How Would Jesus Vote?

As an evangelical who worked in Democratic politics before entering journalism, I'm used to getting looks from liberals who are embarrassed for me when I use the E-word to describe myself. Confusion flickers across their faces as they instantly reassess my political leanings and intelligence. People who have known me for years start asking whether I watch Fox News and brace for spontaneous proselytizing.

And then there is the more dangerous sort of bias. A few months ago, while participating in an early-morning panel discussion in the heart of Manhattan, I was startled fully awake when a man stood up to declare that Democrats who reached out to religious voters, especially evangelicals, were akin to those who collaborated with the Nazis. I put on a sweet smile of Christian charity and counted to 10.

Comments like that explain why so many of us liberals who also happen to be evangelicals have stayed in the closet for so long. It is hard to overcome decades of suspicion, much of it richly earned by leaders of the religious right who used faith in the cause of a political power grab and in the name of intolerance and fear. But the lingering misconceptions are also painful reminders of the price people like myself have paid for staying silent while others claimed a monopoly on faith. And the country has paid, too.

That thought seems to have been on Sen. Barack Obama's mind last month, at the end of a presidential debate in Myrtle Beach, S.C. "There have been times," Obama said, "when our Democratic Party did not reach out as aggressively as we could to evangelicals because the assumption was, well, they don't agree with us on choice, or they don't agree with us on gay rights, and so we just shouldn't show up. . . . And that means that people have a very right-wing perspective in terms of what faith means and of defining our faith."

Amen. Democrats weren't just passive nonactors who stood by helplessly while the GOP claimed Christ for itself. Instead of pushing back against conservatives' insistence that Democrats aren't religious, the party beat a hasty retreat, ceding the high ground in the competition for religious Christian voters and discussions of morality. The religious divide in U.S. politics that emerged -- call it the God gap -- represented as much a failure by Democrats as it did an achievement by Republicans.

The first religious bloc that professional Democrats wrote off was the evangelicals, despite the fact that fully 40 percent of born-again Christians describe themselves as politically moderate. Then party officials started to steer clear of Catholic voters, spooked by their opposition to abortion. Michael Dukakis's 1988 campaign was the first in Democratic history to turn down all invitations to appear at Catholic venues.

Thus isolated, the professionals who run Democratic campaigns fell into a self-reinforcing spiral of misconceptions about the faithful. As being religious became not just declasse but downright dangerous in Democratic circles, religious Democrats silenced themselves. No one wanted to be lumped in with the likes of Jerry Falwell, who went on Pat Robertson's show "The 700 Club" two days after 9/11 and accused the left of helping cause the attacks.