Carney: This was the silver lining of the election for me, that these were Democrats who were very comfortable in talking about faith and not just as a personal thing. If I can quote from some E.J. Dionne columns here — Adam Hamilton said: “The gospel isn’t just about a personal faith. It’s about the call to be in the world.” Scott Colom: “When we talk about policy issues we need to talk about it through a faith and values lens.” This is a very important thing that, I think, we struggle with as a country because we rightly see that religion shouldn’t be legislated.
We shouldn’t mandate that people go to church. We shouldn’t impose, through legislation, some specific religion. We can’t establish a religion. But there’s this myth that we should just take our religion out of our brain when we’re talking about politics, or ask our elected officials to do that, too. And the fact is that, if you’re passing a policy — if you’re going to go ahead and say, actually, no, we’re going to expand Medicaid. Why are they doing that? Again, Scott Colom says, well, it’s a biblical duty to serve the poor, not just that it would be good to keep people from starving.
As a Christian, you have to believe that you have to feed the hungry. You have to clothe the naked, house the homeless. This is actually a duty. They think you can do it through the government, and the point is that they are informed by their religion in their policymaking. I think that this needs to be more broadly accepted. And as we become more pluralist, as we get Muslims in the United States Senate, maybe it’ll be easier for us to say, “OK, yes, individual lawmakers and voters are going to be informed by their religion, nobody’s going to impose their own.” But the idea that religion has no place in the public square, that’s a really destructive idea.
Dionne: That was a warmly, “love thy neighbor” thing to do, to quote my column. So thank you for that. And maybe this whole thing is affecting, coming into this room. Two things: I broadly agree with that. A lot of Democrats were religious before and didn’t talk about it. John Kerry is a good example, where he spent a year, after 2004, talking to a lot of theologians; basically asking, “Why was I tongue-tied on this? How could I talk about it?” So it is a myth that Democrats were all godless all those years. That just wasn’t true.
On the other hand, it is very clear that Democrats did find a way, partly because of the nature of the candidates themselves, to talk more about this. And by the way, just if I can put a parenthetical in here, Black politicians have always been very good at talking about faith. And what you saw with Scott Colom was deep in his own tradition. But yes, I think what you’ve got is Democrats being much braver about saying, “We want to have an argument about faith. We want to talk about what faith really demands of us.” And I think they are trying to replace the culture wars with a much broader moral argument. I’ve been writing about this, this year. And the biggest compliment to Democrats is that they talk so much about faith that when the Republicans couldn’t attack them as being anti-religion, they attack them as heretics. And as I tell some Democratic friends, that’s a big improvement for Democrats.
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