Amy Sullivan: Appeal to Evangelicals by Denying Your Beliefs

Should the Democratic Party stop trying to be the party of secular government and secular social progress and instead become a party which promotes Christian exceptionalism, Christian beliefs, and liberal Christianity? That appears to be the upshot of just about everything Amy Sullivan writes. She has effectively made a career out of telling everyone who will listen that Democrats need to say less about secularism and say more that will appeal to Christian egos. She's not a cynical manipulator, though. She really believes in what she is saying and even applies it to herself by denying what she believes because it doesn't sound appealing to Christian traditionalism.

You're pro-choice. Does that interfere with being an evangelical?

Well, I don't like the [pro-choice] label. I guess the reason I wrote about abortion the way I did in the book is because I have serious moral concerns about abortion, but I don't believe that it should be illegal. And that puts me in the vast majority of Americans. But unfortunately, there's no label for us.

Source: Salon

Yes, there is a label for you: "pro-choice." As Amanda Marcotte has to explain, "If you think abortion and other forms of contraceptive birth control should be legal - i.e. that women should have the legal right to decide when they have children - you are pro-choice." Amy Sullivan's position is, by definition, pro-choice. Even if she doesn't want to emphasize the "choice" part, it's still pro-choice.

Sullivan reminds me of someone saying "I don't believe in any gods, but I'm not an atheist" or "I believe in full social and political equality for women, but I'm not a feminist." Such statements implicitly accept all the attacks made by anti-atheists or anti-feminists, so that even a person for whom the label is correct is too frightened to accept it publicly. I don't think it's a coincidence that Sullivan is also one of those who doesn't appear to like the "liberal" label and goes instead for "progressive" — implicitly accepting the validity of years of Republican attacks on liberalism.

The political division in America over abortion isn't between those who see abortion as having a moral dimension and those who don't, it's between those who want to keep abortion legal and available on the one hand and those who want it to be criminalized on the other. Amy Sullivan appears to be trying to frame the abortion debate as if it involved the former distinction, which would be incredibly dishonest. We cannot legitimately gloss over the fact that there are people in America who want to make abortion and even contraception punishable crimes. We have to make a distinction between the phrase "I have serious moral concerns about abortion" and "abortion is a subject which necessarily involves serious moral problems." If someone says the first, then I'll believe it is true for them.

The second, however, isn't a true statement. There can be cases where abortion poses serious moral questions, but not ever single instance of abortion does. The Christian Right benefits from a blurring of the distinction between the two because if they can get anyone to agree that any cases of abortion involve moral problems, they can quickly move to saying that abortion is inherently problematic. After getting agreement on the premise that abortion involves serious moral questions they then move to conclude that women can't make those moral decisions herself — and therefore they can't be permitted to legally chose to have an abortion.

The biggest thing Democrats can do is to recognize that evangelicals can and do vote for them. Sixteen million evangelicals voted for John Kerry in 2004. So, to write off the entire constituency from the beginning is to ignore people that are already on your side. And obviously it makes it much harder to add to that total. So absolutely the biggest thing is to recognize that evangelicals are already part of the ranks of the Democratic Party. I point out Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, two evangelical Democrats. So that's not an oxymoron. And the other things are not a matter of pandering to evangelical voters.

It continues to shock people when I talk to Democratic audiences and I remind them that 87 percent of Americans say that religion is an important part of their lives. And that includes a heck of a lot of Democrats. Republicans are not getting 87 percent of the vote. I continue to meet people who insist, and these are hardcore Democrats, who insist to me that Bill Clinton is not religious, that it's just an act, that he had to go to church to put off his Republican critics and that he's really not a religious guy. Who find it inconceivable that Nancy Pelosi is a committed Catholic, [or think] that whenever she talks about faith now it's just the result of advisors and consultants telling her it's smart, when in fact this is a woman who's been quoting the Bible in closed-door meetings for decades. So I do think Democrats are kind of surprised to learn who the religious are in their midst and I think those are mostly the secular Democrats. The religious Democrats who I talk to are somewhat relieved because they had all been thinking that they were all by themselves.

Do you suppose Amy Sullivan was offered some cheese to go with all that whine? I can't take seriously any Christian who feels "alone" in American culture, as if it weren't abundantly clear how much of American society, culture, and politics is not only infused with traditional Christianity, but in face how much of it continues to work to reinforce Christian egos and pride by telling them how superior they are just for identifying as Christians. Christians aren't "alone" or "oppressed," it's just that less and less of American culture is telling them how much more wonderful they are than everyone else. This loss of power, status, and pride is then interpreted as a loss of rights or community.

Welcome to the real world that's been inhabited by non-Christian Americans for decades. As Mike the Mad Biologist puts it:

I don't need or want a political figure to validate my religious beliefs. On the contrary, as a member of a religious minority (and here's where the post title comes in), I feel very uncomfortable when politicians do this, because, almost certainly, they are excluding (or invalidating) other religions, even if they don't realize it. Granted, a non-denominational "Rub-a-dub-dub, thanks for the grub! Yay, God!" type of prayer wouldn't bother me (although I don't really see the need for one in a politically-related setting), but it would probably bother many atheists, who would feel excluded. From personal experience, this sort of exclusion feels awful. And, most importantly, unless you feel the need for religious validation from political figures (and that's just f*****g stupid), it is not necessary.

That's ultimately what bothers me about Sullivan. Protestant Christians have been the theological default setting in the U.S. (while at the same time, some claim to be discriminated against. Go figure...). Now that they're not, they get to join the rest of us religious minority types. If every time their religious beliefs and practices will not be granted special 'supraecumenical' status (even when they're actually quite sectarian), they think they're being discriminated against, then they're going to have a very long next couple of decades.

Amy Sullivan's comments could probably be re-framed to represent pandering to other traditionally privileged classes who have experienced a loss of power and prestige over the past century. We might say, for example, what whites in the Democratic Party have felt "alone" and that Democrats need to attract more white voters by using their language and not pushing racially-neutral ideas so much. Or we might say that men in the Democratic Party have felt "alone" and that Democrats need to attract more male voters by using their language and not pushing gender-neutral ideas.

Not only does that sound absurd, but it in fact sounds like efforts to reassert white and male privileges. Well, that's precisely how Amy Sullivan sounds: it's absurd to say that Christians feel "alone" and it sounds like an attempt to reassert Christian privileges when she argues for less use of secular, religiously neutral language. Even worse is the fact that she admits that religious believers and evangelical Christians are already a part of the Democratic Party, despite all the failings she accuses Democrats of. Apparently, they could be attracted to vote for Democrats on the basis of secular policies defended with secular language — as they should have been. I'm not sure that the Democratic Party should want any other kind of supporter.

So, if all those Christians could be attracted to the Democratic Party with the language and ideas Amy Sullivan is counseling against, who does she really want Democrats to start pandering to?