POLITICS Culture, lifestyle play role at ballot

The religious right still holds center stage.
ORLANDO SENTINEL
Heading into a presidential election year, the Republican Party faithful are already rolling up their sleeves and passing the collection plate. In church social halls, they are raising money for voter registration, "issue" advertising and "Christian scorecards," which rate candidates on their positions on key cultural issues such as abortion and homosexuality.
In contrast, there is little activity at the other end of the ideological spectrum. Left-wing religious efforts at political mobilization -- where they exist -- seem puny, aged and marginalized.
Conversely, the GOP has co-opted the support of religious voters by focusing their attention on cultural and lifestyle issues, such as gay marriage.
On economic issues, another mainstay of the left, the outlook is no brighter. Despite the loss of 3 million jobs since 2001, they are more likely to object to teaching Darwin in the classroom than to struggling in an economy increasingly based on survival of the fittest.
Churched vs. nonchurched
The poll numbers are ominous for Democratic candidates, who seem to have written off voters with strong religious convictions. A survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that nearly two-thirds of Americans who attend religious services at least once a week vote Republican. For those who say they seldom attend a house of worship, that figure is reversed -- two-thirds vote Democratic.
Today, liberal religion is seen as a spent force, says Mark Tooley, a researcher for the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a conservative Washington, D.C., think tank.
The religious left tended to be elite, as opposed to grass roots, he says. Today's religious right is younger and more vigorous, drawing its support from growing charismatic and nondenominational churches.
"The religious left was mobilized and excited by the civil rights movement and by the anti-Vietnam War movement, and has had difficulty finding equally passionate causes to replace those," Tooley says. "The religious right has abortion, homosexuality and church-state issues that have energized them over the past 25 years. There's no sign that any of these issues are going to go away anytime soon."
Switching sides
Evangelicals who previously voted Democratic because of economic issues are trending Republican because of cultural issues, Tooley says.
"But at the same time, most of those people are still, by and large, not activists by nature," Tooley says. "They are largely middle-class, suburban people who are not drawn to the same kind of economic wedge issues that would excite the religious left or liberal evangelicals."
Nor are they willing to follow their spiritual leaders on other issues. For instance, opposition to the death penalty, globalization and the Iraq war by Roman Catholic bishops and mainline Protestant leaders has failed to generate grass-roots support.
Finding answers
There are a variety of explanations for the virtual collapse of the religious left.
Some believe its members never recovered from the 1970s, when the movement diffused: affirmative action, feminism, gay rights and multiculturalism. Others think the left was simply outmaneuvered and outorganized by the right.
Savvy religious conservatives decided it was a mistake to see political involvement as wrong, thereby conceding the field to liberals. Access to religious television enabled leaders such as the Rev. Pat Robertson and the Rev. Jerry Falwell to build the Christian Coalition and the Moral Majority political movements. The religious left had no comparable figures.
This political shift climaxed in the presidential election of 1980. In a show of political sophistication and pragmatism, evangelicals chose Ronald Reagan -- who was divorced and rarely attended church -- over Jimmy Carter, a born-again Christian and Sunday school teacher.
Evangelical influence
Experts say the eclipse of the religious left by the religious right also may reflect the decline of mainline denominations and the rise of evangelicals in the 1980s -- both politically and theologically.
In November, a group of liberal and moderate religious leaders from mainline denominations announced the formation of a new organization that is trying to fill the gap, calling itself the Clergy Leadership Network.
The group's goal is to become what some called a Christian Coalition of the left. Founders include the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, former chaplain at Yale University, and the Rev. Joan Brown Campbell, former general secretary of the National Council of Churches, a Mahoning Valley native. They are a Who's Who of veterans of the civil-rights and anti-Vietnam War movements.
The odds against the new group are long.
"I don't think it's going to go very far," says Tooley. "Its leaders are largely retired, mainline Protestant leaders. It would have better prospects if it had enlisted pastors of large black churches, or a few liberal evangelical pastors, or more Catholic clergy and bishops. It just doesn't seem to have plugged into the more dynamic and growing parts of American religion."