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'God gap' challenges Democrats

Shaun Casey had a family-values moment Saturday morning at Lipscomb University.

Casey, the Obama campaign's new senior adviser for religious affairs, was speaking to a group of Church of Christ scholars about faith and public policy when someone asked what the government could do to save the American family.

Nothing, Casey said, because fixing marriages is a job for the church.

"In my church," Casey said, "the biggest threat to marriage isn't external factors. It's the number of middle-aged, heterosexual men who are abandoning their wedding vows."

When it comes to the religion vote, Democrats have been walloped in the last two presidential campaigns. But the Obama campaign, with advisers like Casey, hope to narrow the "God gap" in 2008 by talking about both family values and social justice issues like poverty.

They face a big challenge.

In both elections, two-thirds of churchgoers voted for Bush. In 2004, 78 percent of evangelicals voted for Bush over Kerry. And while Gore, a Baptist, won the Catholic vote, Kerry, a Catholic, did not.

But Casey, an associate professor of Christian ethics at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C, says that Democrats have learned from their mistakes.

"The big thing with evangelicals and Catholics is to show up," said Casey. "That's something Democrats haven't done in the past. You also have to have a story to tell, and Obama has a great one. And you have to be able to connect the dots between faith and the policies that bubble up on the campaign."

McCain faces obstacles

Casey admits that most evangelicals will likely vote Republican. But he believes that a growing number of evangelicals are disappointed with the party and that conservative leaders like James Dobson of Focus on the Family are losing influence.

There's some evidence to suggest Casey is right. In a new survey from the Pew Forum, 50 percent of evangelicals polled said they favored Republicans, while 34 percent said they favor Democrats.

McCain faces problems of his own when it comes to the "God gap." Unlike President Bush and Obama, both of whom are adult converts to Christianity and comfortable talking about faith, McCain has seemed reticent to talk about faith.

"He doesn't have the same affinity with evangelicals that President Bush does," said former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who spoke Thursday at the Lipscomb conference.

Frist said McCain has a strong faith but is reluctant to make a public show of religion. "I think that will change," he said

Unlike President Bush, McCain has been estranged from conservative evangelical activists like Dobson. While running for president in 2000, he referred to the late Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as "agents of intolerance." And James Dobson, who said he would never vote for McCain, has repeatedly blasted the presumptive Republican nominee.

Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, said there is still time for McCain to woo evangelical voters. A study by the Southern Baptist publisher LifeWay Research, taken before the end of the primary season, showed 80 percent of Southern Baptist senior pastors said they would vote for McCain. Only 1 percent said they would vote for Obama.

But the election could swing on McCain's running mate, Land added. "If he picks a pro-life running mate, then evangelicals will vote for him."

Influence will continue

Casey believes evangelicals and other religious voters will be a force in American politics for the foreseeable future, no matter who wins the election. And one issue they will push is for making the fight against global poverty a top priority.

One of the surprises of the Lipscomb conference was that speeches by conservative Republican Frist and by progressive evangelical Jim Wallis, author of God's Politics and The Great Awakening, made nearly identical points.

Both focused on addressing global poverty and AIDS as top priorities for the next president. And both drew on Martin Luther King Jr. for inspiration. Frist ended his speech with a quote from King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail": "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."

Wallis told his audience that while elections are important, ordinary believers can change society in ways that politicians can only dream of. A longtime Washington resident, Wallis often tells visitors that they can identify members of Congress by looking for people holding a wet finger in the air to test which way the wind is blowing.

"You change a nation not by replacing one wet-fingered politician with another wet-fingered politician," he said. "You change a nation by changing the wind."