President Barack Obama’s choice of Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at his inauguration was suffused with political overtones. While the selection of Warren (who, like most Americans, opposes same-sex marriage) attracted fierce attacks from homosexual-rights groups, it also was seen as a way for the president to increase his political capital with evangelical voters.
A few days later, Obama’s decision to wait until after the anniversary of Roe v. Wade before issuing an order restoring U.S. funding for international abortion groups was seen as proof that our new president is willing to reach out to both sides in the abortion debate. Even though waiting just one day had no substantive effect on abortion policy, many in the media saw it, as one newspaper put it, as proof of the president’s “sensitivity to foes of Roe. v. Wade.”
But, barring divine intervention, Warren’s inauguration prayer and Obama’s one-day abortion delay won’t help the new president’s standing among religious conservatives. To understand why, Obama should study Jimmy Carter, whose presidency taught evangelicals a generation ago that Christian policies, not symbolic gestures, matter most.
On his way to the White House in 1976, Jimmy Carter captured the support of 60 percent of white Protestants. This was because Carter was a born-again Sunday school teacher who peppered his speeches with biblical allusions and declared that he prayed to God “not continually but many times a day.”
During Carter’s 1980 re-election bid, many pundits expected Carter to repeat his success with religious voters, especially facing Ronald Reagan, a divorced former Hollywood actor who rarely attended church and seemed uncomfortable with public declarations of faith. Carter’s success seemed inevitable.
But Carter lost two-thirds of churchgoing voters, and the election.
Jimmy Carter attracted religious voters in 1976 because he was an ardent “believer.” He lost them four years later in part because of his support for policies most religious voters abhorred, including liberal abortion policies, the Equal Rights Amendment, special rights for homosexuals and ending public school prayer.
Evangelicals also discovered that, though not a regular churchgoer, Reagan understood that America’s liberty comes from God and that it was wrong to destroy innocent human life. Religious voters learned a generation ago that strong religious sentiment is not by itself a reliable predictor of policy.
The 1980 presidential election foreshadowed Obama’s difficulties with evangelical voters. Ever since bursting onto the national political scene at the 2004 Democratic National Convention announcing, “We worship an awesome God in the blue states,” Barack Obama has made attracting religious voters a cornerstone of his presidential aspirations. As David Paul Kuhn of Politico wrote a few days before Election Day, “No Democratic nominee in the modern day has made more of an effort to court religious voters than Obama.”
But, according to exit polls, white evangelicals chose John McCain over Barack Obama by 50 percentage points, 74 percent to 24 percent. Obama improved on 2004 Democratic nominee John Kerry’s white evangelical vote by only 3 percentage points. This despite that Kerry made almost no effort to court religious voters and faced a much more overtly religious opponent whose campaign focused on turning out religious voters.
What happened?
During the campaign, Obama made several mistakes that disenchanted religious voters. First came the revelation of incendiary remarks by Obama’s long-time pastor and spiritual mentor, Jeremiah Wright. Then, during a religious forum at Warren’s Saddleback Church, Obama’s glib remark that the question of when a child gets human rights is “above my pay grade” stunned those in attendance, including me.
That incident led to increased scrutiny of Obama’s abortion position, which evangelicals soon discovered is uniformly anti-life and includes positions even the abortion group NARAL has refused to endorse.
Added to this were Republican nominee John McCain’s firmly pro-life answers at the Saddleback forum (When does life begin? “At conception.”) and the selection of pro-life heroine Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. Like Reagan, McCain is a divorcee who was reluctant to use overtly religious language on the campaign trail. But, again like Reagan, McCain held the right positions on what religious voters call the “nonnegotiable issues.”
It’s hard to downplay these developments. Last spring, after a giant opinion poll by Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life showed that abortion and marriage continue to be crucial for evangelical voters, Pew’s John C. Green told the New York Times that the survey “suggests that the efforts of Democrats to peel away Republican and conservative voters based on economic issues face a real limit because of the role these cultural issues play.”
In the days before the election, as polls continued to predict that few evangelicals would turnout for Obama, Green told Politico, “What we could be seeing is that comfort and campaigning only go so far [with religious voters], and that ultimately it’s substance that matters to these voters.”
Obama should ponder an important lesson of Jimmy Carter’s failed presidency, which is that “faith without works is dead.” If Obama wants to send a real message of inclusion and build a bridge to the faith community, he must do more than invite evangelicals to offer prayers and wait a day before implementing an extreme policy that forces Americans to pay for overseas abortions in a time of recession. He must affirm basic Christian values in his policies while distancing himself from the extreme social positions that alienate most Americans. It will be by Obama’s deeds, not his words, that the evangelical community can be won.
Birthright citizenship is a breach in the border
Daniel McCarthy