Joshuah Bearman: ZZ Packer On America And Religion

Nov 14, 2004

ZZ Packer On America And Religion

ZZ Packer, esteemed short story writer, political junkie, and conversational powerhouse, penned an essay on everyone's favorite post-election topic, the evangelical vote and submitted it in the comments section of an earlier post on this site. The comment was many times longer than the post, and surely more informed. Of all the political writers I encountered on the campaign trail, ZZ was the self-proclaimed "official novice" — and yet was the only one who managed to sit down with Kerry one on one for half an hour. Here is her essay on the main page, where it deserves to be.

How to Solve Our “Religious Problem”

If we continue to believe that red-staters are all stupid hicks, we might as well go ahead and join The Bell Curve Club. Many red-staters voted the way they did not because they were stupid, but because they lacked skepticism and feared change. Most social conservatives’ discomfort with gay marriage and a pro-choice platform does not de facto equal homophobia and anti-choice; it is just that — discomfort. Republicans exploit that discomfort and fear of change the same way they exploit Americans fears of terrorism, and unless liberals learn how to accommodate those in need of acculturating themselves to the irrationality of their fears, these red-staters will remain vulnerable to the right who are more than willing validate such fears.

Sadly, the people in the best position to help the Democrats win back the South and the Midwest are those most often ignored by their party — religious Democrats. My fellow blue-staters may not understand evangelicals, but I do; I was raised as one. My church’s brand of evangelicalism was so strict women couldn’t wear pants, makeup, or jewelry. My church believed in speaking in tongues; believed that a good Christian went to Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting, Thursday Night Bible Study, in addition to Sunday school, Sunday worship, Sunday dinner at the church, and the two hour Sunday fellowship which followed.

Granted, I grew up in the black evangelical tradition, which differs with white evangelists in only in one respect: black evangelicals vote Democrat because of civil rights legislation, whereas white evangelicals in the South were often segregationists. For that reason, the Democrats will never win over the white evangelicals, nor should they want to. But they should be trying to win over religious moderates, white, black and Latino.

But now many black religious voters are being wooed by faith-based initiative money from the Republicans, and many of those black evangelicals accounted for Bush increasing his support among blacks from 9 percent to 16 percent. Bush also won 44 percent of the Latino vote because the GOP successfully convinced many of these Catholic (and increasingly evangelical) Latinos that the Democrats are the party of abortion and lax “family values.”

Once the GOP captures single-issue voters like Blacks, Latinos and unions, the Dems will have lost a good portion of their current base. As James Carville recently noted, the party's concern about interest groups has resulted in “litanies, not a narrative." Carville highlights a problem the Dems in the upper echelon of the party should have seen coming; the party’s surfeit of groups who are now tied to the Democrats by certain single issues that trump all others; civil rights, immigration and the minimum wage, and unions. It is, ironically, the triumph of liberalism which makes these single thread issues recede into the background as gains continue to be secured on those fronts, leaving that dangling single thread vulnerable to being snipped by the sharp divisive scissors of “values.” Working-class white voters went to Reagan because of tax cuts, the infamous “trickle down theory” and strong national defense, and the Dems have never really gotten them back. The way to win back these working class whites (and hang onto the black, Latino, and union single-threaders) is to reinforce our principles through religious Democrats whose fluency in speaking the language of these voters extends beyond religion.

Democrats of faith don’t have to “cloak” any message in religious metaphors the way the right is fond of doing. These religious Democrats see that many Democratic stances are, in essence, the same tenets of the world’s great religions—a promotion of peace and brotherhood over needless war and intolerance; an understanding of our obligation to help poor children and their parents as opposed to the Christian right’s philosophy of merely protecting the right for poor parents to have children, then abandoning those children once out of the womb. The Christians among them understand that “the Good Samaritan” was not only a parable behooving us to help our fellow man, but a caution against xenophobia. The Christians in our party understand that when Jesus implored, “he who is without sin, cast the first stone” this was not only a lesson about the perils of self-righteousness, but Jesus’ adamant refusal to play into the invidious sexual politics of the day (at no point does Jesus tell the prostitute who was about to be stoned to cease her slutty ways, if I recall my Bible correctly).

The more progressive religious-minded folk understand that stating that the Democrats are “for abortion” is like saying every gun owner is “for homicide,” and we all know that’s just not the case. The progressive and moderately religious are, by and large, for real solutions, and rather than foolhardily trying to legislate all sexual behavior, they advocate sex education, birth control and the morning-after pill to reduce unwanted pregnancies. These people know how to talk to the red states and swing states because, more often than not, they live in them. But if we continue shipping in the Prada and Birkenstock crowd to talk about abortion, gay marriage and Iraq to the small-town Main Streeters on their way to Home Depot, we’re toast.

While people like me check into Salon, Slate, Daily Kos and Atrios, few of these sites are going to convince anyone beyond the liberal choir, whereas a site like sojo.org, might. Sojourners magazine bills itself as dedicated to faith, politics and culture, and its online edition, sojo.org, is likelier to make inroads with the red staters with its admonitory “Confessing Christ in a World of Violence,” part of which states:

Where is the serious debate about what it means to confess Christ in a world of violence? Does Christian "realism" mean resigning ourselves to an endless future of "pre-emptive wars"? Does it mean turning a blind eye to torture and massive civilian casualties? Does it mean acting out of fear and resentment rather than intelligence and restraint?

Though the site has been declaring throughout the election cycle that “God is not a Republican…or a Democrat,” sojo.org is peppered with quotes by people like Angelina Grimke, an abolitionist and feminist who once declared, "I have not placed reading before praying because I regard it more important, but because, in order to pray aright, we must understand what we are praying for." Such lines make even the most secular liberal go warm and fuzzy inside, and remind us that even if some regard religion as the opiate of the masses, we must make distinctions between the peaceful potheads among us and the crackhead addicts of the Christian Coalition.

I am not advocating for a conflation of church and state — I don’t believe in it. What I’m arguing is that progressive believers and secularists alike have always based their political and social decisions on a deep sense of what is morally sound and just. This is why my religious mother votes Democrat. Her view not only supports the separation of church and state in the abstract, but in practice. In contrast, religious fanatics like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell clamor for theocracies, ironically enough, because they are so insecure in their faith that their deepest fear is that the church’s dictates are not potent enough, and can only become so by extending the church’s reach into the state. That anxiety compels them to try to legislate intolerance and strip away people’s rights in the name of God—because without invoking anyone short of “The Deity Himself,” they’d categorically be dismissed as nut jobs even by their own believers. Our country’s history has shown us that religious progressives act as much better bulwarks against these religious fanatics than secularists, and that’s one of the many reasons why the Democratic party should enlist the aid of their own ecumenicals if it seeks to maintain a healthy separation of church and state.

Religion is the new populism and populism is the new religion. But we’ve lost our populist message and no longer appeal to the interests of ordinary Americans. True, we believe in the interests of ordinary Americans, but we don’t appeal to them. Currently, the improvisational nature of the party precludes any overarching vision for a candidate to plug into, leaving them to cobble together one on their own every four years, or count on the weakness of their opponents. Even if we count on our more religious members to get out our moral message, we can’t use them in the same reactionary way we’ve done in the past against the GOP, or we’ll always be four years behind, and vulnerable to GOP marketing jujitsu. The moral message has to be part and parcel of our total vision. Even without such a message, we’ll remain susceptible to the attack of being for “big government,” which, when explained in simplistic GOP terminology, doesn’t sound good to the common man who wants immediate money in his pocket after tax day. We have to be able to explain, in lucid terms, why a Democrat making six-figures decides that a tax cut is a bad idea. Or how a religious Democrat comes to conclude that church in the government eventually means government in the church.

The Democrats biggest foe isn’t conservatives, or the religious right, but our own high level operatives who assume human rationality will win the day over human nature. Black Democratic leaders have always galvanized support by appealing to their largely religious base, and they recognize that you can’t use a rational message to convert the masses without first appealing to the gut and heart. White operatives in the party never have a problem with winning black constituencies this way come election time, and yet, when it comes to the rest of the electorate, somehow different rules apply. Segregation at its liberal best. Everyone patted Barack Obama on the back for delivering a great speech at the DNC, but no one congratulated him for doing the near impossible; crystallizing the message of a party that seems hell-bent on involution.

If Kerry had won, we would have reveled in our victory in much the same way that we stewed in our ultimate defeat in 2000, and we wouldn’t have viewed this period as one of reflection and reorganization. We learned a few lessons from the 2000 election, but we concentrated on the battles, not the war; tactics, not strategy. We grew our grassroots, but so did the GOP. Their success was in fertilizing and feeding the local grass, instead relying on transplants. We grew our grassroots, but so did the GOP, and their grassroots were given the attentions and care of Ortho-man landscaper himself, Karl Rove.

Yes, we were out there, we got people registered, we canvassed the swing states and we canvassed some more. The foot soldiers did a great job. Hell, Kerry did a good (not great) job. But, at long last, we left religious Democrats like my mother in a bind — she saw how the Democrats were losing the battle to the religious right, but felt she had no support in combating their rhetoric; the grassroots Republicans are equipped with talking points from the GOP, but all she had was a do-it-yourself message. The GOP had its church arm put out 12,000 copies of “Inner Strength” a hagiographic documentary about Bush and his religious faith, with distribution centered in Ohio and Pennsylvania. You might counter that we had Fahrenheit 9/11, but that’s not the sort of movie my mother is going to take her Sunday School class to see, whereas I bet plenty of Sunday school classes in Ohio were corralled into church basements to watch “Inner Strength.”

Despite my mother’s personal beliefs about abortion or gay marriage, she remains a Democrat, and, being newly retired, she did as much for the cause as she could. Yet, she was frustrated at every turn by the lack of support and infrastructure for religious lefties to engage in community outreach, which in turn saves both religion and politics from fanaticism.

My husband, an avid fisherman who occasionally hunts, suffers from a similar dilemma. When he goes fishing, he’s often the only Democrat on the boat, and he tries to appeal to his fellow fisherman by telling them that the Democrats are actually better for the health of the oceans, but many of them are already convinced that Sierra Club and PETA want to restrict a sportsman’s ability to harvest fish or hunt. By the time he gets on a boat, his fellow fishermen already fear the Sierra Club more than Exxon because the GOP has effectively driven a wedge between the environmentalists and the conservationists, with the Dems doing little to stop them. People like my mother and my husband are in regular contact with the voters we need, and yet they feel like outsiders in their own party. They are the ones who get laughed at when Kerry goes on a last-minute goose hunting expedition or attends four church services in one day.

If all of this sounds like it will call into question how wide and inclusive to make our already wide and inclusive party, it does. If all of this sounds as though it will obfuscate our vision, it won’t. The last time the Democratic party had a clear vision was LBJ’s War on Poverty, which appealed to the Good Samaritan principle and trounced Goldwater while doing so. But the Republicans learned from Goldwater, developing a powerful strategic machine and they co-opted our strategy of having a vision as the engine that keeps everything in motion. We haven’t had a sellable vision or a winnable strategy since LBJ. The Clinton campaign saw this, and had to script one on its own. Our 2004 “vision,” despite all the campaign slogans to the contrary, was Anything But Bush. And our strategy wasn’t, “It’s the economy, stupid” or even, “It’s Iraq, stupid,” but rather, “Isn’t Bush stupid?” That was our “vision.”

What we need is our own political brand of evangelism. The conservatives have a well-wrought message, but no works. We have the substantive works, but no message, and certainly no overarching vision. We are the ones with the easier task before us, but we can’t rely on the elite activists in the party to do the job of conversion; these people simply don’t speak the language. Religious Democrats do. But we shouldn’t use them in a Democrat-Republican game of keeping up with the Joneses; we should embrace them for a much better reason — they, ironically enough, are the only ones in the Democratic party who won’t simply preach to the choir. But they need a vision to preach, and they need support from the party they believe in, despite mounting evidence that their party doesn’t believe in them. We can’t leave them out there, alone and alienated in the red states we’re now so fond of bashing, or else we’ll lose them as well.

When my mother talks of winning over the hearts and minds of others, she always refers to the “fish and loaves” approach — alluding to how Jesus fed the masses fish and bread before delivering his sermon. For the rest of us secular folks, I’ll employ another metaphor. Give a dog a bone. Then maybe he’ll join you the next time you go a-huntin.’

Nov 14, 2004 | Permalink

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Joshuah Bearman

Nov 14, 2004

ZZ Packer On America And Religion

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