Liberals and Religion (Again)

There has been continued talk of religion and politics, and it occurs to me that my post about religious squabbles among liberals doesn't really address one of the key issues people like Ed Kilgore and Amy Sullivan are raising: outreach to evangelicals who are disenchanted with the Republicans. This is a fairly important point, and it deserves a response.

So here's my response to Kilgore and Sullivan: be my guest. Go ahead. Knock yourselves out.

That's not as snarky as it sounds. It just seems like common sense to me: if you are religious and liberal, and you think there is a lot of potential support for liberal causes among religious people who currently think the Democratic party is anti-religious, then it's up to you to try to bring those people in. I honestly don't know if such an effort is likely to work at all, but if you think it will then by all means have at it.

Telling the rest of us (the secular liberals) what we ought to be doing serves no purpose. I am never, ever going to be a credible messenger about faith to people who believe. Nobody who doesn't believe, who doesn't speak and think the language of faith, can be a credible messenger. It's your job. Don't talk about it; do it.

This is not to say that we who don't believe have no part in this. What we can do is not feel threatened by the very idea of outreach to evangelicals. We can acknowledge that faith and liberalism are not incompatible, that a lot of people are motivated by their faith to embrace progressive causes, and embrace their progressivism regardless of what we think about their faith. We can accept that religion is a factor in politics whether we like it or not, and that appealing to faith in the service of liberalism is not a threat to the wall between church and state. Let everyone arrive at progressivism by their own path, provided they arrive here.

There are caveats, of course. Trying to bend policy to fit an evangelical Christian worldview--soft-pedaling gay rights or choice, say, or inventing symbolic 'family friendly' issues--isn't going to convince anyone, and is going to hurt us. We should welcome evangelicals provided they are willing to deal with us as we are: dedicated to individual liberty as well as economic interdependence, to personal tolerance as well as civic virtue.

So, Amy, Ed, Steve, and all of you religious liberals: if you can make that pitch, if you can use the connection of shared faith to bring people into the big tent without compromising the, um, tentpoles--well, then, good for you.

[That's all, folks]