GetReligion's Mollie reviews the coverage of the "Barack Obama Christian candidate" advertising in Kentucky. Of particular interest is Joseph Gerth's article in yesterday Louisville CourierJournal, which notes how Obama is being identified as a Christian in a couple of radio spots airing in the state as well as via the very churchly brochure. As I noted a few posts ago, this is not a new thing under Obama's sun. Is it appropriate? By longstanding campaign rule of thumb, once a subject is on the table, you've got greater latitude (as a journalist, as a candidate) to bring it up. Think marijuana use, which has been on the table since the 1988 campaign cycle (does anyone remember Judge Ginsburg?). Obama's religion is, for better or worse, very much on the table. The question is: Does the upside of quelling the persistent rumors of his Muslim identity outweigh the downside of reminding everyone of Jeremiah Wright?

Whatever such a campaign might do to neutralize antagonism to (or even generate support for) Obama among white churchgoers, the real oomph for him in organized religion is going to come from the black churches, come the general election. The bump-up in African-American turnout thus far gets the attention it deserves from Adam Nossiter and Janny Scott in today's New York Times. We ain't seen nothing yet.

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This morning, Politico's Jim Vanderhei and Mike Allen proferred six ways for the Republican Party to resuscitate itself, based on a canvas of GOP pooh-bahs. Notable by its absence was any call to gin up a religious appeal. Only Jeb Bush (remember him?) touched on the subject, to wit:

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said it’s time to return to a family values message — backed up by ideas families actually like. “Our reforms and beliefs need to be framed in the context of how they help families. A family-friendly focus is really important, given the angst that people feel these days.”

Which brings us to the California Supreme Court's 4-3 decision this afternoon legalizing civil marriage for gays and lesbians. As Ambinder notes, the GOP quote meisters have been notably slow off the mark responding to this latest threat to the republic. We'll see what the morrow brings, but given John McCain's more or less federalist approach to the subject (let the states do what they want), it doesn't look like the current powers-that-be think that this dog can hunt.

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Stories hither and yon (and yon) on Pastor Hagee's apology to the Catholics.

On Kos, Hunter thinks it's curious that Hagee should write his letter to Donohue, rather than some official Catholic entity. But this problem should really be laid at the feet of the Catholics, not Hagee. It was Donohue who took the lead in criticizing the good pastor, and in fact official American Catholicism has more or less (with a wink and nod) given Donohue, who's no theologian or otherwise accredited expert in Catholicism, the role of responding to real and perceived incidents of anti-Catholicism. Effectively, he's the Catholic Abe Foxman; but whereas the Jewish establishment in America has always functioned with separate communal agencies operating independently or with voluntary coordination, the Catholic Church is the kind of top-down enterprise that used to like to respond in its own name.

In the present case, it's worth recalling (as the coverage I've seen hasn't) that Donohue over a month ago declared himself satisfied with Hagee. So his latest statement of satisfaction, expressed in a God-o-Meter interview, is just reiteration. Put that together with the dance Hagee's done with Deal Hudson and other Catholic right-wingers and you know what's going on here. After the second round of the Wright story, Hagee reemerged as a McCain problem, so GOP Catholics like Donohue and Hudson had to engineer another end to the Hagee saga. And you see, Hagee actually apologized for what he said, whereas Wright didn't. Nyah, nyah.

On the substance (be warned, you may not be able to download the first page), Hagee does reasonably well allowing as how he's been educated on the rather more mixed record of the Catholic Church and the Jews over the ages, and I suppose he sort of wiggles out of those pesky whore-of-Babylon references. But the idea that his ministry demonstrates his "profound respect for the Catholic people" is a load of longhorn flop. As this blog has made clear, Hagee's ministry at Cornerstone Church has for decades dealt in the denigration of Catholicism, and prospered by persuading San Antonio Hispanics to leave the faith of their fathers and sign up with his brand of premillenialist evangelicalism.

But politics is a beautiful thing, and if the desire to be a big national and international player has impelled Pastor Hagee to embrace a more charitable view of his separated brethren, who are we to cavil?

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This is the kind of brochure you might send out if you were running for Congress in, say, Mississippi's first district. Either Obama's folks are a little bit rattled by the size of their loss in WV or they've decided to try a little experiment looking ahead to November. My advice: Dial it back.

Quick update: Whoops! Reid just reminded me that Obama began using a piece of literature of this sort back in January, when rumors of his being a Muslim began surfacing big time. Reid blogged it then. The only difference is that they seemed to have upped the ante by highlighting the white cross in front of the organ. Anyone remember Mike Huckabee's floating cross Christmas card?

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In West Virginia, Obama did better with Catholics--white Catholics--(45 percent) than he did with any other demographic, secular or religious, including voters aged 18-24 (38 percent), and including those with no religion (34 percent). Figure that sucker out. (For the record, there are not enough African Americans in the state to register on an exit poll.)

Morning Update: Altogether, Catholics constitute less than six percent of the WV population, but represented eight percent of Democratic primary voters. Their greatest concentration is up in the panhandle, where WV is squeezed between PA and OH. Ohio County, where Wheeling is located, is nearly 40 percent Catholic--by far the largest Catholic concentration in the state. There, Clinton won by a 58-36 margin, 19 percentage points less than her 67-26 spread statewide. So apparently it's the old Catholic steelworker families that were the base of such support as Obama got in the Mountain State. (Clinton got just 52 percent of the Catholic vote.)

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The following comment from Cindy just came in:

Hold on there, I'm an ex-Huckabee supporter present Obama supporter unless possibly old, incoherent, cancer surviving McCain picks Huckabee as VP sidekick -- and I perceive you mocking my belief in the rapture and consider it really tacky and ad hominem caricature-baiting not worthy of this fine blog.

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Yesterday's Robert Novak column floats the idea that Mike Huckabee is playing a double game, publicly supporting John McCain's candidacy while secretly encouraging his hard core evangelical backers to withhold the hem of their garment. The idea is to acquiesce in an Obama presidency as divine punishment on a sinful people--whose sin, presumably, will be sufficiently expiated by 2012 that Huckabee can be elected president.

There's so much spinning and woofing in this classic Novakian exercise that it's hard to tell the real from the fantastical. It is not unlikely that some Huckabites imagine themselves laying back in the weeds (homeschooling their kids and subsisting on nuts and berries) during the Obama Tribulation until the arrival of Messiah Mike. The question is: Who will be raptured away before the election?

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Whither the evangelicals this election year? Across the country, journalists are eagerly scrutinizing the scarce tea leaves for signs that they are turning away from their Republican allegiance. Yesterday, for example, the Seattle Times' published Haley Edwards' did a story on just such a turning away on the part of young evangelicals. Also this CNN piece by Tom Foreman. But thus far, there's precious little data such as would convince an empirical social scientist that there's something happening out there. Take Sunday's Rasmussen poll, for example. Having turned its main attention away from the Democratic primary and to an expected Obama-McCain race, it solicited the views of evangelicals, and found that they favored McCain by 69 percent to 28 percent. That's a few percentage points worse than Republican congressional candidates did among white evangelicals in 2006, but there's no indication that Rasmussen limited its sample to white evangelicals. Through in Hispanics, and what you've got is no movement whatsoever.

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As the primary season winds down, we would do well to consider one of the slices of the religious demographic pie that has thus far received little attention: those who, when asked for their religious preferences, say "none." These Nones have, in recent years, trended Democratic (just as the most religious have trended Republican). In the 2006, they voted overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates.

As between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the Nones have preferred Obama, and in most places by a considerable margin. Overall, they constitute about 15 percent of the electorate, but they are spread unevenly around the country. In proportional terms, they are far more plentiful out West than they are back East or down South. Obama's notable success in the Western states has, I believe, something to do with his appeal to the Nones.

The least churched of all the states of the union is Oregon, where Nones make up about one-third of the adult population. Only a third of Oregonians actually belong to a religious body. (One third claim a religious identity but do not belong.) Because being a None is the norm in Oregon, Nones there tend to be a bit older, a bit more conservative than Nones elsewhere. Still, I'd guess that they will make up a good half of all Democratic primary voters in the Beaver State next week. And I'd also guess that two-thirds of them at least will vote for Obama. That Oregon will push him over the top in pledged delegates (not counting Florida and Michigan) seems very, very likely.

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How does religion relate to presidential conduct? Every now and then, a president acts in a way that pretty clearly seems to express his religious commitments. Rarely is the expression as clear as it's been with George W. Bush's faith-based initiative. But it was not hard to see a religious impulse at work in, for example, Jimmy Carter's assiduous pursuit of a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt.

With presidential candidates, of course, we can only ask questions. And, when a candidate's religion worries some portion of the electorate, the questions tend to be unedifying. Would Jack Kennedy take orders from Rome? Would Mitt Romney take orders from Salt Lake? Would Barack Obama take orders from Jeremiah Wright?

Of greater use to to try to see the candidate's religious background and journey (if journey there be) as a window onto his or her identity. In this regard, Hillary Clinton's more than passing engagement in the semi-secret organization known as The Family is of more than passing interest. Yesterday this blog received a comment from Jeff Sharlet, whose book on the organization, The Family, will be out in a little over a week. Our exchange is here.

Having not yet read the book, I'm not sure to what extent, if any, Sharlet ties Clinton to the Family's right-wing political inclinations. He agrees that the thing has a fundamentally establishmentarian ethos--how the Family is dedicated to bringing Washington's movers and shakers together. That is the source of its particular appeal to Clinton, I suspect. (It is sort of the Renaissance Weekend of American religion.) That her favorite Bible story is Esther speaks volumes: Make me the queen and I'll save the people from the evil that threatens.

More than anything else, it is the impulse to solve problems from the top down, from the inside out, that seems at the core of Clinton's public being. Her failed health care initiative is the case par excellence. What's missing is the inspirational voice, the prophetic challenge, the spiritual summons. That latter--just words, she says--is, of course, Obama's stock in trade. At bottom, they are religious opposites.

Update: My exchange with Sharlet continues in the comments to this post.

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Obama's Catholics bite back at Donohue, on God-o-Meter.

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