Amy Sullivan's book

Russell Arben Fox wants to know why people aren't talking about Amy Sullivan's new book "The Party Faithful: How and Why Democrats are Closing the God Gap," about Christians who are active Democrats (like Amy). This is, says Russell

... too bad, because Amy's book is very good--or at least, it does what it sets out to do very, very well. I have some serious reservations with it, reservations that aren't all that dissimilar from complaints that I've voiced about Amy's basic approach to her chosen subject before. But let me get to those objections later on: first and foremost, let me praise this book as a very solid, very persuasive, very accessible journalistic story of the Democratic party's failure to attend to and attract religious voters over this past century (focusing especially on the past four decades or so), and of the tentative successes some Democratic politicians and activists have had in recent years in getting that to change. As far as political books looking to comment on the events right at hand--like the current presidential race--are concerned, this one deserves much more attention than it's gotten so far.

Russell's review is pretty thorough, and positive. It really makes me want to read the book, which is sitting on my dining table about 20 feet from where I'm typing this. I knew Amy, my friend and sometime Bloggingheads.tv partner, was writing the book, and I have been looking forward to it, because I knew that Amy was too honest and thorough not to criticize her party for closing the door to religious believers. Unfortunately, her book arrived as four other books were stacked up by my bedside demanding my attention (I owe a review to The American Conservative on a new book about animal rights by month's end, and am reading three other books simultaneously to inform my Reluctant Vegan blog). I can report, though, that I read the first chapter of Amy's book over dinner one night last week, and it's really engaging. Anyway, Beliefnet's given Amy a page to lead a discussion of the book, and as Russell points out, Salon did a long interview with her about it. Excerpt:

It continues to shock people when I talk to Democratic audiences and I remind them that 87 percent of Americans say that religion is an important part of their lives. And that includes a heck of a lot of Democrats. Republicans are not getting 87 percent of the vote. I continue to meet people who insist, and these are hardcore Democrats, who insist to me that Bill Clinton is not religious, that it's just an act, that he had to go to church to put off his Republican critics and that he's really not a religious guy. Who find it inconceivable that Nancy Pelosi is a committed Catholic, [or think] that whenever she talks about faith now it's just the result of advisors and consultants telling her it's smart, when in fact this is a woman who's been quoting the Bible in closed-door meetings for decades. So I do think Democrats are kind of surprised to learn who the religious are in their midst and I think those are mostly the secular Democrats. The religious Democrats who I talk to are somewhat relieved because they had all been thinking that they were all by themselves.

The contretemps over Barack Obama's pastor really should play to Amy's strengths, because it raises questions over the style and content of certain aspects of liberal Christianity -- and besides which, Obama has run as the most explicitly Christian Democrat in my adult lifetime. I wish I could honestly recommend "The Party Faithful," but I've only read part of it. Nevertheless, based on what I have read, and based on what I know of Amy and her work, I'm sure that Russell is right: it's an important book that ought to be more talked about right now. Because so many Crunchy Con readers are Democrats who are Christians, I hope you'll check out "The Party Faithful." If you have read it, please tell us in the comboxes what you thought.

UPDATE: Here's the transcript from a long, terrific Pew Forum discussion last month about the "God gap." Panelists were Amy Sullivan, E.J. Dionne and Ross Douthat, with questions from folks like Terry Eastland, Barbara Bradley Hagerty and Terry Mattingly. I highly recommend it. Ross does a great job here of presenting the basic view from us on the Right who view our liberal friends like Amy and E.J. and what they're trying to do sympathetically, but skeptically:

And one of the big questions for liberal Christians who take their faith seriously is, well, how do you address the issue of abortion and what does it mean to be a pro-life liberal, or a liberal who would like to see the number of abortions reduced, let’s put it that way. Both of them talk a great deal about the efforts of liberal Democrats who are also Catholic or evangelical to come to terms with this issue.

I would just submit – and I’d be curious to hear their thoughts on this – that the nature of America’s abortion regime as established in Roe v. Wade and modified in Planned Parenthood v. Casey makes it extremely difficult, one, for serious Christians to give their assent to the system – to the extent particularly that it removes the issue from the space in which normal democratic activity, lawmaking and so forth, takes place – so it makes it very difficult on the one hand. And it also makes it very difficult to find compromises and common ground.

I imagine that Amy and E.J. would disagree with me to a certain extent on this, but I think what ends up happening for liberal Christians is you end up spending an enormous amount of time talking about attacking the root causes of abortion, talking about attacking the conditions facing unwed mothers, talking intensely about family planning and particular sex educations in schools, and so forth.

It would be my contention that there is very little evidence based on the experience of developed countries – both in the United States and comparing it to Europe, which has different abortion laws and in many cases more restrictive abortion laws – it’s very difficult to imagine that the abortion rate can be significantly reduced in the United States so long as there is no real ability to place serious restrictions on it in the first two trimesters. As long as there isn’t that ability, it remarkably reduces the amount of space for compromise on the issue. And so you end up with things like, on the one hand, religious conservatives in South Dakota pushing a complete ban on abortion, no exceptions for rape and incest and so forth, which is immediately repudiated by the voters because the percentage of Americans who support that is very low, and on the other hand, all that liberals can ever talk about is teaching more about condoms in schools, making the morning-after pill more widely available and so forth, both of which affect abortion rates on the margins but really only on the margins. So that’s I think one real stumbling block for liberal Christians going forward.

Two others identified by Ross: First, the concern that liberal Christianity is but a "fig leaf" over a secularizing agenda -- that is, that liberal Christians, however sincere, are being used by secularizers (as distinct from secularists) as cover for their real agenda, which is to push religion out of the public square. The last concern is the example of Europe, where Christianity is a dead letter, raising concerns about to what extent the welfare-state policies favored by the left in both Europe and America have weakened Christianity.