Democrats move on from God to immorality

 I tried to get this published to the American Thinker web site but they had too many and so rejected it. I leave it here. I have also posted it to the alt.politics discussion forum at https://groups.google.com/g/alt.politics/c/bHPIo12EmqE

    The god Prometheus is credited with giving humans fire “lighting the way to reason, and independence.”  So says a publisher whose authors believe true freedom excludes thoughts about God.  Secular humanists and atheists have consistently reveled in this spiritual liberation while Democrats, though, have romanced the religious while staying aloof of Promethean rebellion.

    In America, conservative religious folk have always suspected, though, that any marriage between Democrats and traditional faith was a marriage of convenience at best.  Democrats, though, need votes requiring them to mouth the required pieties, but the truth still comes out when pundits write about Democrats’ supposed religiosity.  Case in point. In 2007, Nancy Gibbs wrote¹ that Democrats, in 2006, pulled in 67 percent of the secular vote.  The problem?  Conservatives have a “patent on piety,” she suggested, contrasting with liberals who have a “worship of diversity” that “all but excluded the devout.”  Democrats, though, wanted to colonize fresh religious ground to make up for past failures, and there were plenty of those.  Here’s Gibbs on John Kerry in 2004: “when it came to religious voters, as the saying goes, he never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”  Howard Dean did even worse.  On the 700 Club, Dean said Democrats “have an enormous amount in common with the Christian community,” a revealing statement I’d say is akin to oddly quipping that your friend “is not that pretty,”  Apparently, there are no Christians in the Democrat “community.”  Dean’s aides asked state party chairs if they talked to religious leaders or religious press and their response was to say they really did not.

In 2008, liberal apologist Eric Alterman² also noticed this gap among Democrats when recognizing that roughly only twenty -- five percent of voters, in 2006, regarded Democrats as “friendly to religion.”  While offering us examples of some Democrats, FDR for instance, who were friendly toward religious belief, few if any contemporary Democrats are listed to inspire modern spirituality.  Instead, Alterman admits, almost as if in a regretful whine, that no liberals condemn the media for obsessively covering vulgar sexualized preteens.  Alterman does suggest, though, that liberal Democrats can shine in making the moral case against giving large tax cuts to the rich.  The rub is this, then: if someone or something has too much money, liberals are worried about it but not anything passing as traditionally immoral, by Christian or Jewish standards, like sexual deviancy or abortion.

Twelve years later, the divide seems to have worsened as Democrats apparently have abandoned any pretense at pleasing the traditional American religious.  They are, in essence, secular spouses who have put up with their partners’ religiosity for years because they are afraid of what friends will say.  Now they want a divorce, and political commentators are taking notice.
Healing process?  What’s that?  Now Democrats are moving on, flirting with their real true love.  Caleb Parke, writing for Fox News, informs us that the DNC passed a resolution praising "religiously unaffiliated" as the "largest religious group within the Democratic Party," people that “overwhelmingly share the Democrat Party’s values.”
Peter Beinart, writing in the Atlantic, notes that Democrats would usually end their speeches with positive references to God: asking God’s blessings, for instance.  Not anymore.  “Today, by contrast, progressive white candidates more often cite religion as a source of division,” he says.  “While white progressives once described religion as something that brought Americans together, they’re now more likely to describe it as something that drives them apart.”

Michael Wear, a former Obama White House staffer, notes that the fact that 81 percent of white Evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in the last election “shows not just ineptitude, but the ignorance of Democrats in not even pretending to give these voters a reason to vote for them.”  Despite Bill Clinton’s argument that we are stronger together, for liberals, he says, “It’s much easier to make people scared of evangelicals, and to make evangelicals the enemy, than trying to make an appeal to them.”

The result of this walkaway is to put Democrats increasingly in line with what unbelievers want – whether humanists or otherwise.  I believe Democrats have given up on what they perceive as religious knuckle-draggers and pivoted on the other side of the intellectual teeter totter mostly because they never intellectually respected the religious viewpoint.

They have, in particular, become even more entrenched in their abortion philosophy.  According to Charles Camosy, a pro -- life Democrat, writing in the New York Post, Democrats aren’t interested in his views anymore.  Freedom to abort is the Democrat holy grail, the thou – shalt – not – sin -- against they are ready to hang their secular robes on.

Democrats have increasingly staggered toward socialism, another secular totem, and the thought that Americans can solve problems without government interference seems alien to Democrats.  In 2020, they teetered on the edge of electing a candidate who hid not from his socialism but proudly trumpeted it.  That was until they decided to switch from an aged Muppet -- like Russian honeymooner to a candidate who can barely construct a sentence.
As far as the riots, the silence from Democrats is deafening -- a sort of Stalinist roar.  Columnist Buck Sexton has dubbed them the “riot party.”  Some Democrats like Clinton ally Lanny Davis suggest the rioters are helping Trump get reelected.
The question is this, then: why have Democrats willingly gone down the slippery slope of moral decay so quickly? Sooner or later you might expect conscience to pull back on one’s moral reins to stop such things and even issue the philosophical comeuppance of “you’re simply wrong, get over it.”  Moral obligations, conscience, and guilt, though, suggest a link to religious tradition, and secular folk have built a philosophy around dismissing such things.  Alterman admits as much when telling us it is religious tradition that conservatives cling to and which liberals run away from.  If there is a tradition that liberals can point to it is, well, the tradition of running away from religious belief.

Given the cultural reminders of personal sin preached by traditionalists everywhere, the liberal response is to shore up their unintellectual foundation with sand.  Guilt, though, continually haunts us, so euphemisms are used to distract.  The pro --life know this well.  Sometimes avoidance and forgetfulness come in handy; people forget that at one time things were not as they are now, but liberals act as if the way things are now is the only morally correct way things could ever be. The immoral becomes moral, and the next generation forgets (or sometimes is not even taught) that the moral needle was moved while they move it once again.  Any casual observer of all secular idols (Darwinian evolution, abortion, sexual libertinism, socialism) will notice such patterns.  Orwell could have based an entire book on liberal reasoning.
While repentance and absolution are the only true fix to the current state of affairs, the Democrat party, I think, has gone over that edge long ago.

Notes:
1.       Nancy Gibbs, “How the Democrats Got Religion,” Time (July 12, 2007)
2.       Eric Alterman, Why We’re Liberals (New York: Viking, 2008)