I noticed an op-ed in Sunday’s LA Times by Tony Quinn, a California-based political analyst who co-edits the California Target Book. It struck me as terribly wrong so I wanted to refute Quinn’s central argument — that Democrats have “abandoned religion” and are “too secular” to win on the national stage. This is utter nonsense.
Quinn’s thesis was pretty straightforward, if not entirely original. He argues that Republicans’ gains since the 1994 election have come about due to the GOP’s success with “cultural” issues.
“‘Angry white males’ in their pickups with gun racks have brought about fundamental political change by doing nothing more than shifting their loyalties from Democrats, based on economics, to Republicans, based on culture and values,” Quinn argues.
More specifically, however, Quinn suggests the Dems’ problem is a religious one.
“The Democrats’ problem goes beyond simply being irreligious,” Quinn wrote. “There’s an undercurrent of hostility toward religion in the highest ranks of the party. The Democrats’ dismissal of Bush’s ‘faith-based initiative’ is just one example of their hostility.”
After watching the Democratic leaders in general, and the Dem presidential candidates in specific, in recent years, I have to wonder if Quinn and I are living in the same country.
Far from being “irreligious” and “hostile” towards faith, I’ve seen the party and its leaders work diligently to do the exact opposite. The last two Democratic presidents, Clinton and Carter, were Southern Baptists who frequently cited scripture and attended church services on a weekly basis, unlike the last three Republican presidents (Reagan and both Bushes), who attended services sparingly.
More recently, the Gore-Lieberman ticket should have shattered the misperception of the hyper-secular Dems once and for all. Gore, for example, proclaimed himself a “born-again Christian” in an interview on 60 Minutes during the campaign. He also told the Washington Post that he often asks himself, “WWJD” — a catch phrase popular among Christian youths meaning “what would Jesus do?”
Lieberman, an orthodox Jew, brought the 2000 campaign’s emphasis on matters of faith to new heights. Indeed, the very day he was introduced as Gore’s running mate, Lieberman raised a few eyebrows by opening his first campaign address in Tennessee with a prayer and a recitation from the Book of Chronicles.
Indeed, in an August campaign stop in Detroit, Lieberman sounded like a religious right ally when he insisted, “As a people, we need to reaffirm our faith and renew the dedication of our nation and ourselves to God and God’s purposes.”
Well, that was way back in 2000, you say? The field is far more secular now? Not really.
Obviously, there’s the Rev. Al Sharpton, whose campaign could hardly be called irreligious. The man, after all, pastors a church and frequently reminds his audiences of the need to introduce the “Christian Right to the right Christian.”
And Lieberman is just as pious in 2004 as he was in 2000. In just the last campaign debate, Lieberman made multiple references to “God” and “faith,” at one point telling the audience, “[O]ur faith, our religions, the values that we get, the sense of right and wrong that we get from our faith are what helps us decide what to do in public life and in private life.” Today, the Washington Post reported that Lieberman said his favorite book is the Bible. [insert gagging sound here]
Even the real candidates in the race are keeping up with religious rhetoric of their own. Wesley Clark has made his three Fs — freedom, faith, and family — part of his stump speech. Howard Dean, after a year of solid secularism, is suddenly embracing religion almost daily, referencing the book of Job, emphasizing the role of religion in his public policy decisions, and citing the example Jesus set. John Edwards recently explained, “[M]y faith has been enormous to me in my personal life and of course my personal life is a big impact on my political life.”
Indeed, I don’t think there’s a Democratic candidate in this race that has failed to make regular church/synagogue appearances as an integral part of their weekend campaign activities. It’s hardly the mark of a party “hostile” towards people of faith.
I should also note that the single most religious voting constituency in the United States is African Americans, who, in the last national election, supported the Dems over the GOP by a nearly a 5-to-1 margin. I realize that secular voters also prefer Democrats by wide margins, but that doesn’t make the party anti-religious, it makes the party diverse.
Quinn’s op-ed, meanwhile, simply states Dems’ lack of religiosity as a given, as if it were too obvious a fact to warrant an explanation. When he insists that there’s an “undercurrent of hostility toward religion,” Quinn cites only one example to support his flimsy argument — general Democratic opposition to Bush’s so-called “faith-based” initiative. Unfortunately, this doesn’t make any sense either.
First, opposing a scheme to transfer tax dollars to religious ministries doesn’t make you hostile towards faith, it makes you supportive of the First Amendment. The two are not mutually exclusive. Second, Quinn fails to note that plenty of conservatives have also been very critical of Bush’s “faith-based” initiative — including Bush allies in the religious right such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. By Quinn’s logic, this would make religious right leaders “hostile” towards faith as well.
Quinn is perpetuating a caricature-like myth of the anti-religious Democrats facing the pious Republicans. It’s an intellectually lazy approach unsupported by the facts.