Double standards for values voters

There’s so much hand-wringing going on over the ‘religious right’ and ‘values voters’ in the media and politics that a commentary calling the bluff of the hand-wringers is unusual and refreshing.

Patrick Hynes and Jeremy Lott did that in an opinion piece in USA Today yesterday.

The religious right has been demonized for pursuing a political agenda aligned with its beliefs. When the religious left acts in kind, shouldn’t the same scrutiny be applied to its progressive push?

Good question. Here are some more:

Should our laws be based on the Ten Commandments? How much religion in government is too much? When does legitimate participation by the pious in civic life take on troubling theocratic overtones? These are questions that conservative religious leaders wish the press would put to them.

Ah, but the press would have to be intellectually honest, and fair and balanced, to do that. So thankfully, we now have the benefit of blogs and op-ed commentaries like this to get voices of reason the attention they deserve.

In our political tradition, most evangelicals and other conservative Christians today are really moderates. They want a government that is non-sectarian without being hostile to organized religion and people of faith. That’s a whole lot closer to what the Founders had in mind than the officially godless public square advocated by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Face it. The honesty of this is just refreshing.

What’s more, the creation of the religious right was largely a function of the courts and politicians pushing the boundaries the other way. Evangelicals were moved to civic activism because the IRS threatened to revoke the tax-exempt status of private Christian schools; because the U.S. Supreme Court removed abortion from the political process; because mentions of the Almighty began to be scrubbed from valedictory addresses for fear that someone, somewhere might take offense. Today, the term “goddamn” is treated as protected speech, but remove the “damn” and watch the lawsuits roll in.

Point starkly made. You have to flinch at how true that is.

So evangelicals did the only responsible thing they could in a democracy. They organized and reached out. They found allies in churchgoing Roman Catholics, mainline Protestants, Jews and even some agnostics who believed that religion plays a vital role in holding society together. In this they were not so different from the civil rights leaders of the past, whose rallying cry was the God-given dignity of every American. The new coalition grew over time to the point that the religious right (or “values voters,” if you prefer) became the single largest voting bloc in American politics. 

That fact is intolerable to many intellectuals.

It takes for granted that those considered to be “intellectuals” in this country, are…what?…the ‘anti-religious left,’ by contrast. And they do tend to run most of the think tanks and universities.

But these guys make another really good point somewhere around the middle of the piece, one that we virtually never hear. That these critics have actually come up with a counterbalance to the ‘religious right,’ besides the anti-religious left.

As proof, we offer Exhibit A: the religious left. No comparable group of political activists has received as much news media attention since the last election.

According to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, religious lefties are about 7% of the electorate. They are called on regularly by Democratic politicians seeking to win over values voters.

What’s interesting is that leaders of the religious left have not been hit with a similar and constant charge of “theocracy.” This despite the fact that religious lefties articulate public policy positions in the context of the Bible and frame their political entreaties in the moral “values” language we are accustomed to hearing from Christian conservatives.

Think back to 2002, when the Evangelical Environmental Network launched the “What Would Jesus Drive?” campaign. It wasn’t a joke. It was an attempt by the religious left to convince Christian voters that “transportation is a moral issue” and that they should therefore “advocate for government policies,” including higher fuel economy standards and more public transportation. As with cars, so with a whole lot of other things. This small but loud minority wants to remake America with its own interpretation of Christ’s teachings.

And that’s what we need to understand, that it’s not just an occasional odd ad campaign for cars, or soundbite from a political operative spinning the Gospel their way. It’s an agenda to excise the Judeo-Christian tradition out of the social fabric that was woven with those principles.

As I said in the posts below on this subject, everyone is a values voter. Don’t be foooled by rhetoric. Someone’s set of values will prevail in an election.