The "God Gap" Revisited

Beliefnet's Steven Waldman has an interesting blog tracking religious themes at the GOP convention. Previously, he has argued that the purported "God gap" between the parties is simply a church attendance gap, pointing out that other measures of faith (e.g., daily prayer) do not vary too much between Dems and Republicans. He uses this thesis to put a different spin on the question that has been discussed endlessly by the politically and religiously minded among us:

At a panel discussion Tuesday morning, Michael Cromartie, head of Evangelical Studies at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, suggested that the gap exists because 15% of Democratic voters now are secular, and the party has avoided religious rhetoric and moved to the left on social issues in order to appease that voting block. That in turn has made the party less welcoming to religious voters. The two Democratic panel members disagreed with each other over whether that was true. Mike McCurry, Bill Clinton's former press secretary, felt there was a grain of truth to that theory, but his old friend John Podesta, the former White House chief of staff, said he couldn't recall a single meeting where any adjustments in rhetoric or policy were made to appeal to secularists. "I just have never heard that point made," he said.

This being the Republican convention, the focus was on what mistakes the two political parties have made. But it's also time we asked what this God gap says about religion. Conversely, the question is not why less-frequent attenders vote Democratic, but why Democrats are drawn to church less often. Why are progressive houses of worship unable to create an urgent reason for liberal people to show up on Sundays?

That's a good question, and undoubtedly many factors are implicated. Skeptics will say that attendance drops as the threat of eternal damnation recedes into the background. Let me offer one other possibility. I've attended conservative evangelical churches, Episcopal churches that fall squarely in the "progressive" column, and Catholic churches. In my experience, as churches become more suspicious of the "supernatural" elements of scripture and church tradition (a suspicion that pervades much of mainline Protestantism and provided the foundation for modern evangelicalism's rise), it becomes more difficult to maintain a communal conception of Christianity as a set of transcendent truth claims. Commitments to worthy social causes and fellowship must be central to any Christian congregation, but without an abiding belief that the faith tradition is more than a tradition, church involvement has the tendency to take its place among the ranks of worthwhile activities to be pursued as time permits, rather than a non-negotiable manifestation of a person's core convictions.

Rob