Race, Religion, and the DNC
Since losing the 2004 Presidential Election, one meme that swiftly found purchase within some Democratic circles is the “we need religion†meme. The core argument is simple. In order to effectively compete with the GOP, Democrats need to better fuse their policies and programs with the values and morals that make states like Nebraska bleed red. If the Democratic Party does not learn this language and begin to recruit candidates on a local and national level who actually speak this language fluently, the DNC will be consigned to the status of a permanent minority, or so the argument goes. Eleanor Clift, puts it succinctly: “if the Democrats want to win election, they have to figure out a way to fill up the pews.â€
There is nothing particularly new about this critique. The conservative wing of the Democratic Party, the Democratic Leadership Council, has long argued that the Democrats need to do a better job of speaking to rural and suburban whites. Howard Dean touted this argument when he talked about the need to recruit NASCAR dads and the drivers of Confederate flag stickered pickups. There is, of course, a racial component of this argument that cannot be ignored. One of the reasons rural whites haven’t voted for the Democratic Party in the first place is because they believe the Democratic Party has been hijacked by black folks. But the central argument — to get a winning majority the Democratic Party needs to speak more effectively to working class and rural voters — is a fair one.
The question is to what degree do religion and spirituality play in this discussion? As much as people want to point to the power of the evangelical vote, it isn’t clear from exit poll data that Bush’s reelection was as much a sign of evangelical transcendence as some would think. Even Karl Rove admitted that the role of “moral values†played fourth fiddle to a number of other issues — most important being Kerry’s decision to vote for the war and then against it. Yet and still consider this. It was no more than ten years ago that conservative Christians argued they should get out of politics altogether. Now? It is clear that evangelical Christians constitute a significant political force that will not go away anytime soon.
While thinking about this, it dawned on me that the idea that the Democratic Party needs to learn about religion ignores one of their key constituencies — African American voters.
Now I don’t buy the argument that black people are somehow genetically religious. Not only are there a significant number of black men and women who practice a religion other than one of the Big Three (Christianity, Judaism, Islam), there are a number of black people who — believe it or not — don’t even believe in God. Furthermore, I don’t buy the argument that the black church is explicitly political or that it has, in and of itself, been the most progressive force for change within black communities. But, for better or for worse, there is a sense that black people actually work to cultivate a relationship with God more than any other democratic constituency. So when the DNC says that we have got to understand the role of values and spirituality in American life they are saying one of two things. They could be saying that they don’t believe that black people are as religious as they profess to think black people are. I find this hard to believe.
Take a look at this year’s primaries as well as the Presidential election. With a couple of exceptions, whenever a Democratic candidate wanted to speak to black people, they did so in a church from the pulpit. When Dean wanted to show that he understood black people’s pain, where did he do it? When Kerry wanted to show that he hadn’t ignored black voters, where did he do it? Where did Clinton turn when he wanted to shore up support after the Monica Lewinsky scandal? In the church, of course, with digital cameras softly clicking. While it would not be too far off base to accuse Democrats of pandering, I am fairly sure they don’t think black people are faking religion.
On the other hand, they could be saying instead that we don’t need to get black folks’ religion. That religion doesn’t count — we’ve got enough of that. Instead we need the type of religion that drives thousands of men to Promise Keeper events held throughout the country. We need the type of religion that inspires parents to take their kids out of school in favor of Christian home school programs. We need to understand the type of religion that causes people to give you the shirt off their back on the one hand, and say that homosexuals should be damned to hell for their behavior on the other. I can understand this perspective to a degree, but it is bankrupt.
Black people can and should be out front in this effort as well. Because while black people are some of the most liberal in the country politically, socially we can be extremely conservative, and a significant part of this comes from exposure to conservative Christian messages. People were right to worry about black voters leaving Kerry for Bush over gay marriage. So understanding the role of religion in black communities, taking advantage of that wisdom, and using black spokespersons well-versed in this tradition can still provide a degree of ingress into the spiritual world of rural white voters.
Now there is a third option. It could be that the DNC thinks that the religion of black people doesn’t matter to white evangelicals. Furthermore, not only does it not matter, it actually runs counter to the belief of evangelicals. Ron Walters has written a book arguing that the growth of the GOP, particularly over the last ten years, can be attributed to white nationalism. Not the old school KKK type, but a new fangled version that combines implicitly nationalistic rhetoric and imagery with the moral fervor of Old Testament based Christianity. I would imagine that this new fangled version would have a significant amount of cache with the type of people who voted for Bush largely for moral reasons.
Now this last option is the scariest to me, because it would basically take this nationalist movement as a given and instead of countering and neutering it, actually push it along. In so doing, not only would the DNC have to jettison blacks and other non-whites from their coalition, but inevitably they would have to jettison unions and women too. I do not see how this would be workable, and even if it was workable, I do not see how this would be desirable.
So the DNC obviously has a few choices to make. If they indeed determine that they need to get religion, they need to think about whether they believe they can only cobble together a majority by pandering to white nationalism explicitly or implicitly. If they believe that, then they don’t need black people…and more importantly black people don’t need them. But if decision makers within the DNC decide to fuse religion and politics in a more progressive manner, it seems to me that there is absolutely no constituency better able to fuse the language of government aid with the language of the New Testament than African Americans. Just as Bill Clinton ran to black churches as soon as he got caught with his pants down, and relied on them heavily to save his second term, the DNC needs to run to them as well. And black people need to be wide-awake when they come a runnin’.
(As an aside, for those who haven’t quite begun to read the papers again, the administration has moved to cut $300 million out of the Pell Grant program. It is expected that approximately 90,000 students from working class homes will lose their grants. Nothing like compassionate conservatism.)
