Let us imagine for a moment that Barack Obama is elected president in November 2008. Whether it fills you with joy to know that a bright, charismatic young man has defied centuries of prejudice to become the first African-American president or with horror to think that the US might be governed by an inexperienced snob with a poor choice in pastors, it is commonly perceived that such an event would mark the birth of a new era in American politics. President Obama would probably control both houses of congress by a handy majority, as well as enjoying a strong mandate for reform after eight years of recession, war and corruption. There is a wide perception of Obama as a 'transcendent' personality, that is a statesman who is capable to appealing to left and right and who does not operate within the confines of established political discourse. Obama's campaign claims to have put forward 'an argument for a more unifying style of leadership. In a time of great partisanship... he doesn't use his considerable rhetorical gifts to demonize Republicans. He's not neglecting his core values; he defends his progressive vision with vigorous integrity. But for him, American unity - transcending party - is a core value in itself.'

One of the key components of this strategy is making a fresh, non-partisan appeal for the support of religious voters. Obama has tried to frame a pro-Christian message that talks in broad terms about shared values while avoiding specifics that might alienate secularists and atheists. It appears to be working - according to a recent Time-Yankelovich poll, the Senator is regarded as a deeply religious man and his negative rating among conservative protestants is a relatively low 27% (it was 65% for Hillary Clinton when she was still running). And there is plenty of votes to fish for among Christians. Ninety percent of Americans believe in God, 70% affiliate themselves with an organized religion, 38% call themselves committed Christians and substantially more people in America believe in angels than they do in evolution. Very often, committed Christians decide the outcome of elections. In 2004, John Kerry was deeply hurt by his position on abortion and gay marriage. This helped him to lose the Catholic vote (a rare thing for a Democrat to do) and tipped the election in Bush's favour.

Moreover, the Obama's appeal to religious voters comes at a propitious moment. Evangelical and Catholic organisations are calling for immigration reform, Pat Robertson has cut an ad with Al Sharpton endorsing Al Gore's campaign for a cleaner environment and the National Association of Evangelicals has called for more aid to Africa and a better strategy on tackling AIDS. Many churches are frustrated with the Republican Party, which has promised much but delivered little in the last eight years. President Bush established a department for Faith Based and Community Initiatives that was woefully under-funded, and the administration has failed to scrap Roe vs. Wade or prevent several states legalising gay marriage. As Christians feel pushed away by a negligent GOP and pulled towards a Democratic Party that is more comfortable talking about faith, they may feel inclined to switch their votes.

The argument goes that liberals can co-opt Christians by talking about issues that their faith teaches them to take a vaguely left-wing line on. Pioneered by the liberal evangelical preacher Rev. Jim Wallis, this strategy involves highlighting the issues of poverty and global warming while downplaying, or ignoring, moral problems like homosexuality and abortion. Wallis proposes that Democrats reframe public policy debates in a manner that appeals to the religious - using faith-based language to promote ideas such as national health insurance, foreign aid and tax reform. In a seminal speech in 2006, Barack Obama concurred that by shedding itself of its militant secularism, the Democratic Party, 'might recognize some overlapping values that both religious and secular people share when it comes to the moral and material direction of our country. We might recognize that the call to sacrifice on behalf of the next generation, the need to think in terms of "thou" and not just "I," resonates in religious congregations all across the country. And we might realize that we have the ability to reach out to the evangelical community and engage millions of religious Americans in the larger project of American renewal.'

President Barack Obama, it is hoped, would be able to appeal to Christians and to break their political alliance with the GOP. His rhetoric would bridge the gulf between the religious and the liberal to form a new coalition based around America's desperate need for social reform. It is an exciting and beautiful dream. However, history suggests that it is a dream that might quickly evolve into a nightmare. The experience of the last two Democratic administrations has shown that the strict ontology of the American right cannot be easily disregarded and the fundamental questions that it raises about the division between state and church cannot be dodged. Moreover, liberalism itself is psychologically incapable of embracing a Christian agenda in the fullest sense - only those parts of it that favour its traditional platform of public charity and free expression. When he ran for the senate in 2006, Obama's conservative opponent said of him, 'Christ would not vote for Barack Obama because Barack Obama has behaved in a way that it is inconceivable for Christ to have behaved.' This very personal attack goes to the heart of the problem - liberals are intellectually unwilling to embrace a comprehensive Christology that legislates according to faith rather than reason. Unless President Obama is prepared to go beyond the liberal politics of aggressive secularism and the defence of individual free will at the cost of moral rectitude, then his rebirth as a spokesman for Christian values might prove horribly abortive.

Betrayal and appeasement

The administrations of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton offer two interesting models of how liberals typically deal with issues of faith when in office. Both Southerners with a religious background, they appealed to Christian voters and attempted to use exactly the same kind of rhetoric that Obama is using now to 'transcend' partisanship and the secularist discourse of liberalism. Both, in very different ways, failed. Jimmy Carter arguably was the first post-war president to make his faith a campaign issue and to inject it into public policy making. He won office on a pledge to never lie to America (an attractive proposal after the moral morass of Watergate) and to allow his faith to be his moral compass. The defection of rural, small town protestant evangelicals helped him to scrape together a narrow electoral victory in 1976 and among his biggest cheerleaders was Pat Robertson. But, within the fruit of victory lay the seeds of discord. Carter's overt Protestantism saw a decline in Democratic affiliation among Catholics and Jews and his vagueness on lifestyle issues like abortion and homosexuality prompted many liberals to defect to his Republican opponent (including even arch-liberal George McGovern).

Once in office, Carter's strategy backfired because his personal religiosity did not translate into legislative action. Alcohol was not banned in the White House, abortion remained legal, the administration supported gay rights in principle and prayer in public schools stayed outlawed The low point for the administration's relations with Christian conservatives was the Presidential Conference on the Future of the Family in 1979. An attempt to open up a national dialogue about how to strengthen the family unit, the conference witnessed a profound conflict of opinion on exactly how to define said unit. Evangelicals at the conference tried to use it as a platform to define the family as an exclusively monogamous heterosexual partnership as enshrined in Judeo-Christian teaching. Liberals wanted to broaden America's understanding of what constituted a viable family to include single parents and same-sex couples. Interestingly, both sides agreed on economic issues and voted throughout the conference to expand social security benefits and homemakers' rights. But they could find no agreement on the basic points of moral theology that went to the heart of the conference - hence any potential alliance of interests on public charity was subverted by discord on private morality. The administration made things worse through prevarication and abortive neutrality. When conservatives complained that the chair of the conference was a single, divorced mother, the administration suggested she co-chair with a married catholic man. Christian conservatives felt he had missed the point of their protest while liberals recognised that the compromise entailed an indirect acceptance that a divorced woman could not speak for all American families.

Thus, Carter's ambivalence on moral issues skewed his Christian message and disappointed both religious voters and secular liberals. It is highly ironic that the privately deeply faithful Carter should have sparked the massive defection of evangelical Christians to the Republican Party, but it reflects the fact that endorsement of religious principles in theory must be followed by concrete action. Imagine if the same attitude were applied to any other special interest group. If a presidential candidate were to be photographed carrying a gun but promptly banned firearms upon being elected to office, it would be assumed that he had misled the NRA. If a presidential candidate were to campaign alongside the NAACP, but then outlawed affirmative action programmes and cut social spending when in government it would be construed that he had betrayed the civil rights community. And yet there is a popular assumption among politicians that they can appropriate the language and symbolism of evangelicals and catholics without actually even trying to overturn Roe vs. Wade.

In contrast, Bill Clinton demonstrated that a viable partnership with religious voices will inevitably require concessions on key policy points. In the 2008 primaries, Hillary Clinton was forced to address the fact that her husband had supported in office a ban on partial-birth abortion, the 'don't ask don't tell' policy on gays in the military and the Defence of Marriage Act (DOMA). President Clinton's support for DOMA is a good example of a liberal making an important concession in order to appeal to the religious right - a rare admission that substantive policy rather than vague rhetoric is what actually appeals to politically active Christians. DOMA effectively 'quarantines' heterosexual marriage and makes it impossible for states to introduce same-sex unions. Crucially, Barack Obama has spoken repeatedly of his belief that marriage should be exclusively between a man and a woman, and yet he opposes DOMA. This is a paradox he will have to address. Clinton's relative social conservatism helped him to win re-election in 1996, scooping 53% of the Catholic vote and 36% of the white protestant vote - figures that have not been matched since. A consummate populist, Clinton is unusual among liberals for being prepared to do or say anything to get elected. It is a strategy that only works because, one suspects, he is utterly devoid of leftist principle. If President Obama is more righteous about his politics he may be far more limited in his room for political manoeuvre.

Liberals and faith

Why do liberal administrations who co-opt the language of the faithful on the campaign trail almost always fall out with them when in office? There are two simple reasons. First, questions that relate to ontology cannot be resolved by consensus (as the disintegration of the Anglican communion illustrates) but only by the rigid implementation of orthodoxy. For example, to an adherent of natural law life begins at conception and, as such, a foetus is a human being. If one accepts such a schema, termination can only be regarded as murder and abortion as legalised mass slaughter. In this emotionally compelling context, any compromise on the issue of abortion is tantamount to condoning murder. In contrast, liberals see abortion as both a faith and a public health issue. Thus, while they insist that they do regard abortion as morally abhorrent, the likely effects of illegalisation present a logistical nightmare that they would prefer not to contemplate. More women would die through back street abortions, the welfare rolls would expand and women's basic rights to privacy and control of their own bodies would be lost. Liberals are prepared to negotiate on abortion, perhaps to illegalise non-medical partial birth abortions, because they approach it in the same, nuanced, technocratic manner that they do funding the space programme or balancing the budget.

What though if the fate of a section of society other than unborn children was being debated? In one hundred years time, let us imagine that advances in public health has led to chronic overpopulation. As a small demographic of young workers supports an exploding population of veterans the cry might go up that the USA simply cannot support its economically unproductive aged. Imagine if the federal government allowed struggling families to opt to have their dependent grandparents put to sleep. Would we not be outraged? Would even liberals not see that there can be no compromise with the principle of the right to life? This is how many Christians see the issue of abortion and this is why negotiation with Roe vs. Wade and its legalistic pretext is impossible for them. Because they regard abortion as murder, it is also why the subject, justifiably, means more to them than taxes and social spending. This same degree of ethical inflexibility extends to the issues of gay marriage, euthanasia or prayer in schools. If you believed strongly that only through the salvation of Christ could your children avoid the flames of eternal damnation, would you not be outraged to discover that the schools that you fund with your escalating taxes actually forbid praying to the Lord on their grounds? To quote one 19th century Democratic politician on this issue, 'parents have a right to say that no teacher paid by their money shall rob their children of faith in God and send them back to their homes skeptical, or infidels, or agnostics, or atheists.' Twenty-first century liberals pay lip service to Christian values but do not realise that when a bill on moral issues comes to be debated a black and white stand is required. The issue may be complex, but its resolution must be simple - for a statement of Truth rarely contains contradictory clauses.

If the inflexibility of the evangelical mentality makes compromise a difficult proposition, then the liberal psychology makes faith-based decision making all the more unlikely. Liberals approach politics from the perspective of building coalitions for change and for those coalitions to work they must build policies that offer specific rewards to specific groups. For example, national health insurance is supported by a coalition of interest groups that would benefit from it for very different reasons: unions because it would save their members money, civil rights organisations because African-Americans are the least likely demographic to be covered by health insurance and feminists because they perceive public health as an issue of particular relevance to mothers. In contrast, religious issues hold little appeal for the Democratic base. They do not touch upon bread and butter subjects, offer no economic reward to supporters and do not appeal to specific demographics who vote as a block. As the GOP has long understood, the support of the religious right is a poisoned chalice. Pro-choice Republicans face uphill re-nomination efforts against grassroots, pro-life candidates and the issue nearly denied President Gerald Ford his party's nomination in 1976 and made Rudy Guliani's nomination in 2008 highly improbable. Likewise, during the 2008 Democratic primaries, Hillary Clinton enraged feminists when she described abortion as a 'tragic' and said she dreamed of the day when the procedure would never be practiced. The statement was objectively unassailable, but pro-choice advocates argued that by using the language of the right Clinton demonised a difficult choice that many women have to make and played into the hands of the GOP. In short, religious language does not necessarily offer a fresh coalitional strategy for liberals. If, however, President Obama should seek to establish one, he should be prepared to make new enemies out of old friends.

The root of the problem is the liberal attitude towards the role of faith in public life. This was eloquently outlined by National Organisation for Women president Kim Gandy, who told an audience in a debate with Rev. Jim Wallis that, "I don't want a progressive evangelical movement any more than I want the conservative one we have right now...I don't want my pastor telling politicians what to do or anyone else's pastor doing that." Liberals viscerally fear the imposition of communal values upon free-thinking individuals. The cult of the individual conscience is largely a post-war phenomenon - the populist Democratic Party of old regarded faith as an integral part of public policy making. Three times presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan was a Christian peace activist, prohibitionist and fierce opponent of Darwinism. But liberalism in the 1950s began to eschew civil religion in favour of a civil-rights-focussed defence of the separation of church and state. This was partly a reaction against both the McCarthyite anti-communist crusade at home and totalitarianism abroad. But it also reflected a long standing scepticism of meta-narratives, utopianism and even ideology within US liberalism. If one regards social progress as a process of negotiation, compromise and context shaping, then the idea of being led by an uncompromising faith becomes abhorrent and plain silly. Moreover, given that liberals see social reform as part of a dialogue with modernity - an adaptation of governmental machinery to better suit the demands of a society in rapid transition - something as archaic and irrational as faith has no role to play in setting a framework for social action.

Indeed, in the current climate of global fundamentalism and religious war, liberals are far less likely to give ground to an absolutist world view that they cannot empathise with. The work of neurologists and psychologists like Michael Gazzaniga has demonstrated that the division between secularists and the religious right can be understood by things as basic as chemical processes and the predomination of one side of the brain over the other. It is actually arguable that the dividing lines of the debate over the separation of church and state are delineated in large part by genetics and locality. A recent poll showed that by a 2-to-1 margin (62% to 29%), Republicans say a President should use his faith to guide his decisions. Democrats reject this idea by a similar margin. The conflict over the proper role of religion in US politics is not merely constitutional - it is about two fundamentally different world views and two different approaches to the purpose of government.

Beyond secularism

In sum, it is perfectly possible that Barack Obama's attempt to reach out to religious voters will pay off in the fall election - just as it did for Jimmy Carter in 1976. However, once he is inaugurated and the tough decisions have to be made he will find that the evangelical community will accept nothing less that 100% support for its campaigns, while the liberal base will regard any attempt to embrace Christian moral values within public policy as a betrayal of its core ideals. Therefore, liberals are probably deluding themselves if the think they can manipulate religious voters by talking in terms of personal revelation or faith. Even President Bush proved unable to satisfy the lust for change that such rhetoric stokes up and his administration at least enjoyed a mechanism for communication and appeasement with America's evangelical leadership.

There are two alternative electoral strategies that both provide consistency of approach and a bold programme for government. The first is to actually make a greater value out of the Democratic Party's reputation for secularism. While public religiosity is still a big factor at the polls, rising unease among libertarian conservatives towards the influence of faith in Republican politics means that the Democrats could peel off parts of the GOP's coalition. Certainly a tough stance of maintaining the separation of church and state would mean the Deep South would remain decidedly red, but it might actually attract voters in anti-statist Western states like Kansas and Colorado. Moreover, there is a growing block of self-described atheist voters who believe (absurdly) that they are the last minority in America to be openly persecuted and face overt discrimination. Within this block lies a potential new cadre of Democratic activists every bit as motivated as religious conservatives to go to the polls, or donate their time and money to campaigning (and atheists are usually quite wealthy). The added benefit of this strategy is that it would mean President Obama could stand proudly by his party's long term commitment to equal access abortion, same-sex unions and stem cell research. The only downside is that it would undermine his 'transcendent' image and force him to actually confront special interest groups rather than co-opt them, as is the traditional liberal instinct.

Finally, the second strategy would be to trigger a radical electoral realignment by endorsing not only the language and themes of the Christian conservative movement, but its policies too. Such an aggressively communitarian agenda would mean abrogating the traditional liberal defence of individual conscience, but it would also help to popularise its programme of social reform. By allowing prayer in schools, making a clear statement that marriage is strictly between a man and a woman and banning abortion on demand, the Democrats would resolve these issues in a single congressional session and begin the process of building a new coalition of all of those on both left and right who think government can and should be used to help improve people's lives. To be sure such a tactic would alienate many lifestyle activists, people of minority faiths and militant atheists, but it would help rebuild the New Deal coalition of middle and working class Americans united by economic need and support for social welfare programmes. It would put states like Ohio, West Virginia, Georgia, Louisiana and Missouri back into the Democratic column and lay the foundations for a powerful new electoral majority.

However, one suspects that such a strategy would be so antithetical towards liberal notions of free will as to be unlikely in the stream. If so, then this reflects a greater failure of Democratic politics to embrace the spiritual and realise that man does not live off Medicaid and rational discourse alone. An appeal must be made to his soul. To quote William Jennings Bryan, 'Eloquent speech is not from lip to ear, but rather from heart to heart.' Whether or not Barack Obama truly understands this remains to be seen. Let us pray that he does.

Dr. Timothy Stanley is a British historian specialising in the recent history of the Democratic Party and stood as the Labour Party candidate in Sevenoaks at the 2005 General Election. The co-author of 'The End of Politics: Triangulation, Realignment and the Battle for the Centre Ground', he is currently working on a monograph for Kansas University Press.