Piety Parade

A characteristically detailed essay in the Sept. 8 issue of The New Yorker raises the always-hot issue of faith-based voting.

In “Party Faithful,” author Peter J. Boyer’s big-picture implication is that Barack Obama has a realistic chance to wrest large chunks of a dependable core constituency away from a Republican Party still lukewarm toward, and skeptical about, the religious convictions of John McCain.

With the up-front acknowledgement that I am among the world’s worst political handicappers and analysts, I’m not so sure Boyer is right. More to the point, in this specific context I’m not sure I care.

Both McCain and Obama – as Boyer notes and every observer is well aware – have “values voter” problems. McCain first alienated his party’s right wing by condemning its two highest-profile evangelical polemicists, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, as “agents of intolerance"; he soon thereafter alienated the political center by accepting the endorsement of wing-nut End Timer John Hagee.

Obama, of course, has – and deserves – a Jeremiah Wright problem he will never completely shake as he tries to convince Americans in the political center, where elections are won, that he respects and shares their convictions.

Boyer’s essay begins with a detailed analysis of how Karl Rove engineered a “Catholic strategy” for George W. Bush, using as his blueprint Ralph Reed’s earlier success in mobilizing evangelical Protestants. That a lengthy essay on the politics of faith begins on those notes should tell us something about what we’re really dealing with here.

This is election-as-jihad, an exercise in chest-thumping public piety that has probably always been with us, but which has become a cynical political science over the last 30 years or so.

It hijacks the language and postures of faith -- not faith as a defining value system that might tell us something profound and authentic about the men and women who would lead us, but as a carefully and calculatedly crafted tool – one shaped suspiciously like a wedge.

With this tool gripped firmly in hand and waved high aloft for all to see, politicians swagger through campaigns not like Lincoln and Douglas debating for an Illinois Senate seat in 1858, but rather like the King and the Duke in Huckleberry Finn gleefully exploiting the Christian charity of gullible hicks at a tent revival.

Boyer concludes that Obama has “begun to transform the faith-unfriendly Democratic image that made the Republicans’ 2000 and 2004 strategies possible.” It’s a transformation which even Rove claims to admire:

“The overt hostility of some elements of the Democratic Party is being usefully scrubbed away by Obama,” Rove tells Boyer. “And, for that, everybody in America ought to be thankful.”

So Karl Rove looks approvingly on Barack Obama’s appropriation of the rhetoric of faith. For that, everybody in America ought to be skeptical.

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