Slate's Amy Sullivan laments the rapid drop-off in the polls of those who believe that the Democratic party is "friendly" toward religion:
[I]t is startling that in the two years since this Democratic revival began, the party's faith-friendly image has dimmed rather than improved. The Pew Research Center's annual poll on religion and politics, released last week, shows that while 85 percent of voters say religion is important to them, only 26 percent of Americans think the Democratic Party is "friendly" to religion. That's down from 40 percent in the summer of 2004 and 42 percent the year before that-in other words, a 16-point plunge over three years. The decline is especially troubling because it cuts across the political and religious spectra, encompassing liberals and conservatives, white and black evangelicals, mainline Protestants, Catholics, and Jews.
Ms Sullivan, however, mistakenly attributes this decline to Republican mischief:
In the past year, stunts by the right have taken a toll on the Democrats. There are the repeated Justice Sunday events, in which Republican congressional leaders bravely defend America from the onslaught of liberal activist judges, and the War on Christmas hysteria, in which Bill O'Reilly defends baby Jesus from secular tyrants at Target. If you say anything enough times on Fox (see: Saddam Hussein, role in 9/11 attacks), you can get some people to believe it. It's not a surprise that all of this affects conservatives' views of the Democratic Party's faith-friendliness. Of more concern to Democrats is the effect such tactics have on moderate voters. The percentage of self-identified political moderates and independents who believe Democrats are friendly to religion each dropped by 18 points over the past two years, according to Pew. These respondents may not exactly believe the rhetoric of Justice Sunday, but it seems to have planted a seed of doubt in their minds.
As long as Democrats continue to believe that their problems with Christian voters stem from Republican propaganda they'll never recover the confidence of those religious moderates whose estrangement Ms Sullivan bemoans. The reason for the disaffection among religious voters is simple and can be discerned by pondering the following six questions:
- Which party most strongly supports abortion on demand?
- Which party most strongly supports gay marriage?
- Which party most strongly supports the secularization of our culture?
- Which party's policies are most congenial to our cultural "slide into the sewer"?
- Which party is most strongly opposed to school choice?
- To which party do most militant atheists and agnostics belong?
In the answers to those questions lies the root of the Democrats' problem with religious voters.
By the way, Sullivan has a funny line in her essay where she drily observes that "random-seeming insertions of Bible verses into floor speeches came off as Tourette's syndrome for Democrats." Good one.