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Monday, Jul 6, 2009
Will the political mission to fashion an evangelical glow around Barack Obama lead to the White House?
By Sarah Posner
Read more: Religion, Abortion, Politics, Religious Right, News, Barack Obama, 2008 election
Reuters/Rick Wilking
Sen. Barack Obama waits to speak in Aberdeen, S.D., May 31, 2008.
Aug. 15, 2008 | James Dobson, who sits atop the fortress of "family values" at Focus on the Family, took time out of his daily radio show in June -- 18 minutes to be exact -- to lambaste a 2-year-old speech by Barack Obama about how his Christianity had shaped his political views. Obama, Dobson fulminated, was "deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own worldview, his own confused theology," while appealing to the "lowest common denominator of morality" by supporting abortion rights.
After Dobson's comments made headlines -- only because his media operation leaked the text of the radio show to the Associated Press the day before it aired -- an advertisement defending Obama appeared on Colorado Christian radio stations. "With all these stones being cast at Sen. Obama, it can be hard to know what to believe," a woman's voice gently intoned while a piano tinkled in the background. "But in Luke, Jesus taught us that we must listen to what a man says, because out of the overflow of his heart, his mouth speaks." The ad then played a clip from the speech that so riled Dobson, in which Obama laid out how his salvation at Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ informed his politics.
Speaking on behalf of Obama's heart was the Matthew 25 Network, a new political action committee launched by Democratic operative Mara Vanderslice, who served as John Kerry's religious outreach coordinator. The PAC, not affiliated with the Obama campaign, is named for the 25th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, in which Jesus is said to have told his followers to feed the hungry and clothe the naked: "Whatever you did for one of the least of these, my brethren, you did for me."
Matthew 25 aspires to advance "a better Christian witness in politics" and challenge the dominance of conservative evangelicalism in swing states like Colorado, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia, and perhaps even the Bible Belt strongholds of North Carolina and Georgia. Deploying a rapid response on Christian radio to vouch for Obama's faith, to defend him with what Vanderslice calls "an authentic Christian voice," will be the PAC's principal focus. "We're going to have our hands full with smears," she says, and combating them on English- and Spanish-language Christian radio "will be our niche." More recently, Matthew 25 condemned a John McCain campaign ad that appeared to suggest that Obama was the antichrist.
Matthew 25 has emerged out of the belief among evangelical Democrats that the Democratic Party needs to get religion to win. In 2005, led by Pentecostal minister Leah Daughtry, then chief of staff to the Democratic National Committee, the party initiated a "Faith in Action" agenda, intended to reach out to religious voters concerned about poverty, the environment and healthcare. Daughtry is now chairwoman of the Democratic National Convention, and for the first time, the convention, beginning Aug. 26 in Denver, will open with an interfaith gathering and include a People of Faith Caucus, which will meet throughout the week to hear faith leaders discuss how to mobilize voters.
The Obama campaign is engaged in its own religious outreach, with the candidate meeting with 30 high-profile religious leaders in early June, proposing his own version of Bush's faith-based initiative, and employing a religious outreach team. The campaign sends out a weekly "American Values Report" highlighting statements by Obama, profiles of religious supporters and blog responses to a weekly "values question," such as, "How do you gauge a candidate's character?" Soon the campaign will launch an initiative aimed at reaching out to younger evangelicals through house parties and other events. And on Saturday, Obama will appear with John McCain at a forum held by the Rev. Rick Warren at his megachurch, Saddleback, in California.
Fashioning a halo around Obama may be a wise political move, but not all religious activists, not to mention their secular allies, are sold on it. They see the strategy as pandering and question whether the candidate should be compelled to prove his religious credibility at all. Daniel Schultz, a United Church of Christ minister, the proprietor of the Daily Kos spinoff Street Prophets and an Obama supporter, recently fired off a post, "Matthew 25 Goes Full-On Obama's Jesus Juice," asking, "Do we really need a presidential campaign based on out-Jesusing the other side?"
Vanderslice, Matthew 25's driving force, has been at the center of the Democratic Party's stepped-up religious rhetoric since the 2004 election. She says her advice that Kerry talk about his faith and reach out to religious audiences was ignored, causing him to relinquish a significant voting bloc to Bush. (A senior Kerry campaign staffer disputes her account, calling it "rewritten history." The staffer says that Kerry, a religious person, did talk about his faith and meet with religious leaders, particularly Catholic leaders, during his presidential campaign.)
While Vanderslice claims to have been thwarted in the Kerry campaign, she believes she will be more effective in her support of Obama, who thrilled her with the words, "We worship an awesome God in the blue states," in his speech at the 2004 Democratic convention. She has rallied support for Matthew 25 from a host of influential religious figures and politicians. They include Vicki Kennedy, the Catholic wife of the iconic senator from Massachusetts; Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., the House majority whip; centrist and evangelical Sen. Mark Pryor, D-Ark.; and Brian McLaren, leader in the "emerging" church movement, whose books have influenced Obama's director of religious affairs, Joshua DuBois.
Vanderslice is no doubt aware of polls that show that more than half of white evangelicals -- Christians who claim to have had a "born again" experience and a personal relationship with Jesus Christ as their savior -- are soundly conservative, and probably out of reach for Obama. So with a $500,000 budget, she has set Matthew 25's sights on the roughly 30 percent of evangelicals who are centrist or moderate. She believes Matthew 25 can win them over by stressing Obama's stance on ending the war in Iraq and helping the poor and vulnerable, at home and abroad. Those are the kinds of Christian values that appeal to moderates, she attests, rather than the religious right's fixation with opposing gay rights and abortion.
