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David Brooks is supposedly The New York Times op-ed page's conservative columnist in a sea of more left-leaning writers. But in today's column, he notes, "Bush has had the worst year of any president since Nixon in 1973 or L.B.J. in 1968." So why isn't John Kerry dominating the polls?

"One big reason," says Brooks, is that Kerry's campaign is too secular:

Clinton seems to understand, as many Democrats do not, that a politician's faith isn't just about litmus test issues like abortion or gay marriage. Many people just want to know that their leader, like them, is in the fellowship of believers. Their president doesn't have to be a saint, but he does have to be a pilgrim. He does have to be engaged, as they are, in a personal voyage toward God. … If Democrats are not seen as religious, they will be seen as secular Ivy League liberals, and they will lose. John Kerry doesn't seem to get this. Many of the people running the Democratic Party don't get it either.

Instead, he says, Democrats are busy shoring up their base—the secular left, which is united "more than anything else [by] a strong antipathy to pro-lifers and fundamentalists." The secularist ranks are growing, so it makes some political sense to do this, Brooks says. But "just as Republicans have to appeal to religious conservatives but move beyond them, Democrats have to appeal to the secular left but also build a bridge to religious moderates."

Brooks seems to have missed Friday's Washington Times story by Julia Duin, which reports that Kerry's advisers—including Catholic priests—are telling him to stop talking about religion.

Jesuit priest Robert Drinan told Duin that "he has advised the campaign to clamp down on religious rhetoric and 'keep cool on the Communion thing. … The mood now is to shut up about it.'"

Duin also reports that Mara Vanderslice, the Kerry campaign's director of religion outreach, has been "sidelined" and her advice ignored.

"Every time something with religious language got sent up the flagpole, it got sent back down, stripped of religious language," an unnamed Kerry staffer says.

At least part of Vanderslice's isolation is due to a press release from the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. Last week, the Catholic League's William Donohue said she seemed more like "a person looking for a job working for Fidel Castro, not John Kerry." Donohue particularly pressed the point that Vanderslice was present at the December 2000 Seattle demonstrations against the International Monetary Fund—protests which turned violent—and 2002 protests against the IMF and the World Bank. Donohue also said she spoke at rallies organized by the radical AIDS and gay rights organization ACT-UP.

But while Donohue says, "Vanderslice was raised without any faith and didn't become an evangelical Christian until she attended Earlham College, a Quaker school known for its adherence to pacifism," he doesn't note that it looks like her evangelical faith stuck with her. In 1998, she was an intern with the evangelical community and magazine Sojourners, and later became outreach coordinator for the anti-debt Jubilee USA Network.

"I was raised as a Unitarian Universalist; I'm really grateful for the openness that tradition gave me," Vanderslice wrote for Sojourners in 2002 (here's a photo). "When I later learned about Jesus and studied the scriptures in college, I could feel that I came to know myself as a Christian through my own study and prayer. I am now active in the United Church of Christ and plan to go into ministry some time."

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June (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48