In God Who Trusts?

By Andy Willis

Democrats need to embrace religious voters

On Nov. 2, 2011, Republicans in the House of Representatives called a vote to reaffirm “In God We Trust” as the national motto. Now, you may assume some reasonable motivations behind this action, like that the motto was due to expire or being challenged by another motto like “Satan has Dibs.”

You would be wrong. The reason lawmakers gave for this affirmation is a gaffe President Obama made earlier in the year by referring to “E. Pluribus Unum” as our motto in a speech. I could focus on the waste of time this is for our Congress, but in truth, this example reminded me of the larger political framework of this country and its attitude toward religion. A growing body of work led by writers like Amy Sullivan and Michael Winters has analyzed how Republicans have successfully labeled themselves the party of faith, and how Democrats allow themselves to be labeled as the party of the secular elite. But the values debate is not something that the Democratic Party can afford to ignore. Progressives must also mobilize religious voters.

The fact that America is a religious nation remains evident through simple statistics and anecdotes. According to Gallup, 78 percent of Americans identify with some form of Christian religion and only 13 percent claim none. 56 percent of Americans believe that religion plays a “very important” role in their lives. More subtle indicators can be seen through Albert Pujols’ affirmation that God has a main role in his life and Barack Obama’s dedication of an entire chapter in The Audacity of Hope to religion. Religion presents itself in our small unconscious phrases like “God Bless You” and in soaring rhetoric like the obligatory grace, “God bless you and God bless the United States of America.” Like it or not, believe in it or not, the Divine is an undeniable presence in the American psyche.

To preface, political affiliation is a human construct, and labeling God with any degree of certitude is a dangerous idea which I will avoid. However, the two are inseparably linked for our subjective realities and will always influence our political ones. Laura Epstein CMC ‘14, Vice President Internal of the Democrats of the Claremont Colleges, explained, “For many people, religion informs people’s morals, which informs their political ideologies.”

It is this recognition – that our morality requires action – that inspired the creation of the Moral Majority and the evangelical political movement. The religious right emerged as a reaction to the perceived social degradation of the 1960s and 1970s, focusing on issues of abortion, homosexuality, and promotion of God in the public square. In 2004, evangelical voters made up 36 percent of George Bush’s total votes, which need not have been the case.

Among the other major concerns of evangelicals are the materialism of our culture, the distribution of wealth, the environment, and the military-industrial complex. These are progressive political causes, but they were not sufficiently engaged in the 2004 elections. Democrats spent so much time listening to secular elements of their party and the outlandish Republican supporters that they began to forget about religious progressivism. A senior Kerry advisor famously stated, “We don’t do white churches.”

This changed to some extent in the 2008 election. Claremont McKenna Professor Gaston Espinosa, the head of the Religious Studies Department, is currently on sabbatical writing a book on President Obama’s outreach to religious groups. About Obama’s strategy in 2008, Espinosa writes, “Aware that his personal faith journey could serve as an asset and as a point of contact with racially and socially progressive Evangelicals, Obama argued that Democrats in general and he himself in particular were not inherently anti-Evangelical and anti- faith.” The results of this strategy led Obama to beat McCain in almost every major religious and racial-ethnic minority by 14 percent- age points – a ten point increase from John Kerry’s performance. Grassroots political action groups like the Matthew 25 Network and the Catholic Association have also contributed to an upswing in Democratic religious voters.

Progressive politics and religion are not mutually exclusive, nor are they limited to the borders of the United States. Take the example of Oscar Romero, who spoke out courageously on social justice in El Salvador as a Catholic priest. Mohandas Gandhi used religious justifications with his ideal of satyagraha in order to overthrow an empire, liberate his people from the Caste System, and advocate for a form of communalism – ultimately inspiring a reverend to help us realize the goals of the Civil Rights Movement.

To the progressive religious Democrats among our readers, you are not alone and you are not a contradiction. If the Democratic Party is going to further assert itself in the culture war, it has to embrace the history of both national and international religious progressives.