I understand why they are doing it
Can Leah Daughtry Bring Faith to the Party?
By Daniel Bergner, New York Times Magazine, July 20:On Sundays she is a Pentecostal preacher. During the week she is planning the Democratic convention....
In her positions as Dean’s top aid and the convention’s top official, Daughtry, who is 44 years old, is leading the Democratic Party’s new mission to make religious believers — particularly ardent Christian believers — view the party and its candidates as receptive to, and often impelled by, the dictates of faith. She sparked this crusade, both to transfigure the party’s image as predominantly secular and to take enough votes from the Republicans to win this year’s presidential election, in the aftermath of George W. Bush’s 2004 defeat of John Kerry. And in her vocation as a Pentecostal pastor she stands for faith in an extreme form. There is nothing equivocal about her belief. Hers is a religion not only of divine healing but of talking in tongues....
...in early 2005...Dean....asked her to stay on as chief of staff and backed her plan to hire a team, to be known as Faith in Action, that would help the party to hear, and to be heard by, voters of deep religious conviction. Gradually she put together the F.I.A. group that has met weekly at the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in Washington: three evangelicals, a Catholic, a Muslim and a Jew, all with backgrounds blending work in religion and politics. (F.I.A., Daughtry says, will very likely be melded now with the Obama campaign for the coming months, then recommence on its own after the election.)....
This will be the first Democratic convention to start with a religious service, another sign meant to prove that the party is serious about belief, and the F.I.A. members, who have worked for months on how best to inject faith into the convention, want to be sure the gathering is led, and well-attended, by a wide range of the religious....
The big tent theory behind this all is a political good. But it is ok to politely refuse the pompoms and quietly think "ick ick ick, no thanks, I think I will be busy doing other stuff that week?" This is coming from someone who has often disagreed with the more radical fundamentalist atheist contingent in the blogosphere: the idea of an "old timey religion" populist revival convention really does turn me off. I really do still like the overall political marketing potential of a moderate version of the separation of church and state thingie, and I think a lot of fellow Americans cynical about politics right and left might agree with me on that front.
The DNC is not a state run party.
It's a private organization.
No conflict of church and state.
Next.
July 19, 2008 10:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
Was talking about their marketing choices, hon.
July 19, 2008 10:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
You really don't know what you're talking about.
July 20, 2008 12:03 AM | Reply | Permalink
Ohhhh...I get it.
The title of the post is "I understand why they're doing it".
It was snark.
You're good.
July 20, 2008 12:12 AM | Reply | Permalink
That's an interesting one, arta. Thanks for the story. I'm not too worried about it going all Old Timey Religion. If the group has Muslims & Jews & (gasp) CATHOLICS in it, then I suspect it won't be Revival Tent time.
That said, there IS part of me that gets a nasty grin at the thought. Of all my green & feminist & alterno-world leftie friends having to deal with it, within their own Party. Yeah, I know - the Right & their freak friends in the Pulpits have been working 24/7 for years to shove it down all our throats out here. But... rarely have I seen religion in any form (other than maybe Pagan ritual stuff) accepted into "my" groups. So for me, I'd get some private entertainment value from watching my buds quiver. Hell, they might even start babbling & go all tongues on me!
July 19, 2008 11:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'll be happy to oblige, quinn. Consider this: ~~~ to represent me quivering. Of course, the entire comment can be thought of as babbling, possibly in tongues.
I hope you find entertainment to be gratifying. Since the Dems have become America's second right-wing party, I'm sure the laughs will be non-stop.
It's just a shame that Falwell died. He would have made a great HUDSec.
July 20, 2008 8:36 AM | Reply | Permalink
~~~~. That was gooooood.
But you're right. I don't need to see much more of it. Let's hope the Dems smarten up on this stuff.
July 20, 2008 5:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
~~ (quivering tapering off)
July 20, 2008 6:50 PM | Reply | Permalink
One of the low points of the 2000 race for me was hearing about Gore & Lieberman holding hands down on their knees to pray. Ick ick ick.
July 20, 2008 3:02 AM | Reply | Permalink
And ick.
July 20, 2008 5:33 AM | Reply | Permalink
This is the kind of thing that springs out of a Democratic leadership that isn't in tune with religion. They have been bamboozled by the Republican bullshit and now apparently believe that most Americans who are "religious" are fundamentalist wackos when clearly that has never been the case.
People like Kerry, Dean, Clinton and yes, Obama not being highly committed to or having much understanding of the mainstream of American religiosity cannot relate to religious Americans as Democrats used to be able to do when their leadership was made up of people steeped in traditional religious training and practice... Please note I am not equating belief with these things.
The point is familiarity and comfort with the ideas, language and thought processes of those who are the people filling the many more millions of pews of mainstream protestant and catholic churches across America. It sickens me to see this massive void in the understanding of our political leaders regarding this very important subject matte. Appointing a Pentacostal minister as a sort of weird liaison to "Christians" is just weird when you consider how narrow a swath fundamentalists are of American religion.
July 20, 2008 3:06 AM | Reply | Permalink
The problem's been that the MSM took that segment of voices - usually drawn from within the white Southern Baptists, fundamentalists, evangelicals & charismatics - as equalling "religion" in America. If he can in any way neutralize that wing, or at least create competing voices within it, I suspect it'll make it a lot safer for the rest of Americans to vote for him - of more mainstream religious views, and those not religious at all. I've found some of his speeches on religion - to left church groups - as well as his wider, non-religious, statements, to be fairly confidence-inducing. We'll see if the pentecostal thing goes off the bend, or stays somewhere people can stomach it.
July 20, 2008 3:37 AM | Reply | Permalink
I was raised in the Church of Christ, legacied into that particular branch of fundamentalism by virtue of my mother's Oklahoma roots. The ubiquity of this brand of Christianity in the south (having much in common with the Southern Baptists) is hard to overstate.
I've got a lot of mixed feelings about religion (I'm now agnostic), but one of the things that drove me away was what I saw as the chasm between teaching and practice. While most churches do a lot of good things in their communities, I couldn't help but feel that overall, the political expressions most often extrapolated from the belief system were contradictory to the spirit of the teachings advanced.
While I don't have much use for organized religion myself, I've always thought it odd how often it's aligned with more conservative political ideas, particularly with the more fundamentalist strains, given what Christ seemed to be saying, and wondered why such a large swath of believers seemed so at odds with a progressive social agenda. It seemed that the interpretation of faith was more directed by sociopolitical predisposition, rather than the other way round. Not surprising, perhaps, but unfortunate all the same. And it seems they've assumed a disproportionate influence by virtue of the activism, organization, and monolithic voting behavior.
There seems to have been a little movement lately with some of these folks finally equating stewardship and environmentalism, etc., wedging away some of these fundamentalists from their total embrace of the Right. For me, if we're going to be stuck with religion playing such a large role in US politics, I would hope it could be enlisted toward what seem to be fundamental Christian ideals that are consistent with progressive goals, like tolerance, social justice, environmental stewardship, and so on.
While I certainly don't want the Democrat party to become enmeshed with and beholden to the Religious Right as have the Republicans, the idea that the Democratic party is not hostile to religion would seem to be a net positive. If the areas of agreement can be strengthened, I would hope that a) good works can be achieved, and b) the unanimity advancing the undesirable positions might be blunted. If the common ground can be emphasized, perhaps these voters might be more evenly spread across the political spectrum, diminishing their disproportionate influence.
July 20, 2008 8:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
I dunno. I'll wait and see how they pull it off. I understand your resistance to hokum, artappraiser, and these things usually do come off as hokum.
But I think this is one of Obama's strengths, so maybe it'll work. I think the guy actually understands religion in a way that most Democratic pols haven't. By which I *don't* mean that he believes in stigmata, miracles, etc. more naively or more sincerely than they did. I actually think the guy understands what religion does for us socially, not because of what he says about religion, but because of the way he does politics.
E.g.
"We will remember that there is something happening in America.
That we are not as divided as our politics suggest,
That we are one people,
That we are one nation,
And together we will begin the next great chapter in the American story, with three words that will ring from coast to coast, from sea to shining sea,
Yes we can . . .
Yes we can heal this nation.
Yes we can repair this world."
That's religion, as I understand religion. The sense of sacredness may be imagined as supernatural, but (personally) I don't think it comes from anything supernatural. It's really an expression of a group's faith in itself, rising above obstacles, division, and suffering.
And actually, as long as Obama can make American civic religion work as well as he did last winter, I'm not sure it matters a whole lot how they do the prayer breakfasts and so on. Much of the distrust of religious people is related to a sense that liberals don't really embrace any collective symbols. Vague assurances about the great tradition of religious freedom (aka "everyone can do whatever they like") don't cut it for them, but a candidate who clearly believes in collective redemption . . . might just cut it. We'll see.
July 20, 2008 9:23 AM | Reply | Permalink
You always say that: Wait and see.
July 20, 2008 10:53 AM | Reply | Permalink
Sorry. You're right, though: I do always say that. Temperamental consequence of being both a moderate and a (literary) historian.
July 20, 2008 12:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
Sorry, there's no such thing as a "moderate." There is no Moderate Party. There's no definition of moderate in American politics. As George Lakoff says, Joe Lieberman is a hawk about Iraq yet liberal about abortion. Chuck Hagel is against the war in Iraq and pro-life. Both can be called moderates. It's a meaningless term.
Thanks for the non-answer.
July 20, 2008 3:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm using it as a description of temperament, not as a description of a political program. It's a non-answer to a non-question.
July 20, 2008 4:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
Exactly my point. You will non-answer endlessly.
July 20, 2008 8:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
Artappraiser:
"It all comes down to respect. Trying to play in the sandbox with the more radical right-wing religious contingent seems to me to be a silly attempt to triangulate in the name of the Lord".
Amen. I have long detested, nay loathed, the notion from some know-it-all components of the left that anything involving religion is anti-everything good. I'm not that concerned with a little non-denominational prayer at the convention; my feeling is that it couldn't hurt. The "problem", of course, comes if it's not being done as an expression of faith, but rather as a blatant and unambigous political gesture.
To me, the solution is easy, I mean this is a simple one. It's all about respect. It's not about empty gestures and prayer in the public square (what did Jesus say about that kind of stuff?). It's about respecting people who observe religion; it's about demonstrating that the First Amendment is real, so that if you want to pray a certain way, well then may G-d bless you and yours.
Hey, AA, I don't know if you remember, but that's why I got so incredibly pissed off at MJ Rosenberg a few months back, because he was mocking one of his right-or-wrong Israel posters for writing G-d the way I just did. I wrote to you that that was the way that I was taught to write G-d, and that's the way that my Dad was too. So, I called him on his bullshit, and I stand by that, and I say that what he did was not groovy progressive, but rather downright, garden-variety and unambiguous anti-semitism. Not that MJ is anti-semitic, but he was displaying anti-semitism to score a couple of points with some of his anti-zionist fans. I hope most of those folks were as appalled as I was, and frankly if they weren't then they could just go f**k themselves too.
In any event, I wasn't digressing OT, because I think that was a perfect example of what certain folks on the left should be ashamed of themselves for. That does not mean, however, that we have to mimic the radical right folks who I believe disrespect everyone, religious folks, atheists, and all in between, when religious gestures become part of the political arsenal.
Again, plain and simple, it's all about respect. If you don't want to respect and understand that certain people cannot, for example, support a pro-choice person on religious grounds, then you lose both politically and morally. That doesn't mean that one doesn't profess pro-choice views even it will cause certain folks not to vote his or her way. It's all about respecting those who believe or who don't believe and I think that's what the Establishment Clause is all about in the first place. It sure as hell ain't about saying looky here, we can use prayer for political gain too.
I was just out in Patchogue where I grew up to attend funeral services for one of my boyhood buddies who died a week ago in a dumb amd tragic motorcycle accident. I was always one of the Jewish kids in my class, and I thought it to was perfectly natural and fine. When my deceased brother Frank's mom saw me at the wake on Thursday, the first thing she said was that she always remembered me coming to her house on Christmas Eve to eat the fish that Italian catholics cook on that holy night as part of their tradition. I then went to the mass for my brother Frank on Friday, and when it was time to kneel and then receive communion, I didn't kneel or receive communion. None of my childhood friends gave it a second thought; I had been in that situation with them many times before. And they weren't offended in the least, because they know that I respect them and love them and that I honor their traditions and their religion. And that's the way this relatively observant Jewish guy was taught to behave, and perhaps our politicians should take a lesson from the way things work in the real world. Yes AA, this is an easy one--it's all about respect.
Thank you for an excellent post, and let us say, Amen.
Bruce
July 20, 2008 10:28 AM | Reply | Permalink
Edit this sentence:
"I was always one of the Jewish kids in my class, and I thought it to was perfectly natural and fine."
Should have read:
"I was always one of the only Jewish kids in my class, and I thought it was perfectly natural and fine".
July 20, 2008 10:33 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'm going to go ahead and say ick, ick, ick. I think I've been among the more strident atheists on the board but the reason I get worked up is that there's a double standard at work. Have the Democrats ever made a public effort to reach out to people who've chosen not to believe in a god?
I don't object to the party reaching out to religious communities but in the end, politically active religious types want policies enacted. If our party is going to support some of those policies they'd better have some serious secular rationales for it because I don't want to have to pay a tax or obey a law to please some god that I don't even believe in.
July 20, 2008 10:43 AM | Reply | Permalink
"I don't object to the party reaching out to religious communities but in the end, politically active religious types want policies enacted."
Generally, I'm a lot closer to the "keep this stuff out of the public square" crowd here than not, but the stridency of some of it betrays an ignorance (or rather an incredibly narrow view) of the wide range of what religion and religiousity can actually entail. Yes, politically active religious types want policies enacted. (Politically active __________, regardless of how you fill in the blank, wants policies enacted. Politically active golfers want policy enacted, right?) The danger here is assuming because someone is "religious," a) that you know what kind of policies they want enacted and, b) that those policies are automatically against your best wishes.
Let's take politically active agnostic Jack on one hand, and politically active baptist Jill on the other hand. Jack is against capital punishment. He finds it fundamentally abhorrent on an ethical level. He doesn't believe that the state should sanction and commit murder as a way of deterring murder. He writes letters to his elected officials and attends protest events at every execution in his state. Jill was born and raised in the baptist church. She teaches Sunday school and leads a bible study group on Wednesday. She never misses a service. She prays with shut-ins and delivers meals to ill members of her church who cannot make it to services. (In other words: She's very baptist.) Jill is against capital punishment. She finds it fundamentally abhorrent on an ethical and moral level. She believes that there is a God-given commandment against murder, and that's all the policy guidance she needs on the matter. She writes letters to her elected officials and organizes her church group's carpool to the same protest events that Jack attends. They live in the same state. Is there any reason why Jack and Jill shouldn't stand shoulder to shoulder in opposition to capital punishment in spite of the fact that they arrived at that position for different reasons?
What I'm getting at is this: I ultimately want a government that passes good laws and sets good policy. Period. There are going to be legislators and other figures on both sides of the aisle who do what they do because of/as a part of/heavily inspired by their religious upbringing, just as there will be government officials who do things in spite of/in conflict with their stated moral and religious beliefs. At the end of the day, whether the laws are good or bad is much more important to me than whether the person who cast the deciding vote was wearing a cross. Setting that aside, I have a fundamental problem with the notion that the immoral, ammoral GOP is widely treated as the Party of God. And it doesn't help progressives one bit to be so knee-jerk anti-religion that we concede the narrative and take stances that alienate people who agree with us on policies but have a different justification for their stances...
July 20, 2008 12:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
I agree with you. I'll side with an anti-death penalty Christian any time. But more often than not I see Democrats siding with the religious groups on social issues -- violent video games, Hollywood content and the like. Or, even worse, opposing same sex marriage. I'm with you, policy first. But our party has a bad record.
July 20, 2008 2:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
I just threw up in my mouth a lot.
July 20, 2008 11:00 AM | Reply | Permalink
This is just one more example of how totally the Democrats have bought Republican spin. This has become so deep within their own souls that they can no longer even see themselves.
I became interested in politics when I was 9 when religion and politicis combined and motivated my Irish Catholic parents to take me to a JFK campaign rally. Never have I believed that Democrats are anti-religion.
When I think of liberals and religion I think of the Kennedys, Tip O'Neil, Tom Harkin, etc. I think of Jews like Feingold and Wellstone. Even Kerry, however much he acted like an uptight WASP, was a Catholic and I don't know how many times I heard Chris Matthewes blather about how religious Teresa Heinz Kerry was and how often he ran into her at Mass.
No, we're not all Southern Baptist good old boy blue dogs, but we have nothing to be ashamed of when it comes to religion. If we'd just stop being focused group and start being authentic we might win something.
Did you know the Pope opposed the war in Iraq? He did. Too bad all those Catholic Democrats were too afraid to mention it.
July 20, 2008 11:47 AM | Reply | Permalink
I really do still like the overall political marketing potential of a moderate version of the separation of church and state thingie, and I think a lot of fellow Americans cynical about politics right and left might agree with me on that front.
Agreed. Moderation would be wise--especially when mixing religion and government.
Once Republicans effectively established themselves as the party of Christians, the Democrats really had no choice but to do something. Maybe there is a way for Democrats to reach out to the most religious Americans and also show that the separation of church and state is in the best interest of their own religious freedom. Governments entangled with religion just pollute and manipulate religion to further their own agenda and keep the masses in line. Obvious... but so many don't see that. I guess the problem is that the leaders of the most fervent religions often work hand in hand with the government in a way that followers fail to recognize.
July 20, 2008 1:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
oops. quotes for the first paragraph.
July 20, 2008 1:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
I like Howard Dean and how he is trying to rescue the Democratic Party from the DLC but I do believe in this case he got snookered by his chief of staff. Maybe he, like McCain, needs to learn how to use "the google".
Penecostals are a very, very small percentage of practicing Christians* and are regarded as by the much more numerous Baptists and Methodists in my little corner of the South as a little too charismatic. They do, however, make better copy for NY Times reporters.
Note in the same chart that Obama's denomination has an even smaller percentage.
*3.3%, if my math is right.
July 20, 2008 4:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
I really do still like the overall political marketing potential of a moderate version of the separation of church and state thingie, and I think a lot of fellow Americans cynical about politics right and left might agree with me on that front.
Without a doubt.
July 20, 2008 10:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
from
Americans Move to the Middle
by Charles M. Blow, New York Times guest op-ed, July 26, 2008
July 26, 2008 2:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
I posted that last comment for my own reference
But I should add a comment in case anyone who commented ends up coming back to this thread because I did that...I read all the comments and appreciated them, just thought it best after making people aware of the article that I let any discussion proceed without my further input.
Personally, my reaction was to handing over the planning for the convention to F.I.A. was that I just don't think it's a great marketing choice at this time. I have nothing against the DNC having an outreach to religious communities, just the opposite, I think it's a great idea, along the lines of showing respect, as argued by bslev and others on this thread.
I was just thinking that giving the convention planning over to the director of F.I.A. is fiddling scarily with brand identification of the Democratic party, at precisely the time that many more Americans are getting sick of injection of religion into politics. If its done wrong, it will be seen as insincere and "icky" by many, including religious folks. I hope those like Quinn who think she might do it "right," are putting a lot of confidence where I don't have much. The DNC hasn't shown much marketing savvy in the past, and the way Dean hired her, as described in the article, doesn't make me confident that anyone thought this out. The description of her in the article doesn't give me a lot of confidence that she has a bead on the American public at large, but that she only best understands her religious demographic. She seems like a bad choice to plan the convention. I was thinking that the convention may end up being a turnoff for lots of people, even the butt of comedian's jokes in the future. I hope I am wrong and that she doesn't overdo the religion thing at precisely the wrong time.
The party does need more inclusion of the politically active religious, but I really don't think that should come off as one of its main brand identifications at this point in time. If the convention does that, it will be a mistake.
Patriotism of some kind, now that's a whole nother thing...there's where I think people are hungry for a redefined brand away from what the GOP defined it as. I think people are finally ready to join in being proud of the idea of the U.S. being a multi-culti rainbow, rather than ridculing that concept. And no, I don't think that conflicts with the anti-illegal-immigrant situation, because I think the vast majority of people angry about that are angry about 1) illegal, and 2) that the illegals mostly come from one culture which to them, threatens to dominate.
July 26, 2008 2:29 PM | Reply | Permalink