Finding Democrats In the Pews

Many recent books have predicted, described, and celebrated the demise of the so-called religious right — that amalgam of conservative religious movements and sects that was never as coherent, well-organized, or threatening as its critics (and enemies) feared. Two of the most prominent recent examples come from self-proclaimed “progressive” evangelicals, Amy Sullivan and Jim Wallis.Ms. Sullivan’s “The Party Faithful” (Scribner, 272 pages, $25) is a rollicking, if highly partisan, look at the terms of engagement applied by the two major political parties in the religious sphere. Interestingly, it provides an especially shrewd and amusing diagnosis of the Democratic Party’s tone deafness when it comes to religious belief and sensibilities (one chapter heading: “Keep Your Rosaries Off My Ovaries”).She is typically succinct on the dilemma facing liberal evangelicals:The problem for any progressive religious movement during the past fifty years has been that its most natural political allies — the New Left and the future leaders of the Democratic Party — largely threw religion overboard in the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s.Her remedies — better organized outreach efforts and a bit more balance and tact on hot buttons such as abortion and same-sex marriage — wind up sounding pretty lame. But she is a careful reporter with a wonderful eye for detail. The Democratic low point for Ms. Sullivan comes in 2004 when someone from John Kerry’s campaign brain trust responds to a speaking invitation by saying “we don’t do white churches.”Mr. Wallis’s offering, “The Great Awakening” (HarperOne, 352 pages, $25.95), is paradoxically less sharply partisan and more mean-spirited in its approach. There is a brief foreword by Jimmy Carter, and that is a pretty good tip-off on what’s to come: The one-term Carter presidency, arguably one of the very worst of the last century, was notable for its sanctimony. Mr. Wallis, whose best-selling “God’s Politics” (2005) covered similar territory earlier, has provided a slapdash meditation on the wretchedness of conservative ideas on domestic and foreign policy and the nobility of his own quest to broaden the evangelical message to embrace pacifism, anti-poverty programs, and — you guessed it — global warming.A lot of “The Great Awakening” is about Jim Wallis, and he is a far less interesting subject than he apparently believes himself to be. Along the way, we learn about his first marriage, his second marriage, his two boys, his Little League duties, his speeches, the lessons he picks up from chance encounters on the road, his temporary loss of faith, and his despair about the methods and madness of all those evangelical leaders who disagree with him. He clearly views himself as a prophet as well as a righteous public scold, delighting in recalling the outraged reaction to a “study guide” on racism he once published:My introductory piece opened by saying, ‘The United States of America was established as a white society, founded upon the genocide of another race and then the enslavement of yet another.’When he repeats this assertion at a conference on racial unity, his preening is unseemly:At the conference, I again received a shocked response to my controversial sentence and to the idea that those who benefit from oppression are responsible for it. But this time the shock was from black pastors and laypeople who had never heard a white person speak this way before.You have to be pretty bitter, and no brain trust, to make that kind of simplistic assessment of a dynamic and, yes, flawed history that also produced original and revolutionary concepts of governance, technology that transformed and continues to transform the world, and levels of material well-being that were previously unimaginable. All this while remaining essentially a religious nation with abnormally high levels of voluntarism and philanthropy.Mr. Wallis is obviously operating on a much higher moral plane than the rest of us, and that may help explain why he is occasionally neglectful of his facts. In a typical slap at the Bush administration, he declares that regardless of antiabortion rhetoric, abortion rates declined under President Clinton and have gone up under President Bush. The Guttmacher Institute reports that there were 8% fewer abortions in 2005 (the latest available data) compared with 2000, and that the abortion rate was at its lowest level since 1974.Both Mr. Wallis and Ms. Sullivan purport to hold traditional views on matters of personal morality such as abortion and same-sex marriage and they seem to recognize that these views are at odds with their more secular fellows on the left. They believe, however, that such issues can be finessed and compromised, and that important “progress” is still possible within a coalition that includes millions of religious voters. In her insightful account, Ms. Sullivan defines progress as Democratic political victories and a rebuilding of the Roosevelt-era Democratic coalition; in “The Great Awakening,” Mr. Wallis seems to have a more radical agenda in mind. But both books appear more interested in political gains than religious transformation, and in that sense the authors resemble the cynical operators they love to caricature on the right.Mr. Willcox, a former editor in chief of Reader’s Digest, lives in Ridgefield, Conn.

Finding Democrats In the Pews

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