 |
Read more of Kim Lawton's October 3, 2006 interview on religion and politics with Georgetown University government professor Clyde Wilcox:
Q: Has religion been a problem for the Democrats in recent years?
A: Democrats have lost the ability to talk about religion very authentically in American public life. When you think of 1988 and the Democratic National Convention, a magnificent speech by Mario Cuomo talking about "the city on the hill" and using all kinds of religious imagery -- but Democrats speak of religion much more awkwardly now, or not at all.
Q: What happened?
A: I think that a couple of things happened. First of all, there is a secular component to the Democratic constituency. It's a small minority, but they're unhappy talking about religion a lot. I think that many religious liberals, reacting to the Christian right, don't like to talk about religion in politics because they think that the Christian right does it wrong, so they don't want to do it themselves also.
Q: Has this hurt the Democratic Party in national elections the last couple of times around?
A: Probably so. Ninety-six percent of Americans claim to believe in God. Large numbers of Democrats go to church regularly. One of the complicated things about our elections is that we don't know what issues will be important in the next four years, so how do you know who to trust? How do you know which candidate will represent your values? They need to tell you something authentic about what they care about. Religion is one of the shortcuts we use to determine what people care about.
Q: To what extent have the voters sensed the Democrats haven't been doing that? Why hasn't the average faith-based voter been sensing that, at least in the national elections?
A: Mainly because the Democratic candidates don't talk about religion very much. You saw, in the 2004 campaign, John Kerry very reluctantly and very late talking about religion, although he is in fact an authentically religious man and had many important speeches earlier in his career on religion. So if a voter is looking to see who's talking about religion, Bush is doing it all the time. But it's worth noting that Bill Clinton used religion very effectively as a candidate. He quoted Scripture more often as president than George Bush has. So it's not all candidates who have a problem. For the Democrats, it's just some.
Q: To what extent are the Democrats now recognizing that this has been a problem for them? How are they starting to address this?
A: They fully understand this is a problem, and there are a couple of efforts now in town for think tanks to begin to study the problem. They do surveys, they do focus groups. They try to figure out how they can frame authentically religious issues in ways that are appealing to Democrats, but also don't turn off some other Democratic voters.
Q: What's happening? What are they doing?
A: There are a number of issues that the Democrats think are really faith-based issues, like, for example, providing health care for poor women; helping nutrition programs for pregnant women; the war; all kinds of issues they think of in religious terms, but how to phrase those issues in ways that make the faith seem genuine, make it not seem forced. Some of these groups are doing focus groups and surveys among African-Americans, trying to figure out how to talk about all kinds of issues, including gay rights, in a way that resonates with the religious base there. Many groups are trying to survey Catholics, trying to figure out how to talk about many authentic Catholic issues, like the death penalty, economic redistribution, health care, and things like that in ways that will make them appear to be very religious issues but also authentic issues.
Q: How much of this is pragmatic politics?
A: Sometimes it is, sometimes it's not. There are some genuinely very devout Christians and Jews who are studying the way to talk about their faith in a way that resonates with voters. And there are some political experts who are trying to figure out ways to win votes.
Q: What is some of the language? You mentioned that they are also thinking about language. What are some examples of how they're trying to figure out what kind of language could resonate?
A: For example, if you think about, say, social welfare programs, at some level those could be considered pro-life programs, according to many liberal Democrats, because they make it possible for a woman to choose life. You could have two possible ways that you could decrease the abortion rate. One would be to limit abortion; the other would be to provide resources to women so that they might choose to have a baby. So they're thinking about ways to frame that in a way that resonates with both Catholic and evangelical voters that doesn't seem like it's too politically opportunistic, because in fact in many cases it's not opportunistic. It is a genuine belief that this is the important way to get women to make that decision.
Q: How tricky an issue is abortion for the Democrats when it comes to reaching out to faith-based communities?
A: For Catholics, it's a very difficult issue, because the Catholic church in the United States has chosen to make that one of the most important issues on the political agenda. Actually, most Catholic voters are not strictly pro-life, but they don't like abortion-on-demand, or they don't like very liberal abortion laws either. So they're sort of in the middle on abortion, and it is an issue that Democrats have to talk about with great care, I think.
Q: How do they do that when the women's movement has been such a key part of the Democratic base?
A: I don't think necessarily all Democratic candidates are going to run away from a pro-choice position. Maybe some of them are going to say, "Look, I support my church. These are the five issues I agree with the church on, but there's one I don't, and that's this issue." That will resonate among many Catholics in America who don't agree with the church on one, or two, or three issues. But they have to do that early in the campaign. You can't do it at the last minute. You can't do it in a forced and rushed manner.
Q: Let's back up a little bit and talk about how the voting patterns of Catholics have changed recently. It used to be a traditional Democratic stronghold. Where are they today?
A: Republicans have made big gains among Catholic voters, particularly among young and observant Catholics. The older observant Catholics remain loyal Democrats, but the more often you attend church, if you are young and Catholic, the more likely you are to vote for the Republican Party. In the last election, more than half voted for Bush, even though there was a Catholic candidate on the ballot, so that was a big loss for the Democrats.
Q: Are they working to win them back? What faith-based communities are Democrats working hard to win over?
A: Catholics are the swing voters in American politics right now. They constitute a big bloc of voters, and they don't fit neatly into either political party. On the one hand, the church teaches them to be pro-life, anti-abortion, and to be in opposition to same-sex marriage. On the other hand, the church teaches them to oppose the death penalty. The church condemned the Iraq war. The church is in favor of economic redistribution. Those are pro-Democratic values, so many Catholics feel conflicted. They feel that neither party speaks to them, which is why both parties are trying so hard to speak more clearly to them. African-Americans remain a very strong Democratic base. They need to turn out in elections in high numbers in order for Democrats to be able to win. That means they need to be enthusiastic. There has been some conflict among some African-Americans over the same-sex marriage issue, which does not play well in African-American churches. Particularly, the comparison between same-sex marriage and civil rights is something rejected by pastors in these churches, who think they are very different kinds of issues. There is also a group of moderate evangelicals that are not Christian right types at all, but people who are worried about things like the environment, worried about things like world AIDS and so forth who might be in play in some elections, and Democrats are trying to appeal to them also.
Q: A lot of people have the image that all evangelicals are part of the religious right, and they're all Republicans.
A: Evangelicals are actually a very diverse and interesting community. African-Americans are mostly evangelicals, and they tend to be very Democratic. There is a group of very progressive evangelicals -- Jim Wallis and Sojourners, for example -- who argue very strongly that the Bible is all about justice and social welfare. There is also a group of evangelicals sort of in the middle. The National Association of Evangelicals, for example, has taken positions on global warming, has taken positions on the Sudan, has taken positions on a number of issues that are not obviously conservative, so they're taking a very diverse set of positions that Democratic candidates have a chance to win some of those voters.
Q: To what extent is it a new strategy to see Democratic campaigns and the Democratic Party reaching out, making an effort, holding events to win over some of these constituencies?
A: It would have been really common twenty or thirty years ago. So it's new for 2006, but it would not be new for 1970. In the 1970s, there would have been many outreach programs to churches. But as the Christian right began to dominate the Republican Party discourse at some level, the Democrats then began to pull back on the religious rhetoric and began to use it less effectively. So they are trying to rediscover their roots, in a sense.
Q: What are the political risks for them of doing this?
A: Two risks. First of all, you might appear to be inauthentic in your language. You might appear to be just using your religious rhetoric for politics. When you think about the chairman of the Democratic Party talking about Job as his favorite book in the New Testament -- I tell my students you have to at least know the table of contents of a book before you talk about it. So when people seem to talk about the language of faith but obviously are not themselves religious, that is worse than not talking about faith at all. The second danger, which I think is a smaller one, is that there are people who are very uncomfortable talking about religion in politics, and so those people might be alienated by the conversation. To the extent that the language becomes too overpowering, then some of them may be less enthusiastic about Democratic candidates, might stay home or contribute less money.
Q: Some high-profile Democrats -- Senator John Kerry, for example, and Barack Obama is another example -- really urging their party to do more. What do you make of some of those speeches, and what's the reception been?
A: In some parts of the Democratic Party, it's been a very warm reception. Barack Obama's powerful speech at the Democratic convention, where he says "We worship an awesome God in the red states and the blue states," you know, tested very well and was a very popular message. And I think it was a true message, because most Democrats are in fact religious people. John Kerry discovered this a little bit late. There were a lot of people who were urging him to talk much more early in the campaign about his faith, which was real, and to talk about how his faith intersected with politics. His advisors told him this was risky because of the abortion issue and maybe he should just not talk about it at all. I think that was a mistake. So he was a little late to the party, but he is at least understanding it now.
Q: Let's talk about John Kerry -- the fact that people really pushed him to do it two years ago, and he didn't do it, or he did it badly or awkwardly. For him to make a very direct and powerful speech two years later -- is it too late? How does that play? Does it look like he's positioning himself for something else?
A: I think it actually, two years before a presidential election, looks much better than two months before the presidential election. Kerry had been a religious man all of his life. He had made strong speeches before about this when he was not running for president. In fact, Catholics for Kerry urged him very strongly to release one of those speeches to the press. Six months before the campaign, it would have been very smart to have done that. Two months before the election, it looks like you're just trying to pay for votes, right, you're just trying to pander to the voters. But now, two years afterwards, when you've had time to think, I think it comes off all right.
Q: How much internal pressure is there from the campaign staff experts and strategists? Does a candidate who might want to talk about these issues face a lot of pressure?
A: Of course. There's a lot of contradictory advice you get during a campaign -- people coming with polls and with instincts that say this is a mistake. If you do this, you might lose. In a very close election candidates tend to be risk-averse, and so you think maybe it's risky to talk about this, so maybe I shouldn't. So during the Kerry campaign, he was getting strong pressure to talk about it early; he was getting strong advice not to talk about it. He eventually listened to the people who said don't talk about it.
Q: You mentioned earlier that it has to be authentic. To talk about it inauthentically is worse than not talking about it at all. Is there something beyond just words, though? How important is the language? And how important are actions or policies that follow up on those words?
 |
|
|
|
A: I think policies are very important, and I think that a lot of the Democrats who were talking a lot about religion can point to a number of their votes, a number of the policies they've advocated that are based on their faith. We have the governor of Virginia who ran very aggressively on his faith and has talked about various policies in his administration that fit with that. If you just talk about religion and it doesn't ever show up in anything you do, that doesn't seem very real. But if you can point to, throughout your career -- look at the things I've done; I've done this and this and this; this all resonates from my faith -- then I think voters trust that.
Q: How important is Ohio? How important is the faith-based component of the electorate in that state?
A: In the governor's race, we have an African-American guy who is appealing very strongly to the religious conservative community, based on his opposition to same-sex marriage, his opposition to abortion. He used that very effectively to win the Republican primary. He's running against another preacher, really, someone who has also authentic faith credentials. So he's losing that race very badly. At some level, the Democrat in this particular race comes off as an inclusive religious person, whereas the Republican comes off as a more exclusive religious person. When candidates use the language of faith to exclude, that tends to be a disadvantage in elections. To skip parties for a second, if you think about the way Bush talks about faith, he doesn't really talk about the specific things in terms of policy he gets from his faith; he talks about prayer makes him feel. He talks about how Christ saved him from the barstool. He talks about things that are inclusive, across at least the Christian faith and really across other faiths as well, so that kind of language tends to defeat language that is very narrow and sectarian.
Q: How important is Ohio overall when you think about national election stakes?
A: It's a very close, competitive state, with the Senate up for grabs. The Senate seat there is very competitive. The governorship would be important to the next presidential election, so it's a pretty important state.
Q: Let's look at Pennsylvania, specifically the Senate race there, where you've got Republican Rick Santorum, a Catholic, and Democrat Bob Casey, a Catholic, both taking positions against abortion for a change. Tell me about that race and the faith component there.
A: I think here's a case of a Democrat who has authentic pro-life credentials -- [Casey's] father was a strong pro-life Democrat -- running a campaign where the voters trust him on this issue. The difficulty that puts Santorum in is that he needs to say he's even more pro-life than Casey, without necessarily scaring moderate voters in the middle who might be worried about the strong language he uses. Santorum has a few times used very strong language to talk about same-sex marriage. That language, I think, actually even in moderate evangelical families, seems a little offensive, seems a little scary. So at some level the Casey campaign has pushed Santorum to the right in his language, which is not the place he really wants to be.
Q: I want to think ahead to 2008. What lessons are we going to learn from the 2006 midterm election about the impact of religion? What are people going to be watching for in 2008?
A: I think in the 2008 presidential campaign, for the Democrats, you're going to see people talking about their faith early. You might see them talking too much at some level, forcing the issue into places where it doesn't exactly fit, but trying to establish very early on their credentials, trying to say, look, this is who I am. If they do it wisely, they'll be using it as a way to communicate to voters their core values, to say you can trust me on this value, on this value, because it resonates deeply with my faith, it resonates with who I am. You might see a sort of shouting match in the Democratic primaries, where someone tries to outbid someone else in being authentic. The frontrunner, of course, is Hillary Clinton. She is, I think, very authentic in her faith. The trouble is no Republican voters will trust her on that issue, so she has been writing about this for a long time. She has been talking about it for a while. In her case, I think she needs to do things that are subtle to show this, like show how regularly she has attended church all these years and all the things she's done, sort of let that come out, not necessarily from the campaign, but from other places in the party and interest-group community.
Q: Do you think some of the recent outreach to grassroots Democrats, trying to turn out religious Democrats to vote and the specific targeting of faith-based voters -- is that also with an eye toward establishing a machine for 2008?
A: Probably so. The problem for the Democrats in using churches as a mobilization tool is that moderate Christians tend to not go to church as often as very conservative Christians. So churches are a very effective place for finding most conservative Christians every Sunday [and] a reasonably good place for finding moderate Christians once or twice a month. Using the churches as a mobilization base is less effective for Democrats than it is for Republicans. But I think that the whole party -- all kinds of interest groups in the party, all kinds of actors are realizing that this is something that is reasonable to talk about to voters. The voters need to find a way to trust you on issues. They need to find a way to understand who you are, so if you have something that is authentic, you might as well share it. I wouldn't be so cynical as to say it's all about building machines. On the other hand, once you've identified voters who respond to certain kinds of messages, you do have a tendency to contact them again, by mail and by phone, to use those kinds of messages in the future, so it will be pretty helpful in 2008 also.
Q: What about the Republicans? What are their big religion challenges for 2008?
A: The difficulty with the Republican Party is that if you take a very strongly Christian right set of positions on issues, that appeals to the base and helps you win primaries, but it can alienate moderate voters in the general election, which is why George Bush was so effective in 2000 and 2004 -- not really talking about the extreme rhetoric, but really talking about how his faith made him feel and how it guided him. Candidates like a Bill Frist who has been out front sort of pushing on the social agenda on the extreme -- that might be popular with primary voters; it'll be tougher in the general election. What Republicans need to find is someone who is sort of bilingual, like Bush. Bush can go into an evangelical audience and use phrases like "the wonder-working power of faith," and people who don't know that hymn don't react to it; people who do say, ah, I understand. So he was very good at sending multiple messages subtly and in a nonthreatening manner. I think that's the challenge for Republicans: to keep the base activated, to keep them believing that it matters who wins the election, without alienating moderate voters.
Q: A lot of potential Republican presidential contenders aren't from that evangelical world and aren't necessarily comfortable in that world. Is that going to be a challenge for the Republicans?
A: It will be a challenge for those candidates in the primaries, where evangelicals are very dominant in some of the early primary states -- South Carolina, in particular. If the Republican Party was to nominate a real social moderate, like a Giuliani or whatever, then it would probably be difficult to appeal to that base in the general election. On the other hand, maybe you could win more votes in the middle and that might be a winning strategy. What the Republicans always try to do is get the really high turnout from that base and then find a way to sort of moderate that image in the middle.
Q: Who do you think evangelicals in particular might like as a presidential candidate?
A: The guy they like right now -- at least a month ago -- was George Allen. On the other hand, his Senate campaign has been so disastrous in the past month that maybe they're a little less warm to him right now. If McCain would be the nominee, the real question would be could they make up with him? He actually is a very conservative guy. He's very pro-life, for example. His record is very strong on that. But he really alienated the Christian right activists by attacking them in the 2000 primaries. And so are they willing to sort of make up over that and accept a guy who's really pretty conservative, or not?
Q: Overall, how important is religion still as an electoral force?
A: I think that it is a very important subtle electoral force. I don't think, at the end of the day, many people sort of look at their Bible and decide who to vote for, or listen to the pope and decide who to vote for. I think there's a lot of other things wrapped into this -- your economic issues, your party identification, and so forth. But for a lot of voters who find themselves torn between two candidates and wondering in the confusion of the campaign who they're going to trust, I think religion then serves as probably one of the very most effective cues to say these are the core values of this particular candidate.
Q: Has religion really been politicized recently, in the last couple of elections?
A: In the last two or three elections, churches have become very involved in elections, maybe to the detriment of the ability of those churches to do other faith-based activities. I've had reports of people who feel uncomfortable in particular churches on either side of the aisle, because the church has become so strongly associated with one party or one set of candidates. So I think churches have become very involved in mobilization in the last three election cycles, and one of the important questions is not just how does religion influence politics, but how does politics ultimately come back to influence religion?
Q: Any words of advice for the Democrats?
A: I think that the Democrats should be careful not to overdo the faith language. It only works if it's authentic. It only works if it appears to be non-opportunistic. I think the worst thing that anyone can do is appear to be using religion for political advance. At some level, when that happens then it's a bigger reaction against you than if you don't talk about religion at all.
Q: Are we all values voters?
A: The question of values voters -- I think one of the things the Democrats are trying to say is that their faith leads them to important values, also; that compassion for the poor is an important value; that, say, not torturing people is an important value; that peace is an important value; that economic justice is an important value. So what the Democrats are trying to say is faith leads to more than just attitudes on abortion and same-sex marriage. It leads to a whole rich panoply of positions, and their positions are actually consistent with faith on many of these issues.
Q: What challenges does the pro-choice base of the Democratic Party represent?
A: Pro-choice activists are very nervous about Democratic candidates beginning to talk about middle options and moderate approaches. I don't think necessarily they need to be nervous about this, depending on how the issue is framed. What many in the faith-based community are talking about, for the Democrats, is not limiting people's choices but really providing more opportunities for a richer set of choices. So if you're not talking about, say, banning an abortion but rather providing health care for a pregnant girl or woman and then providing child care when she has the baby, this can't be a bad thing. This just opens up opportunities. However, they are nervous that this is a slippery slope; that once you start down this, then suddenly you begin to accept more limitations, and suddenly the whole pro-choice position goes down the tubes.
Q: Some Democrats are talking about reducing the number of abortions -- that abortion is never a good thing and so we need to reduce the numbers. Does that make pro-choice Democrats nervous?
A: It can, although really no one is out there saying we need more abortions to make America a better place, right? At some point, what Hillary and what John Kerry are saying is, if we can prevent some pregnancies on the front end, and then if we can provide some options to let people, maybe, if they want to, choose to have a baby on the other end, this would reduce abortions without ever limiting someone's freedom to make the choice on their own.
Q: But the concern is that could also indicate it's a bad choice.
A: Yes, that at some point then this becomes a moral condemnation of the abortion decision. Both parties are beginning to say that you really shouldn't make this choice, and so the nervousness is that this then leads to a willingness to compromise on basic choice issues.
Q: How risky for Democrats is it to talk more about religion? There are various communities they have to keep as part of their base, right?
A: There's a group of people who are secular who do not want to hear a lot of talk about religion. For those people, this will be an alienating experience. There are other people who maybe don't share the faith of the candidate, who might be worried about very exclusive language, which is why something like what [Senator Barack] Obama says, "We worship an awesome God" -- that's a very inclusive kind of language. If we say, "The Christian faith is the unity of America," that's not inclusive. The more exclusive the language, the more worrisome it is for the Democratic base; the more inclusive, I think the more unifying it is.
|
|
