LAST Sunday, America's presidential candidates underwent a public grilling from Rick Warren, a prominent evangelical leader. He asked both men at what point a baby gets human rights. John McCain replied that it was at the moment of conception. Barack Obama answered that from a theological and also from a scientific point of view, the question was "above my pay grade".
Both the evangelical and the Catholic wings of the US blogosphere were incensed. It was not, they argued, as though Obama's voting record or his views on abortion weren't generally understood. The point was rather that, in a forum where the issue was bound to arise, his answer was so lame and such a cop-out. Was this the best he could manage? Having had months to frame a response, he clearly expected to get away with fudging it. The general view was that he'd have been far better off giving a straight answer that, however unwelcome, at least suggested he took the question seriously.
On Monday he added insult to injury by repeatedly accusing the National Right to Life movement of lying about his voting record. It had referred to his stand as an Illinois state senator on the Born Alive Infant Protection Act - banning the infanticide of babies that survived abortion procedures - which he opposed. For all his confident assurances to the contrary, within 24 hours the Obama campaign was obliged to concede that he had misrepresented his previous position.
Again the blogosphere was up in arms, posing the question: how could he have expected to get away with false claims about matters of public record? As one much-read blogger and lay theologian, Thomas Peters, put it: "Only laziness or intentional story-burying in the media can kill this embarrassing (and revealing) story."
The Left-liberal broadsheets can ignore the incident as comprehensively as they like. The Hannity & Colmes show and The O'Reilly Factor on Fox News, which reach big blocs of swing voters and pro-lifers, turned their attention to it mid-week. They reinforced the concerns of the faith-based blogs that are increasingly shaping debate in the churches and in small-town America.
It's ironic that the net, which Obama has used to such great effect in attracting supporters and funding, may play a significant part in his undoing in the campaign proper. Although he may well see withholding medical assistance to babies that somehow survive abortions as a logical thing to do, to people of delicate conscience it seems almost unimaginably hard-hearted and ideologically driven. Many of them may have been prepared to overlook the way he voted on the issue before he became the Democrats' presumed presidential candidate. Fewer will be prepared to ignore him lying about it now. Republican McCain will benefit both from the traditional Democrats who won't turn out to vote for Obama now and from the independent religious conservatives and the Republicans who have another good reason for voting against him.
Jim Wallis is a religious activist and a leading member of the clerical Left. He's most famous for his book God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It, and the thesis that the US is in a "post-Religious Right" phase. He argues that concerns with social justice, world peace, human rights and immigration have overtaken the narrow spectrum of questions concerning life issues and sexual morality that have long preoccupied the 23per cent of Americans who are evangelicals, mostly to the benefit of the Republican Party.
It's hard to be sure about the extent to which Wallis is detecting a real trend, as opposed to predicting what he hopes will come to pass. After all, it's perfectly possible to be concerned about both sets of issues. What is clear, however, is that the inconvenient theological first principles that rule out abortion, embryo stem-cell research and gay marriage haven't simply vanished into thin air because the Left wished they would. Nor, despite Wallis, are social justice and world peace wholly owned subsidiaries of the Democratic machine. To put the shift into some sort of perspective, one recent poll found that about 30 per cent of American evangelicals described themselves as moderate or centrist, rather than born again. We'll know soon enough how many of them are more swayed by the symbolism of electing a black president than traditional, totemic issues.
The other faith community on which the outcome of a close election could well hinge are Catholics, who comprise 25 per cent of American voters. Until the 1960s the Catholic vote was a core Democrat constituency. But, as in Australia during the Howard era, it has gradually drifted to the Right. In the last presidential elections, 52 per cent supported George W. Bush and only 47 per cent voted for the pro-abortion, Catholic Democrat John Kerry. At the moment it's an even closer contest than the McCain-Obama polling, with 45 per cent saying they'll vote Republican and 44 per cent favouring the Democrats. But in a recent survey, 59 per cent of those broadly identifying as Catholics - irrespective of the regularity of their church attendance - said they were opposed to abortion.
Widely syndicated columnist Linda Chavez argued two weeks ago that Obama's Illinois voting record would come back to haunt him and pointed out that, with his black liberation church affiliations, he had even less grounds than Kerry for taking Catholic support for granted. "Barack Obama has a Catholic problem. If he doesn't do better than John Kerry did in 2004 with this quintessential swing voting bloc, he won't be elected ... Catholics are by no means a single-issue voting group. But for observant Catholics, those who attend mass regularly and follow the church's teachings, a candidate's position on abortion matters."
Summing up, she predicted that: "As on so many issues, Obama risks losing the far Left of his party if he moderates his own out-of-the-mainstream positions in order to win more centrist voters. Instead he'll probably continue to talk out of both sides of his mouth on the issue and hope Catholic voters don't notice." In the wake of this week's performance, it's unlikely that anyone who's concerned about abortion will fail to notice either the double-speak or where he stands. Even if the mainstream media manage to keep changing the subject, as Obama prepares for the Democratic convention in Denver next week, he must be wondering how best to deal with a book that Charles Chaput, Denver's high-profile Catholic archbishop, has just published: Render Unto Caesar: Serving the Nation by Living Our Catholic Beliefs in Political Life.
Chaput is a Native American of the Potawatomi tribe and a Franciscan monk with serious social justice credentials. He is not partisan in a political sense. Nonetheless he's long been one of the most uncompromising members of the hierarchy in insisting that politicians who call themselves Catholics and trade on it to get themselves elected need to be mindful of the church's teaching when framing public policy. In 2004 he argued that Kerry, as an avowedly pro-abortion candidate for the presidency, should have been denied communion. No doubt he will be saying the same thing about Obama's running mate if he describes himself as a pro-choice Catholic. Three mooted contenders this week, Governor Tim Kaine and senators Joe Biden and Jack Reed, all fall in that category.
As the book's title suggests, Chaput covers the whole field, from life politics to wage justice in the US, environmental issues and aid to the Third World. Considering America's political class, he says that more than 150 members of Congress call themselves Catholics and wonders, "What difference do they make?" His conclusion is just the kind of rallying call the Obama campaign team has been dreading in recent weeks. "We need to take a much tougher and more self-critical look at ourselves as believers; at the issues underlying today's erosion of Catholic identity and at the wholesale assimilation - absorption might be a better word - of Catholics by American culture."
