The Chronicle has an article today about churches mobilizing support for (and, in a few cases, opposition to) Proposition 73. Nothing in it is all that new to me, but it's a good reminder of how the Republican machine has used evangelical conservative congregations as an organizing tool. From the article:
Though organizers on both sides of Prop. 73 say this level of faith-based organizing is unusual in California, conservatives used the same strategy in President Bush's 2004 re-election campaign. Then, anti-gay-marriage measures in several states energized conservative religious voters not only to vote for Bush but to reach deeper into their church communities to bring other voters with them to the polls.The reason this is such a powerful tool is that churches (or more properly congregations) are more than just a Sunday morning worship service; they are communities. For millions of Americans, their church is their social life, their extended family, their business network, and their entertainment all in one. Few churches have the organizational brilliance of the Latter-Day Saints, but evangelical churches are still the organizing principle for the lives of millions.
"We are going to apply those things we learned (nationally) in 2004 to California," said Gary Marx, a former colleague of Ralph Reed, former leader of the Christian Coalition, who specializes in national outreach to religious communities for the Republican Party. The California Republican Party invited him to the West Coast to lead a church effort here.
And the thing about a community is that it is a powerful tool for propagating and, more to the point, reinforcing beliefs. If your church family is overwhelmingly pro-Bush, odds are that you'll pretty much agree with them; odds are even stronger that if you disagree, you won't say much about it. The enormous practical benefits of belonging to a community far outweigh such abstractions as political philosophy. If the people you know and love and trust happen to love and trust and think they know Bush, then he must be okay.
This is what the GOP has going for it. By propagating Republican beliefs among their congregations, the evangelical churches form a kind of permanent party.
The Democrats, on the other hand, exist (as far as most people are concerned) only at election time. The rest of the time the party might as well be in mothballs in the attic. Come an election they'll ask you for money, they'll ask you to volunteer, they'll ask for your vote, but the rest of the time they might as well not exist. And that's the problem.
The second smartest thing Dean did--in the long term, possibly the smartest, but only if the party expands on it--was to create communities of supporters. The Dean Meetups added a social function, an element of fun and a sense of community, to the business of campaigning. People met and talked and had a good time and formed networks of friends and probably fell in love sometimes and campaigned for Dean.
What I would love to see is a permanent Democratic Party--an organization that exists in tangible ways providing tangible benefits at the local level. An organization that has regular events--not just campaign events but social events, charitable events, recreational events, public service days. An organization that people can point to and say 'they throw an awesome party' and 'they do real good in the community'. An organization reaching into the reddest of the red counties where Democrats feel like mute isolated freaks, emboldening them to speak up with the knowledge that they are after all part of a community.
A permanent party.
Only within the last 10 years or so is something like this even feasible...but it is feasible now, and at (relatively) reasonable cost. The Republicans already have their version; this is our chance to even the odds, and if we grab it we could build a majority that would last for decades.
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