Democrats shift to embrace religious left

By Samuel G. Freedman, New York Times News Service

Sunday, Aug. 28, 2016 | 2 a.m.

Four months ago, as Hillary Clinton turned her attention from the Democratic primary toward a fall race against Donald Trump, her campaign released a commercial titled “Love and Kindness.”

Against the soundtrack of a soulful ballad, the advertisement showed Clinton in a series of warm embraces, including one with a grieving mother. The onscreen text included the phrase “do all the good we can, in all the ways we can, for all the people we can.”

Through secular eyes, the advertisement linked Clinton to some resolutely uncontroversial concepts — hope, kindness, love, good. In doing so, it sought to soften the perception that she is untrustworthy and unlikable.

From a theological viewpoint, however, the commercial communicated in profound and coded ways. The music evoked a cappella gospel quartets. The text echoed an axiom of the Methodist Church, Clinton’s lifelong denomination. The very title of the spot could well have been “Agape and Chesed.”

“Agape” is the Greek word for the Christian ideal of “the love of God operating in the human heart,” as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once put it. And “chesed” is the Hebrew term for goodness or mercy, which the first full English translation of the Bible, made by Myles Coverdale in 1535, rendered as “lovingkindness.”

The religious resonances typify a strain of spiritual language that has been a part of Clinton’s general election campaign, reaching its apogee at the Democratic National Convention.

During his speech to the Democratic convention, for instance, Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey declared, “We are called to be a nation of love.” The Rev. William J. Barber II, a Protestant minister who has led the “Moral Mondays” civil rights protests in North Carolina, told the delegates, “We must shock this nation with the power of love.” Sen. Tim Kaine, the vice presidential candidate, called his Catholic faith “a North Star for orienting my life” toward the “fight for social justice.” One of the most ubiquitous placards on the convention floor featured the religiously inflected pun: “Love Trumps Hate.”

This repeated adoption of God-talk by liberals signals a shift from the rhetorical norms of the last 40 years in presidential politics. Beginning with the prominent role of the group Moral Majority in Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign, conservative Republicans were the ones linking their political positions to Christian principles. In mobilizing their own constituency, Democrats deplored the specter of religious influence on public policy.

Now those roles have become more contested. Trump has received some high-level evangelical endorsements and has told conservative pastors in Florida that his presidency would preserve “religious liberty” and reverse what he called a government-enforced muzzling of Christians. He captured the Republican nomination in part by carrying a plurality of evangelical voters, but has alienated a large portion of theologically conservative Roman Catholics and Mormons who are normally reliable elements in the Republican base.

The Clinton campaign, meanwhile, has given voice to the religious principle of love — an explicitly Christian concept that is espoused by most monotheistic faiths — as the root of liberal policies.

“It was extraordinary during the convention to hear this discussed explicitly and implicitly,” said the Rev. Dr. Otis Moss III, the pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago and the author of a forthcoming book about the scriptural interplay of love and justice.

“Most of America views love in a very sentimental capacity,” Moss said. “But the way God loves us — agape — is not about me liking someone or me feeling good about someone, but about God making a deep demand” on humans to seek the kind of equitable society that King termed “the beloved community.”

Jennifer A. Herdt, a professor of Christian ethics at Yale Divinity School, made a similar observation.

“Liberals have been more comfortable talking about justice than love,” she said. “What we’re now seeing is the recovery of an understanding of love and justice as connected to each other, this notion of love reviving the heart of democracy. Because democracy has a heart. It’s not just about your individual project. It’s about coming together.”

Indeed, Trump’s serial disparagements of Muslims, Mexican immigrants, disabled people, African-American protesters and women — and his campaign’s popularity among white supremacists and anti-Semites — gave the Democrats a wide berth to position themselves as the party of lovingkindness.

However expedient in this election cycle, the party’s decision to use religiously inflected language reflects a shift. Of course, virtually every candidate for president has intoned the expected mantra “God bless America.” The “civic religion” of Cold War America, with its evocation of a “Judeo-Christian tradition,” was used by politicians of all stripes to contrast devout America from “godless Communism.”

Yet the first Catholics to seek the presidency — the Democratic candidates Alfred E. Smith, in 1928, and John F. Kennedy, in 1960 — had to publicly promise not to take orders from the pope in order to quell bigoted attacks. On issues such as abortion, same-sex marriage and aid to parochial schools, the Democrats have coalesced around separation of church and state.

The one contrary example in modern liberalism was the civil rights movement. No matter how much progressives might wish to play it down, that political effort was organized by members of the clergy, mobilized through churches and infused with religious language. In a 1962 sermon, “Levels of Love,” King based the quest for civil rights in agape’s command that humans should emulate God by loving others, even their enemies, however different in class, race, religion, and political belief.

In this exceptionally divisive presidential campaign, such Christian language has connected to people in other faiths — especially those who have been on the recent receiving end of bias and hate crimes.

“The language of the civil rights movement is deeply familiar to anyone who is familiar with the Quran,” said Omid Safi, the director of Duke University’s Islamic Studies Center. “One of the most-known verses in the Quran is that God commands you to engage in love and justice. And to love your fellow human being in that way is to merge with the divine current.”

Valarie Kaur, a filmmaker and activist who is Sikh, said she heard in the convention’s language a version of her religion’s concept of “chardi kala,” meaning to serve God and humanity through “relentless love and optimism.”

“We’ve seen a resurgence of the language of love this election season for a reason,” she said. “The escalation of hate and vitriol has been so extreme and confrontational that Americans are hungry for a potent language in return.”

The Clinton campaign’s use of religious rhetoric does, of course, have its downside and its detractors. The hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee, which is supposed to remain neutral during the party’s primary, showed its staff members trying to undermine Sen. Bernie Sanders’ vigorous challenge to Clinton by calling attention to his atheism.

Writing recently in Crisis Magazine, Paul G. Kengor, a political scientist and self-described Reagan conservative, retracted his praise for Clinton’s attitudes about traditional marriage and religious liberty in light of her support for same-sex marriage.

John Cavadini, a professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame, suggested that the Democrats’ “love language” can be heard in two very different ways depending on who is listening.

“It draws on Christian vocabulary, but doesn’t appear to have overtly religious content,” he said. “It seems to come from a more secular, civil kind of spirituality. But when you start using that language, maybe it does bring about a certain elevation of political discourse and insert an ideal that is deeper than the rhetoric. At least it’s better than hate language.”