Can Democrats Marry Progressive Politics with Religion? (They Have in the Past)

Political pundits are labeling presidential adviser Karl Rove a genius for focusing the attention of his boss upon such “moral” issues as same-sex marriage and abortion and working to attract the four million evangelicals to the polls who sat out the 2000 election. Meanwhile, Democrats targeted Ohio and its loss of manufacturing jobs as the most likely electoral prize to upset President Bush, who is the first President since Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression to preside over a net loss of jobs during his tenure (unless the December and January numbers come in as strongly as last month's).

The Democratic strategy seemed sound. Cities such as Youngstown, Ohio, once a center of steel production in this country, have lost population and jobs. Steel plants close to be replaced by the burgeoning prison industry, and former steelworkers are saddled with lower paying and non-unionized jobs as prison guards for the growing incarcerated population of this nation. Yet this Democratic issue of jobs was apparently successfully trumped by the moral issues of abortion and single sex marriage which evangelicals perceived as more threatening to their way of life than an economy in decline.

This reading of the 2004 election is likely to produce a great deal of hand-wringing among liberals as well as jeremiads about the separation between church and state and how television evangelists are misleading the working people of this nation. Of course, many evangelicals come from comfortable middle class backgrounds, but those on the political left are on target when they observe that many working class people vote against their own economic interests in favoring candidates whose rhetoric focuses upon social agendas which they will never be able to enact. On the other hand, these same conservative candidates successfully implement economic policies which favor the wealthy and hurt the working class. A good example of this would be the successful Senate candidacies of Tom Coburn in Oklahoma and Jim DeMint in South Carolina. Taking such extreme positions as urging the death penalty for doctors who perform abortions and banning single pregnant women from teaching in the public schools, these two men used moral outrage to fuel their candidacies, while at the same time advocating a regressive national sales tax to replace the federal income tax; a measure which would increase the tax burden upon the working class people of their states. This political strategy of talking more about moral issues while enriching the wealthy at the expense of the working and middle classes has worked well for the Republican Party since the 1980s and is well documented in Thomas Frank’s insightful book What’s the Matter with Kansas?

So what are the liberals to do about this state of affairs—bemoan the ignorance and anti-intellectualism of the working class and poor? Perhaps some history will shed a bit of light here. With the construction of the Erie Canal in the early nineteenth-century linking the Great Lakes with Hudson River and New York harbor, western New York boomed economically. This prosperity, however, proved to be short-lived for with the competition of new technology such as railroads, business was less dependent upon the canal, and the region suffered a devastating depression or “panic” as it was called in those days. Jobless workers who were terrified about how to feed their families assumed that the Biblical last days were near. Surely, God would be not let such an economic disaster befall his people. As western New York suffered economically in the 1820s and 1830s, the region was swept by a religious revival movement in which many workers sought solace believing that the “second coming” of Jesus was nigh. This religious fervor produced what some historians have labeled the “burned over district” as people of the region were exhausted by the emotionalism of preparing for the new millennium. Out of this ferment came the Second Great Awakening, Shakers, Millerites, and Mormonism. While the Shakers who advocated celibacy as a way to purify oneself for the millennium died out and William Millers’s calculations for the exact day of Jesus’ return proved to be erroneous, the Mormon faith continues to grow in converts. But the reaction to the economic plight of the region also produced more secular responses which mingled with the religious fervor. Utopian communities such as Oneida were formed to address the crushing economic burdens suffered by families and provide more communal solutions to the materialism of Jacksonian society. A working class alliance between laborers and farmers formed the backbone of the Democratic Party in New York State during the Jacksonian period.

This legacy of combining religion and progressive politics was also apparent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the Populist Party, Social Gospel of progressive America, and grass-roots socialism which garnered popular political support in such prairie states as Kansas and Oklahoma. During the Great Depression, such populist radicals as folk singer Woody Guthrie combined images of Christianity and progressive working class politics. After all, Jesus was a working class carpenter.

However, this progressive strain in evangelical Christianity has been largely ignored in recent years. Democrats must address issues of war, health care, education, housing, and security in a populist fashion which is never condescending and respectful of more traditional values. In recent years, our increasingly conservative and corporate media have succeeded in selling fear to Americans with depictions of terrorism and crime. What progressive Democrats must do is convince working class Americans that the real danger is not the gay or lesbian couple living next door, but rather the increasing power of a corporate America which has no sense of values. While the Fox News channel embraces the politics of George W. Bush, the Fox Network of Rupport Murdoch produces reprehensible programming which is unsuitable for our children. Progressives must hold corporate America responsible for the lack of compassion and concern for values beyond the profit motive. And this must be done in a fashion which is respectful of families. Appearing with celebrities who spout four letter words we do not want our children to hear is not going to endear working and middle class families to the banner of progressive Democrats. The election of 2004 should not produce despair on the left. The working people of this country in places like Youngstown, Ohio deserve more than to be abandoned to the manipulations of Karl Rove and his corporate allies. From the Burned Over District to the social gospel to Woody Guthrie there is a progressive religious tradition which should and must be tapped beyond the fears and narrow faith-based initiatives of the current administration.