So Born Again Christians Tend to Vote Democratic
Essay
The Democratic Political party Is Not Antithetical to Organized religion
By | March 3, 2020 
(AP/Matt Rourke)
For decades, the Democratic Party has been diagnosed with a "faith problem," an accusation that nevertheless makes headlines. In the fall of 2019, the Washington Examiner detailed the party'southward apparent aversion to any mention of prayer, Scripture, or God's will, and a Religion News Service column pointedly asked the question: "Do the Democrats have a organized religion problem?" The New York Times causeless there was a God gap betwixt the two major parties when it heralded a religious revival on the left in 2017, claiming that religious liberals had "sat out of politics" for the past forty years.
To exist sure, in that location are rise numbers of religiously unaffiliated Autonomous voters, and fewer white Christians vote for candidates on the left. Yet the Autonomous Party's secular prototype seems erroneous when ane considers how oftentimes candidates take folded religious rhetoric into their campaigns. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were certainly well versed in church-talk. In 2007, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton sabbatum downwards with Jim Wallis, the founder of the progressive evangelical organization Sojourners, on CNN to talk over religion, and in the 2016 race, vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine made frequent mention of his Catholicism. Later on 2016, pundits criticized Hillary Clinton for declining to reach out more to religious voters, merely in fact she consistently spoke about her own Methodist faith.
This yr, many of the top Democratic hopefuls accept fabricated a concerted effort to affirm their religious beliefs. Though they may frame their policies on abortion rights and gay rights in non-religious terms, Democrats do non avoid or dismiss faith altogether. Instead, they offer religious voters, peculiarly Christian voters, with critical alternatives for applying faith to politics, albeit with a decidedly different tone and message than their counterparts in the GOP. Whereas Christian Republicans emphasize prayer, doctrine, the end-times, personal sin, and conservancy, Christian Democrats tend to promote the social gospel—namely, Jesus' mandate to care for others, especially the poor and oppressed.
Since the late nineteenth century, progressives have continued the social gospel to social justice issues such as poverty, public wellness, taxation, and wealth equity reforms. In 1907, for instance, Baptist theologian Walter Rauschenbusch popularized the social gospel in his book Christianity and the Social Crisis, which encouraged Americans to channel their religious principles into activism. "Whoever uncouples the religious and the social life has not understood Jesus," he wrote.
Presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren, a Methodist, has suggested the same, citing Scripture such as Matthew 25:31-46 in many of her stump speeches. When asked about her personal motto at a recent Democratic debate, she cited it again. A favorite passage among social gospelers considering of its explicit command to assistance those in demand, Matthew 25'due south parable of the sheep and the goats condemns those who have neglected the hungry, the sick, and "the to the lowest degree of these" among u.s.. For Warren, the lesson is clear: "That passage is non about you lot had a good thought and held onto information technology. … No. Information technology says, you lot saw something wrong," she told a CNN town hall. "You saw somebody who was thirsty. You saw somebody who was in prison house. You saw their face. You saw somebody who was hungry, and it moved you to act. I believe we are called on to act." In this framing, her push for health care reform, prison reform, and living wage increases are substantiated past the will of God.
Warren isn't the only presidential candidate employing religious linguistic communication on the campaign trail this yr. Earlier dropping out of the race in early January, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker appeared so comfortable with God talk that Religion News Service distinguished him as a potential political spokesperson for the religious left. Sometime Vice President Joe Biden has also made connections between his religious and political beliefs, saying that his "sense of fairness and justice and disdain for those who abused their power … catamenia from the teachings of the Catholic Church." Like Warren, Biden believes that practiced deeds for the common good, not just prayer, are the duty of whatever Christian.
The candidate who talked nigh his organized religion the almost was peradventure Pete Buttigieg, an Episcopalian from South Curve, Indiana. Earlier suspending his campaign recently, Buttigieg, a gay, married man, frequently took the offensive against those who challenge LGBTQ rights or question his faith. "If you belong to the Christian tradition that I belong to," he explained at a town hall meeting concluding October, "then you believe that God loves y'all, and yous wait around and you find that you're gay, and those two things exist at the aforementioned fourth dimension." Marshalling social gospel language, Buttigieg went on to say that his faith "instructs me to identify with the marginalized and to recognize that the greatest thing that any of u.s.a. has to offering is dear." During a presidential debate final summertime, Buttigieg chastised Republicans for failing to abide by the gospels when separating immigrant families and putting children in cages. His employ of religious rhetoric, which he has linked to his belief in helping the poor, has prompted some observers to compare him to social gospel progressives of the past, although the old mayor'due south popularity amongst billionaire supporters raised eyebrows for those who questioned his stated intentions to address economic inequality.
Even a politician who typically eschews religious claims, Bernie Sanders, has alluded to religion during the by two elections. In December, Sanders' staff posted Instagram photos of the outspoken socialist celebrating Hanukkah, and in an episode of PBS'southward "Finding Your Roots" with Henry Louis Gates Jr., he fabricated pointed references to his Jewish identity and the persecution his ancestors faced in the past. "Information technology merely makes united states realize how hard we have got to piece of work to not descend into this type of barbarity and to create a globe where people tin dearest each other," he stated.
Sanders has as well addressed evangelical Christians, most notably at conservative stronghold Liberty University in September 2015 during his last presidential run, urging students to extend their religious values into progressive politics. In his try to "find common footing" with his audience at Freedom, Sanders chose to link his non-Christian ideals to the ministry of Jesus, referencing the "Golden Rule" from Matthew seven:12. "So in everything, do to others what y'all would have them to do to you, for this sums up the law and the prophets," Sanders said, adding, "It is not very complicated." The Vermont senator agreeably quoted social gospel advocate Pope Francis and upheld the moral pick to "stand with the poor." "We are living in a nation and in a world, and the Bible speaks to this issue," he noted, "which worships non love of brothers and sisters, non love of the poor and the ill, just worships the acquisition of coin and great wealth. I exercise not believe that is the country we should be living in."
Though Democrats have not avoided religious language, they have struggled to augment the spectrum of religiously based policy. Voters who favor an inclusive, cooperative religion that promotes social justice have not captured the same attention in national politics, ever since the GOP began, as Buttigieg put it, to "cloak" its political agenda with religious justification and capture the media's attention in the 1970s and 80s.
The GOP'due south self-conscious association with Christianity has gone far at disarming Americans that voting Christian is voting Republican. But an intense focus on single issues such as abortion, gay rights, or the state of State of israel, co-ordinate to progressive Christians, misses the forest for the copse. These Democrats remind the true-blue that love, tolerance, social justice, and fellowship class the core of Jesus' ministry and should be broadly practical.
The Rev. William Hairdresser, the vocal leader of the Moral Mondays move and reviver of the Poor People'due south Campaign, has challenged conservative Christians on these terms. Using 1 of his often-repeated phrases, he told Jelani Cobb of The New Yorker that the so-called Moral Majority Christians "'say then much about areas where the Bible says very little'—ballgame, homosexuality—'and speak so little virtually the issues where the Bible says so much,' similar poverty, empathy, and justice." Since gaining national attention after he spoke at the Democratic National Convention in 2016, Barber's advocacy for social gospel activism has opened a space for progressive Christians to gain some new political traction. Warren, Sanders, and Buttigieg pledged to participate in Hairdresser's proposed debate on poverty, which activists in the Poor People's Campaign are pressuring the Autonomous National Committee to hold this year. Many of the candidates spoke at the Poor People's Presidential Forum final June, and Buttigieg also made a betoken of meeting with Barber at his church in North Carolina this past Dec. During the presidential debate in Jan, Buttigieg made a specific reference to Barber'due south entrada.
There is little reason to doubt that the encompass of religious rhetoric amongst Democrats is born of sincere personal conviction, but it is as well good political strategy. If Democrats promise to mobilize voters, particularly swing voters also every bit racial minorities, and so appeals to progressive religious values can provide one path to progressive policies. While white evangelicals still form much of the Republican base of operations, in that location accept been cracks in that foundation, especially when it comes to questions of Trumpism and its moral barometer. A recent editorial and another follow-upward piece on the topic of white evangelical politics in Christianity Today provide significant cases in point.
Across the white evangelical demographic, however, in that location are millions of religious Americans predisposed to answer to religious rhetoric that frames social policy in alignment with their values. In fact, a recent poll shows that 86 percent of self-identifying Democrats, not counting swing voters, believe in a higher power or spiritual source. Not all these voters may take the Bible or church as seriously as their more bourgeois counterparts, but they do profess a spiritual conventionalities in a strength for good in the globe. Democrats, by marshaling the social gospel, tin can ground the political party's policies in spiritual substance without resorting to strict doctrine or the kind of dogmatism that could turn off non-religious voters. Every bit the primaries go along in the side by side few months, the Democratic candidates may exist able to tip the balance in their favor past offering Christian Americans more than choice and flexibility for their religious sensibilities than the GOP.
The Democratic Party is not antithetical to religion, even if it is struggling to find a fashion to express its politics in terms of broad religious values that can appeal to diverse constituents of believers and non-believers alike. At its upstanding baseline of social justice, the social gospel theology that many Democrats express has the potential to reach across denominations and perhaps reach across various faith groups, including Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists, who believe in human being rights and social justice as moral imperatives. As Sanders put information technology back in 2015: "I am motivated by a vision, which exists in all of the great religions, in Christianity, in Judaism, in Islam, Buddhism and other religions." Though Sanders was addressing a Christian audience, he, more than any other candidate talking most faith, has made his remarks near religion and justice inclusive. "I think that when we talk about morality, what we are talking well-nigh is all of God'southward children," he has said. Convincing conservative Christians to change their minds about abortion or gay rights in order to vote for Democrats will exist hard if not impossible in the short-run this election bike. And however, the social gospel has been the nearly constructive theology to rally progressives in the past century, and information technology continues to provide political currency for the Democratic candidates in 2020.
Vaneesa Cook is a historian, professor, and freelance author in Wisconsin. Her book Spiritual Socialists: Religion and the American Left is available through the University of Pennsylvania Press. Follow her @CookVaneesa .
Source: https://religionandpolitics.org/2020/03/03/the-democratic-party-is-not-antithetical-to-religion/
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