News21 A Journalism Initiative of the Carnegie and Knight Foundations

Mara Vanderslice says two moments define her life.

The first, she says, was an instant of clarity that arrived as she worked with missionaries in a Bogotá slum. For an 18-year-old, it was a stark contrast to growing up in middle-class Boulder, Co. She began to realize that billions of people-- “God knows each by name” – subsisted on pennies a day, and that stunned her.

The second was her conversion to Christianity at Earlham College, a Quaker school, in Indiana. “One evening in our campus worship I had a moment where I really felt like God was calling me, and said, ‘I have been calling you by name, I have been knocking on your door. You are mine,’ ” she explains.

Many thousands of miles and three long years separate those two moments. But they have shaped not only a career, but, in her words, “a ministry”: trying to reclaim a faith-based message that the Republican Party has, seemingly, co-opted over the last 30 years.

Vanderslice and partner Eric Sapp run Common Good Strategies, a consulting company that has helped Democratic political candidates reach out to religious voters, with notable success, over the past two years.

“I have never understood why the Christian voice that was raised up in American life seemed so focused on conservative issues and not as much on those who I think Jesus spent much of his ministry with,” Vanderslice says. “So for me it was very frustrating that once I claimed a Christian identity that somehow there was a sense that I should then change my party membership to becoming a Republican.”

For Sapp, who grew up in a Christian home, the formative experiences of faith were quite different. But he says he too experienced a call.

He had planned to go into policy and politics, but a brief question from a stranger in a British church – “so you’re going to be a minister, right?” – gave him pause and kept him up much of the night. The son of a Presbyterian minister, he had never considered following in his father’s footsteps. But he then pursued divinity school and public policy at Duke University. As a through-and-through Democrat, he began to tire of fielding such questions as: You’re this religion, aren’t you a Republican? How can you be a Democrat?

A chance meeting – or, in Sapp’s view, a providential one – on Capitol Hill in the spring of 2005, a few conversations over coffee, and Vanderslice was ready to launch the partnership with Sapp. Over the past two years, their consulting firm, based in Alexandria, Va., has helped Democratic political candidates reach out to religious voters.

It’s an unusual venture – living out one’s religious beliefs through a career in the aggressive and profitable world of political consulting. Both insist it is faith that drives them. And whether they are encouraging candidates to express their religious beliefs in the public arena, setting up meetings between candidates and religious leaders or helping candidates to give religion-based speeches, it is faith that informs not only which campaigns Vanderslice and Sapp work with but also the overall message of those candidates.

“We don’t want to try to make all Christians become Democrats – that is not our goal,” Vanderslice says. “But the goal is that there should be more balance, and it just felt so wrong for me in every way that people of faith would feel that there is only one political persuasion for them. And that is where the passion for the work started.”

Both say they’re compelled by their religious, as well as political, beliefs. And they say the candidates they work with – a roster that has included U.S. Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pennsylvania), Gov. Jennifer Granholm of Michigan, Gov. Ted Strickland of Ohio and U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) – are also guided by faith.

The partners stress that candidates who speak about God must do so from an authentic place, and preach a heartfelt message.

They are not alone in their push to reclaim religious territory from the Republican sphere, where it has played a central role in campaigns at many levels for decades.

The top three Democratic candidates in the 2008 presidential race –Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards — have all spoken out, publicly and often, about their faith. The Republican field, in contrast, has largely shied from doing so – signaling, perhaps, as academic experts have suggested, that the GOP’s dominance in aligning with religious voters is fading.

“The religious vote is more up-for-grabs than usual,” says Alan Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, where he is a political science professor. “It has certainly been discussed for a long time – at least 10 years. But there's a greater opportunity for Democrats in 2008.”

Americans are beginning to realize the problems that can stem from identifying religion with one particular political party, Wolfe says.

“It's bad for politics and religion if one party is viewed as the natural fit for religious voters – it's dangerous,” he says. “It's bad for politics if one party is seen as religious and one as secular – it's reproducing the ugly wars of Europe, which we don't want in this country. It's bad for religion – while religion has a place in politics; religion and politics are not the same, and if they are equated, it's bad for religion.”

Sapp says he agrees with Wolfe “very strongly. Our goal is to help provide balance and be sure that the Democrats have a prophetic voice to balance out the right.”

Before forming Common Good, Vanderslice advised U.S. Sen. John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign on faith and religion. “It was the very next year,” she says, “when I think there was a little bit of a wakeup call to Democrats, frankly, that Kerry (D-Mass.) had lost and there was an understanding that we had lost religious voters, values voters – but also with Catholics, with weekly church goers. Bush had made even greater gains with evangelicals and also even those that we would think in our base communities, what Democrats would call our base communities – Hispanics, Protestants, where we had lost a lot of ground.”

Vanderslice says Common Good allows her and Sapp to pursue both a goal and a passion: “There’s many in the religious community that are speaking to issues, and that is wonderful,” she says. “But we felt what was needed was a real culture shift within the Democratic Party itself, and we had it within our heart and mission that we could get behind there and help build bridges and build relationships that would ultimately change the culture within our party.”

While the firm is moving toward working with state parties, the challenge begins with the individual candidates, both partners say.

Consider the summer of 2006, when the organization began working with U.S Rep. Heath Shuler of North Carolina. Shuler, who was running his first Congressional campaign, was already outspoken about his faith, and bringing it into his discussion of global warming, a major part of his platform, says Andrew Whalen, communications director for Shuler and the Congressman’s former deputy campaign manager.

Vanderslice and Sapp worked with Whalen to get the greatest exposure for his message.

“If I was putting together an event on global warming, they’d connect us with reporters at outlets who might be writing about that,” Whalen says. Similarly, Common Good worked to get Shuler’s faith message out in religious and secular media outlets on a national level, so that constituents would see his name beyond the local level.

Sapp also provided a unique voice among Shuler’s consultants, Whalen says.

“A lot of times consultants come from the same place. Eric offered a different point of view than most consultants – in the end, the advice may be the same, but it was framed differently.”

Common Good’s work at the state party level allows it to build relationships that last beyond campaigns, Sapp says.

“You can keep relationships going and continue to expand things out.”

They say they are working to focus more on state parties, and are negotiating with party leaders. Neither partner, however, would say which candidates or state parties they are courting because talks are pending.

One state where Common Good’s strategy was effective was Kansas.

Kansas Democratic Party Chairman Larry Gates heard Vanderslice speak at a national party event in early 2005 and decided to hire her to consult on issues of faith. Gates, a friend of the state party chairman in Michigan, was familiar with work Vanderslice had done there, according to Kansas Democratic Party Executive Director Mike Gaughan.

The Kansas state party, which had many Catholic candidates, was especially interested in reaching out to Catholics, Gaughan says.

“We needed to engage faith voters,” he says. “We had kind of ceded that ground to the Republican Party – that is true nationally, too. Bringing Mara in, we wanted to talk about how candidates could talk about their faith.”

Abortion remains a major part of political debate in Kansas.

With Vanderslice’s help, Democratic candidates began meeting with local Catholic clergy and lay leaders, discussing what Democratic Governor Kathleen Sebelius had already done to reduce the number of abortions. “Once we addressed abortion, we could address social justice and the environment – issues that Catholics and Democrats see eye-to-eye on,” Gaughan says

In addition to facilitating outreach to the Catholic community, Vanderslice helped the state party in Kansas, a traditionally red state, find a framework for discussing faith. “One very specific thing that helped was the language of the common good,” Gaughan says. “Once our chair embraced it, it was so natural coming out of his Catholic faith … It spoke to traditional Democratic values; it was the string to tie it all together.”

Vanderslice and Sapp are currently working on the campaign of John Arthur Eaves, who is running for governor of Mississippi, Sapp says.

Nationally, Sapp says that since each of the Democratic front-runners has some form of faith consultant, “we made a decision to stay out of the (presidential) primaries.”

Still, Vanderslice says she’s impressed with how the Democratic candidates are reaching out to the religious community.

“I think the most amazing thing about 2008 is that if you look at the top three of our top presidential candidates … I think all three of them have very deep commitments and roots in their own personal religious lives and are comfortable speaking about it and the role religion plays in American life,” she says.

Vanderslice says Common Good would like to work with the Democratic presidential nominee. The firm, which consists of Vanderslice, Sapp and extra staff they bring on in busy campaign times, works out of the dining room in Sapp’s home, surrounded by photos of his wedding, wooden objects he has carved and a small terrarium.

Sapp and Vanderslice warn that references to faith on the campaign trail can’t be superficial and that they apply their own litmus test to candidates who want to hire them.

“Our first operating principle was that [a candidate’s message] had to be authentic,” Vanderslice says. She and Sapp sit down with each candidate to discuss what is central to his or her faith and how to incorporate that into a message that will resonate with voters.

There is skepticism about campaign trail expressions of faith.

“In part, I think it’s great,” says Hartford Seminary President Heidi Hadsell, who is also an ethics professor. “Because if people are religious, inevitably they are religious…their religious values shape their political opinions and political philosophy.”

At the same time, she says, “I think part of it is demagogic. Part of it is – that’s the flavor of the month. That’s the tune that everybody is dancing to right at the moment. So, I listen for authenticity. And not just the words.”

Hadsell says she looks beyond how a candidate presents him or herself on the campaign trail to his or her past and community to discern whether he or she has a sincere expression of faith.

For Vanderslice, digging out the core truths of one’s beliefs is key; but just as important is enabling candidates to craft those deeply-held personal beliefs in a message that takes hold.

“A lot of what we did was just work with candidates to help them find ways to express what was real and authentic to them about their faith experience,” Vanderslice says, “how it informed their calls to public service and to work to provide opportunities for them to do that.” Vanderslice and Sapp would then set up small groups where a candidate could share this message with local religious leaders.

This focus on authenticity means that expressing faith may not take an expected, or a more conventional form.

“We have actually made a really important point of saying we are not trying to get Democrats to quote from the Bible, and that is absolutely not what we are trying to do,” Vanderslice says. “And sometimes we will say that very explicitly that this is not about asking someone to quote from this chapter and verse.”

Proving he or she knows the Bible backwards and forwards may not be the most important thing for a candidate.

“Sometimes I think the most effective languages or ways to connect are not to directly quote from Scripture but from really speaking about that deep, heartfelt experience,” Vanderslice says.

“People of faith are incredibly perceptive…and they are going to see through something that is not real, and I think it has been very important to us to say this has to be about what drives you at the deepest level, that comes from a place of faith and prayer and that we should not be afraid to say that.”

On the Republican side, consultants look for the natural connection between candidates and their constituents.

GOP media consultant Wayne Johnson says candidates each have a “natural constituency” of people who share his or her core beliefs. Johnson says he works with candidates to develop a platform based on this constituency.

Johnson’s own in-house polling has found that for “those with liberal theology and liberal politics – the liberal politics is what has the intensity,” he says. “There’s a religious aspect, but it’s not driven by religion.”

In contrast, he says, conservatives’ politics are often driven by their theological views.

Johnson, the immediate past president of the bipartisan American Association of Political Consultants, expresses concern that “religious convictions can be appealed to by those who don’t share them. Campaigns face all kinds of challenges when they do that.”

For his part, “we discourage candidates from being manipulative about faith,” Johnson says. “Not because it’s not important. It’s too important.”

Still, belief is a powerful magnet for like-minded voters.

According to Joanna Kuebler, a spokeswoman for U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), voters want candidates to reach them on the level of faith. And, she says, the electorate generally responds positively to candidates’ expressions of belief.

Whalen, Kuebler’s counterpart on Congressman Shuler’s staff, concurs.

“A lot of times, faith is viewed as a partisan issue,” he said. “Some people are very faithful and are just not comfortable speaking about it. Voters can see genuine belief as the driving desire to public service.”

The trend of Democrats speaking out about faith is likely to continue, experts say.

“I think the idea of religion and one political party in a tight alliance like in the past – with the GOP and evangelicals – will not happen again for a long time,” says Wolfe, of the Center for Religion and American Public Life. “Evangelical voters will have a lot of questions about identifying their religion with one political party.”

For Vanderslice, the questions were raised long ago. And she’s making it her life’s work to answer them.

As the religious vote attracts more attention, “you’ll see more companies and consulting firms just making this a part of what they do,” says Sapp.

Even so, the partners regard their consulting as enough of a cause that they would like to work themselves out of business.

“Ultimately, if our work catches on, Eric and I say we would love to put ourselves out of a job. We started this to change the culture [of the party] and if we can change that, we would love to move on to other things,” Vanderslice says.