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But what would faith-informed politics look like? Only a few quotes of hers on this subject appear online:

"We plan to go all over the nation," she told PBS's Religion and Ethics Newsweekly. We plan to have a religious Web page on the DNC site and to let people of faith be heard. To let them know that their voice can say, 'We think the federal budget is a moral document. We think that there are issues in this campaign that have a theological underpinning.'"

And those theological underpinnings are?

"The basic foundation of all the faiths is the command to love your neighbor and care for your brother and sister," she told The Daily Camera. "All of these issues have to do with caring for each other. … Even paying taxes is a way of loving your neighbor."

That's as specific as it gets. Does the Democratic Party really want to communicate that its religious values come down to paying taxes? Aren't they trying to downplay the whole party-of-higher-taxes thing?

Donohue may have overstated his case against Peterson, but he was right about Kerry's acceptance speech line, "We welcome people of faith. America is not us and them." "It used to be the other way around—people of faith were the core of the Democratic Party who welcomed non-believers to the table," Donohue said. "Now it's been reversed. Kerry's use of the words 'us' and 'them' is even more striking: He literally aligned the most active Democrats with the faithless and then tagged the faithful as the outsiders."

The party's hiring of Peterson was a step toward changing that, even if promoting taxes and taking "under God" out of the Pledge were unlikely to attract people of faith to Kerry. Her real asset would have been communicating theological underpinnings of key issues to the party leadership.

But that's not going to happen. "As of today I am resigning my position as the director of religious outreach because it is no longer possible for me to do my job effectively," she told Religion News Service yesterday (the article isn't available online, but The Washington Post has a brief summary—scroll down to the third item). "I continue to believe, as do leading faith leaders across this country, that John Kerry should be the next President of the United States and that John Kerry's values of opportunity, family, and responsibility are America's values."

That's the second feather of sorts in Donohue's cap. When he criticized Vanderslice, the Kerry campaign shut her up, and she hasn't been heard from since. Now Peterson is actually gone, and unlikely to be replaced (why didn't they just hire Amy Sullivan in the first place?). Even if they were imperfect choices, do religious Republicans really want such religious Democrats silenced—even before they have really said anything?

Washington Post calls for censorship
Part of Peterson's amicus brief focused on the nature of schools. "This case is not about whether government can request this mixed patriotic and religious pledge of adults," says the brief. "It is about whether government can request it of children in the public schools. Nowhere has this Court been more sensitive to government's obligation of religious neutrality than in the public schools."

Yesterday, The Washington Post editorial page took that a step further: "Parents should be able to send their children to public schools without fear they will be proselytized," the paper said. And so, the editorial argues, the Montgomery County school board should "stick to its guns" in forbidding Child Evangelism Fellowship's Good News Clubs from sending flyers home with students.

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August (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48