June 12

by Michael Luo

New PAC Seeks to Court Christians for Obama

A fund-raiser is being was held on Tuesday in Washington for a nascent political action committee that is hoping to reach out to Christian communities on behalf of Senator Barack Obama.

When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left. Then the king will say to those at his right hand, “Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.” Then the righteous will answer him, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?” And the king will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family,* you did it to me.” Then he will say to those at his left hand, “You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.” Then they also will answer, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?” Then he will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.” And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.
Matthew 25:31-46

Called “The Matthew 25 Network,” the new organization, which is still in its earliest stages, is being spearheaded by Mara Vanderslice, who was director of religious outreach for the Kerry-Edwards campaign in 2004 and did similar work for several statewide Democratic candidates, including Governor Ted Strickland of Ohio, Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania and Governor Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas.

Mr. Obama, the presumed Democratic nominee, is beginning to step up his outreach to the religious community, and met Tuesday in Chicago with a group of about 30 leaders, including the Rev. T.D. Jakes, the black mega-church pastor.

Ms. Vanderslice, who has been active in the budding movement over the last few years to encourage Democrats to be more willing to discuss matters of faith, declined to detail the group’s plans, because she said the organization is planning an official rollout later in the month.

Nevertheless, according to a description of the group that came with the invitation to its fund-raiser tonight in which the suggested contribution is $1,000, the committee is hoping to reach out to “targeted religious communities that are key to electoral success for Senator Obama, including Catholics, moderate evangelicals, Hispanic Catholics and Protestants.”

Mike McCurry, a former White House press secretary under President Clinton, is the most prominent name on the invitation to the event tonight in which the suggested contribution is $1,000.

Mr. McCurry described the group as very much a “work in progress” and said tonight’s event is more of an “exploratory meeting” to gauge support.

But he said, if the group does manage to get going, his sense was the goal would be to focus most heavily on “white evangelicals who are non-conservative.”

“That could be a pretty significant component of the Obama vote if done correctly,” he said.

John C. Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, has described evangelicals as falling into three camps — traditionalist, centrist and modernist — on how rigidly they adhered to their beliefs and their willingness to adapt them to a changing world.

The traditionalist evangelicals are those who are usually labeled as the Christian right, while the centrists might be represented by a newer breed of evangelical leaders who remain socially and theologically quite conservative but mostly sought to avoid politics previously. The two camps are roughly the same size, each representing 40 to 50 percent of the total population.

Experts agree, though, that the centrist camp is growing. Centrist evangelical leaders have been at the vanguard of efforts to broaden the evangelical agenda to include issues like global warming, poverty and AIDS.

Estimates of the number of evangelicals nationwide vary depending on how they are counted and how the term is defined, but Mr. Green put it at roughly 26 percent of Americans.

With his ease in talking about his Christian faith, Mr. Obama had once been seen as somebody who might help Democrats do more to appeal to weekly churchgoers, who voted for Mr. Bush over Mr. Kerry in droves, and even make in-roads among more moderate white evangelicals.

But the controversy over incendiary remarks by Mr. Obama’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and the comments by Mr. Obama at a fund-raiser in the Bay Area about people in small towns clinging to guns and religion, appear to have damaged him.

Even in the Democratic primary, after Mr. Obama edged Mrs. Clinton among weekly churchgoers in New Hampshire, the dynamic reversed itself in the later contests, with Mrs. Clinton beating Mr. Obama handily among white weekly churchgoers in places like Pennsylvania and Indiana, while Mr. Obama did significantly better among the non-religious.

It appears, however, that the Obama campaign is intent on competing for religious voters of all stripes, including evangelicals. It is planning to add a full-time evangelical-focused staffer to its existing religious outreach team, which already includes Catholic-focused and Jewish-focused staffers.

Mr. McCurry said the advantage of forming an outside group, which functions independently of the campaign, is the separation allows them to tailor their outreach to evangelicals specifically, where he said Mr. Obama’s efforts need to be bolstered.

“If you do things inside a campaign or inside the institutional party, you have to be relentlessly ecumenical and involve everybody,” he said. “It becomes a homogenous message.”

Mr. McCurry conceded that Mr. Obama has been “sidetracked with the whole Wright psychodrama,” but he said it was important for him to talk about his spiritual walk, especially with the wild rumors that have persisted through e-mail chains about him being a Muslim. (He is not a Muslim.)

“I think it’s imperative for Senator Obama to talk about the meaning of faith for him and how it would inform the work he would do as president,” he said.

The new group’s name takes its inspiration from the 25th chapter of the gospel of Matthew in which Jesus talks about how he will select people like a shepherd separating sheep from goats, saying, “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.”