MORE ON RELIGIOUS VOTERS. Amy Sullivan and Addie Stan know more about the religion issue than I do, so I�d like to get their opinions on the risks of going for the evangelical vote -- it strikes me that even the smartest, most heartfelt attempts to lure evangelicals away from the GOP to the Democrats are not without risks. First, it will be hard and rather costly to try to break them away. In 2000, Southern Baptists voted 88 percent against the Southern Baptist candidate, Al Gore. That doesn't strike me as attributable to Gore�s lack of religious identity or facility in talking about his faith. Too many religious conservatives have simply made firm partisan commitments, and any counter-arguments or cross-talk from Democrats and liberals will only alter this at the margins. Sure, stock market fortunes and elections are often won at the margins. But will the cost of trying to make slight gains among evangelicals be worth the losses?
The problem with outreach to any group of unlikely-to-vote-for-you voters is that a party or candidate always risks a loss of authenticity. This is just as true when John Kerry buys a goose hunting license as it is when Democrats kneel uncomfortably in pews: Whatever added votes are squeezed out of such moments are outweighed by the many more votes lost by looking inconsistent, pandering, wishy-washy, and duplicitous to the broader electorate. For this very reason, you don�t see Bush wearing a half-turned red Yankees cap trying to appeal to the P-Diddy vote.
Third, because the South is home to the most and most fervent evangelicals, it would take major gains there to make statewide and many local elections competitive. On the other hand, I do think some of Sullivan�s arguments could make a difference among the more heterogeneous, less strident, more church/state-separation-oriented evangelicals who cast key votes in America�s most purple region, the Midwest.
Finally, in all the national media coverage of religion and politics, we rarely if ever hear that the country is secularizing -- repeat, secularizing. In 1990, the American Religious Survey showed that only 8 percent of Americans were self-identified atheists/agnostics/non-denominationals; by 2001, that number jumped to 14 percent and, by that rate of growth, is probably approaching 16 percent today. That�s a doubling of the share of seculars in just 15 years. And, because younger Americans are more secular than their parents and grandparents -- Gen Y has the same share of seculars as Catholics! -- this trend promises to continue. Does it make sense for the Democratic Party want to become evangelized as America secularizes?
--Tom Schaller
