The Good Evangelical?

When Barack Obama chose pastor Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at his inauguration it sent ripples of disapproval through liberal ranks. Salon’s Joan Walsh, for example, attacked Warren as "a poster boy for kinder, gentler 21st century bigotry".

An evangelical Christian and pastor of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest California, Warren is a firm opponent of same sex marriage. Last year he angered many socially liberal Americans by comparing it to incest and polygamy. But Warren also argues that Christians need to do more about issues like poverty and social justice. So if Obama wants to focus on issues like these, should he reach out to evangelicals like Warren?

Conservative columnist David Brooks would say yes. In a 2005 column for the New York Times he wrote:

… we can have a culture war in this country, or we can have a war on poverty, but we can’t have both. That is to say, liberals and conservatives can go on bashing each other for being godless hedonists and primitive theocrats, or they can set those differences off to one side and work together to help the needy.

The natural alliance for antipoverty measures at home and abroad is between liberals and evangelical Christians. These are the only two groups that are really hyped up about these problems and willing to devote time and money to ameliorating them. If liberals and evangelicals don’t get together on antipoverty measures, then there will be no majority for them and they won’t get done.

Obama seems to agree. In a 2006 speech he said "we can affirm the importance of poverty in the Bible and discuss the religious call to environmental stewardship all we want, but it won’t have an impact if we don’t tackle head-on the mutual suspicion that sometimes exists between religious America and secular America." He went on to say:

… when we ignore the debate about what it means to be a good Christian or Muslim or Jew; when we discuss religion only in the negative sense of where or how it should not be practiced, rather than in the positive sense of what it tells us about our obligations towards one another; when we shy away from religious venues and religious broadcasts because we assume that we will be unwelcome – others will fill the vacuum, those with the most insular views of faith, or those who cynically use religion to justify partisan ends.

In other words, if we don’t reach out to evangelical Christians and other religious Americans and tell them what we stand for, Jerry Falwells and Pat Robertsons will continue to hold sway.

More fundamentally, the discomfort of some progressives with any hint of religion has often prevented us from effectively addressing issues in moral terms. Some of the problem here is rhetorical – 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. Imagine Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address without reference to "the judgments of the Lord," or King’s I Have a Dream speech without reference to "all of God’s children." Their summoning of a higher truth helped inspire what had seemed impossible and move the nation to embrace a common destiny.

Our failure as progressives to tap into the moral underpinnings of the nation is not just rhetorical. Our fear of getting preachy may also lead us to discount the role that values and culture play in some of our most urgent social problems.

Obama wants to call a truce in the culture war. He wants to defuse social and cultural issues which have drawn many less affluent Americans away from liberal candidates. And if he succeeds it raises an interesting question — will conservatives try to lure these voters back by abandoning small government rhetoric and promising to use government programs for conservative ends?

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More on Obama, faith and politics in this 2006 Troppo post: ‘The Return of the Prodigal Voter‘.