It came out of the blue.
During a rare presidential press conference dominated by Katrina
and Harriet, (some reporter) asked an ever-so-peculiar
question:
“Mr. President, the Bible speaks of goodwill towards
the least of these. With that, how are you going to bridge the
divide of poverty and race in this country beyond economics and
home ownership, that after Hurricane Katrina and also the Bill
Bennett statements? And also, how can the Republican Party gain the
black vote — more of the black vote in 2008, after these public
relations fiascos?”
Flash to my in-laws’ dinner table. (Some AmSpec readers
will recall my in-laws are dyed-in-the-wool Democrats and members
of MoveOn.org.) Amidst a conversation about the merits of a welfare
state versus America’s traditional rugged individualism, my
father-in-law scratched the phonograph needle across the vinyl
record grooves: “The one thing Jesus talked about more than
anything was helping the poor.”
Now flash to my in-laws’ countertop where sits a Democrat Party
bumper sticker that reads: “Jesus cared abut the poor / So do we.”
(Note, curiously, that it does not reside on their car bumper.)
It’s not hard to discern what’s going on here. After years of
getting their hats handed to them by the so-called Religious Right
and after losing the “moral values” voters by a margin of 82% to
18% in the 2004 elections, Democrats and the political Left have
resolved they can’t beat ‘em, so they’ll join ‘em. Their policies
are now inspired and endorsed by the Big Fella Himself.
They have a tough row to hoe. Fewer Americans (29%) today view
the Democrat Party as “friendly to religion” than did last year
(when that figure was 40%), according to a Pew Research Center poll
from late August. Indeed, after three consecutive years of decline
in the “friendly to religion” department we can detect an inversely
proportional relationship between the Democrats’ use of religious
rhetoric and their public image on religious amiability.
Why?
First, merely slapping the Jesus label on stale social welfare
programs won’t make them popular, particularly when the vast
majority of Democrat leaders in Washington oppose efforts to invite
churches of all denominations to take part in the welfare game
through President Bush’s stagnant Faith Based Initiative. According
to Pew, allowing churches to apply for public funding to help fight
poverty is viewed favorably by 66% of the American people.
Second, Democrats have been breathing their own exhaust
regarding Republican greed. Yes, the GOP is viewed as
disproportionately favorable to business, particularly big
business. And yes, many Americans are skeptical of any claims of
altruism by big business. But the resultant fallacy that most
Americans are searching for their inner Karl Marx and all they need
is the Democrats to tell them raising taxes is What Jesus Would Do
is an absurd leap, which, frankly, leaves many Americans shaking
their heads.
Third, most Americans of faith know full well Jesus cares deeply
for the “least of these” (by the way, try to imagine the Bill
Bennett-style firestorm of controversy if a Republican politician
referred to African-Americans as “the least of these” as the above
referenced reporter did). But they also know that nowhere did
Christ prescribe compulsory charity as a remedy for poverty. The
liberals’ attempt to buy their way into Heaven by extirpating
indulgences from others is not what Jesus has in mind.
Fourth, the political Left assumes that poverty programs in the
United States which have transferred trillions of dollars from rich
to poor in the last 40 years (to say nothing of our individual
charitable efforts) amount to nothing. Our policies still “favor
the rich at the expense of the poor,” as the talking point goes.
And they’re right. The poor sadly are still with us. Which ought to
explain something to the political Left that we on the Right have
accepted as a given for decades now: government-run social welfare
programs don’t benefit the poor; they suspend them in penury.
Fifth and finally, the political Left is deeply conflicted
internally on the matter of religion in public life. To begin with,
there exists within the Left a powerful secularist element that
would love to exclude any mention of Christianity from the public
square. These are the folks who run those obnoxious anti-Christmas
campaigns every December and shriek about church-state separation
whenever anyone breathes a word about Intelligent Design. There is
an actual organization called the Godless Americans Political
Action Committee. And of course we’ve all heard of Americans United
for Separation of Church and State. How are these folks going to
react if the Religious Left ever gains any momentum within the
Democratic Party?
To further complicate matters, there are two camps within the
Religious Left itself. There are the real Religious Leftists, or
rather the sincere ones, such as Jim Wallis, who adhere firmly to
the proposition that Christ’s charge for us is to keep the peace
and fight poverty. But then there are the hangers-on and the
charlatans such as Howard Dean, who only started quoting (or
rather, misquoting) the Bible recently after years of railing
against politicians who “only want to talk about God, guns, and
gays.” Wallis himself has labeled Dean’s Biblical rhetoric
“inauthentic.”
But why does it all matter anyway? Well, because for lack of
anything else to discuss about her, Supreme Court nominee Harriet
Miers’s Christianity has become the topic of the day. It is likely
her alleged literalist Biblical worldview will be a subject of
great speculation as to how she might view the U.S. Constitution
and vote on key issues of morality, abortion being the most
high-profile. And now that it’s okay for reporters and liberal
activists and politicians to quote liberally from the Bible and
invoke the name of Jesus to promote their political agenda, it will
be interesting to observe how they behave during the coming Miers
battle.
