Dear Democratic candidates:
You aren’t going to win the votes of conservative Christians no matter how often you invoke God in your stump speeches, and no matter how often you speak glowingly of your faith. The reason is simple: the God you speak about ain’t the God they recognize. For all intents and purposes, you will always be considered godless heathens by them, even if you ban all discussions about abortion rights, women’s rights, etc. Just take a gander at this piece by a “Christian” reporter at LifeNews.com if you don’t believe me.
The leader of a top evangelical ministry is taking issue with pro-abortion Democratic presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Prison Fellowship Ministries President Mark Earley says the two are trying to reach out to Christian voters by talking about God but promoting the killing of God’s children through abortion.
The two top candidates for the party’s nomination have been very open in recent weeks to talking about their faith and they are actively courting religious voters. […]
But Earley writes in a recent commentary that their efforts are disingenuous because the two candidates take decidedly anti-Christian views on some political issues, namely abortion.
“I appreciate that the candidates are taking a risk when they talk about their faith,” Earley wrote in an opinion column.
“The problem is that all of this ‘God Talk’ misses the point: what Christians want – or should want – is a candidate who shares their moral and culture concerns, not just their religious vocabulary,” he explained.
He points out that both Obama and Clinton recently addressed a Planned Parenthood conference and expressed their unbridled support for abortion — which is anathema to Biblical value.
Get the picture? They won’t be voting for Democrats no matter how strongly you profess your faith, and no matter how far away you run from “liberal” values in your campaign speeches. The best you can hope for is that Christian conservatives sit the next election out because the Republican nominee isn’t considered a real Christian (i.e., Romney) or is too squishy on “moral values” like homophobia and and the “right to life” (i.e., Guliani).
Indeed, if you were truly intelligent (and independent of your DLC trained campaign consultants), you’d recognize that the Republicans won the last two Presidential elections (or made them close enough to steal) by appealing to the GOP’s base supporters, not by attempting to appeal to the mythical center. Karl Rove never met a radically conservative issue (gay marriage bans, anyone?) he wasn’t willing to promote to insure the turnout of conservatives, and that approach worked pretty well for the Republicans over the last decade. Only the incredible fiasco that is the Bush administration, coupled with the most corrupt Congress in history, prevented it from succeeding again, last Fall.
So, in light of the Republicans’ success at turning out their base supporters to win elections, why are so many of you deliberately running away from the progressive wing of your own party? You know, the largest group of people who call themselves Democrats? The same people whose values and positions are shared by a majority of Americans on everything from health care to Iraq, abortion rights to an economic policy that favors American jobs over corporate profits gleaned from outsourcing those jobs to foreign shores? Indeed, one can make a legitimate claim that it was the willingness of Democratic candidates to proudly proclaim their progressive values that won them control of Congress in 2006.
The country is read for a progressive, people oriented populist message. Yet, the two leading Democratic candidates, both in the polls and in fund raising, Clinton and Obama, continue to disparage progressives and progressive values, running away from us as if we were plague infested rats.
It’s not 1992 anymore, boys and girls, and we don’t need Clinton style “triangulation” between “New Deal liberalism” and “Reagan Conservatism” anymore. The public has seen how the corporate friendly policies of the Clinton years, and the even more corporate friendly policies of the Bush years, have drained our nation of jobs and created the greatest wealth disparity since the Great Depression. They don’t want to hear about the advantages of “free trade” and they sure as hell don’t want to see multi-millionaires and billionaires and their corporations sitting fat and happy while the rest of us remain mired in jobs (those of us who have them) that don’t pay enough to cover our mortgages, our food costs, or the expense of filling our gas tanks with $3 plus gasoline.
So, a word to the wise, dear candidates. If you want my vote, and the votes of millions like me, stop trying so hard to appeal to hard core conservative nutjobs who vote for whomever their preacher tells them is the best man (which, by the way will always be a Republican). They make up a smaller and smaller percentage of our population, and there is no way you are going to get them to vote for you in any event. Try appealing to the people who actually vote for Democrats for a change. Otherwise, you might just wake up on election day and find we haven’t shown up at the polls on your behalf.
Sincerely,
Steven D
This salvo is a pre-emptive attack aimed at trying to keep evangelicals who are parting ways with the Republican Party in the fold.
There are a lot of evangelicals who are tired of reducing Christianity to the angry God of the Fetus.
The evangelicals that you will hear from in the media will be the foaming-at-the-mouth ones who are completely sold out to the Republican Party.
Meanwhile, a lot of evangelicals are going to quietly vote their conscience on the environment, the Iraq War and the inequality in the economy. You won’t hear from them at all.
I have an aunt that is an evangelical and a progressive, and she already votes for Democrats. She doesn’t need to hear about someone’s faith to vote for them. She wants to hear about what they plan to do to put that faith into action with progressive policies like universal health care, no more corporate and billionaire welfare, getting out of Iraq, etc. Oh, and she would like to see gays have equal rights too. For her it is a Christian imperative that all people should be treated equally. Yet who is talking about that among the Democratic candidates (except for Kucinich perhaps, or Gravel)?
If the Clintons and Obamas of the world were really interested in getting her vote they would spend less time telling everyone how religious they are and start talking about these issues and what they plan to do about them. But they aren’t. The candidate who comes closest is Edwards, who has consistently advocated for progressive policies and values. I suspect that is her candidate, and not because of his alleged faith, but because of what he stands for.
Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards all have strong authentic beliefs. They are not pandering.
Yay, Steven. You nailed it.
Oh, Steven, I am clapping my hand for you so hard that my hands hurt! Do not ever loose your thought process, ever! You are so right on that, that it is so obvious! hugs….
ps: hope your family is doing well. Give my best to your wife, especially, and hope she continues to do very well.
Family is doing great, and that includes my wife. Thanks for the good thoughts Brenda.
Do you think, Steven, that we all just might get a message from Jerry Falwell from his new home, in ref: what his new home is like??!!..<<wink, wink>> You know how hard he spoke of that new home….he was so convinced…wonder if he went to the place he was thinking he wold go to?
I sometimes wonder at the supposed intelligence of the dem candidates when they get sucked into using the rightwing talking points on pro-life/family values etc.
It’s time they took a page out of Rove’s playbook and used the so called strengths of the rethugs-pro-life/family values and used it against them. Make pro-life a dem talking point of family values…you’re pro-life if you’re for having all children have health care, you’re pro-family values if you want all families to have livable wage to support their families, you’re pro-life if you want families to breathe healthier air, you’re pro-life if you don’t want the Nat. Guard used as regular army but want them here to respond to state or national disasters to help families here survive and live, you’re pro-life if you want to make sure the poorest among us getting a helping hand instead of giving tax breaks/taxpayer money to corporations who pay no taxes…You change the language of the playing field to your advantage not theirs.
Agree 100%.
Why Dems don’t introduce their own pro-family values and language is precisely because these values are so powerful. The kind of things you’re talking about are some form of social democracy, and the Dems don’t want that any more than the Rethugs do.
In Germany, it was the Christian Democrats who began to construct the German form of the welfare state, which they called the “social market economy”, precisely because it was believed that under modern conditions, observing the Gospels requires the state to intervene in the market economy.
I don’t see why the Greens don’t start using this kind of language, though. Hell, they could even say that just about any religion you can think of teaches that we must take care of our fellows, if they cannot take care of themselves, so that we must get back to building the welfare state, since private charity on its own is insufficient.
Right on, Steven!
People — of the liberal sort, anyway — have an unfortunate tendency to assume that all people are basically the same, and since liberals are mostly rational, accommodating folks, they assume that the other side is, too.
There are rational, accommodating conservatives, to be sure, but none of them are among the Religious Right. When it comes to those folks, we are talking about people who want to imprison and/or kill people like us, which is to say people who aren’t like them. Read Deuteronomy, Judges, and Numbers sometime. They aren’t long. Then imagine people who really believe that shit. In the world they envision, people like us are supposed to be put to death.
The other important thing to remember is that these fuckers aren’t playing. They’re dead serious. They want to bring back the good old days when the Church was the ideological head of a collection of warring police-states that made the Soviet Union look like a beacon of personal liberty. These are the same people who used to burn people alive for publishing books, practicing medicine, and differing on exceedingly minor points of doctrine.
Steven, another very nice piece.
But a slight quibble. I think it’s a mistake to call these people “Christian conservatives” or “conservative Christians”. That just legitimizes them. In the 1970s, the term for them was “Jesus freaks”.
These people have a radical agenda, so it is wrong to call them conservatives, in the same way that it is wrong to call Bush or Cheney conservatives. And their peculiar positions don’t derive from Christianity, so calling them Christians is misleading, too. Chris Hedges uses “Christianists”, and I think that’s an excellent term.
You probably know the following, but I’ll mention it anyway. Right-wing evangelicals only picked up anti-abortionism in the 1970s. Before that, the “right to life” was only an issue for Catholics; issues having to do with sex and reproduction don’t really play much of a role in normal Protestant doctrine. The reason Christianists embraced the anti-abortion cause was that it gave their followers something to rally around and get excited about. Thus, they did so for tactical and political reasons, not religious ones.
my christian friends down south refer to the cuckoo bananas type people as “backwards”.
it fits quite well.
DING!…we have a winner! well said steven
“Try appealing to the people who actually vote for Democrats for a change. Otherwise, you might just wake up on election day and find we haven’t shown up at the polls on your behalf.”
it’s not just the pandering to the “conservative evangelicals”, but the entire spectrum of moving to the right…being a “progressive centrist” in dlc speak, whatever the hell that means…that’s so annoying to me.
there is a subgroup of voters out there who will not vote for any d candidate, regardless of who it is. illustrated by the 25 – 30% that form the chimperors’ base, that cannot and will not be won over. the best that can be hoped for is that they are so pissed off at the lack of progress of whatever their particular orthodoxy is, that they take a bye on election day.
the first candidate who makes a strong appeal to the inherent liberal/progressive…populist if you will, tendencies of, what amounts to, the super majority of this country could run away with this election, and carry a lot of new progressive contenders into congress with them.
the lack of vision, and the clinging to the old inside the beltway political stratagems is, frankly, incomprehensible to me.
it’s the math, stupid!… 75% of the country’s looking for a reason to vote for you, that’s where the energy should be going. of all the front runners, hillary seems to understand that the least.
looks more like 3¢, than 2¢, so l’ll stop now.
lTMF’sA
Speaking as someone who was once quite involved in a fundamentalist church, I notice there are many of us on the progressive side who tend to often conflate the terms “evangelical” and “fundamentalist”, treating them as if they are interchangeable; when in fact they are often very different animals altogether.
What you hear and see represented, most times, in the mainstream media and on the talking head shows, are those allied with the “fundamentalist” side of the equation. Count among these such people as James Dobson, Rod Parsley, Pat Robertson, John Hagee, Donald Wildmon and many others that would all be considered Dominionists. They are the ones who believe that God has commanded Christians to essentially obtain control of the secular, humanist government of this country and create a defacto theocratic government which is to be controlled and run according to literal interpretations of the Bible. These people and their followers are likely the majority of the current base for the Republican Party.
The term “evangelical” can often be used to encompass any Christian group which believes they have been commanded by God to spread the “Good News” of his gospel for salvation. This calling does not necessarily encompass the larger effort of the fundamentalists to control not only the spiritual life of the individual but all other aspects of their lives. Lutherans, Methodists, Church of Christ, Presbyterians and Catholics can be among those who would likely be considered “evangelicals”. People in these groups are the ones which are likely to be very receptive to a Progressive message. These are the ones that we need to focus on. You are correct, Steven, in stating that we will never, ever, ever win the votes of the fundamentalist sect of this country. And, unfortunately, contrary to your opinion, I believe the fundamentalist group is significant in number and growing. The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the country, can be counted among this group. These people are very committed, very driven and believe without a shred of doubt that they will do whatever is necessary to accomplish “God’s purpose” on this earth.
So, yes, let’s remain focused on our message and not waste time trying to argue with those who have no use for discussion or debate. In their mind they are just waiting for Jesus to come. Let’s continue to appeal to those whose religious views tend to align more with the Progressive views of human compassion and a making the lives our brothers here on earth a little bit more tolerable in an ever increasingly insane and unjust world.
I don’t think it makes sense to say that Catholics “would likely be considered evangelicals”. Evangelicals are Protestant by definition. In Germany, there are two established churches, the Evangelical (Lutheran) Church and the Roman Catholic Church. In the US, the meaning of “evangelical” is slightly different; it is the “prototypical” American form of Christianity, with things like personal charisma playing a larger role than the liturgy and theology, as is the case with more “traditional” and established churches, and with churches having a higher degree of independence.
You are right that progressives often conflate fundamentalists and evangelicals, but you seem to suggest that evangelicals lean towards being progressive, whereas I think the term doesn’t have any political implications. Evangelicals tended to be progressive up through the Civil War, being the main force behind the abolitionist movement, but after that the regressive, fundamentalist form of evangelicalism appeared.
I absolutely agree that secular progressives must not only bash fundamentalists, but also build bridges to (progressive) evangelicals and other religious groups. America is a religious society, so to bring about serious change, you need to draw upon religious values. (The Civil Rights movement was led by a reverend.) The Rethugs realize this very well. Democrats shy away from it, I would guess because genuine Christian values are necessarily progressive and anti-imperialist.
In 2000 George Bush received roughly two-thirds of the White Evangelical vote. That means that one in three White Evangelicals voted for Al Gore.
One in three.
To hear the secular left tell it (as well as the religious right, to be sure) everyone who calls on the name of Jesus Christ for salvation necessarily votes lockstep with the GOP, but that has nothing to do with the real world. The most irritating thing about this assumption is the fact that it essentially ignores the millions of Black Evangelicals like myself – some 10 million or so of us – who not only vote Democratic but are exceedingly partisan in our politics.
Still the invisible man…
Note, I spoke about conservative Christians, not all Christians. Also please note up-thread my comment about my evangelical aunt who is a committed Democrat and progressive.
I read your diary the first time, that’s why I replied.
We may have different understandings of the meaning of the word “Evangelical” – my understanding of the word means conservative Christians, i.e. Bible-believing Christians. The overwhelming majority of Black Christians are what you would call conservative Christians in every way except voting. Our view of the Bible and of the person and work of Jesus Christ mirror that of those you denigrate, we simply vote differently. Black Christians have always been socially conservative and fiscally progressive – what I would call Biblical since the Bible demands personal integrity and responsibility as well as communal support for the least of these our brothers.
You ask – in your title, no less – why Democrats should “Pander To Fundamentalists,” asserting that the candidates “aren’t going to win the votes of conservative Christians no matter how often you invoke God in your stump speeches, and no matter how often you speak glowingly of your faith.” That line of thinking would say that John Edwards should have put the kibosh on his “Son of a Mill-worker” spiel because he wasn’t going to win the votes of manual laborers – patently absurd. Embedded in your diary is the assumption that people for whose faith is of first importance to them will never vote for any of the Democratic candidates. This is demonstrably false.
I have learned to avoid crediting to malice that which can more readily be attributed to ignorance, and I believe this to be a case in point. You clearly don’t understand the demographic to which the candidates are speaking – to your ears, pandering. I don’t want to come across as condescending or lecturing – although that ship may have sailed by now – but I will discuss it with you if you like. For now, suffice it to say that no Democrat has won a contested state-wide or nation-wide election in the last 50 generation without an overwhelming majority of the Black vote, and that vote is beginning to slip somewhat to the GOP – in large part due to conversations with White liberals…
And I need to do a much better job of editing before hitting Post…
Isn’t asking them to vote for you in the same family as enabling them? Times they are a changin’ and the denialist branch of the evangelicals might be wanting to step aside because there’s some work to be done on this planet of ours and time’s a wastin’ (sorry, listening to Dylan)
Steven, I don’t get your premise. The fundamentalists don’t have proprietary rights to God. So why is invoking God pandering to the fundamentalists?
I take your point that God-talk by Democrats will not cut any mustard with the hard-core religious right. That is true. But why do you assume that’s what Obama et al. are trying to do?
And BTW, Oscar in Louisville, I found your posts very interesting and I think you are right.
My understanding (please correct me if I am wrong) is that Jesus came to show a new way,rooted in love. The Old Testament served as history and doctrinal basis for the Jewish people for solidarity and cultural survival. The God of the Old Testamentis thundering daddy who says you better listen or else. Jesus softened the message. The Dominionist appeal to a fear based old idea of God and that is how they control their followers. It is time forthe true followers of Jesus to hear what Jesus said with their hearts