Huckabee's Lament

PFAW's excellent Right-Wing Watch reports that Mike Huckabee is getting a little fed up with all the love and forgiveness going on between religious right leaders and the various adulterers and cross-dressers in the Republican presidential field:

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, beloved by many on the Religious Right for his positions on wedge issues but dismissed as a serious presidential candidate, has spent the last few weeks deploying a seemingly desperate gambit aimed at undermining support for frontrunners Rudy Giuliani and John McCain. They should “be held to a standard of personal accountability and responsibility for their personal lives,” he said, alluding to what Vision America’s Rick Scarborough called “multiple marriages and serial adultery” among the candidates. “If Republicans in this election vote in such a way as to say a candidate’s personal life and personal conduct in office doesn’t matter,” said Huckabee, “then a lot of Christian evangelical leaders owe Bill Clinton a public apology.”

[...]

In a recent appearance in Iowa, Huckabee sharpened his “personal lives” attack, noting that “I’m specifically referencing Christian evangelical leaders who were the most vocal in saying back during the Clinton era that personal behavior, personal responsibility and character were the key factors in a president’s criteria.” He accused those leaders of selling out to the Republican Party.

Huckabee is stuck in a vicious circle: he's doing terribly in the polls because he has been unable to gain support from the leaders of what should be his base in the primaries; he has been unable to gain that support because he's perceived by said leaders as unelectable.

It continues to mystify me, and as far as I can tell, it really does all trace back to the Club for Growth's vigorous attacks on Huckabee a few months ago. Otherwise, what's not to love? He's a governor, a Baptist preacher, a star on the stump, he's been on Oprah, and he has a flair for reframing traditionally Democratic social issues within a conservative narrative. In fact, I think it's this last trait, more than the specific tax increases he approved in Arkansas, that doomed him in the eyes of the Club for Growth crowd. They've been traumatized by "compassionate conservatism," and the last thing they want is a nominee who intends to go down that road again. The tax increases only sharpened their skepticism. Thus they appplied the "unelectable" tag to him, even though there's no reason to believe he's unelectable at all. Again, the economic conservatives punch above their bodyweight in the conservative coalition.

This time, they've done Democrats a favor.

Labels: 2008, economic conservatives, evangelicals, Mike Huckabee, Presidential election, social conservatives

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 2:27 PM 1 comments

  What We Talk About When We Talk About Religion

Five Before Chaos has a thoughtful post about my ruminations on the rise of moderate evangelicals. JD is generally in agreement, but makes another important point:

The key is for the Dems to not go overboard with the God talk, because then they're going to lose the support of those who hold secularism and rational inquiry in highest regard.

This is a valid concern, and it reflects - albeit more moderately - the worries of many secular progressives who are very reluctant to see Democrats attempt to appeal to evangelical voters.

It would be a tremendous mistake for Democrats to overlook the rapid rise of a secular voting bloc in America - especially as those voters overwhelmingly favor Democratic candidates. Digby had a terrific post about this last month: the growing numbers of "unchurched" Americans present a serious problem for the Republican party. Digby cites Bill Scher:

Democrats crushed Republicans among secular voters, broadly defined as those who attend church seldom (favoring Democrats 60% to 38%) or never (67% to 30%). Republicans retained strong support among those who attend church more than weekly. But among those who only go weekly -- the larger portion of the religious vote -- the Republican lead shrunk from 15 points to 7.

In short, Republicans failed to be competitive among secular voters, while Democrats were at least competitive among regular churchgoers. And since the secular vote is roughly equal to the regular churchgoing vote, according to the last several national election exit polls, that means Republicans and their conservative base have a far bigger secular problem than their rivals have a religion problem.

These secular voters, Digby points out, represent the fastest growing religious group in America.

So it looks, on one level, like a bit of a conundrum for Democrats. How can we free ourselves from the shackles of traditional political piety and appeal to the unchurched while at the same time making new efforts to reach out to evangelicals?

It looks like at least one party is going to end up playing confessional whack-a-mole here. But it doesn't have to be the Democrats. Candidates who are wondering how to talk about their faith - or lack thereof - on the campaign trail shouldn't make religious rhetoric the object. This goes for whether they hold strong religious beliefs or not. Faith both informs and is given substance by one's values. So are the ethical strictures that lead secular folks to make certain moral choices - including the choice of how to vote. The "God talk" that shallow pundits and glib consultants try to foist on candidates is a distraction at best - an exercise in embarrassing fakery at worst. You can't force someone to write a sonnet if she speaks only Japanese. But let her compose in her own language, true to her own experience, and you're likely to find that her poetry is drawn from very familiar themes.

Secular progressives and moderate evangelicals share many of the same values: concern for the poor and the health of the middle class, stewardship of the environment, peace and freedom abroad, equal opportunities and justice for all. Secular Democrats should talk about those values in the way we know to talk about them, and understand that others will use different language to articulate the same concerns. Communication is not about mindlessly parroting someone else's language, nor is it about abandoning your own. It's about searching for ways to transmit ideas from one language to another, and learning to notice when you and your interlocutor are using different words to say the same thing.

Labels: evangelicals, five before chaos, progressives

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 2:27 PM 3 comments

  It's Not Liberals Who Should Worry About Evangelicals

The American left has been subject to a good deal of unproductive speculation and fear-mongering when it comes to the question of evangelical Christians. We've been forced to listen to vacuous scoldings from the bobbleheaded purveyors of the conventional wisdom, who - evidence be damned - insist that Democrats must get right with something called "values voters" if they're ever to have chance at political success again. And from our own ranks we've been capitivated by waves of hysteria over the barbarians at the gates, as we fixate on the most titillatingly scary fundamentalists we can find.

An example of the latter phenomenon was last year's documentary Jesus Camp, which focused on an extremist Pentecostal summer camp in North Dakota. As an anecdotal record, the film was fascinating, but it blundered badly in its misconceived attempt to use the camp as a stand-in or leading indicator for American evangelicals generally. Framing the camp scenes with commentary from liberal radio host Mike Papantonio, the filmmakers moved directly from disturbing scenes of children being emotionally manipulated to dark warnings about how such radicalism is on the verge of taking over America. The film failed entirely to provide any useful context, to challenge its viewers to understand why fundamentalists see the world as they do, what differences there might be among fundamentalists and evangelicals generally, and whether the grandiose claims made by a Becky Fischer should in fact be taken at face value.

A much better starting point for understanding the political dynamics of American evangelicalism is Frances FitzGerald's excellent article in the current New York Review of Books, which examines how, over the past two or three years, moderate and progressive evangelical leaders have begun to take a more assertive role in public discourse. While not downplaying the pernicious influence of right-wing fundamentalism, FitzGerald observes that evangelicals as a whole are not nearly as conservative as many liberals fear, or as the right-wingers would like to believe. And in this context, the rise of the centrists holds a great deal of promise.

FitzGerald's article is worth reading just for its brief history of political evangelicalism in America, which demystifies the process by which groups like the Moral Majority, the Christian Coalition, and Focus on the Family have successively risen to positions of influence in US politics. But her critical point is that only a portion of American evangelicals can be described as genuinely right-wing fundamentalists. This has important ramifications:

[T]he polls that distinguish "traditionalist" evangelicals— defined as committed churchgoers who hold conservative religious beliefs—from their less observant and less theologically conservative brethren reveal significant ideological differences between the two groups. According to these surveys, traditionalists, who make up half of the evangelical population and represent the core constituency of the religious right, have far more conservative views on all issues than the rest.

Statistically, the extreme conservatism of the traditionalists skews the picture of the community as a whole. In fact, "modernist" evangelicals—defined as those who go to church infrequently and don't hold to a literal interpretation of the Bible—have more liberal views on all issues, including abortion and gay rights, than the American population as a whole, but there are relatively very few of them. "Centrists," or those who fall somewhere in the theological middle and make up almost half of all evangelicals, are no more conservative than Americans generally except on abortion and gay rights, and even on these issues they are far more moderate than the traditionalists.[9] In other words, half of the evangelical population doesn't see eye to eye with the other half. In the future the division may become more acute because while the Christian right leaders have become more ambitious and more aggressive as a result of their victories, centrist leaders have, for the first time, begun to assert themselves.

FitzGerald documents the recent efforts of ministers like Gergory Boyd, Joel Hunter, and Rich Nathan - mega-church pastors who have begun to de-emphasize sexual politics and the culture war, and to take strong positions on the centrality of poverty, racism, peace, global warming, and international development as issues of concern to Christians. She also documents how centrists and progressives have been able to assert these issues through the National Association of Evangelicals, working with people like Richard Cizik, the NAE's vice-president for governmental relations, who has

supported the experienced evangelical aid organizations World Relief and World Vision in lobbying for a major increase in US aid for development, debt relief for the poorest countries, cuts in domestic agricultural subsidies, and the inclusion of labor standards and human rights conditions in trade agreements. (Two years ago World Vision campaigned against the Central American Free Trade Agreement because it lacked such protections.) Centrist leaders have also lobbied the administration for more money to fund the global campaign against AIDS, and for a variety of human rights causes, including the deployment of a strong United Nations peacekeeping force in Darfur.[12]

Even Rick Warren, the empire-building author of The Purpose-Driven Life, has focused his political interventions on such causes.

As FitzGerald acknowledges, we have yet to see these efforts result in a significant shift in the voting patterns of evangelicals - who supported Republicans in 2006 at the same rate as in other recent elections. But the right-wing evangelical political machine has been churning for 28 years, since the founding of the Moral Majority in 1979. The centrists and the progressives have only really been politically engaged for two or three years now. And clearly, there is fertile ground upon which they can work.

The darkest fear of most Republicans - the thing that lurks beneath their beds at night - is that the Democrats might one day neutralize abortion as a political issue. At the conservative summit, Laura Ingraham - with almost an audible shiver - asked audience members to imagine what would happen "if the Democrats became the pro-life party." Democrats shouldn't turn against their basic commitment to freedom of choice. But they don't have to. A prevention-first approach to the issue, combined with a real willingness to work with evangelicals on the other issues that matter to many of them - poverty, social justice, care for the environment - could very well be enough to break half of them away from the grip of the Republican party.

A sober look at the facts suggests that the trends in political evangelicalism should be a source of nightmares for Republicans, not for Democrats.

UPDATE: I posted this at Daily Kos. Some interesting comments. It's fair to say there's a great deal of skepticism over arguments like the one I'm making.

UPDATE #2: Now also cross-posted at Diatribune.

Labels: Democrats, evangelicals, Francis FitzGerald, Republicans

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 10:07 AM 0 comments

  Let Me Lie to You

One of the projects I'll be undertaking here at a&s is a look at the history of evangelical Christians as a political force. Since I'm an agnostic ex-Catholic from the West Coast currently living in the Second Most Godless Neighborhood in Brooklyn*, I'll be approaching the subject without any particular claim to expertise - just an open mind and a reliance on good sources.

One of the best online sources of discussion about American evangelicalism is slacktivist, a blog by Fred Clark - himself an evangelical, and one of the most thoughtful observers of the subject I have found. Clark is engaged across a variety of subjects, but his ongoing deconstruction of the Left Behind novels is officially the Very Best Thing on the Internets.

His most recent LB post cites Mark Noll's classic The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind ("The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind..."). Noll's "epistle from a wounded lover" ponders

...a picture of an evangelical world almost completely adrift in using the mind for careful thought about the world.... [E]vangelicals -- bereft of self-criticism, intellectual subtlety, or an awareness of complexity -- are blown about by every wind of apocalyptic speculation and enslaved to the cruder spirits of populist science.

Evangelical thought was not always this way. In the mid-nineteenth century evangelical colleges helped foster a flourishing intellectual life, devoted to democratic principles and enthralled with the scientific revolution as exemplified by the work of Francis Bacon.

And then Darwin happened, and that's another story entirely.

Clark observes one of the organizing principles of the LB novels:

One of the stranger things about LB is the way the authors seem to think that their novel, their work of fiction, serves as "proof" of their [premillenial dispensationalist] claims. They seem to think it not only illustrates, but demonstrates, that faith conquers reason and that Scofield's notes are canonical rather than heretical. They've created a fictional reality in which their weird theories are true. In this fictional world, all who disagree appear as fools.

When you refuse to abide the common rules of defining reality, you're forced to create your own, and to push and push for your airless worldview against the threatening hegemony of intellectual honesty. Faith must conquer reason. This dynamic is at work as much within evangelical circles, as between evangelicals and others. There is no evangelical consensus on standards of truth, but there is an aggressive faction of mindless fundamentalists determined to impose its own truth on others, because to attempt anything less would be to concede the collapse of its entire worldview.

And thus, for now, fundamentalist evangelicals make perfect partners for a party that claims to make its own reality - and, no matter the facts, is determined always to stay the course.

*All statistics made up

(Paul)

Labels: evangelicals, fundamentalists, reality

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 4:09 PM 0 comments