How the Democrats Got Religion

By Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy

A President has to be a preacher of sorts, instructing, consoling, summoning citizens to sacrifice for some common good. But candidates are competitors, which means they seldom manage to talk about faith in a way that doesn't disturb people, doesn't divide them, doesn't nail campaign posters on the gates of heaven. Republicans have been charged with exploiting religious voters, Democrats with ignoring them: Hillary Clinton's voice gets tight as she recalls the mocking response she received when she first spoke in spiritual terms about the longing that people felt to invest in causes larger than self-interest. "I talked about my faith years ago and was pilloried for it," she says, and it is hard to tell if she is more impatient with the conservatives who presumed they held the patent on piety or with the liberals whose worship of diversity all but excluded the devout.

But maybe, she suggests, candidates have learned something from the holy wars of recent years. "Maybe we're getting back to where people can be who they are," she says. "If faith is an element of who you legitimately, authentically are, great. But don't make it up, don't use it, don't beat people over the head with it."

In this campaign season, if Clinton and Barack Obama and John Edwards are any measure, there will be nothing unusual in Democrats' talking about the God who guides them and the beliefs that sustain them. Clinton has hired Burns Strider, a Congressional staffer (and evangelical Baptist from Mississippi) who is assembling a faith steering group from major denominations and sends out a weekly wrap-up, Faith, Family and Values. Edwards has been organizing conference calls with progressive religious leaders and is about to embark on a 12-city poverty tour. In the past month alone, Obama's campaign has run six faith forums in New Hampshire, where local clergy and laypeople discuss religious engagement in politics. "We talk about ways people of faith have gone wrong in the past, what they have done right and where they see it going in the future," says his faith-outreach adviser, Joshua DuBois. Speeches on everything from the budget to immigration to stem-cell research are carefully marinated in Scripture. "Science is a gift of God to all of us," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi during a debate on increased embryo-research funding, "and science has taken us to a place that is biblical in its power to cure."

The Democrats are so fired up, you could call them the new Moral Majority. This time, however, the emphasis is as much on the majority as on the morality as they try to frame a message in terms of broadly shared values that don't alarm members of minority religions or secular voters. It has become an article of faith among party leaders that it was sheer strategic stupidity to cede the values debate to Republicans for so long; that most people want to reduce abortion but not criminalize it, protect the earth instead of the auto industry, raise up the least among us; and that a lot of voters care as much about the candidates' principles as about their policies. "What we're seeing," says strategist Mike McCurry, "is a Great Awakening in the Democratic Party."

The revival comes at a time when the entire religious-political landscape is changing shape. A new generation of evangelical leaders is rejecting old labels; now an alliance of religious activists that runs from the crunchy left across to the National Association of Evangelicals has called for action to address global warming, citing the biblical imperative of caring for creation. Mainline, evangelical and Roman Catholic organizations have united to push for immigration reform. The possibility that there is common ground to be colonized by those willing to look for it offers a tantalizing prospect of alliances to come, but only if Democrats can overcome concerns within their party. "One-third gets it," says a Democratic values pioneer, talking about the rank and file. "A second third understands that this can help us win. And another third is positively terrified."

EVANGELICALS IN MOTION The Democrats' courtship of religious voters exploits a rare Republican predicament: disillusioned with Bush's stewardship and serial scandals, many religious conservatives see a field in which their preferred candidates can't win, and those who can win include, for now, a politically elastic Mormon; the twice-divorced, pro-choice, gay-friendly former New York City Mayor; and a maverick who called conservative religious leaders "agents of intolerance" the last time he ran. "I think that this emerging change in mind-set, at least within significant segments of the Democratic Party, could pay tremendous dividends if the Republicans are foolish enough to nominate Rudy Giuliani," says Richard Land, the Southern Baptist Convention's political guru. While a Mitt Romney nomination might suppress evangelical turnout, he says, as long as there is a basic difference over abortion, socially conservative voters will pick the pro-life candidate. "But if you take the abortion issue off the table," Land predicts, "then a lot of these other issues get oxygen they aren't getting now, such as the environment and social justice and racial reconciliation, all of which Evangelicals care about."

The best handicapper of the religious vote is political scientist John C. Green, senior fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, who has studied the voting habits of the country's 55 million Evangelicals. The most conservative white Protestants, he says, are all but off-limits to the Democrats. But then there are more than 22 million voters he calls "freestyle Evangelicals," worried about not only their eternal souls but also their kids' schools, their car's fuel efficiency and the crisis in Darfur. In the past, those voters may have leaned Republican in part because the G.O.P. has been far smarter about presenting itself as friendly to people of faith while painting the Democrats as a bunch of sneering, secular coastal elites.

But the Republican lock on Evangelicals may be breaking. The percentage of white Evangelicals who self-identify as Republicans has declined from roughly 50% in 2004 to about 44% this past February, according to Green. Now the number is closer to 40% as more Evangelicals choose to label themselves independents. "There is a loosening of the Republican coalition, particularly among people under 30," Green says, "but it is not yet a movement toward the Democrats. It is a small but real change."

The Democratic Party is rekindling its relationship with Catholics as well. For years, candidates dodged Catholics out of fear that abortion would dominate the discussion. Now Democratic leaders are pursuing alliances with the Roman Catholic Church on issues ranging from immigration to the minimum wage to Iraq. Catholic voters, Democrats realize, are the loosest swing vote in the spiritual cosmos, especially as the church has become more outspoken in its opposition to the war in Iraq.

Add to these twists the fact that the leading Democrats are all married to their original spouses and all fluent in the language of faith -- a shift from the era when Democrats limited their spiritual testimonies to awkward appearances at black churches shortly before Election Day. It was Obama who first signaled a shift when he spoke last year at the Sojourners/Call to Renewal gathering and challenged Democrats to make it a little harder for Republicans to paint them as godless hedonists. "If we scrub language of all religious content, we forfeit the imagery and terminology through which millions of Americans understand both their personal morality and social justice," he declared. "Secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square."

Last month Obama was joined by Edwards and Clinton at the Sojourners' forum on Faith, Values and Poverty, where the progressive evangelical leader Jim Wallis pressed them to show some spiritual skin. Edwards explained how he reconciled evolution, which he accepts, with creationism, which he was taught growing up as a Southern Baptist. "The hand of God today," he said, "is in every step of what happens with me and every human being that exists on this planet." Clinton shared the content of her prayer life with the audience: "You know, sometimes I say, Oh, Lord, why can't you help me lose weight?" she said to sympathetic laughter. "Sometimes, you know, it's praying for discernment, for wisdom, for strength, for courage."

Clinton has been more confiding about her faith in recent months, in part because she is in an unexpected footrace for the churchgoing vote. According to a poll for TIME by Pulsar Research, Obama is viewed as a person of strong religious faith by three times as many Republicans as Clinton is, and he reaps political benefits as a result. His approval ratings in red states match Giuliani's, and while Clinton's unfavorable ratings among conservative Protestants are at 65%, Obama's hover at 27%.

THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEFEAT There was a certain purity to John Kerry's failure in 2004: when it came to religious voters, as the saying goes, he never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

Mara Vanderslice would know, since she was the person nominally in charge of shaping his religious identity. Vanderslice, who just turned 32, is a secret agent of sorts who grew up in a Unitarian Democratic household in Boulder, Colo., where she was raised to believe that Christians tended to be Republicans and vice versa. She went off to Earlham College in Indiana, an earnest Quaker school with a dry campus where students took themselves and their role in the world seriously. A semester abroad in Central America launched her on a spiritual journey, which led to her baptism by full immersion in a Potomac tributary. Helping the least, the lost and the last, however, wasn't exactly the G.O.P. platform at the time. "I never understood," she says, "how the Gospel made people Republicans."

But soon she got a glimpse of the answer.

Vanderslice arrived in Iowa in December 2003 to work on religious outreach for Howard Dean's presidential campaign. The job was something of a contradiction in terms. Dean, who had left his Episcopal church over an argument concerning the placement of a bike path, often argued that campaigns should avoid subjects like "guns, God and gays" and boasted that "my religion doesn't inform my public policy." Vanderslice found herself working with advisers who wondered what she was doing there and a candidate who rarely mentioned religious groups except to attack them. "Those voters were a target," she recalled of Evangelicals, "not a target audience."

The reception warmed only slightly when she graduated to the Kerry campaign. "I got my first insight into how behind the Democrats were," she recalls. Not long after she joined the campaign, a handful of Catholic bishops who denounced Kerry's position on abortion publicly suggested that he should be denied Communion. Vanderslice's recommendations that it would be a good idea to return calls from Christianity Today or accept an invitation to speak at John Carroll University were all shot down. But in the final stretch of the campaign, she was dispatched to Michigan, a state whose Catholic voters had longed to meet a Democrat they could talk to. In her first week alone, 72 people walked in the door and volunteered to help. Soon she had nuns doing phone banks, talking about the religious resonances of Kerry's positions. In the end, of course, Kerry lost the race. But he did 15 percentage points better with weekly churchgoing Catholics in Michigan than he did in other states.

Stunned by the results, Democratic leaders launched polls and focus groups and strategy sessions. At the Democratic headquarters, even Dean, now chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), was getting into the spirit. He had seen the Democrats' share of the evangelical vote drop from 33%, when Bill Clinton ran, to 17% for Kerry. Dean's aides began asking state party chairs, Do you talk to religious press? Do you know any religious leaders, even? Ever think to organize them? The response came back, Well, no, not really. Like the national party, most local Democrats had always done their outreach to various constituencies in silos -- veterans on one set of issues, African Americans on another, women on another and so forth. There was never any common language of faith to appeal to those voters. "We walked away from the single institution most Americans turned to when they try to be better than they are," admits Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club. "It was a huge mistake."

THE SEEDS OF REVIVAL Starting in 2005, the party began to test the holy waters. Party officials reached out to religious-news services; headquarters urged state chairs to make lists of moderate pastors and hold meetings to get acquainted. Pelosi attended the opening of megapastor Joel Osteen's new Houston church. On the Hill, lawmakers were hungry for guidance about winning back the values voter. Wallis, whose book God's Politics had set strategists humming on both sides, helped coach lawmakers on how to approach the budget as a moral document. Pelosi huddled with her advisers and emerged with blueprints for a Faith Working Group in the Democratic caucus. She put South Carolina Congressman James Clyburn, the son of a fundamentalist minister, in charge, along with help from David Price, a 10-term North Carolina Democrat with a Yale Divinity degree and a desire to remaster the Democratic message with a stronger faith-based bass line. It's hard to convince voters you care about their values, he argued, if you're not even comfortable discussing them. "I'm not looking for people to add Bible verses to speeches in an artificial way," he says, pre-empting the charge that a little rhetorical repackaging won't fool anyone. "But it's important to let fellow citizens know where you are coming from."

Price told his colleagues they had suffered for their arrogance and skepticism. Many Democrats had reflexively recoiled, for example, when Bush proposed his faith-based initiatives. "We should have said, 'Welcome to the fray, Mr. President. Where have you been? Because we have been at this a long time. So we want to work with you on that,'" Price says. "Instead Democrats took a dim view of it almost in principle."

One morning in the spring of 2005, the faith working group heard from Vanderslice, who had developed a PowerPoint presentation about her Catholic-outreach program in Michigan. Twenty-five Democratic lawmakers turned up -- and they stayed to the very end. She showed them a chart revealing how much more time and money Karl Rove had invested after 2000 in building links to religious voters and how it paid off in voter response in 2004. She made the case that Democrats didn't have to sell their liberal souls; they just needed to become a plausible alternative and engage in a respectful conversation. Don't label people intolerant just because they disagree with you on some issues. Don't write anyone off. "The basic message," she says, "was that we had not tapped into this huge group of people."

At the same time, small-scale mutinies within evangelical circles provided yet more evidence that some traditional religious allegiances no longer held. The conservative evangelical Alabama state chairman of the Christian Coalition doesn't sound like a natural ally for Democrats, but Randy Brinson is as politically ecumenical as he is religiously devout. A professional gastroenterologist and amateur music buff, he was inspired during the most recent presidential campaign to mirror the Rock the Vote campaign by founding Redeem the Vote, which used Christian radio and music festivals to reach out to and register young people of faith.

Brinson's success made him a hero to social conservatives, but his approach also made him a renegade. More than a third of the young people he registered were Democrats, and that was fine with him. "We weren't tied to the Republican National Committee or have some agenda. We just wanted people to vote." Plus, he says, he was more interested in consensus than in controversy or finding the next wedge issue. "Some of them don't want a solution," he says of conservative activists, "'cause you won't have an issue to raise money over."

Brinson has spent the past few years happily talking to all sides. He met with Dean, and the men talked about moral absolutes and what it means to be a Christian, and prayed together. But not everyone was thrilled that people like Brinson were poking their heads into the big Democratic tent. National Organization for Women president Kim Gandy, a Presbyterian, found herself at a luncheon where she was scheduled to speak after Jim Wallis and before Jesse Jackson. She challenged Wallis' vision of a new army of Christian soldiers head on: "I don't want a progressive evangelical movement any more than I want the conservative one we have right now," she declared. It does not constitute hostility to religion, she suggests, to want to keep it at a distance from political activity. "I don't want my pastor telling politicians what to do," she says, "or anyone else's pastor doing that."

Defenders of abortion rights and gay marriage were concerned about the tactical and rhetorical shifts they were seeing. When Hillary Clinton called abortion "tragic" and said she dreamed of the day when the procedure would never have to be performed, the approach appealed to centrists. But it inspired pro-choice champions to argue that such rhetoric makes women feel guilty and plays into the hands of the right. Just as arguments rage within the right between fiscal and social conservatives and between libertarians and virtuecrats, the left has its own internal wars.

PARTING THE RED SEA Going into last fall's midterm elections, Vanderslice decided that the party was just not going to move quickly or boldly enough, and she set up shop on her own. She formed Common Good Strategies in July 2005 and recruited Price's staffer Eric Sapp, who has degrees from Duke in policy and divinity, as a partner in October. It was the first Democratic-tilted, faith-based political-consulting firm. They acted as matchmakers between candidates and receptive clergy and helped candidates navigate the Christian media markets and develop a message that crossed party and religious lines. Overall, Vanderslice and Sapp's candidates -- including Michigan's Governor Jennifer Granholm, a pro-choice Catholic, and Ohio's Ted Strickland, a former Methodist minister -- did at least 10 percentage points better than the Democrats' national average among white Evangelicals and churchgoing Catholics.

But the 2006 election results, rather than providing aid and comfort to those who hoped to close the party's 30-year God gap, actually did the opposite. Democratic House candidates pulled in 67% of the secular, nonchurchgoing vote last year -- 7 percentage points more than in 2004. That growth spurt made it easier for skeptical factions inside the party's power structure to argue that nonreligious voters are an even more vital part of the Democratic coalition now -- and that religious outreach is a waste of precious resources and time.

So for all the progress since 2004, there are unmistakable limits to the party's great awakening. Democratic leaders are delighted to talk about their outreach to faith voters but will not divulge how much money they're actually spending on it. Several outside advisers said the DNC has been slow to craft religious-outreach strategies in key states for 2008. While Pacific Islanders and rural Americans and seniors can easily find places on the DNC website to join the party's activities, faith-minded voters still cannot. And Dean, while eager to meet with religious constituencies, is still his own worst enemy when he appears on The 700 Club to explain that Democrats "have an enormous amount in common with the Christian community," as though there were no Democrats in the Christian community.

Democratic candidates walk a sensitive line, weaving into their personal stories the role their faith has played in shaping their values while signaling that those values remain ecumenical and expansive. By a 2-to-1 margin (62% to 29%), Republicans say a President should use his faith to guide his decisions. Democrats reject this idea by a similar margin.

All that helps explain why some conservative leaders are not yet worried about the Democratic rebirth. "It's a positive thing that Democrats are willing to talk about faith and values," says Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council. "But they are aligned with organizations that sue to stop kids from praying and block the Ten Commandments." Only when the policies evolve, he argues, as opposed to the rhetoric, will the party have a chance to make real gains with Evangelicals.

Honest brokers from both sides say it never does a constituency any good to be taken for granted by either party. If Democrats rediscover a voice they lost a generation ago, they may find they are preaching to a much larger congregation. "The lessons Democrats have learned here is that they can engage [Evangelicals] on these issues," says former DNC chairman David Wilhelm. "We haven't won 'em over. But they are listening."