Evangelicals and Catholics: Exit, Stage Left?

Joseph M. Knippenberg, Oglethorpe University

     You know that the electoral cycle is beginning to rev up when groups start issuing statements of political principles, attempting to set the agenda for candidates and to influence and mobilize constituencies. Another sign that things are getting serious—in a purely political sense, at least—is prominently placed stories, like these two, about a party’s efforts to court what might prove to be a swing constituency.

     Since the Republicans seem at the moment to be on the defensive and the Democrats are feeling their oats, all the action right now appears to be on the left side of the political spectrum. Democrats are reaching out to erstwhile Bush voters in an effort to peel away enough of them to turn the tide in their direction. Two particularly vulnerable constituencies are groups that once upon a time were at home in the Democratic Party—Roman Catholics and evangelicals. The political mathematics here is very tempting: both groups are enormous, comprising nearly half the electorate between them. A relatively small shift in a Democratic direction could make a huge difference in a national election.

     A closer look at the 2004 results gives a glimpse of what’s at stake. While George W. Bush won the evangelical vote by a hefty margin (78-22), it was probably his narrow edge among Catholics (53-47) that provided his margin of victory, especially in closely contested states like Ohio. But not all Catholics and evangelicals are alike. The Pew Forum’s post-election “American Religious Landscape” survey divides both groups into “traditionalist,” “centrist,” and “modernist” camps. While Bush lost modernist evangelicals and Catholics (48-52 and 31-69, respectively), he won the other four, with margins ranging from 55-45 (centrist Catholics) to 88-12 (traditionalist evangelicals). While the Democrats are unlikely to make much headway among traditionalists (21% of the electorate), attracting votes among centrists (16%) should surely be possible, as should (it almost goes without saying) expanding their margins among modernists (8%).

     The Pew survey also offers a clue as to the role explicitly religious appeals could or should play in such an electoral strategy. Traditionalist evangelicals and Catholics overwhelmingly regard faith as an important factor in their voting decisions (85% of the former and 75% of the latter say that faith is the most important, or an equally important, factor). By contrast, 41% of modernist evangelicals and only 21% of modernist Catholics hold this view. The centrists are interesting: 56% of centrist evangelicals and only 31% of centrist Catholics regard faith in this way. It would seem at least that nudging centrist evangelicals over the line toward the Democrats requires an appeal to faith.

     No one should be surprised, then, that that’s exactly what Democrats are trying to do, supporting bills in Georgia and Alabama to permit the Bible to be taught in public schools (not devotionally, of course, but for its cultural content), sponsoring legislation to permit the posting of the Ten Commandments (in Tennessee), and generally attempting to frame some of their social welfare issues in explicitly religious and moral terms. They are also reaching out to prominent evangelicals, like Randy Brinson of Redeem the Vote, who are expressing some dissatisfaction with the influential role that business interests play in the Republican Party.

     While I have yet to see a coherent Democratic policy program intended to appeal to evangelicals, I have seen others that may provide templates for such an effort. The first is the "Statement of Principles" signed last week by 55 of the 70 Catholic Democrats in the House. Its core consists in these three paragraphs:

We are committed to making real the basic principles that are at the heart of Catholic social teaching: helping the poor and disadvantaged, protecting the most vulnerable among us, and ensuring that all Americans of every faith are given meaningful opportunities to share in the blessings of this great country. That commitment is fulfilled in different ways by legislators but includes: reducing the rising rates of poverty; increasing access to education for all; pressing for increased access to health care; and taking seriously the decision to go to war. Each of these issues challenges our obligations as Catholics to community and helping those in need.

We envision a world in which every child belongs to a loving family and agree with the Catholic Church about the value of human life and the undesirability of abortion—we do not celebrate its practice. Each of us is committed to reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies and creating an environment with policies that encourage pregnancies to be carried to term. We believe this includes promoting alternatives to abortion, such as adoption, and improving access to children’s healthcare and child care, as well as policies that encourage paternal and maternal responsibility.

In all these issues, we seek the Church’s guidance and assistance but believe also in the primacy of conscience. In recognizing the Church's role in providing moral leadership, we acknowledge and accept the tension that comes with being in disagreement with the Church in some areas. Yet we believe we can speak to the fundamental issues that unite us as Catholics and lend our voices to changing the political debate -- a debate that often fails to reflect and encompass the depth and complexity of these issues.

The first paragraph leaves some room for prudential disagreement about means, but calls attention to the historic Christian concern for “the least among us.” Given their position, there’s no doubt that government will play a substantial role in any means chosen to deal with these pressing social problems. The second paragraph studiously avoids any discussion of prohibiting or limiting access to abortion, preferring an elaborate version of the formula favored during the Clinton administration, “safe, legal, and rare,” though with a stress on the first and third terms so as to accommodate the eleven clearly pro-life signatories. With its near-Protestant stress on “the primacy of conscience,” even to the point of disagreement with the Church on an issue as important as abortion (at least 39 of the signatories score high on NARAL’s scale), the statement both captures the relatively low salience of religion among centrist and modernist Catholics and offers an example of how Democrats could appeal to evangelicals.

     This "Statement on the Christian Right", offered by Protestants for the Common Good, provides a very sophisticated template for articulating Democratic themes in religious language. Insisting that the “God whom we experience through Jesus loves all the world” and that we express our acceptance of God’s salvific love “by loving all others as oneself,” the statement articulates a vision “of the beloved human community” in which all “live abundantly, [and] have a flourishing life.” This vision of universal love has implications for politics and government:

The Christian vision of justice, therefore, includes laws and policies that provide or promote for all the most general conditions through which people are empowered to enhance their communities. Conditions of safety, health, and

self-respect; material provision and opportunity for work; education; cultural richness; beauty and integrity in the environment; a favorable pattern of associations, including freedom of association; and a community of democratic rights, including religious freedom — these are the general sources that empower people to achieve, and they are the business of justice.

While conceding that “mutuality is gravely threatened when dedication to intimate relationships, taking responsibility where one can, and charity for those who suffer are widely missing,” the statement insists that an overemphasis on individual responsibility and character, an assertion that “private morality is sufficient,” betrays an absence of the love of God. “One can no more love God and lack this passion [for justice] than open a window without letting in the wind.”

     In this and many other ways, the statement, written in Chicago, bespeaks its origins in the Windy City.

     Nevertheless, the author, a prominent University of Chicago theologian, has his finger on an important tension in evangelical and Christian thinking altogether, one that plays itself out in the contrasts between, roughly, Republican and Democratic (or, if you will, conservative and liberal) approaches to political life. As he puts it, the tendency on the “Christian Right” is to focus inward, on the church and on the individuals who comprise it. Such Christians work out their salvation and respond to God’s call, above all by seeking to discipline themselves and to lead pious lives. They reach out to draw others into their community, into a similar relationship with God. These are surely acts of love, born of a humble dependence upon God’s grace, but they locate the greatest gifts, not in the promotion of worldly human flourishing, but in leading (or rather attempting to lead) Godly lives.

     On the one side, then, you have an emphasis on individual morality and self-discipline, on the other, an emphasis on loving social activism. The former often regards the temptations of the world as a threat to sanctity, to be either shunned or reformed. The latter can come to regard this view as bespeaking “narrow and rigid ideas of morality” and seeking to impose “parochial standards of behavior that stigmatize or oppress legitimate differences, barring some from their full chance for distinctive contributions to their communities.” If you’re called, as all would agree, to love the sinner, it apparently is, on this view, hard to hate the sin.

     I submit that Democrats and liberals, if they wish to reach out to evangelicals and Catholics who take their faith seriously, must find a way of accommodating those who take self-discipline and personal responsibility most seriously of all. Lovingly scorning those who can’t help but notice the sin around them and who can’t help but be moved by it to action is not a winning strategy. Calling upon them to love everyone, except in the ways that are most important to them (which they must by all means keep to themselves), might lead those morally and religiously serious Christians to conclude that their political suitors are not similarly serious.

     I have no doubt that many inward-looking evangelicals could be more loving and generous to the least among us, though their failings in this regard are far from unique. From what I can tell, many evangelical leaders and denominations are working on that very issue. Evangelical superstar Rick Warren wants Christians to be known for what they’re for, rather than for what they’re against. My own denomination is building its urban and mercy ministries, for both compassionate and evangelical purposes. But the moral and personal dimensions of this faith remain central. If the Democrats don’t make an effort to accept and accommodate them, the other commonalities and bases of strategic political alliance will ultimately not matter. “Family values,” for example, can’t be reduced or limited to economics and social welfare.

     Many commentators, most recently Joseph Bottum, have phrased this point in terms of the need for Democrats to be open to pro-life positions, if they hope to win the allegiance of religious centrists. He is surely correct, but there are so many more issues of personal responsibility and moral rectitude on which the “left libertarian” wing of the Democratic Party is at odds with the religious folk their party is courting. I have yet to be convinced that the tent is capacious enough to accommodate everyone.