Judge not, says Ford to GOP, Bible in hand
Sphere: Related ContentThe rocky marriage of religion and politics was tested again last weekend when Democratic Senate candidate Harold Ford Jr. criticized the GOP’s approach to faith.
During a stop Saturday in Paris, Tenn., Ford said one of the hallmarks of the Democratic Party is that members don’t “use the Bible to judge people.”He then quoted from the Bible about “the spirit of fear,” and living in the spirit of love, and he paraphrased U.S. Rep. Lincoln Davis, D-Tenn.
“My friend Lincoln Davis, who chairs this campaign, says there is one big difference between us and … Republicans when it comes to our faith,” Ford said. “He said ‘Republicans fear the Lord. Democrats fear and love the Lord.’”After Saturday night’s debate in Nashville, Ford told reporters that the comment wasn’t directed at Corker.
“I just made the point … people who go around and try to judge other people are to be real careful,” Ford said.
However, Republican opponent Bob Corker’s campaign and supporters said the comments crossed the line.
“If Harold Ford believes what he said about our relationship with God is true, then it’s incredibly disturbing,” Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., said in a prepared statement. “It’s outrageous for Harold Ford to say that someone’s love for the Lord depends on their political views — and it is offensive to all Tennesseans who want their next senator to bring people together, not divide them.”
Religious rehetoric has “been used fairly effectively by Ford to insulate himself against personal attacks,” said Bruce Oppenheimer, a political science professor at Vanderbilt University. “Clearly the turning point of this was the ad in the church.”
Ford’s ad, filmed inside Mt. Moriah East Baptist Church in Orange Mound, was widely hailed by pundits as successful and criticized by some civil liberty and interfaith groups as questionable.
“The recent rush of candidates-political parties — and their often aggressive tactics — to reach out to ‘people of faith’ lures religious organizations and religious leaders into dangerous legal territory,” C. Welton Gaddy, president of the 185,000-member Interfaith Alliance, wrote in a letter last month to the national chairmen of the Republican and Democratic parties.
“We didn’t mix religion and politics,” Ford told an interfaith gathering at a prayer breakfast in Chattanooga earlier this month after quoting from Ephesians. “I am who I am. I can’t step out of who I am when I go to work.”
The National Republican Senatorial Committee released a commercial that borrowed heavily from Ford’s church ad and questioned his God-focused image in light of his attendance at a Playboy-sponsored party last year.
Behind the back-and-forth is a battle over religious voters, a demographic that in previous election years has helped turn out the Republican vote. This month, a Gallup poll found white religious voters “equally as likely to say they will vote Democratic as Republican,” a dramatic shift from their strong Republican leanings expressed in surveys conducted earlier in the year.
“One of the things the Republicans have done very well over the last 20 years or so is make religion one of their cornerstones,” said John Geer, a political science professor at Vanderbilt University. “The Democrats don’t want to give that ground up. Religion isn’t Democratic or Republican.”
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