The Big Sort (39 page)

The country had sorted and polarized to such an extent that one political scientist observed that voters "approached the race more like British voters casting votes for a parliamentary majority than like Americans weighing the unique merits of individual candidates." In blue Rhode Island, 63 percent of the voters approved of the way Republican senator Lincoln Chafee had done his job. It didn't matter. They voted him out because Rhode Islanders disapproved of his party.
³⁴
Chafee lost in a straight-ticket landslide. The number of people who voted a straight Democratic ticket in Rhode Island in 2006 jumped two-thirds over the number in 2002.
³⁵
People were voting for party, up and down the ballot and all across the country.
^‡
Among the three-quarters of the electorate nationwide who claimed a party (unchanged from 2004), there was nearly pure allegiance: 93 percent of Democrats said that they voted for Democrats; 91 percent of Republicans said that they voted for Republicans.
³⁶

The Republican Party in Congress swung further to the ideological right because of the election. Nine out of the twenty most liberal Republican House members lost—and nineteen of the thirty-one seats that went to Democrats had been held by Republicans in the less conservative half of the caucus. John Fortier, with the American Enterprise Institute, reported that before the midterm elections, Republicans had held eighteen House seats in districts that John Kerry had won in 2004—so-called split districts. After the 2006 elections, only eight remained Republican.
^*
The geographic segregation of the parties continued, as New Englanders rejected most of their remaining Republican representatives. Voters in eleven northeastern congressional districts held by Republicans elected Democrats. Only one Republican from New England remained, Connecticut's Chris Shays, and he barely won. "After Tuesday," Fortier wrote, "if you get into a car in Manhattan and drive north out of the city, you would have to go nearly 200 miles until you reach territory represented by Republicans." The result of the election was to make the Republican House caucus even more ideologically homogeneous. Democrats, meanwhile, did elect some moderates, but only a third of the party's class of 2006 could be considered socially conservative.
³⁷

The Big Sort was at work even within congressional districts. In Louisville, Kentucky, John Yarmuth beat a five-term Republican without carrying a single precinct where Republicans had a majority in registration. Louisville has a large black community, which Yarmuth easily carried. But the margins in these precincts were the same as in previous elections. Yarmuth won because white, liberal neighborhoods "got even more liberal," giving the Democrat "astounding" majorities, according to a former chair of the local Republican Party.
³⁸
Democrat Claire McCaskill spent weeks campaigning in rural Missouri and, according to Jeffrey Goldberg in
The New Yorker,
had what for the magazine was a special ability to "speak in language familiar to, among others, the disaffected hog farmers of Missouri."
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Was this enough to break through the stark division between rural and urban voters? No. McCaskill did no better in rural counties (even those with hog farmers, disaffected though they may have been) than had Democrat Jean Carnahan when she lost to Jim Talent in the 2002 election. McCaskill beat Talent by 42,000 votes because she piled up a 113,000-vote advantage in the cities. The same was true for organic lentil farmer Jon Tester, the flat-topped and butch-waxed Democrat who won the Montana Senate seat from Republican Conrad Burns. Tester lost rural Montana by 9 percentage points, but he won Montana's cities by 11 points. Because he did well in the metro areas, he became a U.S. senator. Fightin Irishman and Democratic candidate Jim Webb lost rural Virginia by 11 points but pulled enough votes in the cities to beat incumbent Republican senator George Allen. The gap between rural and urban voters in these key states—a gap that didn't exist nationally three decades ago—continued despite Democratic candidates suitably spoken, coifed, and armed for the countryside.

Americans remained politically segregated. In the 2004 presidential race in Missouri, 41 percent of the state's voters lived in counties where the contest between Kerry and Bush was decided by 20 or more percentage points. The 2006 race between Talent and McCaskill was much closer, but 38 percent of the state's voters still lived in landslide communities. In Virginia in 2004, 43.7 percent of the state's voters lived in counties that were carried by a landslide in the presidential election. In 2006, the geographic segregation of Virginia's voters increased. In a Senate contest decided by just 7,000 votes out of more than 1.3 million cast, 45.5 percent of the state's voters lived in communities where the gap between Allen and Webb was more than 20 percentage points.

The ideological divisions remained, too. A poll taken by thirty universities asked voters about fourteen issues. Republicans and Democrats disagreed about all fourteen. When Emory political scientist Alan Abramowitz compiled the issues to construct a liberal-to-conservative scale, he found that 86 percent of Democrats were on the liberal end of the scale, while 80 percent of Republicans were on the conservative end. Only 10 percent of the voters were in the moderate middle.
⁴⁰
In a March 2007
New York Times/CBS
poll, 78 percent of Republicans wanted a candidate in 2008 who was at least as conservative as Bush.
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Republicans in 2007 were more religious than they were twenty years earlier; Democrats were less so.
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"My fear is there will be more partisanship," moderate (and defeated) Ohio Republican senator Mike DeWine told National Public Radio a few days after the 2006 election. "You can find areas of common ground, even with people you disagree with on other things; you can find their passion," DeWine said, sounding as if 2005 had been the good old days of bipartisanship. "My fear is that's not going to happen as much as it should in the future."
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In April 2007, DeWine's concerns were borne out. Only four Republicans in Congress bucked the party to vote for troop withdrawals from Iraq. Partisan Republicans saw "the war in Iraq in fundamentally different terms than Democrats and political independents," reported Jonathan Weissman in the
Washington Post,
and "neither side wants compromise."
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"The whole thing is so polarized," Senator Evan Bayh, an Indiana Democrat, said in May 2007. "There is a canyon separating the bases of both parties."
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Democracy always reveals who we are, never what we will become.

—
ROBERT WIEBE,
Self-Rule
A Cultural
History of American Democracy.

T
HE BASEMENT AT
the Calvary Baptist church in downtown Minneapolis on a Sunday afternoon was filled with about fifty homeless guys finishing a soup kitchen dinner while they watched the Vikings whomp a hapless Brett Favre and the Packers. The television was rabbit-eared and fuzzy. The room was humid; it had the look of an elementary school auditorium, with a small stage in the front and an open area where the fellows with their bedrolls were rooting on the Vikings. During the meal, several Generation Y kids wearing T-shirts and soul patches were on the stage wiring mikes, setting up a drum kit, and running the whole system through an Apple laptop. "Five minutes, guys," a mop-wielding church worker told the dinner crowd. When the game was finished, the homeless guys spilled out onto Twenty-sixth Street. Meanwhile, more young people arrived. And within the hour, the basement was transformed from shelter/sports bar to church/coffee house. The kids erected small "prayer stations" in the corners, with cushions, candles, and mosaics of Jesus. There were a few Communion tables with wine and bread. Photos were projected onto two small screens on the stage: a figure behind a diaphanous curtain; a fire-eater; a boy in handcuffs. The images were more evocative than religious, more contemplative than doctrinal. Taped voices sang, "This is not a performance ... Not a concert ... It is our worship."

The people who trickled in were mostly twentyish, but a few gray heads settled around the tables, cushions, and candles. The musicians took to the low stage—bass, guitar, drums, and a small keyboard and synthesizer rigged through the Apple. The music began with rockish praise songs, the kind of swaying, arm-waving, Eaglesque anthems popular in Evangelical youth services. There was a hint of psychedelia in the music, however, that swelled and gradually took over. After about twenty-five minutes, without a break or a pause, the group's leader, Dan Lukas, led his band into something that sounded less like "Already Gone" and more like the Grateful Dead's "Feedback." Verses turned into chants, and forty-five minutes after the band had begun, the music assumed a meditative drone. The images on the two screens turned more cosmic—lights, then the planets, the sun, the moon. The music had gone on for a full hour, nonstop, when John Musick, in black jeans and stocking feet, slid to the middle of the room and asked if anyone would like to take Communion. Some did. The music had put everyone in a semitrance. The drummer, a kid in a stocking cap, dislodged himself from his kit and headed to the table with the bread and wine. Nobody rushed. Musick talked about finding time to "turn off my inner dialogue" and to discover a "centering prayer." He asked everyone to pick a word, a mantra—his was "grace"—and we meditated for another ten or fifteen minutes.

So began the weekly church service at Bluer.

A century ago, the Social Gospel emerged in response to the brutality of a new industrial, urban nation. Beginning in the mid-1960s, the decline of mainline religious denominations and the rise of more fundamentalist faiths were a reaction against a church dedicated more to social uplift than to salvation. The megachurches and "like attracts like" congregations began forming in the 1970s, designed as cultural safe havens after the post-materialist culture shift and social upheaval of 1965 sparked a decline in social trust. But society doesn't stop changing, no matter how much our own time seems the end-all of knowledge and the be-all of experience. Bluer, and churches like it all over the country, are another generation's reaction to the "people like us" design of the modern suburban church—and the segregated political life of present-day America.

Musick perched on a stool and said he wanted to talk about the first piece of Scripture he had ever been required to memorize, the first three verses of Hebrews 12—the "cloud of witnesses" passage. This Scripture would be the topic of Musick's sermon—if "sermon" can apply both to Musick's talk and the carefully measured three-point presentations delivered at the megachurches. Musick's homily wandered, more like a slow conversation than a revelation of the Word of God. Rick Warren, the founder of the huge Saddleback Church, urges ministers to look for ways to save time during services, to "improve the pace and flow." Warren regularly times each element of his service and then looks for ways to speed things up, knowing that his suburban Orange County parishioners are on tight schedules and get easily bored. Remember, Warren wrote in his guidebook for ministers,
The Purpose-Driven Church,
"visitors have already formed an opinion about your church within the first ten minutes after they arrive."
¹
After my first ten minutes at Bluer, Lukas was just getting limbered up on his keyboard. And while Saddleback disperses its Saddleback Sams and Samanthas to the well-appointed parking lot after a stopwatched seventy minutes, the service at Bluer lasted for two hours—and afterward everyone moved upstairs for coffee, tea, and another hour or so of conversation.

There are hundreds of Bluers around the country—Ecclesia in Houston, Levi's Table in St. Louis, and the no-market-testing-here Scum of the Earth Church in Denver, founded first as a Bible study group by the Christian rock band Five Iron Frenzy. Musick attends a regular convention of the "emerging church" each fall near Santa Fe, New Mexico. (The convention is called "The Gathering.") The emerging church is not to be confused with the trying-hard-to-be-hip youth services that megachurches hold on Saturday or Sunday evenings, although many emerging churches began as offshoots of existing churches. Consider this culinary comparison: The Saturday night youth service at a megachurch may brag that it serves Starbucks coffee. At Sojourn, a vibrant emerging church in Louisville, Kentucky, the fare is what the kids would buy if they had a few bucks to spend at a convenience store. After Sojourn's meeting, the congregation retires to the kitchen of the church they are borrowing, and a guy in a Spiderman T-shirt lays out a spread of Ding Dongs, Hostess Cup Cakes, Twinkies, and fireplug-size jugs of Big K cola.

Whatever the megachurch has come to be, the emerging church is the opposite. Churches such as Second Baptist in Houston are large. Bluer and Sojourn are small. (Most emerging churches split like amoebas when they reach the size of a moderate family reunion.) The megachurch style is to have a charismatic leader, a "strong pulpit." The services at emerging churches are centered on the congregation. The megachurch service and its faith are certain. The emerging church is full of questions and doubt; the attitude is purposely nonjudgmental. If the megachurch is brimming with "people like us," the emerging church is mixed company. "I don't need them to be carbon copies," Dan Lukas said of his fellow congregants at Bluer. That's not to say the emerging church is squishy on faith or the Bible, a kind of New Age Episcopa-lianism. The ministers at Sojourn were schooled at Louisville's Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. When I asked a young woman why she worshiped at Sojourn, she told me it was because the ministers there "preach straight from the Word."

John Musick, age thirty-nine in the summer of 2005, grew up in the fundamentalist hothouse of the Assemblies of God. He was a youth minister in Illinois before he had what he called a "reformation awakening." The Assemblies of God is a strict denomination, and its set-in-stone doctrine chafed Musick. "People loved me there and everything, but I was becoming much too liberal," he said. "And there was an anti-intellectual feeling there. You don't question things. You believe and trust what you're told, and that's how it is." Musick drifted to the Vineyard Church, a loose affiliation both Evangelical and charismatic, and he became a youth minister at a Vineyard congregation in Minneapolis. There Musick began the Saturday evening service called Bluer, but he was actually busy creating a megachurch following the "homogeneous unit principle." "We had a huge stage and a light show—fog machines and big screens," he recalled. "I like to say we did everything but shoot Jesus out of a cannon. We were trying to market and minister to a demographic, to young adults. Our thinking was we had the truth, so we must market it so it will be palatable to young adults. And once they took a bite of it, they would think like us. But the problem was, we would attract a decent crowd, but we didn't see much transformation. We had no community. There were very few relationships. And I became very tired of having to put on this performance, this sermon, and create this thing. I discovered that I was a pretty postmodern type of person who was trained to minister in a very modern, linear fashion."