Godless, death-loving Democrats?

Andrew, by the way, is fuming at Ramesh Ponnuru over his new book "The Party of Death," about abortion culture in the US. Andrew thinks it's a slander against the Democrats. The subtitle of the book, though, indicates that Ramesh is criticizing not just the Dems, but the media, the judiciary and all the forces in our society that denigrate human life (Amy, who has read the book, explains this point.)

The editors of Touchstone took grief for titling a piece I did for them a few years ago "The Godless Party." It was an essay based on that widely-circulated Bolce & De Maio study examining survey data and media accounts to show that a) the Democratic Party is as heavily influenced by militant secularists as the GOP is by religious believers, and b) that the media completely missed the secularization of the Democratic Party, probably (the social scientists postulate) because the MSM is so overwhelmingly secular-liberal that they literally couldn't see what was happening to the Dems -- it struck the media as normative. The title of the Public Interest essay in which the scholars presented their findings was titled "Our Secularist Democratic Party." Which is a nicer way of saying, "The Godless Democratic Party." Right?

That's not to say that all Democrats are godless, any more than it is to say that because you might fairly call Republicans "The God Party" -- and mean it cynically -- that all GOPers are religious. Still, it would do the Democrats good to think about why so many people of faith want nothing to do with them. It is not good for people of faith, either, to feel that they have nowhere to go but to the GOP. A lot of us religious folks sympathize with the Dems on some issues, but vote Republican precisely because of the bedrock issues Ramesh talks about in his book.