Faith-based Politics

An excerpt from Jan Linn:

That Republican strategist Karl Rove has pandered to the religious right is not a reason for his opponents to do their own pandering. I say this not to disparage the integrity of the candidates, but to name the nature of the game they are playing.

I was among those Christians who reacted to the Christian right by joining "People of Faith for Kerry." Our group met weekly, bought ads in newspapers across the state voicing our support for Kerry as Christians, and had T-shirts made that carried our message. I spent a large portion of my day at the Minnesota State Fair talking to people who stopped me because of the T-shirt I was wearing.

Looking back, I see this as a colossal blunder. I was committed to making a public statement that Christians could in fact be Democrats. But like members of the Christian right, we were aligning ourselves with partisan politics, leaving us vulnerable to the charge that what we believed in as Christians was nothing more than partisan politics. We ignored the fact that liberal politicians use religion to their political advantage just as conservatives do. The goal of the Kerry campaign in creating People of Faith for Kerry was to elect John Kerry. That, after all, is what political campaigns do.