Evangelicals and Democrats
Nick Kristof echoes a point I made in the early days of this blog: evangelicals are enthusiastic about foreign social justice issues, making them perfect partners for Democrats in legislating on matters that get too little attention — namely disease and development. While it’s certainly true that Rick Warren getting the Saddleback Church to devote itself to AIDS in Africa is impressive, I don’t really see how and why Democrats should try to court Evangelicals on anything besides this narrow band of social policies. Not only are evangelicals incredibly conservative on basic liberal tenets, they’re also amazingly fickle voters who are perfectly willing to essentially vote for whatever candidate best apes their religious beliefs. Republicans are always going to be able to produce more Mike Huckabees and George Bushes than Democrats, so it’s probably not worth sacrificing anything on the oft chance that evangelicals will move to the “D” column because we get together to increase our foreign aid budget.
What we can do, however, is try to get legislators like Sam Brownback and leaders like Rick Warren to rally support, or at least depress dissent, for foreign aid bills. But even this is a perilous path, if Brownback were to condition support for an Obama foreign aid bill on maintaining the global gag rule, or on funding abstinence education in Africa, then pursuing his support would not be worth it.
Another large problem for a potential evangelical-Democrat alliance is that while Evangelicals are exceptionally charitable towards the poor — both at home and abroad — it’s unclear if that will translate to consistent support for government initiatives and spending. Sure, Michael Gerson is willing to throw around government money, but it’s unclear how big his following is in the Evangelical community. I guess I’ll support the Demogelical Social Justice Super Fusion when I see it, until then, we should probably just elect Democrats.
