Harris–Walz Campaign Hires Activist to Woo Religious Voters

05.09.2024 05:06

It looks like Kamala Harris and Tim Walz want God on their side this election.

Does that surprise? After all, this is the party that made its bones as an anti-God party and even booed God at one national convention. Americans who even loosely think the nation’s founders believed God had a role to play in its formation are condemned by these people with scary monikers like “white Christian nationalists.” Nearly all of the Democrats’ social policies push hard against traditional Christian doctrine — they do so on abortion, same-sex marriage, gender identity, and end-of-life issues.

Is Flip-Flopper Inc. reversing its stance on the Almighty as well?

If it means picking up a few extra votes in November, you bet they are. The Harris–Walz campaign has brought onboard a leftist cleric to coordinate faith outreach for the fall campaign. The Rev. Jennifer Butler, a Presbyterian, is a well-known religious activist who will carry the official job title of “national faith engagement director.” She sees her role, according to the Religious News Service, as follows:

I … recognize that we’re at a pivotal moment in American democracy where faith voices for justice are needed now more than ever. The Harris-Walz campaign is a really unique opportunity to shift the debate, to engage all of those who are concerned about what a Trump presidency would mean, the work of this campaign and what it can do to transform America.

She won’t be trying to enlist players from the other team, it seems. That is, unless evangelicals are persuadable by a woman who in 2022 wrote, “We cannot allow our faith to continue to be hijacked by white supremacists covered in religious language.” She calls former President Donald Trump an “autocratic strongman that’s going to control everything” and accuses him and Republicans of “advocating for conservative Christian control and the tamping down of human freedom for Christian nationalism.”

She checks all the requisite leftist boxes — including on immigration rights, voting rights, health-care reform, LGBTQ+ rights, a two-state solution, and outrage over Jan. 6.

The Great Persuader, she is not. She is a get-out-the-vote tool, brought on to preach to the already converted, spurring any dormant voters sitting in mainline pews to darken the Harris–Walz circle on their November ballots.

If there is outreach, it is to those already amenable to vote Left in November. Specifically, Butler talks of reaching out to Catholics in the formerly reliable Rust Belt havens of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and to Mormons in Arizona, an erstwhile solid-red bloc showing troubling tints of purple lately.

The Latter-day Saints number about 440,000 members in the Grand Canyon State. John Giles, the mayor of Phoenix’s largest suburb, Mesa, which was once called the most conservative large city in America, is a Republican, but he is energetically backing Harris. A large contingent of Arizona Mormons fall into the “double-hate” category — they don’t like Trump, true, but they also didn’t like Biden. The Harris campaign hopes they can be inveigled to vote blue this cycle.

While Arizona’s Latter-day Saints’ support for Trump hardly varied from 2016 to 2020 (75 percent in the former, 76 percent in the latter), the Mormon vote for the Democrat jumped from 9 percent in 2016 to 18 percent in 2020. Those 18,000 votes figured largely in Biden’s 10,000-vote victory in Arizona. If Harris can keep that number, or gain on it, she stands a good chance to pick up the swing state’s 11 electoral votes.

Kamala Harris herself is a picture of religious diversity. Raised Hindu, and taken to a Church of God congregation in Oakland by her sister in her youth, she is now a Baptist, an “old-timer” at Third Baptist Church of San Francisco, according to her pastor, Amos Brown.

And she lives her ecumenicity. She lights Hanukkah candles at her house — her husband is Jewish — and celebrates Diwali, a Hindu festival of lights. “She represents a lot of Americans’ religious story, because here’s the thing: Nobody grows up in a straight line with religion in America anymore,” Anthea Butler, a professor of religion at the University of Pennsylvania, told the Religion News Service.

Tim Walz was raised Catholic but married into Lutheranism, and he has been Lutheran ever since, attending now at St. Paul Pilgrim Lutheran Church of the liberal Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). Pilgrim was initially Missouri–Synod, but it bolted for more liberal theological climes in that denomination’s troubles in the 1970s. (See “How a Church Fought Back Against a Liberal Takeover – And Won.”)

Although it has largely hidden its website from nonmembers in the wake of Walz’s nomination — because of all that unwelcome press attention, no doubt — the congregation appears to be fully onboard with the leftist agenda. According to an essay by Robert Benne in First Things, the church is all-in on LGBTQ+ rights. On its website, it lists its staff members’ pronouns and says that it “uses a version of the Lord’s Prayer that avoids patriarchal language: ‘Our guardian, our mother, our father in heaven, hallowed be thy name.’”

An answer to whether Democrats’ enlisting God on their side will pay dividends in votes will have to wait until November.

The Attack on Catholic America

The post Harris–Walz Campaign Hires Activist to Woo Religious Voters appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.