How would Jesus vote?
Tennessee Democrat Harold Ford Jr. goes after the GOP's faithful base in the state with the most white evangelicals in the nation. Polls show his campaign is resonating in the pews.
By Michael Scherer
Read more: Politics, evangelicals, News, Tennessee, Michael Scherer, 2006 Elections
Photo: AP/Mark Gilliland
Rep. Harold Ford Jr.
Oct. 26, 2006 | KNOXVILLE, Tenn. -- Pastor Chris Stephens runs his church services like a rock show. Colored strobes dance across the stage, electric guitar solos punctuate the hymns, and his sermons are filled with exhortations like, "We need a God explosion." The roughly 2,000 worshipers who belong to Faith Promise Church know to expect a blunt-talking believer when they come to Sunday services, a man unafraid to take a stand for Jesus.
So it was no surprise two years ago when Stephens devoted a sermon before the presidential election to a discussion of God's hopes for the ballot box. "If you are a Democrat or a Republican before you are a Christ-ocrat, you are an idol worshiper," he told his congregation. As he explained it, God cared most about just a few core issues in 2004: ending abortion, opposing gay marriage, appointing conservative judges and ensuring the freedom to pray in the public square. Christian voters, he told his congregation, ignore these issues at their own peril. "If you reject Christ, if you have never been born again, you are not going to heaven," he said at the end of the sermon.
Pastor Stephens' message did not endorse any candidate or party, but it clearly pushed a platform more closely associated with Republicans than with Democrats. And versions of that message were repeated at born-again churches across the Bible Belt state of Tennessee, along with Sunday morning voter registration pleas. The effect was spectacular. Among the 51 percent of registered voters who identified as white evangelical Christians in exit polls, the highest percentage of any state in the nation, President Bush won by a margin of 3-to-1, allowing him to carry Tennessee by 14 points.
But visit Stephens this year, and he will freely admit that many of Tennessee's evangelical voters are more ambivalent about voting for Republicans in this election. The biggest reason, he believes, is the deteriorating situation in Iraq. "So many people are angry at the president," he said last Sunday, after inviting this reporter into his office after services. Polls nationwide have shown that evangelical support for Republicans is slipping. But in Tennessee a second big reason is the public message of Rep. Harold Ford Jr., the Democratic candidate for Senate, who hopes to become the first black senator from the South since Reconstruction by appealing to religious voters. "The church advertising has been brilliant," Stephens said. "He presents himself very well."
Stephens was referring to a 30-second television spot that shows Ford strolling through the pews of his childhood church. "Here, I learned the difference between right and wrong," Ford tells the camera, explaining that he is glad his family forced him to worship as a child. "If advertising didn't work, Madison Avenue wouldn't be spending billions of dollars," Stephens said of the ad. "And those folks sitting there listening to Harold Ford sit in the pew and talk about his grandmother taking him to church and all that, I think it can be effective for him."
The church spot is just one part of a campaign by Ford to make his faith a central issue in the campaign, breaking with recent Democratic tradition in the hopes of helping to tip the balance of power in the Senate. On the campaign trail, Ford portrays himself as a moderate, saying he opposes the politics of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, endorses the House Republican immigration plan, and supports a state ban on gay marriage. To prove his point, Ford's get-out-the-vote rallies often double as prayer meetings. During a recent debate with his Republican opponent, former Chattanooga Mayor Bob Corker, Ford repeatedly asked state residents to give him their prayers along with their votes. On his Web site, under the banner "My Faith Is My Guide," Ford writes that he is running for Senate "to put my faith and beliefs into action."
There are signs that Ford's decision to wear his religion on his sleeve is having an effect. At the end of September, a statewide poll showed that just 47 percent of white evangelicals supported Bob Corker, Ford's Republican opponent, while 28 percent supported Ford and 25 percent were undecided. The poll results broke a long-standing maxim of state politics: Churchgoing whites reflexively side with the Republicans by overwhelming margins. "In the Senate race that pattern is completely gone," said Ken Blake, who oversaw the poll for Middle Tennessee State University. According to Blake, Ford's use of faith has "muddied the waters" for white evangelicals. "It makes them not quite so sure that he is the bad guy and Corker is the good guy." Among all of the state's likely voters, numerous recent polls show that the race remains a statistical dead heat.
Outside the University of Tennessee football game on Saturday, Ford had no problem explaining the inroads he appears to be making among evangelical voters compared to 2004, when he worked on the campaign of Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, who lost the state by double digits. "Kerry and I are very different people," Ford said, as he hurried toward the gates of Neyland Stadium, having arrived at the game against the University of Alabama deep into the second quarter. "I serve a big God, he gives me strength every day, and I go to work. I am not that smart. I don't try to outsmart him. I just go to work every day."
Just hours earlier, Ford's opponent, Corker, had taken direct aim at those bona fides as he worked the crowd of thousands who had gathered in orange T-shirts and parkas to tailgate the game. In the mountainous eastern end of Tennessee, football games at Neyland Stadium have an importance that rivals Sunday church, and come with just as many unique rituals. Grown men dressed in incandescent orange will wait for hours in the hopes of bumping chests with University of Tennessee players as they make their way into the stadium, which has enough seats for 104,000 spectators, or about 60 percent of Knoxville's population. For statewide political candidates, it is not an occasion that can be missed. Both Corker and Ford camps came equipped with signs and stickers. Ford's supporters gave out free chili. Corker's offered bottles of water and candy.