The Party Faithful: How and Why Democrats are Closing the God Gap

By Amy Sullivan

Review by David Belden

IF YOU WANT A GOOD, READABLE overview of the relationship between the Democratic Party and Christians (evangelicals, 'main-line' Protestants and Catholics) over the last 40 years, this is your book. Amy Sullivan writes primarily about electoral politics. She details how the Democrats lost majorities of two of their core constituencies--evangelicals and Catholics--and how they are just now beginning to work out how to get them back.

Better still, if you want a book that will give your aggressively secular liberal friends or relatives a pragmatic understanding of why they should grit their teeth and actively, diplomatically, seek political allies among believers, this should do the trick. It is hard to read this book and not conclude that anti-religious liberals have been childishly stupid over the last decades. If they had not been spooked by God-talk and "pro-life" vehemence, but had simply accorded basic respect to believers who shared their values on other issues, like poverty, contraception, education, healthcare, the death penalty, and war, they would have won over enough evangelical and Catholic voters to win the White House several more times. The most striking thing about the 2000 and 2004 elections were how close run they were. Sullivan's play by play on the Kerry campaign's tone-deaf approach to religion, and how, for example, this Catholic candidate lost the Catholic vote in Ohio, the critical swing state that lost him the election, by 44 to 55 (a 6 point drop from Al Gore's support among Catholics there in 2000), will leave you gasping. While the Bush campaign had legions of operatives working the religious vote, the Kerry campaign hired one young woman who was then sidelined and muzzled. For that we have suffered four more years of torture, energy policy failure and all the rest? It's all too easy to blame Bush's victories solely on the religious Right. Amy Sullivan, a journalist who was raised evangelical, has the wit to understand just how much of the failure rests with secular liberal myopia.

What you will not get much insight into from the book is deeper reflection on what may be missing from liberal philosophy, as distinct from liberal electoral strategies, that enabled this generations-long failure to happen. Strategy is about making allies; philosophy asks if there is anything to learn from them.

Can the secular, who are not about to take up religious beliefs, nonetheless learn anything from the believers? This of course has been a major theme of Tikkun magazine in all its twenty-three years. It was curious that Sullivan referred to the Clintons' espousal of a "politics of meaning" early in Clinton's first term, without a mention of that term's author, Michael Lerner, Editor of Tikkun. Apparently she is not drawn yet to a deeper critique of liberalism. For Lerner the secular liberal and left failure is not just one of strategy but of analysis--a deep failure to appreciate spiritual alienation and hunger in Americans. This analytical failure, Lerner argues, arises from a fear of anything that can be considered irrational. It is a wholly understandable fear after centuries of religious wars and irrational fascisms. It persists even though we know that all human beings, including liberals and the left, are moved by fears, passions, longings and ethical values that can neither be dispelled nor embraced simply by rational means. We might wish that pure rationalism were the antidote to religious, racial, gender-based or nationalistic bigotry, but it isn't: love is the antidote, with all its attendant values, practices, pitfalls and paradoxes, and, yes, its alternative analyses.

Sullivan does touch on these issues in the book. She quotes Jim Wallis on the Democratic Party's failure in the mid-1970s to respond to evangelical social activists: "The left had by then turned away from 'common good' politics and towards identity politics, a rights politics." Rights politics, Sullivan comments, "had little in common with religiously motivated altruism." She describes the liberal intelligentsia's thorough rejection of religion by the 1970s and writes that, "Eager to stay in the game, many mainline Protestants responded by filtering most religion out of their political rhetoric, elevating 'rights' over 'righteousness' as the supreme civic virtue." It is telling that when Kerry's lone, young, muzzled religious organizer, Mara Vanderslice, finally opened her own consultancy in 2005 and started winning upset elections for Democrats, she and her partner called their firm "Common Good Strategies." Vanderslice is the primary hero of Sullivan's book: the young evangelical who gets it, when all the veteran organizers don't.

But is there really a huge philosophical gap between rights and righteousness, justice and altruism, individualism and the common good? In the quotes above, Sullivan suggests that such a gap is the heart of the matter, but she doesn't delve further. In most of the book she just seems to think that all that secular liberals need is to understand that the evangelicals and committed Catholics with whom they can make electoral alliances have a different, quirky world-view, which they must be allowed to express in their own way if they are to win votes from their constituencies.

Is there a bigger lesson? Could it be that the liberal world desperately needs to retreat from its own rationalist blind alley back towards a new secular equivalent of "religiously motivated altruism"? Is there in fact such a thing? Who is writing about it? We have George Lakoff writing about how to frame 'our' issues so 'they' get it, but who is teaching us how to develop a secular worldview genuinely based on altruism? Or is that what Lakoff's nurturant parenting is about--I find it hard to tell if he is mostly spin (sorry, framing), or mostly substance. It is interesting that these Christians chose a term, "the common good," that has no religious belief label attached to it. Perhaps Sullivan's next book will go deeper into these questions. We need more religiously-informed critics of secular liberalism who don't simply talk from their own religious tradition, but who can translate into more universal terms what secular liberals are missing: authors like Peter Dunlap, whose Awakening Our Faith in the Future: the Advent of Psychological Liberalism has currently grabbed my attention.

by Amy Sullivan, Scribner, 2008

David Belden, D.Phil., is Managing Editor of Tikkun.