The best we can hope for with this generation of southern evangelical voters is that they will not vote, or will vote for a third party.  This group is not going to vote for a party that does not pander to racism and sexual bigotry, so they will not vote for Democrats. 

The Catch 22 of this situation is that the more we criticize Bush, the more we identify Bush as what he is - an utter failure totally lacking in human morality - the more we give a free pass to the Republican Party.  Bush will be the one the southern evangelicals turn against, not the Republicans, who are also turning against Bush.

So, I suggest we not count on receiving votes from southern evangelicals.  The odds for us doing so are similar to the odds that you will win a $10 million lottery. 

Hoppy in Sacramento

Can any of these voters be won over on economic issues? Maybe I'm stereotyping, but I suspect a lot of these Southern Baptists aren't wealthy and must be concerned about jobs, health care, and overall financial security. And isn't there some way to connect economic issues to Christian values such as helping the poor?

Isn't the ideal to have it both ways?  Reach out to as many religious moderates as you can, but make sure Bush or future right-wingers are called on their attempts to appeal to the extreme right?  Move to the middle and push your opponent to the fringe?

That Cleveland anecdote is a damn good one, though.  It's fun to watch people forced to explain themselves with a look on their face as if they're thinking "gee this made a lot more sense in my head than it does coming out of my mouth". 

It's like we brought a flashlight into the cave of their ideology and we're finding all these weird transparent, blind invertebrates scurrying away from a light they lost the ability to either understand or camoflage themselves from eons ago.

It's like we give them the fruit of knowledge, and they suddenly realize they're naked and hide themselves in shame. 

It's like our entire national collective consciousness experiences a mass satori, and we rejoice in discovering the absurdity of what we all knew was going on all this time...yes, rejoice, for discovering the absurdity allows us to correct it.

Yes, yes, expose them as the secret radicals they are, but do not allow yourself to become the opposite radical.

If anything, Christians should be in favor of universal health care.  At its foundation, health care is a benevolent and charitable dispensing of care for human beings at their weakest moments and in need of help.  See the parable of the Good Samaritan, Luke 10:25-37.

A little background on the story: Jesus was responding to a lawyer who had first asked Jesus what was required of him to inherit eternal life.  Jesus responded by rhetorically asking “what does the law say?”  The lawyer responded with “love God with all your soul, all your strength and all your mind and love your neighbor as yourself.”  Jesus told the lawyer that he had answered correctly; “do this and you will live” Jesus told him.  Not to be outdone, the lawyer asked Jesus (I can envision sarcastically and rhetorically) “who is my neighbor?”  Jesus then went on to tell the story of the Good Samaritan.  From Wikipedia:

When the lawyer then asks Jesus to tell him who his neighbor is, Jesus responds with a parable about a traveler who was attacked, robbed, stripped, and left for dead by the side of a road. Later, a priest saw the stricken figure and avoided him, presumably in order to maintain ritual purity. Similarly, a Levite saw the man and ignored him as well. Then a Samaritan passed by, and, despite the mutual antipathy between his and the Jewish populations, immediately rendered assistance by giving him first aid and taking him to an inn to recover while promising to cover the expenses.
At the conclusion of the story, Jesus asks the lawyer, of the three passers-by, who was the stricken man's neighbor? When the lawyer responds that it was the man who helped him, Jesus responds with "Go and do the same."

…

Find the Truth. Do Justice.

It's like our entire national collective consciousness experiences a mass satori....

I have been saying to myself for quite a while that our country is in need of a paradigm shift in our thinking regarding a whole host of issues -- but especially health care.  You have described in Buddhist terms what I have been thinking in Western terms.

I am not sure that the "mass satori" or "paradigm shift" has yet happened, but perhaps the Republican's overreaching on several fronts will push us toward it.

Find the Truth. Do Justice.

Well, if you want the world to end Bush is your man. He's working on it.

Tom

Questioning Bush about his religion? Excellent ploy! As Phillips has noted elsewhere, speechwriters have done a fine job of courting conservative believers by weaving evangelical (or conservative Catholic) rhetoric into Bush's prepared statements. Yet Bush offers little that is specific about his own beliefs, and more may be behind this than the ordinary politician's reluctance to wade into intractable controversies between people of strong faith.

For reasons I won't go into here, I think Bush is genuinely religious; but like the preacher in the movie "The Night of the Hunter," his is "the religion the Almighty and me worked out betwixt us" -- a designer religion -- and it isn't contemporary fundamentalist Protestantism. Consider, for example, his thoroughly cordial welcome of a transsexual college classmate to the Yale reunion held at the White House ("You've come back as yourself"), or the distance he has kept from the drive for an anti-gay-marriage amendment to the Constitution. This is not the behavior you'd expect from someone who sees homosexuality as a grave moral failing.

In short: many in Bush's religious base would be disconcerted or even shocked by some of his actual beliefs. The need to conceal those beliefs is a source of discomfort to him. Forcing him to ad lib on matters religious will at best cause him to embarrass himself, and at least keep him off his stride.

Otherwise, on a historical point: I sometimes wonder whether we overstress the importance of Scopes to the fundamentalist withdrawal from politics. What gets ignored in the focus on the demolition of poor old W. J. Bryan is the failure of national prohibition, adopted after an overwhelmingly "faith-based" half-century campaign, then discarded after little more than a decade. If that didn't discourage an interest group, what would?

We always seem to lump all evangelicals in with the fundamentalists. I would bet there are a number of evangelicals who feel they have no place to turn.

Exactly right. This is one of the most frequently misunderstood things about religion in America. Fundamentalists are NOT the same as evangelical. All fundamentalists are evangelical, but not all evangelicals are fundamentalists.

All you need to do to understand this is consider what portion of the evangelical vote was won by Bill Clinton and Al Gore, not to mention all the other Democratic governors, senators and representatives in the South.  It is perfectly possible to separate evangelicals from fundamentalists and peel off the former while blowing off the latter.

In my mind, there are two problems Democrats need to solve with respect to this issue.  First, liberals, especially the coastal elites, are fantastically ignorant about religious conservatives, making very crude assumptions about what they believe and what they care about.  According to this view, religious conservatives are all Dobsonites.

Second, liberals and Democrats just don't care about this part of the country.  There is no desire to understand it.  It feels like alien territory to your typical secular, highly educated, urban liberal.  And even when they profess to care, many northern liberals put their foot in it by coming across as hostile, not just to evangelical religion, but all religion.  This was what happened with Howard Dean, who was aggressively secular.

Once again, it is worth contemplating the genius of Bill Clinton.  Here was a guy who was a liberal by most measures (certainly by the measures used by religious conservatives).  Yet because he connected with Southern evangelicals on a personal level, and was culturally familiar with them, he was able to woo them.  Or at least neutralize them. 

This is why I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that, at least for the time being, nominating another Northern liberal like Hillary Clinton would be an epic disaster for liberals.  Far better to find someone with the political skills to appeal to both liberals and Southern evangelicals, if not to win them over, at least to keep them from turning against Democrats en masse.  Given the demographics of the country, it's the only hope for salvation - from Republicans.

Again, not all southern evangelicals are fundamentalist. Many are liberal. Stereotyping is anti-democratic and unacceptable.

I've met a few people who say they vote Republican for one reason, and one reason only, and that's abortion.  These people, who are almost always Evangelical Christians, say that they agree with the Democrats on almost every position, but they vote Republican because the Republicans are anti-abortion.

So, to answer your question, we probably could reach SOME of them on economic issues, but that would be at the expense of some of our core beliefs.

I understand what you're saying, but the comment that liberals don't "understand this part of the country" is in my opinion, false.  As an example, Hillary Clinton came from Illinois, and spent most of her life there and in Arkansas.  Russ Feingold is from Wisconsin and many of these states have democratic governors.  Conservatives have painted liberals as "hostile to religion" and it's simply not true.  Howard Dean, like John Kerry, were not only not hostile to religion, but advocated a position held by most Americans, that religious beliefs are personal and private and should not be used to advance a political agenda.

I also might add that democrats don't need the southern evangelicals and fundamentalists to win.  To remind people, Gore surged in the polls when he espoused liberal causes and won not in spite of it, but because of it.

As long as we focus on campaigning against Bush, trying to turn voters off of Bush, we are doing nothing to win in either 2006 or 2008.  Bush will not be running in 2008, nor is he running now.  We need to focus on campaigning against Republicans in general, the Republicans in Congress in particular, and the neo-con version of Republicanism especially.  We shouldn't give Bush a pass, of course, but unless we are trying to impeach him, we cannot possibly defeat him now.  He needs to be the Republican Party in all voters minds now, to tie him around the party's neck like a noose.  But, the real opponents are not Bush.

Hoppy in Sacramento

They need to be taught both.  The passing of a common knowledge is paramount in our survival of the species, just as knowing what to do with the knowledge is.  I do understand your point in the political context.

QUESTION: Do you believe this, that the war in Iraq and the rise of terrorism are signs of the Apocalypse?  And if not, why not?

OMG....that is one of themost rambling incoherent statements I have ever read/heard in my life!!  JUst WTF did he say?

He jsut when on what appears to be a circuitous jaunt through every single meme the GOP has been spewing for the last 3 years.

Is there something in that statement that strikes a chord with the religious right...cause it all sounded like goulash gibberish to me.

Hillary Clinton is an interesting case because she did, as you say, spend a good chunk of her life in Arkansas and has had a lot of experience dealing with Southerners.  In addition, she has the master, Bill Clinton, by her side, at least theoretically.  But I don't think there's any question that she is perceived by most religious conservatives as something close to the antichrist.  It would probably be pretty hard to win many of these people over, even if she made an all-out push.

As for Feingold, it is simply ridiculous to lump Wisconsin in with states in the Deep South, like Alabama or Mississippi.  Religious conservatives exist in Wisconsin, but they hardly dominate the way they do elsewhere.

I also disagree that Howard Dean was not hostile to religion, although it depends on how you look it.  Sure Dean didn't advocate doing anything detrimental to religion.  But his entire emphasis when the subject came up was on curbing religion, rather than celebrating it.  You don't have to buy into the whole agenda of the religious right to simply acknowledge that religion is important to people's lives, that it deserves respect and that it is an important source of the moral and ethical values we all share.  You never heard words like that from Dean. 

I'm arguing that it isn't enough for Democrats just to say that religion is private and should be kept out of public life.  That will be interpreted at hostile, and rightly so.  It is important to say that religion matters.  It is important to reassure people that our values are informed by our religious heritage, not just cold, impersonal calcualtion.  Above all, it is crucial to show Democrats care, and don't just treat religion as some big obstacle to overcome.

That's weird - sorry! Here is the link again

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04592b.htm

If that doesn't work type in to Google

St. Cyril of Alexandria Hypatia

I wasn't referring strictly to the south, but to the so-called flyover country, because fundamentalism and evangelicalism isn't confined to south.  When did Howard Dean advocate curbing religion?  I would need an example, because I don't remember that as part of his platform.

As to catering to the religious, I see that as a repudiation of everything I believe in as an American.  Perhaps some people's values are informed by their religious beliefs, but mine are informed by a common belief in humanity and the ideals of the American republic.  Religion is meant to inform your character, not your neighbor.  I neither care nor need to know what religion a politican believes in, as long as he adheres to the law and the spirit of the law within the confines of the constitution.

From an anthropological point of view, examining these comment threads is kind of interesting.

First of all, absolutely nobody made a comment about a voice from a burning bush. This is supposed to be a political party, and parties are supposed to be fun, and you guys miss such an obvious straight line. 

That wasn't a facetious comment, mores the pity. you are trying to convince people of your point of view, and you can't lighten up for a second.  Thats not the way it works, why do you think the most trusted reporter on the planet is Jon Stewart? Politics about relieving tension, not anal retention so severe your GI tract backs up enough to supply material for a state of the union speech.

More importantly, it might raise your conciousness  up a couple of feet to where it belongs. Try substituting black, gay, or spanish speaking, or any other minority(indians, trobriand islanders, liberal republicans) for christian and listen how bigoted your comments sound.   

Like it or not, the religious are here, get used to them and figure out some way to live with them; they aren't going away. For one thing, they outnumber you and you really don't want to get them angry. Remember, if they happen to be right, they will always get the last laugh.  You absolutely certain they aren't onto something? Are you certain the party member next to you believes that also?

In addition, if the religious actually fought back, they could probably tear both parties apart without breaking a sweat. They won't though. Neither of you are important enough to bother with.

While Progressives and neoconservatives have been having these deadly dull wars on political theory, faith based organizations have been out there, holding the country together through thick and thin.

In other words, out there among both your constituents, doing your job. Making things right,  promoting the common welfare, while both parties played whip it out and see whose is less tiny.

And they have the power now. The old fashioned way, they earned it with hard work and attention to what's important. They haven't really bothered with either party because they consider you both irrelevant to their job of keeping the nation, the world, together. They only they tend to support the Republicans because the Progressives seem more likely to distract them from their mission. They don't really care if the Republicans keep their promises, as long as they don't interfere.

Try to understand that you are dealing with people with a completely different set of values. They aren't trying to take over the world, its not valuable enough to be worth seizing. It's the "render unto Caeser" thing, if any of you recognize the quote.

So some religious leaders are using their position for political purposes. Who cares? Any member of the  religion can do what they want, as long as they don't interfere with whats important, whats real, and politics isn't.  At the end of the day, all that matters is that a bunch of people survived to live another day. Maybe something big like Katrina victims, maybe just a homeless person on the streets of Chicago, the scale doesn't matter.

Perhaps some of you watch the TV show "Seventh Heaven". You should, the Camden's are pretty realistic portrayals of the religious. Have you ever seen them on the show, try to influence politics beyond their own community? All they ever do is take care of their flock, their constituents. They don't care about politics and influence.

There is one church out in New Jersey that I belong to. 500 people, 50% Chinese, the rest just about every culture on the planet. Maybe half of them believe in Christ, but every last one of them believes in helping people. They are part of a loose knit organization all ov