The roots of the left are deep
Religious leaders running as Democrats is not new. Rather, experts say the candidates are drawing on a long lineage of religious advocacy on the left.
“Throughout American history, there have always been progressive Christians,” said Guthrie Graves Fitzsimmons, vice president of programs and strategy at the Interfaith Alliance, a religious freedom advocacy group.
Graves-Fitzsimmons is a senior fellow at the research nonprofit Center for American Progress, where she studies the intersection of religion and politics.
He has traced the influence of religious leaders at various key moments in U.S. history, from the civil rights movement of figures like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to the advancement of women’s rights.
Conservative groups like the Moral Majority have also previously joined initiatives such as the environmental movement, defending the responsibility of Christians to engage in stewardship of nature.
“Every movement in American history that we associate with leftist or progressive movements has had a lot of people, not just Christians, but people of other faiths and non-religious people,” Graves-Fitzsimmons explained.
Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, traces the roots of the religious left further back in U.S. history to the fight over slavery in the 19th century.
“The abolitionist movement was primarily a religious movement involving a lot of Northern liberal, progressive Christians,” Burge said.
Fast forward to the early 20th century, Burge said, and the country witnessed a “social gospel movement” in the early 1900s, when theologians and pastors sought to apply Christian principles to issues such as poverty and social justice.
“The best-selling book in America for three years in a row around the beginning of this century was ‘Theology for the Social Gospel,’ which is a very liberal Christian book,” Burge added.
But while the religious right tends to be a more homogeneous group, the religious left is more diverse, and faiths other than Christianity are better represented, Burge explained.
“On the religious right, it’s almost all Protestants and Catholics,” he says.
On the other hand, the religious left has stronger representation among other faith groups. Burge pointed out that African-American Christians also lean overwhelmingly to the left, adding, “It’s not just Jews, but there are also Muslims who support the Democratic Party at a high rate.”
