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(RNS) — I recently found a years-old copy of a national political magazine with a cover story I had written, titled “Will Democrats Ever Get Religion?” It built off the subtitle of one of my books, “God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It.” I smiled as I looked at this piece from over 20 years ago asking the same question I still find myself wondering even now.<\/p>\n
For decades now in America, the Republican Party has claimed to own religion and religious values. They proceed to use, abuse, co-opt and reduce religion for their own political agenda. Faith should stay private, they say, except in the cases of “moral values” issues like abortion and gay marriage. Of course, that is bad theology. It is unbiblical theology, ignoring the more than 2,000 verses in the Bible that focus on the poor and oppressed. But Republicans want to command religion in America.<\/p>\n
That is made easier by the Democratic Party, which tends to ignore, dismiss or even discredit religion. Part of the reason why Democrats don’t talk much about faith is that they struggle to know how to express it without sounding like they are proselytizing or imposing their religion upon a pluralistic society.<\/p>\n
I cannot count the number of times that Democratic senators and members of Congress — many of them names you’d recognize — have asked me privately how to talk about their faith. They don’t want to “wear it on my sleeve,” as they say, or make people feel uncomfortable, or offend those of other faiths or no faith at all. They have concerns around expressing their own religion alongside their strong commitment to the separation of church and state. And while all of that is understandable, the reluctance to speak about faith has ceded religion to the Republicans.<\/p>\n
This is despite the fact that Black women, the strongest and most consistent Democratic voting group<\/a> across any racial or gender demographic group, are also the most religious group<\/a> across any racial or gender breakdown.<\/p>\n The other factor is what I call secular fundamentalism. I have been fighting religious fundamentalism most of my life, with the public description of being an alternative to the religious right, which gets tiresome. But there is a bias against religion per se in some parts of the political and cultural left, which is just as irrational and openly prejudiced as religious fundamentalism is.<\/p>\n All this makes many Christians committed to social justice often feeling without a party’s support, and sometimes even politically homeless.<\/p>\n I strongly believe that faith communities should be morally independent of party politics, and their values should both help challenge and shape both political parties. But an amazing thing seems to be happening.<\/p>\n An increasing number of Democratic office holders and candidates in upcoming elections are no longer apologetic about their personal faith. Indeed, they want to apply their own devout faith to the social arena where so much is at stake for justice and the common good, beyond the individualism of private religion.<\/p>\n I spoke to Sen. Tim Kaine <\/a>from Virginia, who coined a new phrase<\/a>, “faith-forward democrats.”<\/p>\n For Kaine, his Catholic faith and, in particular, serving as a young Jesuit volunteer alongside poor people and families in Honduras shaped the rest of his life and career as a civil rights lawyer and now a U.S. senator.<\/p>\n We had a very encouraging discussion about a new group of Democrats who are not afraid to put their faith forward, while being deeply committed to a pluralistic country of people with many faiths and no faith whatsoever. Together, they can all work for the common good — a core goal of Catholic social teaching.<\/p>\n
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