The following piece was produced through OffTheBus, a citizen journalism project hosted at the Huffington Post and launched in partnership with NewAssignment.Net. For more information, read Arianna Huffington's project introduction. If you'd like to join our blogging team, sign up here If you're interested in other opportunities, you can see the list here.
This piece includes an OffTheBus podcast.
Speculation that disgust with the GOP could cause many evangelical Christians to stay home in 2008 has raised the possibility of Democrats "hunting for evangelical votes." Unfortunately, the discussion about this potential in the media and especially the progressive blogosphere has pigeon-holed evangelicals as people who only care about two things: banning abortion and opposing civil rights for gays. Many candidates are following suit by attempting to pander on those issues, although at least a few candidates show some awareness that a deeper connection could be forged with evangelicals by promising action on domestic and global poverty, health care, compassion for immigrants and other justice issues.
A couple weeks ago, when I was filing my last Obama story from a coffee shop, I noticed a college-aged, clean-cut man reading Barack Obama's book, The Audacity of Hope. A little later, I looked up saw him and a friend with their heads down and hands joined in prayer. When I later broke in to their conversation to find out more about them, I learned they they had been praying to kick off a planning session for an anti-poverty program for their church.
I asked about the Obama book, and both said they supported Obama more than any other candidate and had been looking for ways to get involved in the race. One of them agreed to an audio interview and has eventually agreed that I post it, but only anonymously, explaining that he doesn't want to get involved publicly in politics (I'll call him Matthew). You can listen to selections from the interview here:
OffTheBus Podcast:
For a while now, I've been trying to convince many of my progressive friends that there's a huge and vibrant social justice movement rising now among evangelical Christians--but it's just too far outside of their picture of evangelicals for them to believe. Therefore, I got out my recorder to collect some hard evidence.
Before I began recording, Matthew and his friend explained that they were ardently anti-abortion but they both believed that criminalizing abortion would likely only lead to more abortions and more dangerous ones. They agreed with each other that education was one of the best ways to prevent abortion and that it seemed to them that Republicans were against that. Matthew's friend also asked, rhetorically, "Have the Republicans done anything at all that's actually prevented abortions?"
This "progressive evangelical" movement is based, above all, in the Bible. Millions of evangelicals are either recent converts to Christianity or grew up the children of recent converts. One consequence of that is they're reading the Bible with fresh eyes. Matthew said he's been a Christian only for a few years. That means that over these past few years he's almost certainly spent countless hours in Bible study groups, reading what Jesus actually said, not what Christian right leaders say he said.
He's closely aware of the debates that Jesus had with the religious right of his own day -- "The hypocrites," the Pharisees (the Rabbis who represented the religious establishment in Jesus' day) "who prayed out in public on the streets so that people could see them" -- and he's not afraid to apply that Biblical awareness to the politics of our own time. He says that candidates who pander in this day and age will gain nothing with him, but rather that, if they're Christians, they should just "hold true to being a Christ follower." According to Matthew's reading of the Bible that's about, "love...loving God and loving other people...loving yourself and loving your neighbor."
Among the current all-Christian slate of candidates, only a few are genuinely attempting to connect with Matthew's definition of Christ follower as someone who "loves the poor and the people who don't have a voice." Just going by his rhetoric, Mike Huckabee may be doing the best job of it. But neither Matthew nor his friend knew anything about him. Obama has said enough to convince them that he believes in the same Jesus they do. Hillary Clinton has also invoked Jesus as the God of the poor and the oppressed in the immigration debate as well as joining Matthew in equating today's religious right with the self-righteous Pharisees of Jesus' day.
However, while the votes of millions of these "progressive" evangelicals are theoretically up for grabs, there will almost certainly not be any organized effort to channel their votes as a block, the way there was among evangelicals in general in 2000 and 2004.
The above piece was produced through OffTheBus, a citizen journalism project hosted at the Huffington Post and launched in partnership with NewAssignment.Net. For more information, read Arianna Huffington's project introduction. If you'd like to join our blogging team, sign up here. If you're interested in other opportunities, you can see the list here.