Follow Me, And I Will Make You Fishers Of Registered Voters

In the latest attempt on the part of leftists to try to convince the powerful evangelical bloc of voters that they are, too, reaching out to proponents of traditional Christian values, as noted in Thursday’s Washington Times, a new group called the Christian Alliance for Progress announced itself to the world recently. But, like virtually all earlier attempts on the part of liberals to attract the “values voters” – who are attributed with putting the current Republican-dominated government in place – this “outreach” is more about packaging than substance.

The group’s approach to the current dilemma in which the Democrat party finds itself is billed as being different from earlier approaches. According to its leaders, the CAP is unlike other such attempts in that it does not advocate for Democrats to change their positions or message to attract “Christian” voters. Rather, they say they want to present biblical justification for the positions liberals currently hold.

The problem, for the CAP, is that this approach is not “unlike” earlier approaches at all. Ever since the 2004 elections, in which exit polls attributed “values” as one of the chief factors in determining how a majority of Americans voted, the Democrat party, and various groups supporting it, has declared a need and intent to “change course” and become more considerate of “values issues” in its approach to governance. If it had actually done that, the approach of this new group would indeed be a change of tactics.

The problem is that no course changes were ever made in the Democrats’ agenda, only in how they packaged the agenda they already held. Rather than try to moderate certain of their positions to be more attractive to Christian voters, they began to explain to these voters as to why they should already be attracted to the liberal positions as held – by virtue of the fact that these positions are more in line with Christian teaching than the positions actually held by Christians. The only difference between CAP’s approach and earlier attempts is that CAP is actually brazen enough to say this is what they are doing up front.

What will not be any different, however, is the end result of this latest manifestation of leftist arrogance. The voters that CAP is going after have already had numerous attempts to weigh the positions of the left in the scales of their values, and found them to be deficient.

The fact is, it would take – ironically – a miracle for this group to convince Christian conservatives that, as CAP states, providing healthcare to one’s neighbor is a test of one’s spirituality, or that homosexual marriage is part of some biblical call for “equality and justice.” Yet these are precisely the kind of things that the group is determined to do. And while it may be possible to make it sound like the scriptures support such stances by picking and choosing different statements out of context, convincing the scriptures’ adherents that this is an honest and reasonable approach to arriving at truth is a different matter entirely.

As is the case with any problem, the key to the liberals’ problems with “values voters” is to first acknowledge that they have a problem, and acknowledge what truly is the problem. Until they are willing to move past the condescending attitude that says those Christian rubes just don’t know what’s good for them, the Democrats and their liberal supporters will continue to face an uphill battle in the competition for these folks' votes.