Dems get religion in fight to oust Trump

By ELENA SCHNEIDER06/12/2019 05:02 AM EDTDES MOINES, Iowa — One of the biggest applause lines of Pete Buttigieg’s latest trip to Iowa came when he said: “Faith isn’t the property of one political party.”After years of playing down or even ceding the message of faith and values to Republicans, Democratic presidential candidates are trying to reclaim it in the 2020 election, sharing their own personal faith stories and reaching out to a slice of religious voters who they believe have been motivated and alienated by President Donald Trump, who has bragged about sexual assault and paid hush money to an adult film actress. Story Continued BelowBut the Democratic focus on religion comes with a new twist: While some previous Democratic candidates have used their faith to connect with conservative or traditionalist voters, 2020 hopefuls like Pete Buttigieg, Kirsten Gillibrand, Cory Booker and others are using their religion to justify liberal positions on same-sex marriage, abortion and other policy areas that have traditionally animated the conservative religious right in the other direction.Buttigieg, the openly gay mayor of South Bend, Ind., went viral in April saying that Vice President Mike Pence’s “quarrel, sir, is with my Creator” if he had a problem with Buttigieg’s sexuality. “It’s the right moment, I think, for Democrats to challenge that idea.” The rhetoric marks a sharp break from the traditional religious politics of recent decades, said Al Sharpton, the reverend and civil rights activist who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004.“For the last several cycles, people tried to act like, as a candidate, to talk about faith is to make you less progressive,” Sharpton said. That opening is driving a “sea change” in the way candidates are addressing religion on the trail, said Guy Cecil, chairman of Priorities USA, the Democrats’ flagship presidential super PAC.“Part of it has grown out of the despondency after the 2016 election, when Christians who don’t normally get political decided they needed to be more open about it their faith in the context of politics,” Cecil said. “And it also grew out from Trump, who is entirely paradoxical to Christianity, and that opens up some voters to new candidates.”What Gillibrand calls the “misuse by the Republican right of faith-driven people” started well before Trump, she said in an interview with POLITICO before a Sunday church service in Iowa.