THE CENTRIFUGAL FORCES BUILD:

Pilgrim's Progress?: John Kerry's dubious approach to religion. (Steven Waldman, June 29, 2004, Slate)

As you may already know, one of America's two political parties is extremely religious. Sixty-one percent of this party's voters say they pray daily or more often. An astounding 92 percent of them believe in life after death. And there's a hard-core subgroup in this party of super-religious Christian zealots. Very conservative on gay marriage, half of the members of this subgroup believe Bush uses too little religious rhetoric, and 51 percent of them believe God gave Israel to the Jews and that its existence fulfills the prophecy about the second coming of Jesus.

Liberals could read these statistics and sneer about "those silly Republicans" were it not for the fact that it's the Democrats who hold these beliefs. And the abovementioned ultrareligious subgroup is not the so-called "Religious Right" but rather the so-called "African-Americans." [...]

[T]he Kerry campaign suffers from the fact that while most Democrats are religious, many liberal Democratic activists are not. Perhaps the real problem with the paucity of African-Americans at senior levels of the Kerry campaign is not that he doesn't understand racial language but that—forgive the gross stereotyping—the white aides tend to be more tone deaf about religion than the black ones.

It may also be that Kerry is suffering from over-identification with John F. Kennedy. He seems to have decided that the best way to deal with religion in this campaign is the same way Kennedy (the last Catholic Democratic contender) did. JFK1 emphasized the separation of church and state and so, therefore, should Kerry.

If that's the case, Kerry is learning the wrong lessons from that campaign. His and Kennedy's dilemmas were utterly different, requiring different solutions. Kennedy's problem was Protestants. Kerry's is Catholics.

The problem for Democrats is that having lost control of the machinery of government they can no longer transfer sufficient money to buy off all their constituent groups, so ideological differences start to matter.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 4, 2004 7:20 AM