Pandering
CNN has a political piece that really ticks me off: Democratic candidates trying to reach religious voters.
This is insulting on so many levels. First off, the only “religious voters” that anyone seems to be concerned with are evangelicals who are wildly over represented in the media and politics. There are huge numbers of religious people who vote for Democratic candidates, and no one wants to recognize they exist.
Adherents.com has the numbers for religion in the US and if you look at them carefully you will notice that the groups that Amy Sullivan and others keep insisting that Democrats pander to, are the groups in decline.
The largest Christian denomination in the US is the Catholic Church. Where is the specialized outreach to Catholics, if you are targeting religious voters?
If you look at the Harris poll data for the 2000 election on that page you will see that Southern Baptists and Agnostic/Atheists both provided 7.1% of the vote. “No religious preference” provided 10% of the vote.
The Southern Baptists have declining membership, while the Agnostic/Atheist block is growing, so, as usual, the Democratic consultants say go for the Southern Baptists.
The only way the Democratic Party is going to win any significant number of evangelical voters is by abandoning women’s issues and the separation of church and state.
In case Democratic candidates missed it, the party won the 2006 elections without pandering. If the candidates start courting the evangelicals they could find that a number of traditional Democratic constituencies stay at home on election day.
If Democratic candidates feel the need to display their faith, they should become preachers.
7 comments
i swear the “debate” last night looked like a revival tent for a while there.
i want a party and candidates that will pander to my separation-of-church-and-state beliefs.
They should come down to the “Redneck Riviera” for a while and see how they like putting up with this crap.
The mainstream Protestant tradition in which I was raised considers “witnessing” prideful and hypocritical.
For a measure of the absurdity of assuming that any substantial number of people vote based primarily on their religion, please note that four Unitarians (John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Millard Fillmore and William Howard Taft) became President despite the fact that, in the Pew survey, Unitarians are apparently in the “other” category. Do you think the four were elected by the overwhelming Unitarian voting bloc? 🙂 I’ll wait while y’all finish laughing…
I’ve noted before on these threads the very few circumstances under which a candidate’s religion would influence my vote… negative conditions, in which a candidate appears to defy American tradition on religious grounds… and on the whole, I disapprove of voting FOR someone because of the specific religion they adhere to. Of course people can vote on any damned basis they want, but Democrats should not seek faith-based votes.
Bryan, the UUs I know share that tradition you describe of not “witnessing”; I don’t personally know of even one UU who has ever actively tried to convert someone. It just isn’t done. And while most UUs tend to be politically liberal today, there has been a strong component of old-style New England Republicans in there as well (though many of those older UUs are dying off)… and there is an almost unanimous consensus that mixing religion and politics is a bad idea.
I don’t care where people get their call to right action, as long as they hear that call. If Democrats insist on making peoples’ faiths an issue at all, some of us may have some serious thinking to do.
…the whole situation becomes so bizarre at times. Lots of folks – like me – vote for Democrats because they generally espouse values that reflect their Christian beliefs: caring for the poor; caring for children; caring for the sick and disabled any any others not able to adequately look after themselves; seeking peace rather than war for the sake of legacy or power or revenge. This all gets lost because of the outsized noise of the battles over social issues like a woman’s right to control her body (and its surrogate stepchild embryonic stem cell research) or the legal rights of gay and lesbian couples being waged under the overblown pretext of “religious values”. If Democrats want to reach out to “religious” voters they should address the larger issues and not try to finesse those hot-button items. That’s just going to annoy everybody…
It must be the failure of my Sunday school teachers, because I associated Christianity with charity, stewardship, friendship, and peace.
The really divisive issues all tend to be personal decisions, and I’m still waiting for a cogent explanation as to why the government is involved in them.
Marriage is a two part concept. One part deals with the religious beliefs of the parties involved, but the second part is a government defined partnership contract. There is no way of reconciling the parts, so there is no point in trying. The government is Constitutionally prohibited from applying religious conditions. If you haul in religion, you won’t be able to ban polygamy.
we were raised as mainstream protestants too, though the south being what it is, even the most liberal and rational of congregation harbors its share of fundamentalists. to keep us safe from those who would “save” us, my parents kept us out of sunday school and in the summer they sent us off to the jewish community center.
I was “protected” by the military chaplains, who in the past weren’t allowed to get too carried away, and held very neutral, mainstream services.