Tulsi Gabbard

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After five days that shook the political world, are there religious dots for pundits to connect?

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Three U.S. political axioms: African-Americans on average are more religiously devout than whites.

African-American Protestants pretty much determine who can win the Democratic presidential nomination and certainly boosted Joe Biden on Super Tuesday.

Black enthusiasm and turnout are all-important for the party’s prospects in any November.

Then look at the Democrats' two geezers. Former Vice President Joe Biden is sometimes befuddled, but he’s an appealing, old-shoe churchgoer (also pro-abortion-rights and he performed a wedding for two men, but who would still be the first Catholic president in 57 years). Sen. Bernie Sanders (a socialist independent, not a Democrat!) would be the first ethnic Jew in the White House, but would surpass Donald Trump as the nation’s most secularized chief executive.

Sanders swept non-religious Democrats in New Hampshire and South Carolina, then bombed with Sunbelt African-Americans, many of whom frequent churches.

Are there any faith-based dots here for pundits to connect?

The improbably rich Michael Bloomberg quit to back Biden — while at this writing Sanders’ ideological soulmate Sen. Elizabeth Warren stubbornly remained in the fray. (Update: She dropped out this morning, after this memo was posted.)

But pundits assure us it’s Biden vs. Sanders to the bitter end.


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What do Tulsi Gabbard, Stehekin and the Science of Identity Foundation have in common?

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Stehekin is a unique and lovely spot in central Washington state that’s very hard to get to, as it can only be reached by foot, boat or plane. It’s at the end of the lovely 55-mile-long Lake Chelan and about 95 people live there year-round.

So how does this isolated spot become a religion story involving Tulsi Gabbard, the first Hindu to be elected to Congress and one in a crowded field of Democrats vying for president?

I can’t say I’ve ever heard of Civil Beat, a website in Honolulu, but they came up with a pretty interesting story on this lady and went so far as to send a reporter to Washington state to try to track the story down. It begins:

STEHEKIN, Wash. — Deep in the Washington state wilderness, a highly paid political consultant is raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars from U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s presidential campaign.

It’s the kind of money usually spent on national name-brand political operatives with bustling offices and large staffs based in Washington, D.C., or New York.

But few people in the business have ever heard of Kris Robinson, the owner of Northwest Digital, a web design and internet marketing firm working for Gabbard’s campaign. His company address is a P.O. box here in Stehekin, a remote village in the Northern Cascades mountains that’s famous for its isolation.

After explaining how truly out-of-the-way this place is,

Yet in the first six months of 2019, federal campaign finance records show Gabbard paid Robinson and his company more than $259,000…Robinson is one of her top vendors.

Then the religion angle pops up.

Like her, he has ties to an obscure religious sect called the Science of Identity Foundation that’s based in Kailua and run by a reclusive guru whose devotees have displayed political ambitions. …


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Heavy lift in 2020? Democrats continue to seek a modernized faith formula that works

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After 20 Democratic candidates’ “food fight” debates (thank you, Kamala Harris), pundits are pondering whether Harris or Elizabeth Warren will win their developing faceoff, whether senior citizens Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are slipping and whether the party is roaming too far left to win the mushy American middle.

Meanwhile, political reporters interested in religion, and religion reporters interested in politics, should examine whether the Democrats can improve their religion outreach after a lackluster 2016 effort, amid perennial predictions that a revivified “religious left” could counterbalance Republicans’ familiar “Religious Right.”

This time around, Democrats have uttered more religious mentions than usual, but hopes center upon one newcomer, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, an outspoken gay Episcopalian.

Asked about immigration during the debate, Episcopalian Buttigieg said “the Republican Party likes to cloak itself in the language of religion” while “our party doesn’t talk about that as much,” largely because of commitment to separation of church and state. Then this: “For a party that associates itself with Christianity to say that it is O.K. to suggest that God would smile on the division of families at the hands of federal agents, that God would condone putting children in cages, has lost all claim to ever use religious language again.”

There’s upcoming news in Buttigieg’s pick for full-time “Faith Engagement Director.” The job ad says the campaign “rejects transactional interactions” in favor of “creative ways to unlock cultural appreciation.” (Translation, please.) Notably, “women, LGBTQ folks, and disabled people are strongly encouraged to apply.” (What, no blacks and Latinos?)

The Democratic Party has already made a similar hire, with the Rev. Dr. Derrick Harkins serving as director of religious outreach, which he also was in 2012. Back then, the left worried he’d lack enthusiasm for open-ended abortion and gay rights, but interviewers will presumably find he’s now fully on board, in the cultural liberalism department.

Harkins was the assistant pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City and pastor of New Hope Baptist Church in Dallas and Nineteenth Street Baptist Church in Washington, D.C. Since 2015 he’s been “Senior Vice President for Innovations in Public Programming” at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Under Harkins, the party’s first listening session was with the pro-LGBTQ Union of Affirming Christians.


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CNN on Tulsi Gabbard: Some candidates' LGBTQ policy ghosts are more relevant than others

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It’s pretty easy to see where the Rep. Tulsi Gabbard story is going for the new CNN.

I think the heart of the story can be expressed this way: Are you now, or have you ever been a … conservative Democrat (or related, by blood, to one)?

Gabbard recently declared that she is one of the legions of Democrats who plan to seek the party’s presidential nomination. She is the first Hindu (a somewhat controversial convert, no less) to take that step.

However, she also created a mini-media storm with an op-ed in The Hill in which (trigger warning) she took an old-school liberal stand on a key religious liberty issue, affirming Article 6 of the U.S. Constitution, which bans any form of “religious test” for those seeking public office.

Yes, we’re talking about the Knights of Columbus wars. Gabbard wrote:

While I oppose the nomination of Brian Buescher to the U.S. District Court in Nebraska, I stand strongly against those who are fomenting religious bigotry, citing as disqualifiers Buescher’s Catholicism and his affiliation with the Knights of Columbus. If Buescher is “unqualified” because of his Catholicism and affiliation with the Knights of Columbus, then President John F. Kennedy, and the 'liberal lion of the Senate' Ted Kennedy would have been “unqualified” for the same reasons.

Wait for it. Here is the language that probably put a millstone around her neck.

No American should be told that his or her public service is unwelcome because “the dogma lives loudly within you” as Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said to Amy Coney Barrett during her confirmation hearings in 2017 to serve as U.S. Circuit Court judge in the 7th Circuit. …

The party that worked so hard to convince people that Catholics and Knights of Columbus like Al Smith and John F. Kennedy could be both good Catholics and good public servants shows an alarming disregard of its own history in making such attacks today.

We must call this out for what it is – religious bigotry.

The reactions were fierce, to say the least.


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Hindu and Hawaiian: The New Yorker sings praises of up-and-coming Congresswoman

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You can always tell when the New Yorker team meets a religious person they deem to be either progressive-cool, such as former NYPD Muslim cop Bobby Hadid; or a refugee from weird Christian movements (Westboro Church’s Megan Phelps Roper). There are some exceptions, such as their sympathetic treatment of Rod Dreher’s vision of the Benedict Option.

But then there was their anemic coverage of Mike Pence’s faith and their jaundiced view of religious liberty. And then there's their no-holds-barred hostility-verging-on-incoherent treatments such as this review of the faith-based film "Let There Be Light." 

What runs in the magazine is light years away from classic pieces like Peter J. Boyer’s Sept. 15, 2003, piece on Mel Gibson’s movie “The Passion of the Christ.” (Boyer now writes for The Weekly Standard).

So when I saw their latest piece on a Hawaiian politician who’s the first Hindu in Congress, I figured here’s another gushy article in the here’s-a-religious-person-who-isn’t- one-of-those-medieval-conservative-folks vein. As this piece in People magazine on her 2015 Vedic wedding illustrates, Gabbard is a colorful politician who's no stick-in-the-mud.

What saves this profile is how the writer actually did some work on the odd-ish guru that Tulsi Gabbard calls her mentor. First, the intro:

“(Gabbard) is thirty-six, and has a knack for projecting both youthful joy and grownup gravitas. Her political profile is similarly hybrid. She is a fervent Bernie Sanders supporter with equally fervent bipartisan tendencies—known, roughly equally, for her concern for the treatment of veterans and her opposition to U.S. intervention abroad. She is also a vegetarian and a practicing Hindu—the first Hindu ever elected to Congress—as well as a lifelong surfer and an accomplished athlete.
On Capitol Hill, she is often regarded as a glamorous anomaly: a Hawaiian action figure, fabulously out of place among her besuited colleagues. “She’s almost straight from central casting, if you need a heroine,” Van Jones, the progressive activist, says.


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When Obama didn't 'presume to know' Creation details

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Yesterday I wrote a jeremiad against the media’s curiously inconsistent approach to science. The hook was the media outrage over Sen. Marco Rubio’s comments (in the middle of a fluffy GQ interview about rap music) equivocating on the age of the earth.


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