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.