identity that always lurks in the background of American consciousness. This may help explain that high 2002 number for belief in the accessibility of heaven to many faiths. We can all get to heaven--providing we all obey the sacred American moral norms.

So if religious exclusivity is enjoying a bit of a comeback, that may signal a ratcheting back of Sacred America and a return to a clearer sense of church-state separation. Not a bad thing, even though it probably won't get Ed Kilgore back in the good graces of his old Southern Baptist church.

The two Dans are still mixing it up over religion and the Dems, God & Country Dan here and and here, and Pastordan here, the latter enlisting enough in the way of comments to suggest that the discussion has generated more than a modicum of interest, at least at the corner of Street and Prophet. I don't have anything much worth adding, so I'm happy to let the two duke it out to their hearts' content.

Except this: The election's over, the Dems are in power, and the issue at hand is how the Obama White House decides to deal the religion deck. Rick Warren was the first card played, and it suggests that the incoming president sees white evangelicals as the force to be reckoned with, enlisted if possible, or if not defanged. Gilgoff believes that Obama's actually managed the last of these; while I think that's highly unlikely, the effort's noteworthy.

But the real question is: What happens next? My guess is that the White House will undertake a process of religious coalition building, on an issue-by-issue basis: AIDS, Darfur, abortion reduction, faith-based social service provision, poverty, immigration, climate change, health care. Denominational leaders will be players as well as representatives from a wide range of church and para-church groups. The point will be to engage the religious in those areas where their agendas and the administration's coincide. Will some feel that that they're being co-opted? Sure, and with reason, but the invitation to participate will be hard to resist. Who will manage the process? Hey, reporters!

Update: And it does indeed look like the White House is moving in that direction. Thanks for the reporting, Dan!

Protestants read the Bible more than Catholics.

Also: Politically, 41% of regular churchgoers are Republicans, 34% are Democrats, and 25% are unaffiliated with either major party. Fifty-six percent (56%) are politically conservative, 23% moderate and 20% politically liberal.

Dan Gilgoff, late of Beliefnet's God-o-Meter and now covering religion for U.S. News where he blogs as God & Country, has decided to crash our little three-way on religion and the Democratic Party. In a word, he objects to Pastordan's denigration of Mike McCurry's account of the Democratic Awakening. I'll leave it to the good pastor to riposte as only he can. G&C Dan makes the case that Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, Catholics United, Faith in Public Life, the Eleison Group, and the Matthew 25 Network are something new under the Democratic sun, and deserve credit for turning out troops on election day and lobbying their party on behalf of the poor and "reducing the demand for abortion."

This returns our discussion to what we've been calling the Religious Industrial Complex (RIC). It's an amusing name, well calculated to get under the skin of its members, but not really a very accurate one. There's nothing industrial about it, nor is it much of a complex. What it really amounts to is an aspiring Democratic Religious Establishment, or DRE. As such it represents a counter to the religious right, which has alway been so allied with the GOP that it deserves to be called the Republican Religious Establishment (RRE). From its emergence on the national stage in 1980, the RRE has been about the business of making social conservatives--many of them, in the early years, nominal Democrats--into good Republicans, even as it sought to make the GOP the vehicle for a social conservative agenda. The DRE, for its part, has sought to persuade religious moderates (or moderate conservatives) to consider the Democratic Party a worthy vehicle for their values, and to get the party to take those values seriously, even if it cannot fully embrace all of them.

But while the RRE has had a pretty consistent agenda, which it has never been shy about enunciating, the DRE has a tendency to elide the tough issues. Sure, it's against poverty and genocide and unjust wars. But where does it stand on abortion rights, on gay marriage, on hiring rules for publicly funded faith-based social services? In the name of "common ground," it doesn't like to say. That's what drives mainline Protestant lefties like Pastordan nuts, and leads them to accuse the DRE of selling its prophetic soul for a mess of priestly pottage. With the Democrats now about to take charge in Washington, it will be more than a little interesting to see how the DRE comports itself, and what its place at the table of power will be.

If the Wall Street Journal wishes to give its readers a Christmas gift next year, how about retiring "In Hoc Anno Domini," the pseudo-scriptural holiday editorial tapped out by Vermont Royster in 1949 and published by the newspaper on or about December 24 every year since. Historically confused, intellectually incoherent, and by now virtually incomprehensible, it has long outlived whatever useful service it might have done amidst the watch fires of the Cold War. After 60 appearances, enough already!

"In Hoc" begins with Paul on the road to Damascus, and Rome in charge of the "known world." That world was peaceful, yes, but the price was oppression for all who were "not the friends of Caesar." People with odd thoughts were persecuted. Tribes who came not from Rome were enslaved. Disdained were those who lacked "the familiar visage" (the Roman nose?). Everywhere was contempt for human life. Oh yeah, and taxes were too high (ah, Journal). But then came a Light out of Galilee who said, "Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's." Which somehow added up to defiance of Caesar because it meant that there were those who believed that salvation lay not with "the leaders." But Paul was afraid that new Caesars and/or prophets would arise, such that books would be burned and men would think only of food and raiment. And lest such darkness settle, he spake unto the Galatians, saying, "Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage."

Let's see. The Roman order was a pretty good deal for lots and lots of people around the empire, including Paul, the Jew with the odd thoughts, who (according to Acts 22) used his Roman citizenship to avoid a flogging by the authorities. Revolting against the authorities was a big no-no, to be sure, which is why the early Christians were at such pains to emphasize (in contrast to the Jews) their own obedience to Caesar (see "Render" above, Romans 13, etc.) The bondage that Paul was referring to was the Jewish law; and specifically, circumcision. The idea that he feared the emergence of some kind of Soviet regime is sheer anachronistic fantasy. If anyone was to bring the hammer down on freedom of thought in the known world's future, it was the Christians themselves, who, once they got charge of the Caesars' religion, set about proscribing paganism (see Ambrose, Saint) and hedging in Judaism. &cetera.

If the WSJ must indulge in a perennial piece of editorial prose this time of year--and really, who wants to have write the damn Christmas editorial this time--let them print Francis P. Church's 1897 reply to the query of little Virginia O'Hanlon in the New York Sun. Treacly as it is, "Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus" is at least an honest bit of sentiment, expressed coherently and in the prose of its own time, with even a dollop of truth.

Pleasant it is to arrive at (more or less) mutual agreement with cyberfriends, especially at this time of year. After a lively discussion, Pastordan, Rmj, and I seem to have found the same page to be on in re: the Democratic Party and its re-engagement in public religious discourse. Rmj offers a paragraph that, it seems to me, is in particular worth taking to heart:

As I've said here, I think this issue goes deeper and further afield than politics or cultural shifts that made religion a more properly private matter. The latter is, I think, part of the ebb and flow of religion in American public life: sometimes we're Jeffersonians, and religion is a nice idea for how to live one's personal life; sometimes we're devoted to a religious vision that all must share in public, or be declared politically apostate. It's not a very pretty yin-yang, and not exactly a fruitful one, either; but there it is.

Slate's media watchdog Jack Shafer thinks he's got the NYT dead to rights for Paul Vitello's December 14 story on how the recession is boosting worship attendance, at evangelical churches in particular. Not so, clucks Shafer, citing Gallup editor-in-chief Frank Newport's marshalling of evidence that there has, in fact, been no increase in church attendance in these hard times. Weekly attendance, saith Newport, has remained around 42 percent for months and months.

Unbeknownst to Shafer, however, is the bogosity of Gallup's church attendance numbers. What Newport doesn't say is that his company's surveys have shown church attendance to be in that exact numeric neighborhood ever since they began asking the question 60 years ago. As sure as death and taxes, two in five Americans will say they attend church weekly.

But for over a decade, sociologists of religion (and those who read them) have known that 1) a lot of those supposed weekly attenders are fibbing; and 2) more of them are fibbing now than used to. The evidence for this comes from multiple sources, including time-usage studies, on-the-ground observation of parking lots, church attendance records, interviews with clergy. These days, the real number for weekly attendance is in the low 20 percent range. (Here's a citation for one of the more important articles on the subject: C. Kirk Hadaway, Penny Long Marler and Mark Chaves, "Overreporting Church Attendance in America: Evidence That Demands the Same Verdict," American Sociological Review, Vol. 63, No. 1 [Feb., 1998], pp. 122-130.)

So does this meant that Vitello's article is on the money? Could be. A bunch of phone calls to pastors is more likely to turn up something new in the going-to-church department than Gallup's invariant two-in-five. Don't expect the phenomenon to last, though. After 9/11, a host of stories tracked a bump in churchgoing, and then a host tracked the quick reversion to the norm. As Yoda might have said, "Backsliding always we are."

If you're so rich, why aren't you smart?

In one of the dopier letters to the editor I've seen in the New York Times, American Jewish Congress executive director David Harris takes the Gray Lady to task for emphasizing Bernard Madoff's Jewishness:

Yes, he is Jewish. We get it. But was this relevant to his being arrested for cheating investors, or so key to his evolution as a businessman that it needed to be hammered home again and again?

I have read several accounts in The Times of the shenanigans of Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois, yet have no clue what his religion is, nor, frankly, do I care. Why should I? Unless he was acting in the name of his faith, which I assume he was not, what difference does it make?

If Harris doesn't think Jewishness lies at the center of the Madoff affair he might take a look at the latest issues of the Forward ("Madoff Scandal Rips Apart Close World of Jewish Philanthropy") and the Jewish Week ("Amid Madoff Wreckage, Call for Reform") Of course, Harris knows full well how big a Jewish story this is. But because Madoff is such a shonda for the goyim (disgrace in front of the gentile world), he presumably wanted to convey the idea that it would be better if the (yes, Jewish-owned) American newspaper of record just not harp on that aspect of the story. Sha, sha.

Such a viewpoint is part and parcel of the story itself. Among the many things it reveals is that older Jewish philanthropists, accepted as they now are in the wide gentile world, have continued to behave like they live in the closed, who-do-you-know, handshake-deal immigrant world from which they sprung. As Brandeis historian Jonathan Sarna tells Michael Paulson in today's Boston Globe:

One thing that's not sufficiently understood is that the people who are involved in this are disproportionately older, and enormously loyal to the Jewish community If that generation has now been wiped out of money, we're going to see a real change, because the people who made their money in high-tech weren't affected at all, and the younger Jews don't even understand how you could have given that much money to one guy.

One of the critical developments in the Jewish communal world of the past couple of decades has been the increased power of wealthy leaders, over against organizations like the Congress and the American Jewish Committee and the ADL, which have been hollowed out and deprived of influence. This throwback to the days of the Strauses and Lehmans has made for some unlovely backroom family politics and a definite shortage of collective, bottom-up decision making. If there's a silver lining to this very dark cloud, it may be that the demise of Madoff and Friends will return rule by Our Crowd to a Jewish community less cozy, less opaque, and less subject to whim and bluster.

My oh-so-good (if sometimes intemperate) twin Pastordan can't seem to stop fretting about Mike McCurry's (and my, and now Adventus') readiness to acknowledge something like the standard narrative of a Democratic party gone increasing secular if not a- or anti-religious over the past generation. Let me just add a couple of points to a discussion that may by now be trying readers' souls.

So OK, it is a mistake to buy into the journalistic shorthand that Democrats/progressives abandoned public religion in the post-Vietnam era. The sanctuary movement of the 1980s, the ongoing community organizing of the Industrial Areas Foundation (where Obama got his start), were nothing if not faith-based. And there have been prominent politicians ready, willing, and able to wear their faith on their sleeves. But it is sheer nonsense to pretend that the public religious witness on the left has been equivalent to that on the right since 1980, and that the only reason it isn't widely known is the success of the PR machinations of the religious right.

In the 1970s, religious right leaders, having denounced black churches for involving themselves in politics during the civil rights era (abandoning what was called "the spirituality of the church"), decided to go and do likewise. And they really did create a grassroots movement, via a host of national and state and local organizations. Though marquee groups like the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition have come and gone, Christian conservatives have continued to do their thing in American public life, very often but not always tied closely to the Republican Party apparatus. And, I would argue, their actions have tended to make the case against faith-based politics for many progressives. The religious-secular divide within the Democratic Party today is not illusory, and based in part on our experience of a generation of religiosified national politics.

For their part, religious progressives have not, until the past few years, faced up to the need to organize at the grassroots level. I remember giving a talk to a bunch of liberal religious warhorses during the 2004 campaign cycle. They believed that in order to counter the lamentable lack of media attention to themselves, the thing to do was to issue press releases and hold press conferences. They were not particularly happy to hear from me that what they needed was boots on the ground. The prevailing narrative has its shortcomings, but at the end of the day, what it signals is the correct recognition that progressive religious folks are out and about, doing their things in their own ways (hi RIC!) to counter a generation of active religious politics from the other side.

So yes, bro, you and your Dad have kept the faith all these years. But numbers are numbers and movements are movements, and for better or (sometimes) for worse, the Democrats have found religion in a measurable way. What they do with it now is the real question.

Once upon a time, presidents tended to choose their own pastors, or reasonable facsimiles thereof, to give the invocation at their inaugurations. The idea was: Here's the guy who presides over my religious life, the guy I go to for spiritual counsel, and so I'm going to honor him by letting him say the prayer over this latest ceremonial occasion of my life. Thus, John F. Kennedy gave the nod to Boston's Cardinal Richard Cushing in 1961 and, in 1981, Ronald Reagan tapped Bel Air Presbyterian pastor Donn Moomaw. From time to time, the invoking cleric would be chosen for symbolic reasons, as when Dwight Eisenhower selected Orthodox Archbishop Michael in 1957 and Reagan, in 1985, chose the president of Georgetown University, Father Joseph A. O'Hare S.J. [Correction: make that Timothy S. Healy S.J.]

But over the past two decades, it appears that a new office has emerged--that of Pastor to the President. This emergence is a bit obscured by the fact that the only actual holder of that office has been Billy Graham. Graham gave the invocations at the inauguration of George H.W. Bush and both Clinton inaugurals, and was slated to do the same at George W. Bush's 2001 affair, but because of illness had to cede the job to his son Franklin. It is, I think, in this context that Barack Obama's choice of Rick Warren needs to be seen. As has been widely noted, Warren bids fair to become the closest thing to Billy Graham that the country has today. At the moment, he's way more controversial than the now sainted Graham, but in his younger days, Billy was plenty controversial himself.

What's important to recognize is that the position of presidential pastor is not entirely bogus. It entails spiritual counseling, advice and friendship, pastoral care. Graham actually seems to have filled that role for Richard Nixon, which helps explain why Nixon tapped him for his first inaugural invocation. The Clintons are both attached to him; according to Burns Strider, who handled faith outreach for the Hillary Clinton campaign, whenever Hillary was slated to make an appearance in North Carolina, she insisted on paying a call on the old man. And of course, George W. Bush has made central to his faith journey that walk on the beach with Billy. Even if that particular event is, strictly speaking, apocryphal, the personal connection seems real.

Rick Warren is of course the head of the Saddleback world, the crusader for AIDS, the best-selling author of popular religious books. But he also, from what I gather, has taken it upon himself to serve as spiritual counselor to the politically prominent. There is every indication that Obama has availed himself of his services. Amidst all the huffing and puffing about Warren's choice to give next month's invocation, hardly raised at all is the possibility that this was, for Obama, as much a personal as a political decision. His family is, famously, between churches, and his relationship with Jeremiah Wright can hardly be what it once was. Warren seems to have given the president-elect good reason to like him and value his advice; the two call each other friend. We may think whatever we want of either, but this may be more about them than us.

Update: In support of this view of Warren, here's an exchange with Steve Waldman from a recent interview:

Did you ever talk to President Bush to try to convince him to change his policy?

No. No.

Why not?

Never got the chance. I just didn’t. In fact, in the first place, I’m a pastor, and people might misunderstand – I don’t deal with policy issues with Barack Obama or President Clinton or John McCain. I just don’t. That’s not my role. My role is to pastor these guys. As a leader I understand stress.

And even when I disagree with positions they hold, they’ve got plenty of political advisors. They don’t need me to be a political advisor. I’m not a pundit. I’m not a politician and that’s why I don’t take sides. But I am a pastor. And I can deal with “how’s your family doing? How’s your stress level doing?”

That is, according to the Pew's new toting up of the religious identities of members of the next Congress, Jews are the most overrepresented, with 8.4 percent of the representatives and senators as opposed to just 1.7 percent of the U.S. adult population. That beats out those pillars of mainline Protestantism, the Anglican/Episcopalians and the Presbyterians. Pentecostals are badly underrepresented, with 4.4 percent of the population but only .5 percent of Congress. However, they do a lot better than those who claim no religious affiliation. The latter weigh in at 16.5 percent of the population but zero percent of Congress. What does that tell you?

Over at Religion in American History a few days a ago, Matt Sutton was inspired by the Newsweek brouhaha to put up a post calling out evangelicals for taking the hard line on gay marriage while being pretty squishy (these days) on divorce. Matt's point is that if evangelicals are going to to nix the former on biblical grounds, they had better do the same with the latter. (Jesus and Paul turn thumbs down on divorce except in a couple of specific cases.) The post has elicited a lively exchange, thanks to a defense of current evangelical marriage hermeneutics and politics by an anonymous commenter. What's comes through is 1) how insubstantial the moral argument against divorce is; and 2) how much the argument against same-sex marriage rests on its implicit sanctioning of proscribed sexual acts. Anyway, the exchange is worth checking out.

Pastordan wants his friends in the RIC to "explain why, despite all evidence to the contrary, they thought it was a good idea to mainstream Rick Warren as a "moderate Evangelical." Brody, meanwhile, has got scads of pro-lifers raging at Warren for being willing to anoint a pro-choicer president. Obama, for his part, claims this is part and parcel of his campaign to get America to "come together" even when there's disagreement about social issues. And Warren seems to be angling for Billy Graham's title of America's pastor without losing his social conservative voice. Which of the above are shrewd as serpents, which innocent as doves?

A few days ago, Anne Applebaum ululated on Slate that the Madoff affair portends the crippling of capitalism as we know it. Why? Not because the $50 billion that's gone up in smoke is irrecoverable but because this pyramid scheme to end pyramid schemes will finally have destroyed the trust that has permitted us, or at least upper-middle class people like the Applebaums, to go into a car dealership and purchase a new vehicle with nothing more than an unverified personal check.

Applebaum not only thinks it's ironic that scam artists like the Madoffs have undermined the very system that made them masters of the universe, but:

The deeper irony here is that all these schemes were only possible in the first place precisely because we have, until now, lived in a culture with such extraordinarily high levels of trust, a culture in which a customer's bona fides are accepted without question and wealthy people are thought to have earned their money.

Rick Warren to invoke at Inaugural. Jeez.

Update: But at least Joe Lowery's benedicting.

I've set Pastordan on a tear with my little shout-out on Mike McCurry's version of How the Democrats Got Religion. While it's always fun to bait him whether or not it drives up traffic (but thanks, Dan), let me essay a serious response.

Soft-headed boomer that I am, McCurry's account rings true in a way younger folk may not realize. Those of us who came into political consciousness in the wake of the Eisenhower Revival lived in an intellectual world far more suffused with religion than is generally recognized. Forget about the Niebuhrs and their neo-orthodox realism. What counted was the existential witness of Bonhoeffer et al. on the one hand and the neo-social gospel of the civil rights leaders on the other. One reason that the prophetic witness was so powerful in those days was that the priests of the 1950s had done their work well. There was a lot of spiritual energy in those batteries to discharge.

Ambinder's got a good line on former Ohio secretary of state Ken Blackwell's alliance with Texas party chair Tina Benkiser; to win:

Most significantly, this union gives evangelical Christians on the national committee a single ticket to join.

With Blackwell as chair and Benkiser as co-chair, the GOP would have a black face and a female face in titular charge of the party without giving off any vibes that they might be reaching out to "moderates." That's too bad for Maryland's Michael Steele, who has given off just such a vibe. It's equally bad news for incumbent RNC chair Mike Duncan, the apparent front runner despite presiding over the biggest Republican electoral debacle in decades.

Duncan's latest exercise in self-promotion has been an unremitting assault on President-elect Obama for alleged ties to Governor-reject Blagojevich. Is it a coincidence that the assault was piously denounced two days ago by fresh-minted Christian warrior Newt Gingrich? I rather doubt it. Gingrich and Blackwell are longtime allies and collaborators.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but yesterday's letter from some prominent evangelicals paying tribute to departed National Association of Evangelicals governmental affairs VP Richard Cizik seems pretty weak tea. As in: "We know you had to fire his ass but he's a great guy and we hope his replacement won't just be doing abortion and same-sex marriage." And even so, the list of signatories lacks the sort of big dog that might make a few people sit up and take note. Like a Joel Hunter or that alleged paragon of the Big Agenda, Rick Warren. And why Lynne Hybels but not husband Bill? We're talking 28 years in the trenches here.

Speaking today at the National Press Club, Episcopal Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori took a stand against the Bush doctrine of government-funded faith-based social service provision:

"The idea that faith-based groups should have special entree to government funding just makes me twitch," said Jefferts Schori, who leads the 2.2 million-member Episcopal Church. "It makes me twitch when groups funded with public funds will only hire their own members, or use the funds to advance sectarian" views." (RNS)

It will be more than a little interesting to see if this portends a liberal/mainline denominational campaign along these lines. That would indeed pose an interesting challenge for the Religious Industrial Complex. Which side are you on, guys?

Brody's on the case of education secretary nominee Arne Duncan's support for a gay-friendly high school in Chicago. Lest you thought the culture wars were over.

Now that the right has gotten in its licks at Newsweek, comes the left with its own lament that Lisa Miller did not see fit, or have the wit, to include its advanced perspectives on biblical views of love and marriage.

Over at Religion Dispatches, there's Catholic feminist theologian Mary Hunt and U.C.C. activist Peter Laarman, while on the Jewish front, Shalom Center's Arthur Waskow devotes his latest email report (subscribe here) to telling you everything he told Miller but that she didn't get into the story.

Meanwhile, on the RIC front, My DD's Shai Sachs weighed in over the weekend, much to the pleasure of Dispatches From the Religious Left editor Fred Clarkson.

How much religious left is actually out there, and how much difference can what's out there make? Prophets, of course, shouldn't wait on numbers to do their thing, and these ones are entitled to berate centrist progressives for selling out on gay and abortion rights. The question they must ask themselves, however, is how important those issues are to them, as compared with, say, poverty, health care, genocide, and the conduct of the so-called war on terror. Too important to permit a little truckling to social conservatives, whom you've been beating up for making abortion and gay marriage the alpha and omega of their public agenda? Well, OK.

The RIC returns from its annual staff retreat...

Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm (D) and her husband "have bought 300 shares of U.S. automaker stock -- 100 for each of their three children -- and will make them part of their Christmas gifts" (AP).

Mike McCurry, one of the most decent guys in American politics, offers his take on the Democratic religious awakening. Take note Dan, Fred, Sarah et al.

Update: My response to Pastordan's screed.

Twenty years ago, shortly after we had moved from Milton, Mass. to Decatur, Ga., my eldest son returned from a day at Decatur Presbyterian Kindergarten and asked, "Daddy, What's the bobble?"
"What's the bobble?"
"You know," he said. "Jesus loves me. This I know. For the bobble tells me so."
"Oh," I replied, sagely. "It's kind of like our Bible, only different."

I've finally gotten around to reading Newsweek religion editor LIsa Miller's cover story on what the Bible tells us about marriage, and for sure, there's something stunning about a mainstay of the mainstream American news media taking sides in a highly contentious religious issue. Half a century ago, Time roiled the culture by merely providing a platform for a bunch of avant-garde theologians with a stark cover that read, "Is God Dead?"

Steve Waldman, an old newsweekly guy, is appalled at the apparent transformation of one of them into an "an out-and-out opinion-oriented magazine." As an old daily newspaper guy, I've always been put off by the traditional newsweekly confidence that we know exactly what's what, and will tell all you middle-brows what it means so definitively that you don't have to give the matter a second thought--until maybe next week, when we'll retell it as if last week had never happened.

Miller does not depart from that tradition, rushing in with utter aplomb where biblical scholars know there are land mines. Likewise, the magazine's editor, John Meacham, does not hesitate to read America's Episcopalian schismatics the riot act for rooting their opposition to gay marriage and ordination in a book they consider the "final authority and unchangeable standard for Christian faith and life." Saith Meacham:

No matter what one thinks about gay rights—for, against or somewhere in between —this conservative resort to biblical authority is the worst kind of fundamentalism.

When it comes to the Bible, bobble, Old and New Testaments, Tanach, or whatever you want to call it or them, prudence suggests that journalists beware of making definitive pronouncements on what verses mean and how much authority they should have. Making unsourced assertions is known in the news trade as using "the voice of God." It is not entirely forbidden, but it is very much frowned upon.

In the Muslim world, this is not a way to show respect.

In one of those anniversary pieces that sometimes attribute more significance to what is being remembered than is deserved, Peter Baker suggests in today's NYT that the impeachment of Bill Clinton 10 years ago marks the beginning of the vendetta-like conflict that characterizes politics in the nation's capital:

Indeed, except for brief interludes, Washington in the last decade has been governed by a climate of anger and animosity, a modern-day tribalism pitting faction against faction that some trace to the days of the impeachment.

What the impeachment may more truly have signified is indicated in a quote from Mark Corallo, an aide to former Louisiana congressman (and almost speaker) Bob Livingston at the time and later a Justice Department spokesman under President Bush:

At the end of the day, the Republicans were hurt more. We became the party of the moral jihad. I’m as guilty as anyone. We all got wrapped up in it.

Andrew Sullivan rightly corrects Camille Paglia for claiming that marriage is a religious concept that should be left in the hands of religious institutions while the state should concern itself solely with civil unions and the legal rights appertaining thereunto. (The truth is that marriage was always the business of the civil order; the religious dimension was johnny-come-lately.) Sullivan ends his post by lamenting the inability of Americans to accept a "simple rule of civil marriage for all; religious marriage for all who want to supplement it with God's grace":

Why is that so hard for some people of faith to grasp? Why are their marriages defined not by the virtues they sustain but the people they exclude?

As Pastordan suggests, there may not be much interest out there in the Religious Industrial Complex discussion, but there are those of us who like it, and nobody's forcing you to read this.

On the question of the efficacy of RIC outreach, let me get a little empirical. Laurie Goodstein of the NYT was kind enough to make available some number-crunching of the exit poll numbers on white evangelicals that the pollsters, Edison/Mitofsky, did for her; and it's pretty interesting stuff. The margin among 18-29 year-olds went from 83-16 for Bush in 2004 to 66-32 for McCain in 2008. Among 30-44 year-olds, the shrinkage was from 86-12 to 76-23. Among the 45-64 year-olds, there was essentially no change: 76-23 to 76-22. And among those 65 and older, the GOP margin grew, from 68-32 for Bush to 72-26. So we're talking about swings toward Obama of 33 and 20 points in the younger cohorts, and towards McCain of 1 and 10 points in the older cohorts. This does suggest that there may be dividends for the kind of outreach that Pastordan and Fred Clarkson and Digby eschew.

Once upon a time, I co-wrote a book called The American Establishment that, while not uncritical of it, made a kind of case for the establishmentarian approach to life. There can be no doubt that folks like Faith in Public Life and Jim Wallis are establishmentarian as hell. They want to reach across divides, they want to be players, they want to gather together and ask the Lord's blessing. Are they prophets? No, right-thinking and even impassioned as they may be, they're priests, specializing in the laying on of hands and the eirenic sensibility and the rhetorical unction. Fun to read they're not. But like it or not, they may be doing the Lord's work, if by that you choose to mean the gathering up of forces for the, ah, common good.

Are they sometimes wrong and wrong-headed? Will they too readily glad hand and even kowtow to folks who shouldn't be trusted? Do they have a weakness for insiderdom? Yes, all of the above. And so it's important to have some prophets around to give them a good poking now and then. Each side has its proper business to attend to. What's annoying is the priest who pretends to be a prophet, and the prophet who tries to be treated as a priest.

There's been a certain amount of chatter over the past few days about this graph, taken from the General Social Survey, showing that the more strongly identified with a political party you are, the more frequently you are likely to pray. This adds a new item to the existing set of correlations between political participation and religious identification.

The 2001 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), conducted by my colleagues Barry Kosmin and Ariela Keysar, shows that the more religious you are, the more likely you are to be registered to vote. It also shows that independents consider themselves less religious than either Republicans or Democrats, and are less likely to believe that God performs miracles or, indeed, exists. Preliminary results from the new ARIS, now just wrapping up, show that half of those without a religion are independents, as opposed to 30 percent Democrats and 12 percent Republicans.

What's the explanation? Pastordan is on the mark in attributing the correlation to the propensity to be socially involved. People who are involved in one group tend to be involved in others. Of course, you can remain an isolato and pray your heart out. But for most Americans religion is something that if you're going to do it, you do it with others, at least part of the time. Hermits and anchorites are few and far between in the U.S. of A.

Sarah Pulliam has a first-rate story up on the Christianity Today website breaking news of the resignation of Rich Cizik as vice president for governmental affairs of the National Association of Evangelicals, in the wake of remarks clearly indicating that he's grown soft on gay marriage. Here's what he said to Terry Gross in a Fresh Air interview December 2:

I'm shifting, I have to admit. In other words, I would willingly say that I believe in civil unions. I don't officially support redefining marriage from its traditional definition, I don't think.

The Cizik story takes on added significance in re: our little back and forth about the RIC and the import of its reaching out to center-right evangelicals. The NAE has always been an odd duck of an organization, seeming to be the evangelical counterpart to the National Council of Churches but actually representing only a few (and not the largest) evangelical denominations, and accepting membership from individuals and other entities. But Cizik has been a central figure in the "new evangelical agenda" story, and his departure may be a portent. Of what? Perhaps a new institutional home for new agenda evangelicals.

As noted in this space, a few days ago Religion Dispatches ran a piece by Sarah Posner taking a mildly dyspeptic look a what has somewhat nastily (and hyperbolically) been termed the "Religious Industrial Complex" (RIC), by which is meant the small agglomeration of people and institutions that have sprung up over the past several years to help the Democratic Party reach out to--and, of course, round up--people of faith, values voters, social conservatives, those people, or whatever else you'd like to call them.

The burden of Posner's critique was that the RIC has helped shaped a media narrative suggesting (wrongly) that there is some kind of new evangelical left out there dedicated to a broad agenda and led by the likes of Rick Warren and Joel Hunter. Her point is that these evangelical leaders are not who they're made out to be, that RIC has sold its progressive religious birthright for a mess of conservative pottage that, in the end, had precious little electorally to show for it.

Yesterday, under the byline "Katie Paris and the Faith in Public Life Team," one of the charter members of the RIC (and a nicer bunch of folks you'd never want to meet) responded, insisting a bit defensively that its approach has too gotten results and that in any event it's a good thing for progressives to seek common ground with conservatives. To which Pastordan retorted in an extended post that the efforts of Faith in Public Life et al. amount to less than meets the eye. Paraphrasing Jesus, he demands, "Show me the math."

Actually, there is a bit of math on the RIC's side. Much to the surprise of a number of observers (including this one), Obama ended up picking up some significant support among evangelicals, especially those at the younger end of the age scale--just the cohort that voted overwhelmingly for George Bush in 2004. Of course, it's open to debate how much the RIC's efforts contributed to that result. My sense is that the tectonic plate of American evangelicalism is indeed shifting, and that the efforts of (let's call them) center-right evangelical leaders to expand their agenda has legitimated the shift. That's why the old bulls of the evangelical right have gotten so hysterical about them.

That said, there's little question that the RIC and its journalistic proponents (Amy Sullivan, E.J. Dionne) have sometimes let wishful thinking run away with sober judgment, hopefully announcing the evangel of what has not (yet?) come to pass. The problem here is not with the RIC, which is simply going about the traditional political business of grabbing for folks in the middle of the road and spinning the results. Sticking strictly to your prophetic guns, as Pastordan urges, amounts to a lefty version of the Rovian strategy of playing to the base. (Sorry, Dan.)

The real difficulty is with the journalistic narrative. At this point in time, the GOP has much more of a problem with the less religious than the Democrats have with the more religious. And the less religious are rather more numerous these days than the more religious. So while it may make good sense for partisan Democrats to push for a bigger piece of the religious pie, the real story for the next cycle is how Republicans reach beyond their "social conservative" base. And as of now, there's no Secular Industrial Complex to show them the way.

Update: Response of Sarah Posner to an initial response of mine.

OMG he's a Mainline Protestant! He worships at an Episcopal Church.

He is something of a universalist:

When asked if he thinks that he prays to the same God as those with different beliefs [specifically, "Allah"], Bush said, "I do."

"I do believe there is an Almighty that is broad and big enough and loving enough that can encompass a lot of people," Bush said, but he drew a distinction when it comes to those who perpetrate terror.

When asked if he believes the Bible is literally true, the president said that he's "not a literalist" when it comes to reading the Bible, but rather focuses on the important lessons he believes the Bible teaches.

As for whether one can believe in the Bible and believe in evolution, Bush said he does, adding that "I happen to believe that evolution doesn't fully explain the mystery of life.

"I think that God created the Earth, created the world," he said. "I think the creation of the world is so mysterious it requires something as large as an almighty, and I don't think it's incompatible with the scientific proof that there is evolution."

If you're interested, Christian Century has finally posted my wrap-up of religion and the election. Pastordan uses it as a springboard for a cheery tour of GOP politicians angling for the social conservative vote next time around. This includes an extended look at Newt Gingrich and his attempted makeover as a Man of God.

Twenty years ago, when I was was writing editorials and columns for the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Newt was a regular and always entertaining visitor to our conference room. Then a humble congressman from Clayton County--well, never humble, but not the exalted figure he later became--he'd make his pitch for whatever policy he was hawking that day, and then settle in to talk politics. Then as now, he wasn't much of a politician on the stump--he'd run three times for his House seat before finally getting elected, as I recall--but he knew all the gossip; and being without any ideological principles, he was able to do business with anyone and everyone.

For a while, the trait served him perfectly in putting together the varied assemblage that took over the House from the Democrats in 1994. He'd started out as a kind of Rockefeller Republican, then drifted towards libertarianism, and I remember once asking him why, as a libertarian, he supported the religious right's position on abortion and gay rights. "They're part of our coalition," he primly replied. Now they pretty much hold the whip hand.

Newt's an intellectual dabbler who, once upon a time, threw himself into the futurological world of the Tofflers. But his childhood love, thanks to his name, was herpetology, and the Atlanta Zoo's impressive reptile house had--and presumably still has--some eponymous specimens donated by him. His new-found devotion to religion may manifest a long-standing identification with another of their kind: the chameleon.

With all the hoopla over California's Proposition 8, it went largely unnoticed that on election day Washington joined Oregon in permitting physician-assisted suicide. Now a judge in the nearly adjoining state of Montana has found that Montanans enjoy a state constitutional right to do the same. At the same time, and with the lack of commotion that usually characterizes the Land of Steady Habits, Connecticut, having joined its more rambunctious neighbor immediately to the north in permitting same-sex marriages, voted down a constitutional convention that might have done away with them. New York, for its part, now recognizes even if it will not (yet) perform them, while Vermont, New Hampshire, and New Jersey have put civil union laws on the books. Call it the domino effect of social change in America.

John Boehner bubbles that Ahn Cao, the new Vietnamese-American congressman from New Orleans, is the future of the Republican Party. Likewise Newt Gingrich: "This is the opposite of red-vs.-blue, base-mobilization politics.” Meanwhile, African-American RNC chair wannabe Michael Steele rages against GOP conservatives who, in shutting him out, would shut out moderates:

They have been beating me upside the head with it and let me give it to you straight on: Wake up people. I mean what are you going to do? Are you going to kick these folks out of the party? I have watched this party self disintegrate for the last four or five years. I’ve watched this party isolate itself from itself.

Sarah Posner, who writes the FundamentaList column for the American Prospect, has a useful piece up on Religion Dispatches anatomizing what sometimes passes for the religious left inside the Beltway. Posner's grumpy point is that the likes of Jim Wallis and Mara Vanderslice and Katie Paris and Burns Strider are not the real left, but rather the house liberals of the Democratic Party--actually it's important for Wallis to pretend that he's not--who are more priestly than prophetic in their witness for peace and justice. This is not the first time such a lament has been heard in the land. A new book, Dispatches from the Religious Left, rounds up a bunch of outside-the-Beltway lefties to make the case for themselves. I don't have a problem with their case, and I understand their annoyance, but that doesn't seem to me sufficient grounds for scorning those toiling in the spiritual vineyards of Democratic Party politics. There's a role for priests as well as prophets in this world.

Update: Pastor Dan doesn't disagree with me on the possible virtues of insiderhood. It's a nice question, though, whether by prophetic standards Kossack Nation is insider or outsider.

One associates Louisiana politics with many exotic things, but Asian Catholic Republicans are not among them. Now there are two. The first is Bobby Jindal, born to Indian immigrants, who abandoned the Hinduism of his youth and converted to Catholicism. In 2007, he became the first Indian-American governor in the nation’s history. Then, over the weekend, Joseph (Anh) Cao defeated the disgraced William Jefferson to become the nation's first congressman of Vietnamese antecedents. Before becoming a lawyer, he spent some time in a Jesuit seminary studying to be a priest.

Jindal and Cao both deserve to be considered Catholic intellectuals, but there the resemblance ends. A graduate of Brown University and a Rhodes Scholar, Jindal quickly established himself as a culture warrior. Here he is writing on "Atheism's Gods" in the Catholic apologetic magazine This Rock in 1995:

The wave of political correctness, which has affected universities at every level, has also infected religious and philosophical thought. Whereas Western universities once existed to train clergymen and educate others in the fundamentals of the Christian faith, modern centers of higher learning are much more secular and skeptical toward anything remotely religious.

Cao, by contrast, appears to be anything but a social conservative ideologue. According to Adam Nagourney's profile in today's NTY, he has spent most of his adult life as a political independent--an existential choice perhaps related to his fondness for Camus and Dostoevsky. While studying to be a priest he worked with the poor in Mexico and in Vietnamese refugee camps in Hong Kong, then decided to work for social change via politics, helping his community as a lawyer in post-Katrina New Orleans. “Politics and religious life," he told Nagourney, "don’t mix.”

If anything, Cao seems most akin to fellow freshman congressman-elect Tom Perriello (D-Va), a "common good" Catholic who has spent much of his legal career working for international nonprofits dedicated to improving the lot of the least among us. It will be interesting to see how Cao fares in the House Republican conference.

In a comment, Marcus French of the evangelical--or, perhaps more accurately, evangelistic--Voice of Revolution website suggests that the problem with the No Mob Veto letter condemning anti-Mormon violence probably has to do with its last sentence, which reads:

Furthermore, beginning today, we commit ourselves to exposing and publicly shaming anyone who resorts to the rhetoric of anti-religious bigotry--against any faith, on any side of any cause, for any reason.

Today, with National Press Club bells and whistles, Brookings released "Serving People in Need, Safeguarding Religious Freedom"--a set of recommendations on government-religion partnerships written by E.J. Dionne, WaPo columnist and Brookings senior fellow, and Melissa's Rogers, director of the Center for Religion and Public Affairs at Wake Forest University Divinity School, formerly of the Baptist Joint Committee. As you would expect from those two, it's an extremely thoughtful and well-meaning effort, often taking excruciating pains to be even-handed and understanding of the two sides in the contentious debate over President Bush's faith-based initiative. And in that spirit, I urge you all to take equal pains in making your way through it.

On the principal issue of contention, namely, whether religious institutions should be allowed an exemption from anti-discrimination laws in hiring people to perform government-funded work, Dionne and Rogers do not see completely eye to eye, and they sort of punt. Rogers, in keeping with her old-time Baptist separationism, wants no allowance for hiring discrimination. Dionne's prepared to give it some wiggle room. They end up recommending that the Obama administration set up a commission to study the issue. There are complexities of practice here, but I must say I don't have much sympathy for the wiggle-room position, much less the Bushian "let them hire only their own kind" approach. The government's purpose in funding must be secular, so anyone willing to work for that purpose should be eligible to be hired. If the religious institution feels that its religious identity will be watered down by hiring outsiders, then it is asking the government to subsidize its religious identity. And the government shouldn't be in the business of doing that.

Be that as it may, I predict that this will be an area where Obama sticks to principle. Not only is he on record against permitting such employment discrimination, but a lot of important congressional allies (e.g. Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va ) have gone to the mat on this one. Yes, some center-right folks will cry foul, but making the case for not subsidizing religion is not hard--and if, as Dionne and Rogers see it, this is going to be part of a big Obama community-service initiative, establishing faith-based on clearly non-Bushian lines is pretty clearly the way to make hay.

I'm a little surprised at the lack of comprehensiveness of the list of signers of the "No Mob Veto" letter published in today's NYT. To be sure, this protest against violence against and intimidation of Mormons for their support of Proposition 8 comes from the right side of the spectrum (the Becket Fund), but I would have expected signatures from the ADL's Abe Foxman and David Saperstein of Reform Judaism's Religious Action Center (even though they opposed Prop. 8). And nothing from Mainline Protestantism or Islam. Doesn't Becket know how to put together a coalition, or was there some other problem?

Anyone interested in learning why yr humble editor is a danger to youth, look here.

First, Kathleen Parker stirred up a hornet's nest on the right by cocking a snoot at Sarah Palin. Then, the election having been consummated, she made so bold as to suggest that the Grand Old Party might have a religious problem. As in:

To be more specific, the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP is what ails the erstwhile conservative party and will continue to afflict and marginalize its constituents if reckoning doesn't soon cometh.

It seems that she got the term from Doug Marlette, the editorial cartoonist who died too young in a car accident last year. Doug, a colleague of mine on the Atlanta Constitution editorial page 20 years ago, was an army brat who knew his way around southern religion, which he emblemized in the character of Will B. Dunn. An affectionate send-up of the liberal Baptist pastor and activist Will Campbell, Pastor Dunn was a put-upon, slightly dimwitted, decent but not particularly righteous soul who appeared regularly in Doug's daily comic strip Kudzu. Anyway, while Parker says where she got oogedy-boogedy, she avoids defining the term or speculating on its derivation:

If Jim and Tammy Faye put you in mind of oogedy-boogedy, you're getting warm.

Otherwise, the term may best be illuminated by two connoisseurs of the linguistic arts: Fats Waller and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart.

The latter, unable to define pornography, famously said, "I know it when I see it." Waller, responding to a request to explain "swing," said, "If you got to ask, you ain't got it."

Diversity = Bigotry = Cultural Fascism = Multicultural Religion.

Ipse dixit Donohue.

AIPAC:
1. Back Robust Foreign Aid Budget
2. Support Sanctions Against Iran
3. Stop Iran’s Nuclear Program
4. Support Israel's Quest for Peace

J Street:
1. Make Middle East diplomacy a priority

Contemplating the prospects of secular conservatism in the GOP, Andrew Sullivan writes, "I don't see how Republicanism, as it is now constructed, can tolerate atheists in its midst." Clearly, the atheists and other unaffiliated types have gotten the message. Since 2000, the unaffiliated are the only religious grouping that has grown steadily more Democratic in its voting preferences, choosing Gore over Bush 61-30, Kerry over Bush 67-31, and Obama over McCain 75-23. This time around, for the first time, the unaffiliated preferred the Democrat by a larger margin than white evangelicals preferred the Republican.

Last Friday, the Lexington Herald-Leader published a story by John Cheves revealing that Kentucky's 2006 law organizing its Office of Homeland Security lists as its first duty "stressing the dependence on Almighty God as being vital to the security of the Commonwealth." That duty obligated the Office to publicize God's benevolent protection in its annual reports and the state's Emergency Operations Center to affix a plaque at its entrance declaring, "The safety and security of the Commonwealth cannot be achieved apart from the reliance on Almighty God."

The man behind this provision of the law is State Rep. Tom Riner, a Louisville Democrat who happens to be a Southern Baptist minister. "This is recognition that government alone cannot guarantee the perfect safety of the people of Kentucky," Riner told the Herald-Leader. "Government itself, apart from God, cannot close the security gap. The job is too big for government."

Be that as it may, once upon a time, Baptists considered it anathema to get the government involved in promoting God's engagement in jobs like that. Those Danbury Baptists who provoked Thomas Jefferson into dilating on a wall of separation between church and state didn't want government to do anything to further the acknowledgment of God, however beneficial such acknowledgment might be to the security, spiritual or otherwise, of the community at large. These days, that old Baptist separationism can be found in places like the Baptist Joint Committee but increasingly rarely among Southern Baptists.

So the legal challenge must come from quarters like American Atheists of Parsippany, N.J., who yesterday filed a lawsuit on behalf of a number of their co-non-religionists in the Bluegrass State. In asking that references to God be removed from the law, the suit alleges that plaintiffs "suffer anxiety from the belief that the existence of these unconstitutional laws suggest that their very safety as residents of Kentucky may be in the hands of fanatics, traitors or fools." I choose option three.

Update: Here's the complaint.

Charlie Cook canvasses two anonymous Republican wise heads. Neither thinks social conservatism is the problem. And, of course, Ponnuru agrees.

I suppose it should come as no surprise, but the rhetoric of victimization is back on the religious right, with a vengeance. Today Brody is retailing a War on America's Religious Roots that is taking place, horrors, in the new Capitol Visitors Center. It was back in September that Sen. Jim Demint (R-SC) expressed his outrage at the outrage, and now National Review Online's John J. Miller has taken up the hue and cry. Not to mention, of all people, Newt Gingrich, who by way of hawking his new book, Rediscovering God in America, and whatever other less than holy end he has in mind, is soliciting online signatures for a petition that reads in toto:

We the undersigned petition Congress to ensure that the new Capitol Visitor Center is historically correct and accurately reflects the centrality of “our Creator” in the founding of America and in its historic development.

In many ways, the famous Left Behind series, which got off the ground in 1995, should be understood as intended to create this view of Life under Democratic Rule. The novels offer a fictionalized version of the End Times that does not concern itself with the good Christians who are raptured away on the 21st page of the first volume. Instead, as is traditional in this genre of imaginative literature (and such a genre does exist), the focus is on those who have been, well, left behind. And what consumes the series is the struggle of a small band of heroes—the Tribulation Force—to combat the evil empire of the Antichrist by creating a world-wide movement known as the Christian Collective.

That it is somewhat theologically irregular for some of those who are not raptured to manage to get a second chance at salvation—no Christian left behind, as it were—has been noted with asperity by some conservative theological critics of the series. But, I venture to say, the significance of Left Behind premillennialism in constructing this world lies not so much in theologically correct apocalypticism as in a vision of Christians as a beleaguered but resourceful body of warrior pilgrims, working together to defeat the powers and principalities even as they work alone on their individual salvation. Back in the mid-1990s, the stand-in for Antichrist was Bill Clinton. Now he figures to be Barack Obama.

The latest Catholic prelate to push the envelope on the sinfulness of voting for Obama is Father Joseph Illo of St. Joseph's church in Modesto, CA. After the election he sent a letter around to his parishioners saying that they "risked their state of grace" if they knowingly voted for the Democratic nominee:

If you are one of the 54 percent of Catholics who voted for a pro-abortion candidate, you were clear on his position, and you knew the gravity of the question, I urge you to go to confession before receiving communion.

I affirm and support President-elect Obama and every good thing he will do for this country. He has the charisma of leadership, the gift of speech. We have hope that he will end this war and that he'll bring stability to our economy. He's a tremendously gifted man.

It's important to be clear that the criteria advanced in Fr. Illo's letter do not track the line articulated in the 2007 Faithful Citizenship statement of the USCCB:

Steve Waldman poses a question that has been gnawing at those of us who spend way too much of our time poring over exit polls by religious category; namely: Why didn't any more white mainline Protestants vote for Barack Obama? Like Steve, I expected Obama to make real inroads among his co-religionists, a onetime heartland Republican constituency that had been trending Democratic in recent elections. In the event, they voted (according to Pew's account), 55-44 for McCain (as opposed to 56-44 for George Bush in 2004.) Meanwhile, Obama reduced the Republican margin among white evangelicals, whom he wasn't supposed to be making headway with, by a full 11 points. What gives? Here's the best I can manage by way of an answer, based on currently available data.

Mainliners were the only Judeo-Christian grouping whose vote for Bush decreased from 2000 to 2004. And that decline occurred solely among those who attended worship frequently (once a week or more), to the tune of 8 percentage points. Bush actually picked up one percentage point among the less frequent attenders. (These data, worked up by John Green for an article in Religion in the News, can be found here.) We don't yet have the crosstabs for religious traditions by frequency of attendance in 2008, but we do know that among white Protestants, the evangelical portion of the vote increased (by three points), while mainliners dropped by a point. And in the overall attendance categories, there was a drop in turnout only among the more-than-weekly attenders. I'm guessing that the part of the mainline community that had not been in motion--the less frequent attenders--remained in place as it had in 2004, while among those who had been in motion--the frequent attenders--all that changed was that a small number decided not to vote for president this time around.

OK, but so what? My hypothesis is that 1) lukewarm mainliners have for the past decade been frozen into their partisan commitments in a way that may have more to do with where they live and what particular denomination they belong to than with their identity as generic mainline Protestants; and 2) worshipful mainliners reached a new partisan equilibrium in 2004, such that in 2008 just a few were sufficiently torn between conflicting impulses (economic conservatism, anti-Palinism, whatever) that they crossed their arms and stayed at home. Bottom line: White mainliners are now kind of like white Catholics--modestly more Republican than Democratic but less likely to shift around.

The debate over the role of social conservatives in the Republican Party of the Future proceeds apace. Today brings Rod Dreher of the Dallas Morning News, writing USA Today's Monday "On Religion" column, to the effect that the GOP cannot do without 'em. Dreher takes as his text to oppose Jeffrey Hart's anti-evangelical screed in The Beast, wherein the old conservative lion calls for jettisoning the connection with evangelical Protestantism that has characterized the party since the 1980 election. Here's the Hart gauntlet:

The lethal problem for Republicans is that while religion of a particular kind is central to their party today, it is also toxic to moderate, independent, suburban, young and, more inclusively, educated voters.

John McCain didn't get his clock cleaned because of his ardent advocacy for unborn life or his stout defense of traditional marriage — neither of which played anything but a bit part in the tragicomic McCain-Palin campaign.

No, McCain lost because the economy is collapsing on the watch of an unpopular Republican president, and he had no idea what to say about it. McCain lost because his party is incompetent. McCain lost because his choice of Sarah the Unready cast doubt about his judgment. And McCain lost because Barack Obama ran a great campaign.

Where is Jesus in any of that?

My guess is that they wouldn't have any. For at bottom, their interest is not in answering the empirical question but in making a case for grounding the future of Republicanism in religious values--call it social conservatism if you like. The argument is that once you've got the little world of the family set in order, the big world of economic and foreign policy will be just fine. A somewhat rococo version of it can be found on the First Things blog, wherein R.R. Reno claims that the Obama coalition voted out of insecurity--economic and international--and that the way to allay the anxiety is to establish stability among the Lares and Penates. ("Divorce and serial cohabitation bring fluidity and change into the most ancient touchstone of permanence: home and hearth....We can endure the inevitable risks of marketplace and battlefield—but only if we have some confidence about the stability of the deeper, more fundamental things of life.")

This is the "gay marriage undermines heterosexual marriage" argument writ large, and no more convincing for being so. Journey with me, for a moment, back to those happy, stable 1930s, when divorce was difficult, serial cohabitation rare, abortion forbidden, and gay marriage undreamed-of. God might have been in his heaven but all was not right with the world. Was it stable domesticity that made economic collapse and world war endurable? Nope. It was addressing marketplace and battlefield "risks" directly that made domestic bliss possible.