In the autumn of 1998, when Karl Rove was contriving to make Governor George W. Bush President and to build a lasting Republican majority, he came upon “The Catholic Voter Project,” a study of voting behavior in national elections since the Kennedy-Nixon contest of 1960.Catholics make up more than a fourth of the electorate, but they had long defied political targeting.
This was because, since 1972, Catholic voters had essentially mirrored the rest of the electorate, making it impossible for political professionals to shape a distinctive Catholic message—or even to know for certain whether there was such a thing.
The study, commissioned by the magazine Crisis, concluded that the issues that moved Catholic voters could, in fact, be discerned; it was simply a matter of redefining the Catholic vote.
The term “Catholic voter,” the study argued, was meaningless, reflecting an answer given to exit pollsters, and not much more. The only relevant Catholic voter was one whose vote was influenced by the fact of being a Catholic. The Crisis project compared the voting behaviors of active Catholics—those who regularly attended Mass—and inactive Catholics, and found a clear distinction.
Active Catholics characterized themselves as being more conservative than Catholics as a whole, and, although they did not necessarily identify with Republicans, they were in the vanguard of the thirty-year Catholic march out of the Democratic Party. They were patriotic, anti-abortion, and pro-family (believing, for example, that divorce laws should be tightened).
For Rove, the Crisis report posed a thrilling prospect, akin to the framing of a new constituency, to be courted and drawn into the Republican base, as Protestant evangelicals had been, two decades earlier.
“What I saw,” Rove says, “was a group that was searching.” After reading the report, Rove telephoned the publisher of Crisis, Deal Hudson, who had instigated the study, and invited him to Texas to meet Governor Bush. Hudson liked what Bush had to say, and shortly thereafter he agreed to become an outside adviser on Catholic outreach for the 2000 Presidential campaign.
As it turned out, Rove was tapping into something far more profound than voting differences between active and inactive Catholics; he had struck upon a deep current of discontent within the Church, which had been building for nearly forty years, rooted in contending interpretations of the faith.
Rove had chosen the ideal instrument for his Catholic strategy. Hudson was a convert to Catholicism, and, with a convert’s zeal, he embraced an undiluted brand of the faith. As a philosophy student in college, in the late nineteen-sixties, and, later, as a professor of philosophy at Mercer University, in Atlanta, Hudson had shunned academic fads—“The Tao of Physics” and the like—and was drawn, instead, to the classics, where he believed the enduring truths resided. He admired Mortimer Adler, who became a friend, and he started his own Great Books courses. Hudson’s spiritual migration—he’d been a Southern Baptist minister before his conversion, in 1984—was animated by his wish, as he put it, “to wed the truth of philosophy with revealed truth.”
But Hudson’s firm doctrinal orthodoxy placed him in the minority within his new faith, as he discovered, to his surprise, soon after taking a teaching job in the philosophy department at Fordham University, a Jesuit institution, in 1989. One day, he was chatting with a sociology professor, a former Jesuit, who asked him why he’d converted. Hudson shared his conversion story, and talked about the perfect accord he’d found in the Catholic faith between mind and soul. His colleague smiled and said, “I used to feel that way, but I don’t need it anymore.”
“I realized that the Church I had learned to love, and had converted to, was very deep within the detritus of the post-Vatican II confusion,” Hudson recalls. He was referring to the contention that followed the Second Vatican Council, which was convened in Rome in 1962 by Pope John XXIII, in the hope of renewing the Church in its mission to present Christ to the world. By the time the Council concluded, four years later, the Church had a new Pope, and a radically transformed understanding of itself. The faithful began to experience changes ranging from a new Mass (said in the vernacular) to the end of meatless Fridays. The progressive wing of the Church felt that Vatican II was a liberation, and invoked its spirit in challenging the faith’s core doctrines and theology, often to the point of open dissent. This contingent eventually came to dominate much of the institutional Church, holding sway particularly within the Catholic academy. Catholics who hewed to orthodoxy argued their case on the pages of obscure conservative journals, or from outmanned positions on college faculties, and bided their time. “I realized very quickly that I was going to be a culture warrior within the Church,” Hudson says of his arrival at Fordham.
Hudson thrived at Fordham, where, despite his minority view, he got on well with his colleagues and was popular with his students. He took up writing for Catholic journals, in addition to his scholarly work, and ventured onto the lecture circuit, proving himself to be a natural polemicist. But Hudson became a full-time culture warrior sooner than he may have wished, when his academic career suddenly ended, in 1994. After an evening of partying with a group of students on Shrove Tuesday, the eve of Lent, Hudson had a sexual encounter in his Fordham office with an undergraduate. She later informed her dean, and Hudson was strongly urged by Father Joseph O’Hare, the president of the university, to seek employment elsewhere. A lawsuit filed by the young woman was quietly settled, and nondisclosure agreements were signed by all parties.
Hudson moved his family to Washington, D.C., and began a new life. His ideological kinsman, the writer Michael Novak, needed help at Crisis, the Catholic journal he’d co-founded thirteen years earlier, and asked Hudson to become its editor. Hudson agreed, and quickly revitalized the magazine, expanding its subscription base and calling on a network of wealthy, like-minded Catholics for financial support. From his perch at Crisis, Hudson became a prominent figure in Catholic Washington, joining an influential circle of opinion-makers as they cheered the efforts of their champion, Pope John Paul II, to reinterpret Vatican II along orthodox lines. They associated themselves with a group of Catholic bishops, fiercely orthodox and devoted to the Pope (“JPII bishops,” they were called), who meant to steer the American Church more toward orthodoxy. Hudson was avowedly Republican, but he fretted that the Party was blind to its Catholic opportunity, mistaking Catholics for an ethnic constituency satisfied by Columbus Day speeches and St. Patrick’s Day parades. It was this frustration that prompted Hudson to commission the Catholic-vote study, which concluded, somewhat wishfully, that Bob Dole might actually have won the 1996 Presidential election if he had attracted more Catholics in just a handful of states.
Karl Rove wasn’t blind to the Catholic opportunity. When Bush assumed the Presidency, in 2001, Hudson became the volunteer chair of the new Catholic-outreach program of the Republican National Committee. In his book “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” Hudson describes himself as “the Catholic gatekeeper” for the White House. The Administration’s policies clearly reflected a Catholic influence. On Bush’s first workday, he acted to limit federal funding of non-governmental organizations that performed or actively supported abortion as a method of family planning overseas. By the end of his first term, Bush had delivered on every item on a wish list that Hudson says he presented to him at the time of their first formal meeting, in Austin, including its centerpiece, the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, which Bush signed in 2003. That year, Michael Novak explained Bush to an Italian readership in the journal Studi Cattolici. “Never have Catholics had so solicitous a friend in the White House,” Novak wrote. “So pro-Catholic are the president’s ideas and sentiments that there are persistent rumors that, like his brother Jeb, the governor of Florida, G.W. might also become a Catholic.”
Hudson’s circle of conservative Catholics diminished the authority of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops as the conduit between the Church and the government. “If you wanted to get something to the top inner circles of the White House from a Catholic perspective, you could contact Deal Hudson and it was delivered,” William Donohue, the president of the conservative Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, has said. Diminished, too, was the bishops’ more liberal instruction to the faithful regarding their votes, a construct called “a consistent ethic of life.” In choosing a political candidate, the bishops advised their parishioners, they should consider hot-button issues like abortion as being just part of the spectrum of issues that are central to Catholic social teaching, alongside opposition to the death penalty, warfare, and poverty. By 2004, some JPII bishops were positing that John Kerry, a pro-choice Catholic, should be denied Communion, and had even suggested that casting a vote for him might be a sin.
All this helped energize that Catholic cohort which the Crisis study had identified as a ready constituency. In 2004, Hudson’s outreach team, by blanketing parishes in battleground states with voter guides, working with an e-mail list of a hundred thousand addresses, and sending thousands of volunteers into the field, delivered the Catholic vote to Bush. Hudson’s outreach efforts were harmonized with those directed by the evangelical political operative Ralph Reed, a consultant on general voter outreach. Reed, as the head of the Christian Coalition, had largely shaped the religious right and shepherded it into the Republican Party. Rove had engineered a religious political machine that many believed would give Republicans a lasting advantage.
“What Bush did in ’04 had never happened before, and it may never happen again,” Reed told me recently. In the current Presidential election, that latter possibility actually seems likely. Hudson has played only an attenuated role in this campaign. In midsummer, 2004, during the heat of that campaign, someone at Fordham leaked the records of Hudson’s decade-old disgrace; Hudson resigned from the campaign, and as publisher of Crisis as well. Rove, who left the White House a year ago, is now dispensing his advice on Fox News and on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. Reed, who lost a bid for office in Georgia in 2006, is not officially involved with the McCain campaign. But, where the current election is concerned, the biggest difficulty for Republican religious outreach may be the nominee himself. George Bush is an evangelical who wears his faith on his sleeve, and whom Catholics can imagine as one of their own. When I asked Rove whether John McCain has anything like Bush’s purchase on faith-directed voters, he replied, “He does not.”
John McCain’s accidental education in apocalyptic theology began late last February, on a bright, breezy afternoon in San Antonio. His campaign had arranged for a joint appearance by the candidate and the megachurch pastor John Hagee, who, after months of hesitation, had finally agreed to bestow his endorsement. At that point, McCain had the Republican Presidential nomination in hand, but the Christian right still regarded him with deep misgiving. This was owing, in part, to a sense, widely held by many conservatives, that McCain was really the standard-bearer for the one-man Maverick Party, which made him an unreliable ally in such first-principle matters as gay marriage and judicial appointments. Religious conservatives had been put off by tales of McCain’s temper, and by his ungallant termination of his first marriage.
They remembered how he had lashed out against their own in 2000, condemning Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as “agents of intolerance,” and likening them to Louis Farrakhan and the Reverend Al Sharpton.
“I am convinced Senator McCain is not a conservative, and, in fact, has gone out of his way to stick his thumb in the eyes of those who are,” the evangelical leader James Dobson said in a statement read to a national radio audience on Super Tuesday. “I cannot and I will not vote for Senator John McCain, as a matter of conscience.”
That week, religious conservatives helped deliver six states to the former Baptist minister Mike Huckabee. When Hagee’s endorsement came, three weeks later, McCain hoped that it might begin to repair his relationship with the religious right.
At their joint appearance, outside a San Antonio hotel on February 27th, McCain and Hagee exchanged a hug and a few moments of mutual praise, and then took questions from the press. Hagee was asked how evangelical Christians might rally to McCain. (McCain would have to stress the right things, such as his pro-life voting record, Hagee said.)
McCain was tossed a few campaign-trail standards, questions about improving foreign relations, campaign finance, and the like, and then, suddenly, the tone of the event changed. Someone asked McCain what he thought about Pastor Hagee’s views on the end of the world. What about Hagee’s writing on Armageddon, the great final conflict between good and evil? Did McCain subscribe to Hagee’s view that the Antichrist will be the head of the European Union?
Flummoxed, McCain replied, “All I can tell you is that I’m very proud to have Pastor John Hagee’s support.” He went on, “He has support and respect throughout the nation, and, uh, I’ve continued to appreciate his support and his advocacy for the freedom and independence of the state of Israel.”
McCain stepped back, and looked hopefully to Hagee. “You want to say anything?’’
Hagee, a thickset man with a made-for-televangelism baritone, declared, “Our support of Israel has absolutely nothing to do with an end-times, prophetic scenario.”
What had been a relatively straightforward political problem for McCain—persuading a skeptical constituency—had suddenly become a vexing eschatological one. Reporters and Internet commentators began to pick through Hagee’s writings and sermons, and the McCain campaign found itself trying to explain Hagee’s inflammatory interpretations of Scripture, such as his implication that the Roman Catholic Church was the Biblical great whore of Babylon.
Hagee subscribes to a variation of a theology called dispensationalism, which holds that God’s human project can be understood schematically, as revealed through Scripture. Formulated and popularized by nineteenth-century Protestant evangelicals in England, dispensationalism offered a system for recognizing, through a literal reading of Scripture, the whole of human history—past, present, and future—explained in seven Biblical ages, or dispensations.
American evangelicals found great allure in dispensationalism’s hyper-Protestant premise—the divine plan, accessible to all through earnest study—and the system was widely promulgated in this country by evangelists like Dwight L. Moody. The most important fundamentalist text, Cyrus I. Scofield’s 1909 Reference Bible, in which the tenets of dispensation are outlined in the margins, sold in the millions, and remains in wide circulation today.
Many fundamentalists still accept the dispensationalist view—the late Jerry Falwell was a dispensationalist, as is the Reverend Pat Robertson—and many more are at least familiar with its themes. That is partly because of the spectacular dénouement of the seventh, and final, dispensation—the rapture (sudden heavenly ascent) of saved Christians, followed by a seven-year tribulation, during which the Antichrist and a false prophet will install a one-world religion and the forces of good and evil will clash mightily. After the defeat of the False Messiah, Jesus Christ will return to earth and reign in glory for a thousand years, before engaging Satan in one last battle, at Armageddon.
Because Biblical prophecy is largely a literature of symbolism, end-time theology requires a good deal of interpretation. The apocalyptic visions of the prophet Daniel foresaw the emergence of four beasts from the sea, the second of which was a great bearlike creature; Cold War-era dispensationalists saw this as Russia. Falwell believed that the Antichrist, being a counterfeit of Christ, will of necessity be a male Jew.
An interpretation of Revelation 17—“I will show unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters. . . . And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON, THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH”—had long been thought by some Protestants to refer to the Catholic Church, and is reflected in Scofield: “Ecclesiastical Babylon is all apostate Christendom, in which the Papacy will undoubtedly be prominent.”
Dispensationalism sought to unify the Old Testament and the New, and its literal reading of both indicated that God intended to fulfill his promises to Israel. To many fundamentalists, God’s vow to Abraham in Genesis, “Unto thy seed I have given this land,” meant that a real, political state of Israel would come into existence and that, with Christ’s return, human history would culminate there.
These fundamentalists are thus inclined toward a muscular Zionism, and Hagee is among the fiercest of the lot; he is the founder of Christians United for Israel, and McCain’s friend and colleague Senator Joseph Lieberman has publicly supported the organization.
McCain was hardly equipped to defend Hagee’s eschatology. In arranging Hagee’s endorsement, McCain’s campaign had apparently failed to take note of the clamor that attended Mike Huckabee’s appearance at Hagee’s Cornerstone Church, just two months earlier. Huckabee simply ignored the protests, but McCain, the presumptive nominee, would not have that option. As blogs and campaign reporters pressed the Hagee issue, McCain at first firmly stood by the pastor (“I’m very proud to have Pastor John Hagee’s support”), but he began to back away (“I don’t have to agree with everyone that endorses my candidacy”).
The controversy was largely driven by one man, the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue, whose usual targets are Hollywood and the liberal media. Donohue condemned McCain’s association with Hagee the day after the endorsement and vowed to hound McCain until he renounced him.
Interview requests spiked, and Donohue happily obliged, campaigning relentlessly against McCain’s embrace of the man whom he called “the biggest anti-Catholic bigot in the evangelical community.”
One interested observer outside the McCain campaign began to worry that the damage caused by the controversy would extend beyond John McCain. Ralph Reed suggested that Hagee call his friend Deal Hudson to get his advice. Hudson had lunch with Hagee, listened to his end-time theories, and explained to the pastor the Catholic sensitivity to Protestant calumny. (Martin Luther had been among those who first identified the Catholic Church as the whore of Babylon.) Hagee wrote a letter of apology to Donohue, who, after a congenial meeting with Hagee in New York (arranged by Hudson), publicly made peace with the pastor. (Hagee maintains that his invocation of the term “great whore” was never meant to describe the Catholic Church.)
Donohue was satisfied, but the Hagee controversy persisted. By March, the inflammatory sermons of Barack Obama’s former pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, had begun to make headlines, and, for the press, the Hagee issue gave McCain a place of equivalence in the pastor-wars story line. In May, the Huffington Post put up an article citing a decade-old sermon in which Hagee suggested that the Holocaust was part of God’s plan, as it helped usher Jews back to Palestine. Hagee, who had wearied of the dispute, decided to withdraw his endorsement of McCain. McCain took it a step further, renouncing Hagee’s endorsement. Later, he characterized Hagee’s end-time statements as “crazy and unacceptable.” While he was at it, McCain also rejected the endorsement of the Ohio evangelical pastor Rod Parsley, who had made harsh statements about Islam.
Friends of Hagee say that he was deeply pained by McCain’s actions, and other evangelical leaders began to feel that their mistrust of McCain had been warranted. Hudson feared that McCain had wrecked Rove’s religious machine, which had been so devastating to John Kerry in 2004, before he had even clinched the nomination. Acting on his own, Hudson sent feelers to some evangelical leaders to gauge the possibility of their working together, independently of the McCain campaign, to defeat Obama. “No way,” one evangelical told Hudson, declining the offer. “It might help John McCain.”
In retrospect, the most important speech at the Democrats’ 2004 Convention wasn’t the nominee’s (“I’m John Kerry, and I’m reporting for duty”) but the keynote, delivered by a little-known state senator from Illinois. “We worship an awesome God in the blue states!” Barack Obama intoned. The line, even to the unchurched, sounded like something from a hymn (as was the case). It was a rare thing for a national Democrat to pull a verse from a gospel tune up from his internal playlist, but Obama spoke the phrase credibly, with an easy conviction.
In the sorting out that always follows an election defeat, Democrats decided that Kerry had lost because many voters believed that neither he nor the Democratic Party shared their values. Howard Dean had sensed this as a candidate, but he seemed clueless about how to proceed (citing Job as his favorite book in the New Testament, among many other gaffes). After Nancy Pelosi became Speaker of the House, she commissioned a Democrats’ Faith Working Group, a reflexively administrative response to a metaphysical problem.
The most effective Democratic religious outreach has been performed by the Democrat to whom it comes most naturally, Obama. Almost as soon as he joined the Senate, Obama became a prized booking on the speech circuit, where he proved to be fluent in what Jesse Jackson once called “faith talk.” Obama spoke forthrightly about his Christian beliefs and about his conversion experience (“Kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side in Chicago, I felt I heard God’s spirit beckoning me”), in a way that was hardly customary for Democratic politicians. In casting Republicans as the dangerous God Party, Democrats had turned themselves into the Secular Party so resolutely as to seem almost hostile to religious faith—a perilous position in a country where ninety-two per cent of the population believe in God, more than two-thirds believe in the presence of angels and demons, and nearly a quarter have said that the attacks of September 11, 2001, are prophesied in the Bible.
Obama addressed this problem in a remarkable speech on June 28, 2006, at a gathering of the Christian-left group Call to Renewal, in Washington, in which he offered a frank critique of liberal queasiness regarding faith. “There are some liberals,” Obama said, “who dismiss religion in the public square as inherently irrational or intolerant, insisting on a caricature of religious Americans that paints them as fanatical, or thinking that the very word ‘Christian’ describes one’s political opponents, not people of faith.”
Echoing the themes of Deal Hudson’s 1998 Catholic-voter report, Obama said, “The single biggest gap in party affiliation among white Americans today is not between men and women, or those who reside in so-called red states and those who reside in blue, but between those who attend church regularly and those who don’t.” He told secularists that they “are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square,” and suggested that “a sense of proportion should also guide those who police the boundaries between church and state.”
He went on, “Not every mention of God in public is a breach to the wall of separation—context matters. It is doubtful that children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance feel oppressed or brainwashed as a consequence of muttering the phrase ‘under God.’ I didn’t. Having voluntary student prayer groups use school property to meet should not be a threat, any more than its use by the High School Republicans should threaten Democrats.”
Among those who were impressed by that speech was Douglas Kmiec, a professor of constitutional law at Pepperdine University School of Law, a Christian school in Malibu, California. Kmiec (pronounced Kuh-meck) was the embodiment of a Reagan Democrat—a Catholic reared in the Democratic Party, who felt that he had been driven into Republican arms by the leftward lurch of the McGovern-era Democrats. When Kmiec turned Republican, he did so with a vengeance. He worked in the Reagan Justice Department (sharing an office with Samuel Alito), and, as it happens, when George W. Bush was elected he returned to Washington from California—he had gone there to teach at Pepperdine—as the dean of Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law, spending time with fellow Federalist Society members such as Antonin Scalia and Alito. His son, Keenan, clerked for Alito at the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, and for John Roberts at the Supreme Court. Kmiec’s advice on judicial appointments was heard by the White House, and he was himself considered a candidate for the federal bench. Kmiec was the sort of Republican jurist—smart, devoutly Catholic, and a committed pro-lifer—that Democrats had learned to fear.
After returning to Pepperdine, Kmiec was recruited by Mitt Romney to be the chairman of the Committee for the Courts and the Constitution, for Romney’s Presidential campaign. In the era of judicial-appointment wars, such committees are a way of signalling to the Republican base that the candidate is right on such issues as abortion, and Kmiec’s association with Romney was meant to give a pro-life seal of approval to a candidate who was once pro-choice. Kmiec became a Romney true believer, and, when Romney withdrew from the race, Kmiec found himself without a Presidential favorite. John McCain held no ideological allure, and Kmiec, like many Romneyites (and Romney himself), felt a lingering resentment toward him. He believed that McCain had resorted to Swift Boat tactics in misrepresenting Romney’s position on Iraq. “Let me put this as kindly as I can,” he says. “Senator McCain was not the most generous of heart, or honest of disposition, toward his primary opponents. I always want to concede his integrity, because I can’t ever envision myself surviving a P.O.W. experience of the kind that he survived, and I admire those years of his life—but that admirable contribution to American history was greatly dimmed by seeing him up close and personal in the primaries.”
Kmiec found himself reflecting on Barack Obama, and his Call to Renewal speech. “His insights there were not only significantly different from the Democrats of the past,” Kmiec says, “but they were significantly better than either the Democrats or the Republicans of the past, in the sense that he argued that religion shouldn’t be a wedge issue, and that we should stop demonizing each other on that basis. Religion necessarily is a source of morality, and morality is necessarily the place where we draw laws from. That in itself, to have acknowledged that, was a key sales point for me, because even the Supreme Court gets itself tangled on that proposition.”
A week after Romney withdrew from the race, Kmiec wrote about his Obama reflections in an article for the online magazine Slate, which bore the provocative title “Reaganites for Obama?” Kmiec wrote that Obama’s politics of hope reminded him of Reagan’s sunny optimism, and he mused that, while abortion was still of paramount importance to Catholics, years of Republican rule had not significantly reduced its occurrence. “Beyond life issues, an audaciously hope-filled Democrat like Obama is a Catholic natural,” he wrote.
Kmiec’s conservative Catholic friends were aghast, and several of them, including Deal Hudson, rebuked him in Catholic publications, some even suggesting that he was motivated by ambition. Kmiec thought the response heavy-handed, and observed that if this was an example of Republican religious outreach, then John McCain’s campaign was in trouble. “It was a brick through the window with a note attached, and the note said, ‘Obey, or else,’ ” he told me. “I never quite figured out what the ‘or else’ was. I’m a tenured old professor not looking to go anywhere. And I live in Malibu. What is it they’re going to dangle in front of me?”
Shortly after his Slate article appeared, Kmiec received a call from a young woman working in the Obama campaign, a friend of Keenan Kmiec (himself now an Obama supporter) who had clerked with him at the Supreme Court. She asked if Kmiec would consider supporting Obama more formally. In that and other conversations with the Obama camp, Kmiec expressed his admiration for the candidate but also his reservations about Obama’s position on abortion. Obama was such a staunch supporter of abortion rights that he received NARAL’s endorsement over Hillary Clinton, and, at an event for Planned Parenthood, he’d promised that “the first thing I’d do as President is sign the Freedom of Choice Act”—which would nullify most state restrictions on abortion. Kmiec was assured that Obama’s position on abortion was more nuanced than it seemed, and that, although Obama was pro-choice, he was not pro-abortion.
Kmiec eventually got an opportunity to air his doubts to Obama himself, at a Chicago meeting with a select group of religious figures. (Among them was the evangelist Franklin Graham, who asked Obama, “Do you believe that Jesus Christ is the way to God, or merely a way?” Obama responded, “Jesus is the only way for me,” and Graham left the meeting impressed.) “I even raised the objection to just talking about abortion as a vehicle for gender equality,” Kmiec recalls. “I said, ‘You know, this is not language that a Catholic will accept, and I don’t accept it. You don’t need to use it, if I understand your position correctly. So tell me your position.’ And out of that I got an answer that said, ‘I would never counsel my daughters to have an abortion. I view it as a profoundly moral decision. It is my purpose to discourage the practice. But it is also my belief that there’s no other actor on earth than the mother who can address this question. And to be pro-choice means that you contemplate that the choice can be the choice in favor of life.’ That suggests to me that he’s got the mental disposition to understand, at least from the Catholic perspective, how abortion is more a tragedy than a method of equality.”
Hudson told me that he was astonished by Kmiec’s abrupt shift. “Has Doug Kmiec never met a charming politician before?” he asked. He said that Kmiec seems to have adopted the liberal-Catholic construct of “a consistent ethic of life,” contextualizing abortion in a spectrum of other Catholic issues. “It sounds like my friend Doug has just completely gone over to the other side,” Hudson said.
“I want to say back to Deal, ‘We’re worshipping at different churches, then,’ ” Kmiec responded. “The church I have attended since my mother walked me down the block to St. Pascal’s, in Chicago, was one that had taught this social gospel. . . . I would say back to Deal, ‘Yes, I’m in the Federalist Society, and, yes, I believe in private property and federalism and the separation of powers and all that. But these other beliefs I find fully compatible.’ ”
Kmiec endorsed Obama on March 23rd—Easter Sunday, his conservative friends noted. A few weeks later, while attending a meeting of Legatus, a Catholic business leaders’ association founded by the conservative philanthropist Tom Monaghan, Kmiec attended Mass with his colleagues. The priest declined to serve him Communion.
It remains to be seen whether Kmiec is an anomaly or if he represents a broader willingness by Christian conservatives to reconsider their Republican fealty. Democratic Catholic outreach since 2004 has been earnest, perhaps most usefully in the recruitment of candidates who adhere to the Church’s orthodoxy, rather than the Party’s, on such matters as abortion. The Party hurt itself badly with Catholics at the 1992 Convention, in New York, when the governor of Pennsylvania, Bob Casey, was denied a speaking role because of his outspoken pro-life views. After the Party’s 2004 losses, Casey’s son, Bob Casey, Jr., was recruited for a Senate run, despite the objections voiced by pro-choice activists. Casey defeated the religious-right stalwart Rick Santorum, and was among the speakers at the Democratic Convention last week. Doug Kmiec participated in a panel on Thursday, as part of a series of Faith Caucus meetings, a first for Democrats. The Convention had opened with an interfaith gathering on Sunday, featuring remarks from Colorado’s governor, Bill Ritter—a Catholic Democrat, with orthodox views. Among the reasons for Obama’s selection of Senator Joe Biden as his running mate, the most compelling may have been the fact that Biden is a practicing Catholic. (It may be an indication of Biden’s potential in this regard that a Web site called Catholics Against Joe Biden appeared within hours of the selection.)
Obama’s pro-choice-but-against-abortion formulation has been taken up by the Party, and is reflected in the Democratic platform. This apparent softening on the abortion issue, however rhetorical, has allowed for a resurgence of the “consistent ethic of life” construct, now being aggressively proposed by Catholic liberals as the proper Catholic approach to issues.
John McCain’s religious-outreach effort has been attenuated at best, perhaps reflecting the candidate’s pronounced ambivalence toward the religious right, and the insistent agenda of cultural conservatives in general. McCain admitted as much in July, when George Stephanopoulos, of ABC, asked him about his position on gay adoption. He doesn’t support it, McCain said, but he added, “It’s not the reason why I’m running for President of the United States.”
Independents and moderates may admire that attitude, but it is a cold bath to cause-driven activists, who, in another time, would have been able to count upon harmonizing their efforts with those of the national Republican campaign. Activists in California, anticipating a ruling by the state Supreme Court that legalized same-sex marriage, launched a drive to put an initiative on the ballot in November that would amend the state’s constitution to ban gay marriage. The proposal prompted an extensive support effort—forty-day fasts, prayer marathons, and the like—among Church leaders in California and the two other states that have similar measures, culminating in a daylong stadium rally on the weekend before Election Day. “There has been no dialogue with the McCain campaign at all,” says Jim Garlow, the pastor of the Skyline Church, in suburban San Diego, who is one of the drive’s organizers. “If I were Senator McCain, I would do everything I could to identify with this issue. I don’t know that he will. I have no idea what his campaign is about. At this point, he seems quite low-key on these types of things.”
On the evangelical right, there is a pronounced sense that the movement, as a political force, is adrift. This is, in part, the result of a vacuum of leadership, as the movement faces its first election season in a generation without Jerry Falwell on the scene. Younger evangelicals, put off by the image of the Christian right created by Falwell and Pat Robertson, are fiercely pro-life but seem less inclined than their elders to commit themselves to Republican Party politics. Karl Rove has suggested that the movement, though still central to the Republican coalition, may have reached a plateau. “There were a lot of people in 2004 who were motivated to participate in the process because of what they felt to be a personal connection between themselves and President Bush, in part because of the faith link,” Rove told me. “I don’t think they feel that with either candidate this time around. And one thing we know about people of faith, particularly Protestant evangelicals, is that they tend to flow in and out of the system. Evangelicals, certain elements of them, have a very strong tradition of believing that they need to withdraw from the public life of the country.”
George Bush, who was his own best religious-outreach operative, might have been able to fill the vacuum and rally the faith-directed base, and Bush nostalgia is already showing itself among some on the religious right. “George Bush knew how to walk into a room of evangelicals and in five minutes send all the right signals,” Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, in Louisville, Kentucky, told me. “He almost could have left the room having accomplished in five minutes all that he wanted to accomplish. And that is not the case with John McCain. John McCain can walk into the room and in five minutes have people more puzzled about who he is than they were before he came in.”
The signals that McCain does send, especially to the young, are not necessarily helpful to his cause. “You know, a part of it is McCain the man,” Mohler says. “A part of it is McCain the candidate. And a part of it is just . . . his age. This is a man who wore a cardigan sweater when he was campaigning in Florida. I mean, I grew up in Florida, and that’s sending a signal for sure.”
It may be that the greatest motivator for politically conservative Christians is the prospect of a Barack Obama Administration. By midsummer, James Dobson, of Focus on the Family, had reconsidered his vow never to support McCain. On his radio broadcast, with Mohler as his guest, Dobson reiterated McCain’s many faults but allowed that even McCain was better than Obama—whom Mohler characterized as “the most liberal candidate, I think, to gain a party nomination probably in the history of this country.” Dobson proceeded to offer the most tepid semi-endorsement possible. “I have considered the fact that elections always involve imperfect candidates,” he said. “There are no perfect human beings. And you always have to choose between two flawed individuals; that’s the way we are all made. So it comes down to this—and I never thought I would hear myself saying this, but it’s where I am—that, while I am not endorsing Senator John McCain, the possibility is there that I might. And that’s all I can say at this time.”
A nose-holding base does not often deliver election victories, but few evangelicals could imagine what McCain might say or do, with any degree of authenticity, that could excite the base. The prospect of McCain’s appearance with Barack Obama at Pastor Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, on August 16th, made many evangelicals cringe. Mohler was among those who expected the worst from what seemed, given Warren’s disdain for sharp partisanship, a venue perfectly tailored to Obama’s strengths. But McCain surprised. For many evangelicals, the event turned on the question, posed by Warren to both candidates separately, “At what point does a baby get human rights, in your view?” Obama’s response, characteristically nuanced, came across as a dodge. “Well,” he began, “I think that, whether you’re looking at it from a theological perspective or a scientific perspective, answering that question with specificity, you know, is above my pay grade.” Asked the same question, McCain didn’t hesitate. “At the moment of conception,” he said, to the loud approval of the congregation.
“I think it was a good start,” said Rove, who believes that McCain still needs to reveal more to the public about his personal faith. On Albert Mohler’s radio show two days later, the verdict on the event was less tentative. “John McCain just blew Obama right straight out of the water” was one comment from a typical caller. “Politics has a way of making strange bedfellows,” Ralph Reed says. “The irony is that McCain has a chance to win as large a percentage of the evangelical vote as Bush did in 2000, and maybe even 2004, which no one would have predicted six months ago.” Shortly afterward, of course, McCain thrilled his conservative base further with the selection of the fervently Christian Governor Sarah Palin, of Alaska, as his Vice-Presidential nominee. (“A home run,” Reed declared to the Times, and Dobson called the choice “outstanding.”)
The Saddleback event illuminated Obama’s greatest liability for faith-based voters: his resolute support for abortion rights. Many, including Doug Kmiec, winced when Obama said, at a town-hall meeting last spring, that he supported sex education because he didn’t want his daughters “punished with a baby.” The week after the Saddleback event, conservative commentators advanced the theme that Obama supported infanticide, as evidenced by his opposition to a 2003 bill in the Illinois legislature requiring medical personnel to attempt to sustain the lives of babies that survive abortion procedures. Obama’s various explanations—that the bill threatened the rights established by Roe v. Wade; that his opposition was largely procedural—did not stand up well to scrutiny, and even Doug Kmiec admitted to having doubts.
“Here is a bit of an Achilles’ heel,” Kmiec says. “Senator Obama the candidate, as many have observed, is different from Senator Obama the legislator. That’s the unanswered question about the Senator. And it’s a question that does require a leap of faith on my part, and on the part of anyone who comes to him from perspectives like my own.”
Kmiec has decided that he is willing to take that leap. Obama has no reason to expect a mass exodus of religious conservatives from the Republican ranks, but if he can persuade even a portion of those voters who were swayed to Bush’s side by the Rove religious machine, it could be enough.
In Rove’s view, Obama has already begun to transform the faith-unfriendly Democratic image that made the Republicans’ 2000 and 2004 strategies possible.
“The overt hostility of some elements of the Democratic Party is being usefully scrubbed away by Obama,” Rove says. “And, for that, everybody in America ought to be thankful.”+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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Sotto Voce
(Source: NewYorker)