By Jacques Berlinerblau<\/p>\n
That deafening, churning, leather-on-wood sound you just heard is the sound of the entire Romney campaign \u201cpivoting to the general,\u201d as the pundits like to say.<\/p>\n
In the coming months, Mitt and his Faith and Values team will need to figure out how to draw lucrative religious voting blocs to the Republican side of the ledger. Faith-based politicking is always a complicated affair, and for these reasons I offer a few hopefully helpful suggestions on how the Romney team ought to proceed:<\/p>\n
Bait the secularists (if you must): Secular-bashing is among the easiest, and most intellectually dishonest, forms of Faith and Values politicking out there. Easy, because there is widespread confusion as to what \u201csecularism\u201d means. The dreaded \u201cism\u201d can conveniently stand in for anything a politician loathes: godlessness, gang violence, pornography\u2013it\u2019s all good. Or, bad as the case may be.<\/p>\n
It is intellectually dishonest because it fails to identify the benefits of secular policies or try to understand why after two centuries American democracy settled\u2013temporarily, it increasingly seems\u2013on this particular form of governance.<\/p>\n