I was surprised and pleased (and responsive) when I recently received a solicitation from a religious group from the left. I have often wondered where they were.
The Washington Post has a round-up story this morning. These three ‘graphs caught my eye.
Conservative Christian activist Gary L. Bauer said the religious left “is getting more media attention” but “it’s not clear” that it is getting more organized.
“My reaction is ‘Come on in, the water’s fine’ . . . but I think that when you look at frequent church attenders in America, they tend to be pro-life and support marriage as one man and one woman, and so I think the religious left is going to have a hard time making any significant progress” with those voters, he said.
…Liberal evangelicals are ” leaping out of the closet and they are saying ‘Enough is enough,’ ” said Jack Pannell, spokesman for Sojourners, a Washington-based evangelical social justice ministry. “Evangelical Christians are not all white people living in the suburbs and only concerned with abortion and same-sex marriage.”
Without some research I can’t disprove what my neighbor Gary Bauer says. But I’ll leave you with this from “The Politics of Definition”:
In reality, emerging suburban voters are tax-sensitive and concerned about government waste, but not ideologically antigovernment. They tend to be religious and family-oriented, but socially moderate (emphasis added) in comparison to rural residents. They are not anti-business, but they do hold populist attitudes toward corporate abuse and people who game the system. And they worry as much or more about public education as they do about moral values. (Teixeira, “The Next Frontier: A New Study of Exurbia”)