Latter Day Martyrs

Since we don’t yet have a firm date for an Irish vote of any kind, we might as well look at elections somewhere else for some material. In today’s Irish Times, Breda O’Brien (subs. req’d) takes a look at the US election and in particular the apparent phenomenon of Evangelical voters looking for a more “liberal” message in the form of Mike Huckabee than their past loyalties to conservative Republican candidates would indicate. Drawing from a column by Nicholas Kristof, she observes:

Mike Huckabee is a Baptist minister. Once an Irish person (or indeed, many Americans) hears that he does not subscribe to the theory of evolution, it is enough to write him off as a troglodyte. However, he has been deeply influenced by those who believe that there is a biblical mandate to care about issues like climate change, poverty, and a just end to the war in Iraq.

Ironically, Huckabee does not just have to worry about liberal intolerance, but the intolerance of those within both evangelical and Republican ranks who see him as some kind of left-wing nut because he is “soft” on say, immigration …

I wrote recently that there is too much of a good thing when it comes to religion in American politics. Yet, despite the fact that potential candidates are virtually forced to take a position on a religious continuum that ranges only from believer to really staunch believer, pundits still often read the religious question badly …

It is too easy to write off all evangelicals as a monolith - easy, and lazy. Given that evangelicals are such an important force, all the candidates, Democratic and Republican, will be chasing their votes. As Huckabee has demonstrated, the greater diversity among that group makes it a far from easy task. Romney was not accused of being a flip-flopper, just more of a flipper. He flipped his views on everything from guns to abortion towards a stance that he thought might win him more conservative voters. It did not work, despite throwing squillions of dollars at the campaign.

So: Huckabee is succeeding because he has found a new niche among evangelical voters, but the pundits miss it because they don’t recognize the importance of religion in US politics. Perhaps. But with one of the background facts for the column being Huckabee’s success over Mitt Romney, it’s strange not to mention Romney’s religion: Mormonism. At which point the issue is not that Irish people or pundits find Evangelicals weird, but that many American Christians find Mormons weird.

An article in the Wall Street Journal (subs. req’d; alt free link) examining the reason for Romney’s failure looked at this exact issue –

A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll in late January revealed that 50% of Americans said they would have reservations or be “very uncomfortable” about a Mormon as president. That same poll found that 81% would be “enthusiastic” or “comfortable” with an African-American and 76% with a woman.

The Mormon religion “was the silent factor in a lot of the decision making by evangelicals and others,” says Democratic pollster Peter Hart, who conducted the poll. The Romney campaign ran into “a religious bias head wind,” Mr. Hart and his Republican polling partner, Bill McInurff, wrote late last month.

As the article explains, the Mormon religion was the subject of a series of criticisms by high profile pundits, Christian and atheist, although in the latter category it was strange for Christopher Hitchens to attack it as a “mad cult” since he thinks all religions are mad cults.

So the point is not to go too far in seeing Americans as more tolerant of religion in politics than Irish people. After all, our friends up North have put the Reverend Ian Paisley in many positions of power over the last 40 years.

Finally, chastened pundits may want to see the Mike Huckabee boomlet as evidence of a surge of liberal evangelicalism that they had previously missed. But it’s not clear that’s how the people who vote for him see it. All his primary victories have been in the South, no doubt helped by him being the only evangelical candidate on offer — and that aforementioned religious (not policy) distrust of Romney.

In fact, his electoral pattern bears a strong resemblance to that of George Wallace (minus the racism): he’s running as a the real Godfearin’ southerner, the outsider who will shake up the establishment, but whose only hope of success is to pile up enough delegates in winner-take-all southern primaries to leave him (in a best case scenario) with the balance of power at the convention. Which is unlikely to happen.