No Faith in Themselves

On the evening of April 24, "Justice Sunday," tens of thousands of politically conservative churchgoers came together via satellite hook-up to express their support for President Bush's judicial nominees. At the same time, a smaller but still substantial number of people in Washington came down with a dreadful case of the willies.

Most of these jumpy people, it turns out, are liberals - or "progressives," as they prefer to be called nowadays. They seem to live in a state of constant worry over the political activities of conservative churchgoers, though the term that progressives want us to use is "the Religious Right," preferably capitalized, like Fifth Column.

This clockwork sequence of events - religious conservatives make noise, liberals grow alarmed, which inspires religious conservatives to make more noise, further alarming liberals - has become tiresome for those of us who like a little originality in our political dramas. And at last, someone is trying to do something to change the stale dynamic. And best of all, he's a liberal. A progressive, I mean.

Faith and Policy

John Podesta served President Clinton as White House chief of staff during the Clinton impeachment - the sort of post that should silence every human being who's ever dared to complain about his or her job. Now he's president of the Center for American Progress, a research and advocacy group where the pace is a little more stately.

One of the center's signature programs is its Faith and Progressive Policy initiative, which hopes to inspire religious progressives to organize in the way the Moral Majority and the Family Research Council have organized their opposite numbers on the right. Rather than simply becoming alarmed by religious conservatives, Podesta suggests liberals match them at their own game.

"We got involved in this because we got mad," Podesta says. "It seemed to a lot of us, reading and listening to the media, that there was a general assumption out there that to be religious was to be conservative. That's a huge misconception."

Untapped Reservoir

Many progressives, he says, are drawn to politics by their religious convictions. "I'm a Catholic, and I attend Mass every Sunday" he says, "and I think those beliefs are what's made me a progressive." Podesta hopes to do more than correct a misconception, of course. There's a political calculation at work, too. He believes a large undiscovered reservoir of church-going progressives - the religious left, you might call it - is just waiting to be tapped by the Democratic Party.

He cites a poll conducted after last November's election by Zogby International and sponsored by his center. It showed a "silent majority" (54% of the electorate) of religious moderates, progressives, and "non-traditional religious voters" who are either indifferent or hostile to the social positions that motivate religious conservatives to vote Republican.

Same Picture, New Frame

How to tap into that newly discovered majority? "It's a matter of framing issues," Podesta says. He points to the center's recent proposal for universal health care.

"We can argue it on purely practical grounds of how the proposal will effect long-term GDP," he says. "But we also need to argue it in a profoundly moral context - its effect on people's hearts. When 43 million Americans go without health insurance in this country, our faith is offended."

For that matter, he says, the entire liberal agenda, from Third World debt relief to an increase in the minimum wage to establishing mechanisms for "peaceful conflict resolution" in U.S. foreign policy, can be argued in religious, rather than political, terms. Though he'd never put it this way, Podesta's faith initiative is part of a larger Democratic strategy. It's a strategy of emulation - defeating Republicans by aping them.

Many Democrats have been awed by the success of the conservative movement within the Republican Party. So over the last two years, Democratic activists have created a series of mirror-image institutions and initiatives - their own talk radio network, quasi-academic think tanks (Podesta's center is the most prominent), media watchdog groups, ideologically motivated lobbying firms. It worked for conservatives, why not liberals?

Delusion

Podesta's faith initiative shows the delusion at the heart of this mimicry. There's no doubting that religious conservatives have been one of the great engines of Republican electoral success. Yet this part of the conservative movement has been what a progressive might call "organic," a spontaneous coming together of like-minded people in the face of intolerable offenses (so conservatives believed) from the larger secular culture.

The religious right, in other words, is a bottom-up movement, bound together by a sense of grievance. Podesta's initiative, on the other hand, looks like an attempt to gin up an artificial movement that otherwise shows no independent signs of viability.

Podesta is aware of the criticism and says he's not imposing a "top-down" movement from Washington. "It's religious leaders at the congregational level that are going to make this happen," he says. "We can enable them, we can assist them, we can be a catalyst."

This assumes, of course, that such a catalyst is necessary. The electorate contains many progressives with religious convictions, as Podesta's own poll demonstrates. It's also true, however, that they are politically engaged. And they're Democrats.

Podesta hopes to rescue the Democratic Party by giving it something it already has.

Mr. Ferguson is a columnist for Bloomberg News.