How would Jesus vote?

By Christina Littlefield

Sunday, Oct. 8, 2006 | 7:40 a.m.

In 2004 Las Vegas insurance salesman Michael Alires was a hard-core, "I love Clinton" Democrat. Then he discovered Jesus.

His boss ribbed him, telling him it was "only a matter of time before you begin voting Republican."

"Nah," Alires recalls saying, "Jesus is a Democrat. He hangs around with shady characters, has the hippy haircut and he's all about love. He's gotta be a Democrat."

His boss disagreed. Jesus has billions of dollars under his control and it's all tax-free, he said. So he's a Republican.

Today, Alires is a pastor-in-training, having quit the insurance business to work as an assistant at South Hills Church Community in Henderson. He's not so sure these days how Jesus would vote. But he knows the debate over that question is playing out across the country. As the Nov. 7 election approaches, Jesus' affiliation is up for grabs to a degree not seen in a quarter-century.

Ever since Jimmy Carter, a Southern Baptist, left the White House, evangelical Christians and conservative Roman Catholics have powered a religious conservatism that has placed them squarely behind the Republican Party and lifted many national and congressional candidates to power.

From the pulpit and through the Christian Coalition, Moral Majority and other political organizations, the religious right pressed a values-based agenda that favored candidates who opposed abortion and gay marriage, issues they believed put many Democratic candidates on the wrong side of Jesus.

Democrats disagreed, of course, but they rarely tried to fight fire with religious political fire.

Until they lost the 2004 presidential election.

Stung that just a few more Christian votes on their side might have carried the day, Democrats and liberal clergy are aggressively courting values-based voters, arguing that Democratic candidates embrace Jesus' priorities.

But to make that argument, they first have to do precisely what Alires did in his conversation two years ago: redefine Jesus - as a Democrat.

"That is where the game is played," said Stephen Prothero, chairman of the religion department at Boston University. "You pull out the verses that help you, and you ignore the verses that go against you.

"The whole point is to bring the authority of Jesus on your side because he's so widely respected in American society," said Prothero, author of "American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon." "Jesus has over-the-top approval ratings."

Where conservative Christian Republicans are beating their anti-abortion, anti-gay-marriage drum, Democrats are defining a broader spectrum of Christian-based values, including opposition to the war in Iraq, poverty, even global warming.

Where Republicans have Pat Robertson, the Rev. Jerry Falwell and James Dobson, Democrats are lining up more liberal evangelicals such as Jim Wallis and Tony Campolo, members of a new organization of pastors with the curiously un-Democratic title Red Letter Christians.

"We are just calling on people to recognize that they must be politically involved, and the church should be politically involved, but it should be about all of the issues," said Campolo, a nationally respected evangelical leader and sociology professor at Eastern University in Pennsylvania.

The inspiration for the group's name comes from modern Bibles in which Jesus' words appear in red. So the organization derives its focus from his words - on the poor, the hungry, the homeless, the mentally ill, the millions of Americans who do not make a living wage or have health insurance. But the members are silent where Jesus is silent, Campolo said. Jesus never spoke about abortion or gay marriage.

Conservatives say these two issues define society's most basic values, but Campolo and others say they have distracted Christians from more pressing concerns.

"We are concerned when the Christian Coalition puts out a voter guide that says nothing about poor people, when 2,000 verses of Scripture talk about the poor," Campolo said. "The only description Jesus gives us about Judgment Day is how we treated the poor."

But despite the outreach, Democrats face an uphill struggle.

National statistics show Democrats are outnumbered by Republicans almost 2-to-1 among churchgoers.

The conservative Christian voting bloc sprang from one galvanizing event, the 1973 Supreme Court decision to legalize abortion in Roe v. Wade. Christian leaders such as Robertson and Falwell railed against what they saw as complete moral decay.

For decades, evangelicals - Christians who tend to take the Bible literally, stress a personal relationship with Jesus and share their faith - had remained out of the political spotlight. Rather than engaging in the world, they had created their own: a subculture with its own lingo, music and literature, own merchandise and even its own television station - Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network. And so evangelicals, who at last count represented one-third of the U.S. population, were easy to rally, said Maxie Burch, an American church historian and Fuller Theological Seminary professor.

After fellow evangelical Carter disappointed them, they jumped parties and elected Ronald Reagan in 1980 and never looked back.

Their loyalty was not because Republicans were more God-fearing than Democrats, political analysts and religious leaders say, but because they have done a better job of portraying their faith in their politics. They also gave religious leaders a role in shaping public policy, making abortion - and later, gay marriage - part of their national platform.

And it hasn't been just evangelicals who have leaned Republican, but conservative Catholics and mainstream Protestants, too.

The key indicators, in fact, for how people of faith might vote is not what denomination they belong to but how often they attend services, how literally they take the Bible and how they view God, according to a study by Baylor University's Institute for Studies of Religion. Those who take the Bible more literally tend to see God as more authoritarian than benevolent, leading to a black-and-white view of the world that favors more conservative politics.

The liberal, more secular wing of the Democratic Party, representing 10 percent to 20 percent of its base, had ostracized people of faith on those moral issues , leaders on both sides said.

"The two parties have responded in very different ways," said Richard Land, head of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, the country's largest evangelical denomination. "That's the reason why 47 percent of Americans say the Republican Party is friendly to religion, and 26 percent think Democrats are friendly," he said, quoting a recent poll by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. Conservative Christian organizations didn't just vote Republican, but toiled in the fields by registering voters, distributing Christian-friendly voter guides and rallying pastors. Last month, for instance, Falwell told pastors at the Family Research Council's Value Voter Summit in Washington that even Lucifer couldn't rally Republicans faster than Hillary Clinton.

Today, half to two-thirds of all evangelicals identify with the Republican Party, according to the Institute for Studies of Religion. In fact, "evangelical" has become so synonymous with "Republican" that there has been a backlash among more moderate Christians who believe churches have lost their ability to critique both parties .

Still, conservatives are viewed more favorably by the public than are liberals. In the Pew poll, published in August, 69 percent of Americans said liberals had gone too far in trying to keep religion out of schools and government, whereas 49 percent believed conservative Christians had gone too far in trying to impose their values on the country.

"Many Americans want another alternative," said John Green, senior fellow on religion and politics for Pew. "They want faith in public life, but they don't want the Religious Right. "

And that is what Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., has tried to do since the 2004 election. As a Mormon who is anti-abortion and anti-gay marriage, Reid dedicated a page on his Web site to address issues important to people of faith, held several meetings with religious leaders in Nevada and across the country, sent Democrats into rural areas to talk about issues important to religious voters, and attacked the federal budget on moral grounds, arguing that it helped the rich and hurt the poor.

The party is trying to find traction on other fronts, too. Over the Labor Day weekend, Christian politicos launched the Web site faithfuldemocrats.com to promote Democratic candidates and inject their Christian perspective on political issues. Soon after, the Red Letter Christians launched, and Wallis - a progressive evangelical and author of "God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get it" - started a political blog on beliefnet.com.

Democratic leaders Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass.; Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill.; and U.S. Senate candidate Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, followed suit by talking about how their faith influences their politics in public appearances. Kerry, for instance, made national news after telling a sold-out crowd at Pepperdine University, a conservative Church of Christ school, about how he almost lost his Catholic faith in Vietnam and later found it again as an adult.

Is the Democratic effort too little, too late?

"They've lost a lot of time and a lot of credibility," said the Rev. Rob Schenck, president of the National Clergy Council. "More than anything else, the Democrats are at a great deficit when it comes to credibility on the paramount moral issues."

Democrats say they don't have to win over the entire evangelical and conservative Catholic base. They just have to pull away enough people on the margins of those groups so they no longer have a majority, said Ted G. Jelen, who specializes in religion and politics as a political-science professor at UNLV.

In 2004 Bush won Ohio - and by that the presidency - because he was able to bring in more votes from blacks and Hispanics than before, Jelen says. In contrast, all Kerry would have needed was 2 percent to 4 percent of the evangelical vote to win the election .

The Democrats' outreach to the religious faithful isn't readily apparent in Nevada .

No candidates are anchoring their campaigns on moral issues, and none is claiming religious superiority.

Take, for instance, Democrat Tessa Hafen's attempt to unseat Rep Jon Porter, R-Nev. Normally, Porter, a Roman Catholic who once studied to be a priest, might have cited his anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage stance, but Hafen bucks her party's platform on those issues and comes from a well-respected Mormon family to boot.

Similarly, Democrat Jack Carter, as a Southern Baptist, is as much an evangelical as the U.S. senator he is trying to unseat, Republican John Ensign, and more comfortable talking about his faith. (Ensign, who attends the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, did not return requests for comment.)

In the gubernatorial race, Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., can play the anti-abortion card against state Sen. Dina Titus, who is for abortion rights. But the conservative Mormon can't say he is any more religious, as he has been criticized for listing his religious affiliation as Protestant on Congressional listings and Mormon in Nevada. Titus is Greek Orthodox and has made visiting houses of worship a part of her campaign strategy, both to meet people and to "spiritually recharge."

All candidates interviewed for this story say religion is a personal matter that has a role in shaping public policy but should not be pressed on other people. They also all agreed that Jesus wouldn't affiliate with either party.

"If everyone did what Jesus did, you probably wouldn't have Democrats or Republicans anyway; everyone would fall in to the right way," Carter said.

Jesus, says Bret Johnson, senior pastor for South Hills Church Community , "would take the best of both parties and then confront both parties where they need to be confronted."