Democrats Have a Religion Problem
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| Former US President Obama who led his country into homosexual sin and grave debauchery |
A conversation with Michael Wear, a former Obama White House
staffer, about the party’s illiteracy on and hostility toward white
evangelicals.
There aren’t many people like
Michael Wear in today’s Democratic Party. The former director of Barack Obama’s
2012 faith-outreach efforts is a theologically conservative evangelical
Christian. He is opposed to both abortion and same-sex marriage, although he
would argue that those are primarily theological positions, and other issues,
including poverty and immigration, are also important to his faith.
During his time working for Obama,
Wear was often alone in many of his views, he writes in his new book, Reclaiming
Hope. He helped with faith-outreach strategies for Obama’s 2008
campaign, but was surprised when some state-level officials decided not to
pursue this kind of engagement: “Sometimes—as I came to understand the more I
worked in politics—a person’s reaction to religious ideas is not ideological at
all, but personal,” he writes.
Several years later, he watched
battles over abortion funding and contraception requirements in the Affordable
Care Act with chagrin: The administration was unnecessarily antagonistic toward
religious conservatives in both of those fights, Wear argues, and it eventually
lost, anyway. When Louie Giglio, an evangelical pastor, was pressured to
withdraw from giving the 2012 inaugural benediction because of his teachings on
homosexuality, Wear almost quit.
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Some of his colleagues also didn’t
understand his work, he writes. He once drafted a faith-outreach fact sheet
describing Obama’s views on poverty, titling it “Economic Fairness and the
Least of These,” a reference to a famous teaching from Jesus in the Bible.
Another staffer repeatedly deleted “the least of these,” commenting, “Is this a
typo? It doesn’t make any sense to me. Who/what are ‘these’?”
I spoke with Wear about how the
Democratic Party is and isn’t reaching people of faith—and what that will mean
for its future. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Emma Green: Many
people have noted that 81 percent of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump
in this election. Why do you think that was?
Michael Wear: It
shows not just ineptitude, but the ignorance of Democrats in not even
pretending to give these voters a reason to vote for them. We also need to have
a robust
conversation about
the support or allowance for racism, misogyny, and Islamophobia in the
evangelical tradition.
Many of those 81 percent are
accommodating cultural changes in America that are deeply problematic. Liberals
have been trying to convince Americans, and evangelicals in particular, that
America is not a Christian nation. The 2016 election was evangelicals saying,
“Yeah, you’re right! We can’t expect to have someone who is Christian like us.
We can’t expect to have someone with a perfect family life. What we can expect
is someone who can look out for us, just like every other group in this country
is looking for a candidate who will look out for them.”
There’s a lot of conversation in
Christian circles about Jeremiah 29, which is Jeremiah’s letter to the exiles
in Babylon. The message Jeremiah had, and that the Lord had, for the exiles is
that they should seek the peace and prosperity of the city where they’ve been
planted, and multiply—they should maintain their convictions for the
flourishing of others. The concern I have, and that many others have, is that
in this time of cultural transformation in America, you’re going to have many
evangelicals who just become Babylonians.
“It’s much
easier to make people scared of evangelicals than trying to make an appeal to
them.”
Green: Why
is it, do you think, that some liberals—and specifically the Democratic Party—have
been unwilling to do outreach to people who hold particular kinds of
theological points of view?
Wear: They
think, in some ways wrongly, but in other ways rightly, that it would put
constraints around their policy agenda. So, for instance: You could make a case
to evangelicals while trying to repeal the Hyde Amendment, [which prohibits
federal funding for abortion in most circumstances,] but that’s really
difficult. Reaching out to evangelicals doesn’t mean you have to become
pro-life. It just means you have to not be so in love with how pro-choice you
are, and so opposed to how pro-life we are.
The second thing is that there’s a
religious illiteracy problem in the Democratic Party. It’s tied to the
demographics of the country: More 20- and 30-year-olds are taking positions of
power in the Democratic Party. They grew up in parts of the country where
navigating religion was not important socially and not important to their
political careers. This is very different from, like, James Carville in Louisiana
in the ’80s. James Carville is not the most religious guy, but he gets
religious people—if you didn’t get religious people running Democratic
campaigns in the South in the ’80s, you wouldn’t win.
Another reason why they haven’t
reached out to evangelicals in 2016 is that, no matter Clinton’s slogan of
“Stronger Together,” we have a politics right now that is based on making
enemies, and making people afraid. I think we’re seeing
this with the Betsy DeVos nomination: It’s much
easier to make people scared of evangelicals, and to make evangelicals the
enemy, than trying to make an appeal to them.
“The
Democratic Party used to welcome people who didn’t support abortion into the
party. We are now so far from that, it’s insane.”
Green: I’ve
written before about the rare breed that is the pro-life Democrat. Some portion
of voters would likely identify as both pro-life and Democrat, but from a party
point of view, it’s basically impossible to be a pro-life Democrat. Why do you
think it is that the party has moved in that direction, and what, if anything,
do you think it should do differently?
Wear: The
spending that women’s groups have done is profound. 2012 was a year of historic
investment from
Planned Parenthood, and the campaign in 2016 topped it.
Number two, we’re seeing party
disaffiliation as a way of signaling moral discomfort. A lot of pro-life
Democrats were formerly saying, “My presence here doesn’t mean I agree with
everything—I’m going to be an internal force that acts as a constraint or a
voice of opposition on abortion.” Those people have mostly left the party.
Third, I think Democrats felt like
their outreach wouldn’t be rewarded. For example: The president went to Notre
Dame in May of 2009 and gave a speech about
reducing the number of women seeking abortions. It was literally met by
protests from the pro-life community. Now, there are reasons for this—I don’t
mean to say that Obama gave a great speech and the pro-life community should
have [acknowledged that]. But I think there was an expectation by Obama and the
White House team that there would be more eagerness to find common ground.
Green: One
could argue that among most Democratic leaders, there’s a lack of willingness
to engage with the question of abortion on moral terms. Even Tim Kaine, for
example—a guy who, by all accounts, deeply cares about his Catholic faith, and
has talked about his personal discomfort with abortion—fell into line.
How would you characterize
Democrats’ willingness to engage with the moral question of abortion, and why
is it that way?
Wear: There
were a lot of things that were surprising about Hillary’s answer [to
a question about abortion] in the third debate. She didn’t advance moral
reservations she had in the past about abortion. She also made the exact kind
of positive moral argument for abortion that women’s groups—who have been
calling on people to tell
their abortion stories—had been demanding.
The Democratic Party used to welcome
people who didn’t support abortion into the party. We are now so far from that,
it’s insane. This debate, for both sides, is not just about the abortion rate;
it’s not just about the legality of it. It’s a symbolic debate. It’s symbolic
on the pro-choice side about the autonomy of women and their freedom to do what
they want with their bodies. On the pro-life side, they care not just about the
regulations around abortion, but whether there’s a cultural affirmation of
life.
Even the symbolic olive branches
have become less acceptable.
“We’ve
allowed politics to take up emotional space in our lives that it’s not meant to
take up.”
Green: If
you were talking to a secular Democrat who is skeptical about the need to do
outreach to conservative evangelicals or make a compromise on language
surrounding social issues like abortion, same-sex marriage, etc., what would
you say?
Wear: It’s
sad that this is a throwaway response, but it’s the duty of statesmanship. It’s
the duty of living in a pluralistic society to make a case to all folks.
The second would be that America is
still a profoundly religious nation. There are reports that
high-level Democratic leadership was not interested in reaching out to white
Catholics. And they sure didn’t have a lot of interest in white evangelicals.
That’s a huge portion of the electorate to throw out. So if the civic motivation
doesn’t get you, let me make the practical argument: It doesn’t help you win
elections if you’re openly disdainful toward the driving force in many
Americans’ lives.
The Democratic Party is effectively
broken up into three even thirds right now: religiously unaffiliated people,
white Christians who are cultural Christians, and then people of color who are
religious.
Green: And
religious minorities.
Wear: Well,
right, but because of their numbers—I’m speaking in general terms.
Barack Obama was the perfect
transitional president from the old party to the new. He could speak in
religious terms in a way that most white, secular liberals were not willing to
confront him on. He “got away with” religious language and outreach that would
get other Democratic politicians more robust critiques from the left. He was
able to paper over a lot of the religious tensions in the party that other,
less skilled politicians will not be able to paper over.
Green: You’re
a little bit of a man in the wilderness. You have worked for the Democratic
Party, but you have conservative views on social issues, and you are
conservative in terms of theology. There just aren’t a lot of people like you.
Does it feel lonely?
Wear: It’s
not as lonely as it might appear on the outside.
One of the things I found at the
White House and since I left is this class of people who aren’t driving the
political decisions right now, and have significant forces against them, but
who are not satisfied with the political tribalism that we have right now. I
think we’re actually in a time of intense political isolation across the board.
I’ve been speaking across the country for the year leading up to the election,
and I would be doing these events, and without fail, the last questioner or
second-to-last questioner would cry. I’ve been doing political events for a
long time, and I’ve never seen that kind of raw emotion. And out of that, I
came to the conclusion that politics was causing a deep spiritual harm in our
country. We’ve allowed politics to take up emotional space in our lives that
it’s not meant to take up.
Certainly, it would be a lot more
comfortable for me professionally if I held the party line on everything.
Politically, I definitely feel isolated. But a lot of people feel isolated
right now. And personally, I don’t feel lonely because I find my community in
the church. That has been a great bond.
