Panelist EJ Dionne, Jr – a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a syndicated columnist for the Washington Post, and professor at Georgetown University – started off the discussion by saying he was surprised by the extent in which Senator Barack Obama has been “tormented” by religious questions given the amount of effort he spent to think through and explain his faith in the public square.
The author of the new book, Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith & Politics After the Religious Right, commented that although he was not surprised, it was still noteworthy to point out the waning influence of the traditional religious right.
“I think what you saw in the Republican primaries is how weak those forces were,” Dionne contended. “John McCain won the nomination in the face of the opposition.”
Furthermore, Mike Huckabee, whom Dionne called a “fascinating character,” was noted to have won primaries even without the large support from the established religious right organisations.
“So I think even in the Republican Party you are seeing what we thought of as the old religious right weakening very substantially,” Dionne, who is a Catholic, said. “And while I’m not shocked by that, I think it is a very important development.”
Likewise, fellow panelist Amy Sullivan – national editor at Time magazine and author of The Party Faithful: How and Why Democrats Are Closing the God Gap – commented on the religious right and their opposition to McCain.
She said that while many experts have long known that the Republican Party does not have a “monopoly” on religion, she was surprised by the extent of the change in the 2008 presidential race.
“If you told us four years ago that in 2008 that it would be the Republican nominee who was under attack from the religious right,” Sullivan said, listing several examples, “Yet that is what we have this time around, a Republican nominee who is not on good terms with many of the religious conservatives and who is often quite uncomfortable talking about his faith.”
