Charles M. Blow's "Warnings From South Carolina" column this morning (www.nytimes.com/...) is important. I urge all progressives to read it and heed it. As I did yesterday in a post at Daily Kos (www.dailykos.com/...), I'm refraining from examining Blow's column from a Sanders vs. Warren perspective. (Either would be fine by me as the Democratic candidate.) Rather, building on points made by Blow I want to suggest a need which I do not see being met for progressives to have better outreach to people of faith.
As Blow states:
There is a religious split that we should track and deeply consider. In South Carolina, 83 percent of voters said they attend religious services occasionally or more often than that. Biden won a majority of those voters. Sanders won only 17 percent of them. Sanders did, however, win a plurality of the 17 percent of voters who said they never attend religious services.
On this metric, South Carolina matches up rather well with the country as a whole. In 2016, 78 percent of voters said that they attended religious services at least a few times a year. The problem was that Donald Trump won those who attended those services most often.
I take from this two things that refine my overall theme that progressives should have better outreach to people of faith. First, progressives need to make an effort to appeal to voters who don't necessarily go to a religious meeting place all the time but do find religion to play some significant role in their lives.
Second, this should be sincere and not be a "play" for core "Armageddon" Trump religious voters. They have made their choice, which to me is an immoral one. Rather, it should be a recognition that many people, including many persons of color, come from faith traditions. We need to respect this and make it clear that the progressive agenda, including women's rights, is highly moral, in stark contrast to the right's.
As I wrote yesterday:
What then shall we do?
We need to morally confront head on Trump’s unholy alliance with traditionalist purveyors of mass injustice present long before Trump ever thought of running for president. It is nothing new that these traditionalists do not advance true justice in statutes and decrees. Their own holy book points this out.
For thousands of years the economically powerful and their mercenaries, often cloaked in religion the better to exercise cultural hegemony, have generally enacted statutes and written decrees to serve their own interests. For the common people to democratically seize power to dole out true justice rather than continue to allow the powerful to pervert justice indeed seems almost revolutionary.