{"id":46,"date":"2008-05-07T09:03:09","date_gmt":"2008-05-07T09:03:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/stevenwaldman\/2008\/05\/obamas-big-chance-with-evangel.html"},"modified":"2008-05-07T09:03:09","modified_gmt":"2008-05-07T09:03:09","slug":"obamas-big-chance-with-evangel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/stevenwaldman\/2008\/05\/obamas-big-chance-with-evangel.html","title":{"rendered":"Obama’s Big Chance with Evangelicals"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reprinted from the Wall Street Journal Online<\/a>
\nIf Bill Clinton was the first white to be a black president, could Barack Obama be the first non-evangelical to be an evangelical president?
\nHuh? \u2014 you might be grunting.
\nIf Sen. Obama can\u2019t even win moderate white Catholics \u2013- and he lost them again yesterday in Indiana -\u2013 then how on earth could he win evangelicals, the most reliable, conservative base of the Republican Party? He\u2019s pro-choice, pro-gay-rights, and his connection to Rev. Jeremiah Wright has many moderate religious voters worried.
\nAnd yet, if he\u2019s the nominee, Obama has a real chance at winning substantial evangelical support.
\nFirst, evangelicals are in a period of de-alignment from the Republican Party. The leading evangelical pollster George Barna found that only 29% of \u201cborn again\u201d Christians now say they support Republicans, compared with 62% in 2004. That doesn\u2019t mean they\u2019ll flock to Democrats -\u2013 they could end up voting Republican just as much ever -\u2013 but large numbers are up for grabs.
\nSecond, Sen. Obama has been working harder for their support than any other Democrat in recent memory. In his book \u201cThe Audacity of Hope\u201d, instead of describing the religious right as a grotesque, right-wing power grab (as many on the left do), Sen. Obama said that its rise stemmed from Christians \u201cfeeling mocked and under attack.\u201d Far from casting them as bigots, he declared that \u201cmost evangelicals are more tolerant than the media would have us believe.\u201d
\nSen. Obama has ripped Democrats for their failure to tap into the moral and even religious underpinnings of their views. \u201cIf we progressives shed some of our own biases, we might recognize the values that both religious and secular people share when it comes to the moral and material direction of the country,\u201d he wrote.
\nThird, he sounds evangelical. In an interview with the leading evangelical publication Christianity Today, he said, \u201cI am a Christian, and I am a devout Christian. I believe in the redemptive death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. I believe that that faith gives me a path to be cleansed of sin and have eternal life. But most importantly, I believe in the example that Jesus set by feeding the hungry and healing the sick and always prioritizing the least of these over the powerful.\u201d
\nThis is a far cry from Howard Dean who as a candidate in 2004 talked about Job being his favorite book in the New Testament.
\nFinally, Sen. Obama\u2019s race may actually be a plus with some evangelicals. Lauren Winner, a popular young evangelical author and assistant professor of divinity at Duke University, predicts that evangelicals will go for Sen. Obama \u201cin droves\u201d not only because Sen. Obama seems to embody \u201cgood values\u201d but also because the black church \u201cstrikes white Christians as \u2018real religion,\u2019 \u2018real Christianity\u2019 in a way that Clinton\u2019s Methodism or McCain\u2019s Episcopalianism do not.\u201d
\nLet me now offer up the contrary evidence. In a poll of Ohio voters, Sen. Clinton beat Sen. Obama among evangelicals. My Beliefnet colleague Dan Gilgoff (a.k.a. Mr. God-o-meter) is skeptical. In Indiana, Sen. Clinton beat Sen. Obama among weekly churchgoers 52% to 48%, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright no doubt hurting among whites.
\nBut I suspect that evangelicals will split according to age, income and class lines, just as other groups did. In fact, in an online survey on Beliefnet.com of evangelicals, Sen. Obama\u2019s favorable ratings for evangelicals 45 and older was 42% while his favorable ratings for those younger than that was 64.4%
\nI\u2019m certainly not saying this will be easy. The majority of evangelicals are conservative and will likely still vote Republican. But given that evangelicals make up a quarter of the electorate and a third of President Bush\u2019s winning coalition, if Sen. Obama can at least get what Bill Clinton got in 1996 (32% of white evangelicals) instead of what Sen. John Kerry did in 2004 (22%) that could make the difference between victory and defeat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reprinted from the Wall Street Journal Online If Bill Clinton was the first white to be a black president, could Barack Obama be the first non-evangelical to be an evangelical president? Huh? \u2014 you might be grunting. If Sen. Obama can\u2019t even win moderate white Catholics \u2013- and he lost them again yesterday in Indiana…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nObama's Big Chance with Evangelicals - Steven Waldman<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/stevenwaldman\/2008\/05\/obamas-big-chance-with-evangel.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Obama's Big Chance with Evangelicals - Steven Waldman\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Reprinted from the Wall Street Journal Online If Bill Clinton was the first white to be a black president, could Barack Obama be the first non-evangelical to be an evangelical president? Huh? \u2014 you might be grunting. If Sen. 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He's also the author of the Founding Faith: Politics, Providence, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America, which has been published by Random House. Before co-founding Beliefnet in 1999, Waldman was a political journalist, serving as National Editor of U.S. News & World Report and National Correspondent for Newsweek. 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