The Republicans' Secular Gap (with apologies to Bill Scher)

Today was my second day participating in the Los Angeles Times' weekly "Dust Up" feature. [1] Yesterday, I wrote here on the blog [2] about my irritation with the way the question posed for us to answer was inherently patronizing to progressives. Today—writing within a frame equally flattering to conservatives and insulting to liberals, "How can Democrats lure religious voters with the same success as Republicans? Should they even try?"—I brought my annoyance onto the Times web page [1]:

I profoundly agree with you that instinctively calling religious voters "Republican," as the question The Times poses to us today does, is misleading. I'd go further. It's insulting and, by rendering black evangelicals invisible, even racist.

It's also propagandistic -- or, at the very least, lazily acquiescent to Republican propaganda -- because an estimated 80% of Democrats are church-goers (or synagogue-goers, or mosque-goers). Back in 1970, the number was quite a bit higher than that in a place like Tennessee -- which didn't keep the Republican candidate for Senate that year from distributing a flier with the name of his opponent, Al Gore Sr. (a devout Southern Baptist) and a graphic of a crossed-out Bible. His political sin was following the Constitution, which the Supreme Court had ruled forbids organized prayer in school. That's not anti-Christian. That's what the Founding Fathers intended. And yet the slur persists: The same sort of pamphlets circulated in West Virginia from the Bush campaign in 2004. Every time an elite newspaper repeats the question, "How can Democrats lure religious voters with the same success as Republicans?" it's falling for the Republicans' swindle that "religious voters" are all of a piece -- conservative.

I am, it is true, secular myself. But what's more, I'm a devout student of the electorate. I know that the kind of Christians who support conservative policy positions are less relevant to winning elections every year. As Ruy Teixeira and John Judis concluded in their statistical study, "The Emerging Democratic Majority," "Trends among the religious do not favor Republicans over Democrats. If anything, they favor Democrats." Americans who attend church one or more times a week indeed favored George W. Bush in 2000. But the Americans who don't -- a clear majority -- favored Al Gore. The vaunted "Christian right" is, demographically speaking, a stagnant pool: 17% of voters in 1996 and shrinking. The really dynamic voting bloc is made up of those who darken a church's doorstep once a year or less. In 1972, they were 18% of voters; in 1998, 30%. That number's still growing -- in fact, it's one of the fastest growing chunks of the electorate. And predominantly, they don't like Republicans. (What to do about the Republicans' secular gap?)

For what it's worth, I also am a Democrat with a profound respect for the majesty of faith who never misses Bible study -- which is why I know what conservative preachers desperately wish their flocks won't figure out on their own: that Scripture is far more censorious of adultery than it is of homosexuality, and several orders of magnitude more censorious of usury than it is of anything having to do with sexual morality. Regarding usury: In its 1978 Marquette National Bank decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government could not regulate usury. During the years of the ascendancy of supposedly "conservative" Christians in our politics, states began removing their caps on interest rates with abandon, such that some payday loans now charge 2,000% interest.

Republicans, want more Christianity in politics? Start there. You'll have my foursquare support.