The GOP's 'Democrats=Secularists' Campaign Had Some Truth

By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country

Pastordan at Street Prophets says I mischaracterized his position in criticizing him for painting the post-2004 Democratic faith outreach blitz/resurgent religious left as a PR campaign. It's not the recent faith-based activity on the left that constitutes a PR campaign, Pastordan says, but the decades-long effort of the Republican Party and religious right to paint the Democrats as secular fundamentalists: 

The Republican party waged a decades-long branding operation to make "liberal" a dirty word, in part by making it synonymous with "godless heathen" or some such. You can actually see the perception of the Democratic party as being "friendly to religion" dip as Karl Rove's marketing kicked into high gear ahead of the 2004 election. It's come back up since—just less than 40% of the population agrees Dems like faith these days—and yes, that's in part because the RIC made enough noise to change some perceptions.

But the point here is very simple. The GOP branding and reality are not one and the same. Just because every Republican from Dick Nixon to Karl Rove says that the secular elites ran the Democratic party away from the Godfearing Real Americans doesn't make it true. Dems may not have had "an assertive religious left" the whole time, but the party never lost faith, as it were. Yes, it may have become less friendly, and yes, it most certainly did lose its touch on outreach programs of all varieties. But some of that was the result of broader cultural shifts that Democrats struggled to keep up with, and the party was never completely absent religious voices or participants.

Sure, the Democratic Party was never "completely absent religious voices or participants." But that's a pretty weak case for arguing that religious voices continued to be influential on the left after the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, when they did play significant roles.

Now, those voices have become more influential again, as I laid out last week. That shift speaks to more than mere changes in how the left combats the right's campaign to smear liberals as godless heathens. It speaks to real, substantive changes in the Democratic Party that suggest that some of the right's charges about out-of-touch secular elites steering the Democratic ship for a long time weren't entirely groundless.

Take the case of Mara Vanderslice, one of the most important leaders on the rebooted religious left. When Vanderslice was hired to direct Howard Dean's religious outreach for his 2004 presidential campaign, she wasn't taken very seriously by Dean's top advisers. "They said, 'This is a primary, and that's why people like us, because we're secular,' " Vanderslice told me a few years ago, recalling how she was received by Dean's aides. " 'We always get the biggest applause at rallies when we bash the religious right.' "

"I didn't get very far," Vanderslice said.

When Vanderslice was hired to do the same job for John Kerry later in the '04 cycle, she faced similar resistance, though this time, the candidate himself was religious. When Vanderslice would press Kerry's aides to have the candidate, a former altar boy, speak in an overtly Christian setting—at an evangelical or Catholic college, for instance—she'd always get denied.

"Some people [in the campaign] didn't think it was a priority and that we were never going to win those people anyhow," Vanderslice told me. "Then, there were some people who had an actual aversion, who would purposefully take the request out of the pile."

Today, as opposed to being marginalized by her own party, Vanderslice is working for Barack Obama's White House transition team, helping spearhead outreach to religious groups, including setting up meetings between them and Obama's policy advisers. Dozens of representatives from faith-based organizations have already participated in such meetings. If that's not real change in the Democratic Party, from a more secular to a more "faithy" posture—and not just changing fortunes in the dueling PR wars Pastordan writes about—then I don't know what is.

Check out Spiritual Politics's Mark Silk on this debate and on the burgeoning Democratic religious establishment here.

• Read more by Dan Gilgoff.
• Read more about Democratic religious outreach.