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INTERVIEW:
Shaun Casey
July 23, 2004    Episode no. 747
Read This Week's November 7, 2008
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Read more of Kim Lawton's interview about religion and politics with Shaun Casey, assistant professor of Christian ethics at Wesley Theological Seminary:

On John Edwards:

Photo of Shaun Casey Edwards is a United Methodist member and actually brings a sort of reticence to the topic of religion. It's very interesting if you go through his stump speech. He talked a lot about values; he talked about the small town values, growing up as he did. But there wasn't a lot of explicit religious talk or religious rhetoric in his standard "Two Americas" stump speech. Although he did introduce the issue of class, he rarely explicitly raised his religion, as I recall, on the stump.

There were threads of values language that he routinely used, but he rarely referred to religion. He is apparently quite active in the church in North Carolina. But there seems to be a reticence on his part to delve too deeply into his own personal faith and the connection between his faith and his political views. Although he was very eloquent about the haves and the have nots and the need to reach out to the poor and to the lower middle class, he never really tied that directly to his own religious experience or his set of religious values.

He is from a mainline Protestant denomination, he's Southern, and in that sense he has, perhaps, a better ear for evangelical religion, because he's simply a child of the South. He knows the rhythms and the cadences of Southern religion, which is something Kerry himself really doesn't possess.

I think what Edwards will bring to the ticket is his ability to go into the African-American church, number one. He has a comfort, an access, an ease in those worship settings that, frankly, Kerry hasn't had a lot of depth in. But I also think that Edwards has a similar sort of ease among white evangelical communities, too. He has an experience there; he's represented that constituency as a senator from North Carolina, so he's going to bring sort of a cultural balance, an attentiveness to the cadence of Southern religion.

On the Democratic Party and religion:

I think the leadership of the Democratic Party is ambivalent about religion in America. On the one hand, they read the polls; they understand the demographics of the country, which would lead one to say that religion is extremely important in this current election. When you look at undecided voters, for instance, you see that undecided Catholics and undecided white evangelicals in five or six swing states may be absolutely the most critical constituency to be persuaded. On the other hand, there's not a strong comfort zone among the leadership of the Democratic Party with those constituents; they don't know how to reach out to them rhetorically. They don't know how to reach out to the institutions that represent those voting groups. So they see the need but they lack the experience; they lack the confidence, frankly, to reach out to those communities with great ease.

Secular voters tend to break toward the Democratic Party, so there's a fear that they may alienate part of their own base -- the so-called seculars or nonreligious. If a Democratic candidate appears too explicitly religious, that may alienate part of their base. On the other hand, if you look at somebody like Bill Clinton, he had the ability to reach out across religious lines while not alienating the traditional Democratic base. So there is some historical precedent for reaching out to religious groups without alienating the so-called nonreligious voters as well.

If you look at the leadership of the Democratic Party, many of them do not come from those particularly religious constituencies themselves, and because of that there's a bit of distance in terms of life experience between those key voters and the leaders in the party.

On Catholic and evangelical voters:

In a polity that is so evenly and deeply divided, no vote can be taken for granted. If you look at key swing states you see, for instance, in states like Missouri and Florida, an incredible religious diversity. You see Roman Catholic voters represented in large percentages, but also very significant evangelical constituencies as well. If you're going to persuade those folks, you need to come at them with every possible persuasive lever, and religion happens to be one of those most persuasive levers among those undecided voters. If you decide not to reach out to them in vocabulary that they'll understand, you're already at a disadvantage in a closely divided polity.

One of the great, wonderful mysteries of the evangelical world is that they are highly decentralized. As one friend of mine puts it, trying to persuade them is like trying to herd cats. One can't pick simply a handful of opinion leaders in the evangelical world, have them endorse you, and then assume that their constituencies will follow simply because some symbolic preachers have endorsed a particular candidate over another. You have to reach out to evangelicals in a concentrated, conscientious way. You can't go after those voters in traditional symbolic ways.

I think up to 25 percent of self-identified evangelical voters are Democrats or lean Democratic and are persuadable in this election. So if you have, say, 5 percent of evangelical voters in this country who are undecided, that can be the decisive constituency in a polity that is so evenly split between the two major parties.

On the Kerry campaign:

I think the Kerry campaign has struggled mightily on how to handle religion. On the one hand, there is the Communion controversy within his own church. He's had some high-level meetings with leading Roman Catholic bishops in the country and seemingly has negotiated some kind of peace there. The controversy has subsided. He continues to go to Mass; he continues to take Communion and has not been turned away. On the one hand, there seems to be a deep reticence to address the larger issues that, say, Roman Catholic voters or evangelical voters might have. He talks about being an altar boy; he talks about the role his faith has played in his private life, but he has not made the single speech addressing the role that religion plays in his political thought, and he seems quite reticent to do so. On the other hand, his campaign has hired a religion outreach person, which is the first time in recent memory that a Democratic presidential campaign has done that. So they're reaching out as a campaign to religious voters, but he doesn't quite seem to have found his own voice in trying to address those voters directly himself.

In 1992, Bill Clinton went to Notre Dame and made a speech where he talked about how Catholic social teaching had influenced his own political views, and a lot of Roman Catholics were deeply impressed that he took the time to affirm Catholic values, to affirm Catholic institutions. I think it would be wise for Senator Kerry to do a similar sort of thing. For those voters who don't know who John Kerry is, who are really trying to get a handle on what he stands for, where he comes from, and how they might identify with him, he needs to take the time in telling his own story about how his own faith has shaped his politics. That's going to resonate with a lot of religiously motivated voters in this country. If he chooses not to do that, then he allows the other candidate, frankly, to fill in the blanks for him, and I suspect that will not be a very pretty picture.

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On religion and American politics:

There's an argument that arose, really, only in the end of the 20th century, that a president should run purely a secular kind of race. Historically, religion has played an integral part in American politics from the outset, until very recent times. If candidates are going to reach out to religious constituencies, and both candidates in this election are doing that, they owe the polity an explanation for how they connect their personal faith to the particular policies that they embrace and that they hold forth for the country to vote for. To understand who these people are, we need to know about their religious faith if, in fact, they possess it.

Polls show that Americans want to understand where the values of candidates come from. I don't think they're alienated when somebody gets up and says, "I'm a United Methodist," or "I'm a Roman Catholic," or "I'm a Southern Baptist." It helps them connect personally to some of these candidates, to know that they're from somewhere, that they [have] been shaped by particular traditions and regions. The most effective candidates in recent memory have told their stories in such a way that Americans understood their religious values and how those values had an impact on their politics.

On religion, JFK, and beyond:

John Kennedy struggled with how to publicly portray his religion. As early as 1956, when he had an aborted attempt to run as vice president, he tried to find a language which explained how his Catholicism animated his politics, and when you look at those early speeches, he was all over the map, from saying Catholicism had a great impact to saying essentially it was private and it had no impact. By the 1960 campaign, he realized he was going to lose that election unless he had some declarative statement about his religion. In 1960, the fear was that the Vatican would control a Catholic president in the White House, so he had to go to some length to show that that was not, indeed, going to be the case, that the Catholic Church was not going to dictate policies for him, and yet he was a devout person. He went to Mass regularly, and Americans were intrigued by that. So Kennedy set a standard where he claimed there was no conflict between his religious beliefs and his duty as president. In his famous Houston speech in September of 1960, he said if there ever was a conflict between his faith and his politics, he would resign the office of the presidency, but essentially [said] he could not foresee any circumstances where that might happen.

Then you go through the history of the Democratic Party and you see religion play a role. I think in Lyndon Johnson's case, growing up in the Disciples of Christ had a profound impact on his views on poverty and shaped his commitment to the War on Poverty, the chief domestic initiative, in addition to civil rights, during his presidency. Jimmy Carter's story is well known -- how his Southern Baptist faith shaped his views on race, it shaped his views on Middle East peace, it shaped his views on human rights and the pursuit of international justice. Here was a Democrat in the '70s who in essence reached out to evangelicals because he was one. You look at Bill Clinton and Al Gore, and they're both Southern Baptist, they're both evangelicals, and both were fairly comfortable talking about their own religious experience and how that underwrote the progressive political values they espoused.

On the "God gap":

I think the religion gap at one level is real and at another level it obfuscates; it masks a reality. It is true that surveys continually show that the more one goes to church, the more likely you are to vote conservatively or to vote in a Republican fashion. However, if you pull back and simply look at people who do, in fact, worship with some frequency, the God gap basically disappears. One survey I read showed that in 2000, 80 percent of the voters who voted for Al Gore expressed some form of religious affiliation and religious activity. So it's wrong to simply assume that people who go to church or synagogue or mosque with some frequency automatically vote Republican. A large percentage of them do, in fact, vote Democratic. It is true that those who go the most often at this point do tend to vote Republican. That is new. That is a trend now that has been going for 10, 15, 20 years, and the gap seems to be growing somewhat. But it's a mistake, I believe, for Democrats to take that and come away with the conclusion, "Oh, we have to be secular. We can't have religious rhetoric because those votes are already tied up and won by the Republican Party." The data simply don't show that to be true.

On African-American churches:

The African-American church is one of the bases of the contemporary Democratic Party. The party takes it for granted at its peril today because, certainly, the Republican Party is trying to reach out on a regular basis to that constituency. Certainly the events in Florida and all the voting irregularities are going to make it hard for the Republican Party to make significant inroads there, but that's really an interesting object lesson -- that the Republicans understand that if they pick off a tiny percentage of the African-American community, they will win this election. The converse lesson for Democrats should be that if they pick off a tiny percentage of white evangelicals, they will win this election, but it's not clear that the Democratic Party has learned that lesson at this point.

You still see even hard-core secularist Democrats showing up at African-American churches before elections, because they understand that they cannot take that constituency for granted. And you see a lot of very uncomfortable white politicians in those churches near election time trying to look like they're comfortable, which is truly unfortunate. I think, however, that the Bush administration certainly has been reaching out to African-American clergy, particularly through the faith-based initiative. The president's quite comfortable in those contexts in a way that very few Republican politicians have been comfortable in recent memory. So, again, the Democrats can't take for granted that African-American churchgoers are automatically going to go into the booth and vote a straight Democratic ticket anymore.

On gay marriage:

I think the Bush administration is hoping that the gay marriage amendment will have great legs both in the white evangelical community and in African-American churches. The polling data that I have seen say it's too early to say. In fact, it doesn't look like that single issue is going to drive either African-American Christians or white evangelical Christians into the Republican camp. I think the question is, really, what is the mechanism in their minds to effectively address the issue of gay marriage, and it's not clear that the constitutional amendment is the option of choice even among those Christian voters who are opposed to gay marriage.

It's interesting to see that Senator Kerry has not, in fact, endorsed gay marriage, that he stands behind a form of civil unions, even disagreeing with citizens of his own state of Massachusetts, where he has opposed gay marriage. I think that's the reason he in fact opposed it. He realizes that can become a hot-button issue, a lever to be used by Republicans over against Democratic candidates. I think you're going to see many Democrats on the national stage taking a very pragmatic stance against gay marriage but supporting some form of civil unions as an alternative.

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