Democratic Politicians Step Up Religious Rhetoric

Plus, remembering Michael Ledeen

“Miracles start with mustard seeds,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says.

President Trump stopped by the Capitol this week to try to push ahead the “one big beautiful bill.” He offered some praise to Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, a Republican of Louisiana. The Shreveport Times reported it: “I’m his biggest fan. I love this guy…He’s very religious. He prays, he’s a man of God, and so am I. But he’s really to a new level.”

There are some recent signs of some Democrats moving in intriguing ways to compete with the Republicans in connecting with religious voters.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, appeared last month in Idaho at a large rally with Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont socialist. Part of her speech was, “miracles start with mustard seeds, and that is what each and every one of you represent today, small miracles of faith in ourselves, in each other, and in the refusal to give up.” She highlighted that excerpt in video clips posted to social media. The “mustard seed” appears in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and will resonate with readers familiar with the Christian Bible. Even the reference to “faith” is something, though the real miracle might be if AOC would talk about a faith in something beyond “ourselves” and “each other.”

Meanwhile, Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, tells Ross Douthat of the New York Times:

I think it’s OK for Democrats to say we’d be better off as a country if more people affiliated with institutions, and that list includes religious institutions. Let’s have a conversation as a country about how we can help make religious institutions more healthy. As Democrats, we can support more grants and more public funding going to help keep the doors of religious institutions open. When we talk about wages, we could talk about how wages are connected to free time and leisure time and say, as a party, we value people having the time on a weekday evening or a weekend day to be part of a church community — or to be part of any other social or cultural institution where people find companionship.

I think Democrats, yes, have been very reluctant to engage in talk about church and religious life, but I think that’s wrong from a policy perspective and from a political perspective…Jesus talked a whole lot more about caring for the poor than he did marginalizing people who come from different countries or speak different languages, and yet Republicans tend to talk more about religion as a foundation of their policy motives.

For me, I mean, I have made tries — often unsuccessful, frankly — in the last couple of years to rejoin a religious life….Listen, I struggle with my own personal thoughts about God and the afterlife, but I find that even if your beliefs lean toward secularism or deism or agnosticism, you can still find a lot of value in church…the Democratic Party more broadly, I do think, has to get more comfortable with a language of spiritualism, and to not allow the Republican Party to own a monopoly on the ways in which policy connects to religious tenets.

Meanwhile, in Massachusetts—a Democrat-dominated state, albeit one where a lot of judges were appointed by Republican Governor Charlie Baker—a unanimous Supreme Judicial Court ruling issued May 15, 2025, Care and Protection of Eve, found a parents’ religious rights over their child extend even when the child has been removed from their custody into foster care.

The case involves a child whose parents are Rastafarians. “As part of their religious practice, they avoid Western medicine, including vaccines, and take a holistic approach to healing illness,” the opinion said. “In the parents' view, ‘you're not supposed to put anything inside your body outside of what nature has already given you because it goes against God's plan.’”

“Although the Commonwealth has assumed control over certain decision-making concerning the child, at least temporarily, that assumption of control does not extend to the religious upbringing of the child. In this area in particular, the Commonwealth must not overstep its bounds,” the court found. “The religious upbringing cultivated by the child's parents is entitled to respect, notwithstanding a temporary loss of custody.”

“Parents who have temporarily lost custody of their child retain a constitutional right to direct the religious upbringing of the child,” the court found.

Remembering Michael Ledeen: My first encounter with Michael Ledeen, who died this past weekend at age 83, was in 1995 as the newly arrived Washington correspondent of the Forward. I met him in his office at the American Enterprise Institute, which was large and decorated with African masks. It’s possible that he smoked a cigar. I was looking for scoops about the Middle East. He said, “the smartest person in Washington about the Middle East is Harold Rhode. Go talk to him.” It was both accurate and helpful. My 30-year friendship with Harold, who then worked at the Pentagon in the Office of Net Assessment, is one of the many things for which I am grateful to Ledeen.

Eli Lake has a remembrance up at the New York Sun. The Sun also has a lovely piece by Seth Lipsky that is published as an editorial: “We first met Ledeen in the spring of 1981, shortly after we began writing editorials for the Wall Street Journal. The paper’s editor, Robert Bartley, suggested we go to Washington for a few days with an eye to getting to know three rising figures — a young fiscal maven in the White House, Larry Kudlow; a starting congressman from Georgia named Newt Gingrich; and Ledeen, a foreign policy expert advising the new administration.”

David P. Goldman has an appreciation up at Asia Times. The Wall Street Journal editorial page ran a “Notable and Quotable” of a piece by Ledeen on bridge as the ultimate war game.

Prime Minister Netanyahu posted to X a thoughtful appreciation:

I got to know Michael when I came to Washington on a diplomatic mission and he was a guest scholar. He understood a basic truth that many seek to ignore: You must understand the cultures and values of the people driving current affairs to correctly assess the threats and opportunities they present. Michael's understanding of the American people and the Jewish people formed the basis of his abiding faith in the future of America and Israel and in our enduring alliance and friendship. Likewise, his deep familiarity with the Iranian people convinced him that the ayatollahs who oppress them must be prevented at all costs from developing nuclear weapons and that a free Iranian people will be a great ally and friend to America and Israel. Everyone who knew Michael was better for knowing him. I know that I was.

I went back just now and re-read some of my old emails with Michael. He was such a generous friend, so widely knowledgeable and perceptive. Ledeen, who got his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin under the great scholar of fascism George Mosse, was early to perceive the decline of the Ivy League and its elite distance from middle America; as I remember it, at least, he had a deal with his kids that he would help them pay for college at any non-Ivy institution. (His relative Ken Ledeen, by contrast, is super-active in Harvard alumni fundraising.)

Ledeen was good at friendship. He road-tripped with Justice Thomas in Thomas’s motor home. He was pals with Giuliano Ferrara, the founding editor of the Italian newspaper Il Foglio. He was friends with the Bear Stearns CEO Jimmy Cayne and with Judge Laurence Silberman. He frequently lectured to the Young Presidents Organization. With Richard Perle and Stephen Bryen, he threw an annual summer barbecue in Washington.

He wrote a book about Machiavelli (“Machiavelli on Modern Leadership”). He was good at cooking pasta. His father designed the air conditioning system for Disney Studios, and his mother may have been the model for Snow White.

Though his expertise was in Europe and he worked a lot on the Middle East, particularly Iran, he was early in perceiving the threat from Communist China, and he served as a commissioner on the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

Like a lot of people in the Reagan administration he was involved in the Iran-Contra affair. One of the flaws of William Inboden’s recent Reagan book is that it takes an unwarranted shot at Ledeen on that topic.

If there’s something Ledeen’s best known for in recent years it’s his advocacy of support for “the Iranian people against the evil regime that is the central source of terror against us and our would-be friends.” Ledeen felt Iran was ripe for a counterrevolution against the Ayatollahs. As he put it in one column from 2013, “just think of the consequences of a free Iran: the fall of the Syrian regime, a devastating blow to Hezbollah, the Revolutionary Guards, Islamic Jihad and Hamas….And yes, faster, please.”

The Syrian regime has since fallen, and Hezbollah has been dealt a devastating blow. Had people listened more to Ledeen and moved faster against the Iranian regime, the Iranian nuclear issue that the U.S. and Israel are now confronting would be moot, and perhaps the attack of October 7, 2023 would have never happened. Certainly Houthis wouldn’t be launching missiles from Yemen at Israel on a daily basis.

There’s a view that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have somehow discredited neoconservatism or the idea of regime change. The New York Times is out with an obituary of Ledeen whose subheadline says he “wrote many books and articles, some of whose theories were later discredited.”

What’s really discredited, though, is the theory that Iran’s oppressive and hostile regime can be “contained.” The best eventual tribute to Ledeen would be the free Iran that, alas, did not come fast enough for him to live to see.