Faithful Democrats
From a politically-minded, substance-as-meaningless perspective, John McCain won last night’s forum at Rick Warren’s Saddleback church. He tugged on the heart strings with stories about being a POW in Vietnam while Obama detached and intellectualized and pontificated. And, predictably, the crowd in conservative Orange County, CA, cheered a lot more for McCain’s black-and-white, decisive-sounding answers than for Obama’s gray, reality-matters answers. Obama got points for being willing to engage, and he certainly seemed more conversant on the so-called “compassion issues” (that is, the issues the Bible actually talks about). But in the short term, at least, McCain gets the gold star for posturing more effectively.
From a substance-as-actually-meaningful perspective, the biggest problem, as always, is the media won’t call out McCain’s ridiculously hypocritical claims. Few will point out that McCain’s supposed devotion to the environment belies a complete unwillingness to expend an ounce of political capital on it. Or that despite his moralizing on torture he voted to make it effectively legal. Or that his old-school bromides about honor fly in the face of the fact that he’s currently violating campaign finance law and refuses to distance himself from the most vile attacks on Barack Obama’s character. Or that his grave promise to follow Osama bin Laden “to the gates of Hell” apparently doesn’t include entering Pakistan.
Instead, what we’ll get is Chris Matthews spitting, “How will this play?”
On the broader issue of Obama’s evangelical outreach, something occurred to me regarding an issue raised by Pastor Dan (see here, e.g.) and other religious progressives. The general critique seems to be that Obama is paying a disproportionate amount of attention to white evangelicals; instead, he should be pursuing a variety of Christian groups (Catholics, mainline Protestants, etc.) with greater vigor, especially since white evangelicals remain largely Republican. But this grumbling makes me wonder: where are the mainline candidate forums? Did the National Council of Churches try to put one on but get rejected by the Obama campaign? Is the media refusing to cover extensive efforts by mainliners to insert themselves into the presidential debate? Or — as I suspect — is there just not much in the way of an organized effort by mainline Protestants to demand recognition? (Catholics are a whole different ballgame, so I’ll set that group aside for now.)
The fact is that politicians respond to organized power. That’s just an institutional reality. So until mainline liberal denominations organize and apply effective political pressure as a group, the campaigns will probably focus their efforts elsewhere.
Of course, mainline denominations may not want to play such a big role, being more likely to find it crass to mix politics and religion. Fine. But if that’s the case, there’s not much the campaigns can do about it.
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