Democrats: Get religion!

AFTER the deluge, the hand-wringing: What's a Democrat to do?

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Already proposals abound for an extreme makeover. The party has moved too far to the right and needs to veer left. The party has moved too far to the left and needs to veer right. The party needs to stay in the center and wait for demographic shifts (more Hispanics, fewer farmers) to color the country blue.

Such analyses wrongly assume that this election was largely about issues. It was not. This was a faith-based election that signals the consolidation of a new kind of politics -- a cultural politics in which personality trumps policy and faith matters more than facts.

According to widely cited exit polls, voters focused more on "moral values" than on the economy, terrorism, or Iraq. But what does this mean? It means that values voters are with the Republicans on the bedroom issues of abortion, stem cell research, and gay marriage. More important, it means that Americans in the red states want a man in the Oval Office who shares their values, which is to say they want the president to be a man of faith.

Senator Kerry's people knew that. They worried about the "God gap," which has frequent churchgoers favoring Republicans over Democrats by roughly 20 percentage points. And gradually they got religion. "We worship an awesome God in the blue states," Barack Obama testified. And Kerry learned to testify, too, albeit in the starchy manner of a buttoned-up New Englander. But a former acolyte does not a man of faith make, and Kerry never convinced enough of us that he is as fluent a speaker of Catholicism as Teresa Heinz Kerry is of French. His confessions seemed to spring from the head, not the heart. And though he quoted from the Epistle of James ("Faith without works is dead"), he was never quite able to bring his own Catholicism alive. And so he lost. And the "man of faith" won.

Now that the election has divided the Union yet again into blues and reds, Thomas Frank's "What's the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America" has become a must read. Here Frank vents about how Republicans conned Kansas farmers and Wal-Mart greeters into voting for tax cuts for the rich. By dangling before these innocents false promises of an abortion-free America, Republicans bamboozled the good people of Kansas into voting against their economic interests. So what to do? Run left, Frank argues. Protect the interests of working people, not those of big corporations. Then watch America turn as blue as John Lee Hooker. So goes the sort of liberal the heartland loves to hate.

The problem with this analysis is that there's nothing the matter with Kansas. As anyone who has ever hugged an evangelical can tell you, red-state Americans are not confused about their economic interests. They are simply subordinating them to what they believe are more important matters.

Believe what you want about the separation between church and state, the fact is that there is now a de facto religious test when it comes to the presidency. In applying that test, Americans are not zealots. What they want is a president who speaks their language, and that language is shot through with biblical idioms.

Democrats need to learn this vernacular. They need to develop their own cultural politics -- a politics that does not sneer at the deepest commitments of the vast majority of the American people. They need to get right with God. Religion and politics have never been utterly distinct in the United States. To insist otherwise is to cede "moral values" (and the White House) to conservatives.

Toward the end of his campaign, Kerry began to connect the dots between his policies and popular piety. In his convention speech, for example, he adroitly linked the Ten Commandments with proposals for Social Security reform. ("We believe in the family value expressed on one of the oldest commandments: `Honor thy father and thy mother.' ")

Such efforts were too little too late. But it is not too late for the Democrats to build on them. Black ministers have for centuries been drawing political lessons from the Old Testament prophets. Progressive evangelicals in the Sojourners community of Washington, D.C., have for decades been insisting that the "culture of life" should extend to prisoners on death row.

Elections, particularly at the presidential level, are about aspirations, dreams, faith, and hope -- what the theologian Paul Tillich called "ultimate concerns." The Republicans understand that. The people of Kansas understand that. It's time the Democrats did too.

Stephen Prothero is the chairman of the department of religion at Boston University and the author of "American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon."