Amy Sullivan's book
Friday March 14, 2008
Categories: Democrats
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 ......
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About Crunchy Con
Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.
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What people say to pollsters and how they live their lives are usually very different things. The truth is that the percentage of Americans to whom religion is important enough that it is the controlling factor in their decisions is very low, probably less than 5 per cent, certainly barely reaching 10 per cent at most.
And remember, those people have among themselves wildly divergent religious views.
Five per cent, Charles? Where did you get that figure? It seems on the low side to me...
Thanks for the tip! I just popped over to my library's web site and placed a hold on it. It's still on order, but it should be in soon.
Douthat's concern about secularizers using liberal Christian as a Trojan Horse to push their own idiological agenda is just as applicable to Reform Judaism, which has become a branch office of the very far-left.
Conservative Christianity, of course, has NEVER been used to push an ideological agenda, or the goals of certain social groups, so at least we don't have THAT to worry about. [/end sarcasm]
Rod, thanks for the link and plug; sorry I didn't notice you'd thrown this up yesterday. Thanks also for including the long excerpt from Ross on abortion insofar as the Sullivan/Dionne project is concerned. As is made clear in my blog post, I also think the dispute over abortion--or rather, the dispute over the larger question of morality, authority, and tradition for which abortion is an essential battleground for--is crucial to understanding what the Sullivan/Dionne approach to the Democratic party really involves, and what its limits are. In a nutshell, they want to stop the Democratic party from attacking those religious believers who want to join them...but the idea of making today's Democratic party into an organization which will advance, or even just describe as legitimate, the sort of opposition to personal liberation that many serious religious believers are looking for, and thus make the party affirmatively appealing to them, is something else entirely. I would say it shouldn't be, but that's because I believe that a kind of moral discipline is inherent to any real, egalitarian social concern. But for the moment, the most Sullivan and Dionne can say is "let's tone down the personal liberation thing in the face of disagreements on abortion," rather than, "perhaps we should rethink some parts of personal liberation entirely."
So, what was the response?
A bit OT, but I'm curious what the new animal rights book you're reviewing for TAC is.
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