Former Obama Staffer: Democrats Have a Religious Problem

"The Democratic Party used to welcome people who didn’t support abortion"

12.30.2016

Former Obama staffer Michael Wear, who served as part of the President's faith-outreach in both the 2008 and 2012 campaigns, says the Democrats have a serious problem with religion, and need to stop shunning it should they want to win future elections.

President-elect Donald Trump won evangelical voters by 81 to 16 percent against Hillary Clinton and Catholic voters by 52 to 45 percent. According to Wear, who opposes same-sex marriage and abortion, this disparity needs some serious examination by the Democratic Party, which has become not just irreligious but increasingly anti-religious since Bill Clinton clinched the nomination in 1992.

In an interview with Emma Green at The Atlantic, Wear opened up about some of his experiences as an Obama staffer, which included various awkward encounters with fellow staffers that were either ignorant of Christian culture or disdainful of it.

Some of his colleagues also didn’t understand his work. He once drafted a faith-outreach fact sheet describing Obama’s views on poverty, titling it 'Economic Fairness and the Least of These,' a reference to a famous teaching from Jesus in the Bible. Another staffer repeatedly deleted 'the least of these,' commenting, 'Is this a typo? It doesn’t make any sense to me. Who/what are ‘these’?'

Wear also attested to almost quitting his job entirely when he "watched battles over abortion funding and contraception requirements in the Affordable Care Act with chagrin."

As to the oft-repeated question on why Christians would support a man with a morally checkered past like Donald Trump for President, Wear says they were looking for a protector in a culture that has increasingly hectored and isolated them.

Many of those 81 percent are accommodating cultural changes in America that are deeply problematic. Liberals have been trying to convince Americans, and evangelicals in particular, that America is not a Christian nation. The 2016 election was evangelicals saying, 'Yeah, you’re right! We can’t expect to have someone who is Christian like us. We can’t expect to have someone with a perfect family life. What we can expect is someone who can look out for us, just like every other group in this country is looking for a candidate who will look out for them.'

A huge problem for Democrats, Wear says, is their rendering abortion as sacrosanct, shunning anyone from the party that doesn't follow the rubric, a sentiment that even some pro-choicers have started to feel. Wear says that only alienates people that may otherwise vote Democrat, but resist on moral principle. It also doesn't help that the abortion narrative has been pushed solely by pro-abort organizations like Planned Parenthood, who gave "historic investments" in both the 2008 and 2012 campaigns.

Wear concludes that people like himself have begun to feel politically isolated in the Democratic Party as they hemorrhage their last vestige of social conservatives into the Republican party.

"The Democratic Party used to welcome people who didn’t support abortion into the party," he concludes. "We are now so far from that, it’s insane."