Democrats of Little Faith

By Patrick Hynes

The headlines covering a recent Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll, which was conducted in late June, focused largely on the troubling statistic that revealed 35 percent of respondents would not vote for a Mormon for President of the United States. Religious bigotry, while a shadow of its former self, still lurks around electoral corners.

But as if that information were not disturbing enough, some statistics from the same poll have received less attention but appear nevertheless to invalidate the American left's affectations of religious tolerance and pious political correctness.

According to the survey, 37 percent of self-identified liberals would vote against an evangelical Christian candidate for president; 38 percent of self-identified liberal Democrats would do so. Democrats as a whole are significantly more likely to vote against an evangelical Christian candidate for president -- over a quarter (28 percent) -- than either Republican or Independent voters. And barely a majority (53 percent) of all Democrats would vote for an evangelical candidate for president.

This new information could not come at a worse time for Democrat politicians. Since their 2004 electoral drubbing, some Democrats have made entreaties toward the evangelical community. Recently, for example, Democratic Senator Barack Obama of Illinois urged his party to reach out to evangelicals so as not to "abandon the field of religious discourse."