The Party Faithful : How and Why Democrats are Closing the God Gap by Amy Sullivan [book review]

The Party Faithful : How and Why Democrats are Closing the God Gap by Amy Sullivan [book review]

Some on-line progressives to dismiss Amy Sullivan as a concern troll, mainly those who have managed to convince themselves that Democrats can somehow regain power without reconciling themselves to the vast majority of voters who take religion more seriously than they take politics. That they are wrong does not make Sullivan right on all counts, but she is certainly a voice worth hearing.

The book starts with a narrative of how Democrats lose the Evangelical and Catholic vote. History is rarely confined to a single narrative, but there is much to recommend Sullivan’s chronicle. To a great extent, Democrats did write off both groups as holding positions incompatible with the party’s. The most adept Republicans recognized that politics consists of unifying those holding differing positions to build a governing coalition. There can be no doubt that much that the Republicans did was deceitful and damaged both the party and the co-opted religious groups in a very short run. That does not excuse the Democrats for their failures.

Sullivan moves on to the Clinton years, in a chapter subtitled “faithful presidency”. This might seem like a bit of a stretch, but she hits the nail on the head in the following chapter on “John Kerry’s Religion Disaster.” It certainly wasn’t that Kerry was not a faithful Christian and a thoughtful Catholic, but that he pretended that whole part of his life didn’t matter. Religion matters to most religious people. Sullivan is right in pointing out that his response worked for Kennedy, but JFK didn’t have to address abortion. Forty years later, a lot has changed.

Similarly, Sullivan’s prescriptions for making the Democratic Party more “religion-friendly” have a lot of merit. It is not enough to show that the Republicans have been hypocrites or that they cynically manipulated believers, Democrats must earn votes. Nothing wrong with that. In a democracy, building coalitions is how you achieve the power to accomplish things.

Sullivan’s book is valuable to religious progressives for its narrative strength, though it will have little shocking to most of them. Those who want to either use or exclude religion will find little here of value.