Redefining Democracy, Ethics, and Evangelicalism
Joseph Loconte
In the current issue of The New Yorker, Peter Boyer wonders whether Barack Obama and the Democratic Party can capture the votes of supposedly disaffected conservative Christians, both Catholics and Protestants. Political strategists, of course, are wondering the same. Yet the article, “Party Faithful: Can the Democrats Get a Foothold on the Religious Vote?” treats recent political history as clumsily as it does Christian eschatology. It seems to be an essay on an eager, yet ultimately fruitless quest for a thesis.
Mr. Boyer implies that the controversial Obama endorsement by Catholic law professor Douglas Kmiec (a colleague of mine at Pepperdine University) signals an increasingly faith-friendly Democratic Party. “Obama’s pro-choice-but-against-abortion formulation has been taken up by the Party, and is reflected in the Democratic platform,” Mr. Boyer writes. “This apparent softening on the abortion issue, however rhetorical, has allowed for a resurgence of the ‘consistent ethic of life’ construct, now being aggressively proposed by Catholic liberals as the proper Catholic approach to issues.”
What kind of moral “construct,” it must be asked, demands government support for the use of lethal violence against an unborn child, while at the same time hails government spending on pre-natal care? Catholic liberals and left-leaning evangelicals do indeed call this a “consistent ethic of life.” Intellectual honesty, however, suggests it is something else—something like an incoherent ploy to ease a troubled conscience. Even if they haven’t read George Orwell, most conservatives probably won’t swallow this logic, such as it is.
Nevertheless, without offering any evidence, Mr. Boyer repeats the claim that religious conservatives are in a state of political vertigo. He then quotes Republican strategist Karl Rove to underscore the supposed softness of evangelical support for the Republican Party and its presidential nominee:
“On the evangelical right, there is a pronounced sense that the movement, as a political force, is adrift. This is, in part, the result of a vacuum of leadership, as the movement faces its first election season in a generation without Jerry Falwell on the scene . . . Karl Rove has suggested that the movement, though still central to the Republican coalition, may have reached a plateau. ‘There were a lot of people in 2004 who were motivated to participate in the process because of what they felt to be a personal connection between themselves and President Bush, in part because of the faith link,’ Rove told me. ‘I don’t think they feel that with either candidate this time around. And one thing we know about people of faith, particularly Protestant evangelicals, is that they tend to flow in and out of the system. Evangelicals, certain elements of them, have a very strong tradition of believing that they need to withdraw from the public life of the country.’”
Put aside the media’s feverishly inflated view of the “leadership” provided by Mr. Falwell and Mr. Robertson for rank-and-file evangelical Christians. (This is a convenient way to impugn believers every time such “leaders” make inflammatory or outright bizarre political comments, which happens with numbing regularity.) The more important problem with this critique is that whatever Mr. Rove’s political skills, his view of evangelical political engagement are stunningly naïve. This is the problem with an obsessive focus on presidential voting patterns—Mr. Rove’s narrow specialty.
The one thing we do know about evangelical Protestants, the one thing that even a brisk reading of American political history tells us, is this: they have been the most thoroughly, most passionately engaged religious group in American civic and political life for about 350 years. You’ll find evangelicals present at virtually every important political and social debate—preaching, praying, petitioning, educating, and building grass-roots institutions of every kind. For all its excesses, for all its faults and fumblings, there is no religious movement more firmly committed than evangelicalism to social and political renewal—from the neighborhood rescue mission to the war-torn refugee camp.
How is it that their democratic engagement fails to register on the political meter of the punditry class? Perhaps it’s because the typical pundit’s view of democracy—what Mr. Rove calls “the system”—tends to reduce democratic action to the voting booth. That’s a pretty impoverished vision of citizenship. I used to think, probably unfairly, that this was a liberal vice. Now I know better.
Joe Loconte is a senior fellow at Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy and a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum. He is working on a book about the history of religious freedom in the West.
0 Responses • Columns, Joseph Loconte, Faiths and Worldviews, Public Square, Society, Thu 04 Sep 2008
