Note: This response cross-posted at StreetProphets here.

From:
Rachel Laser, Director of the Third Way Culture Project
Robert P. Jones, Ph.D., Religion Scholar and Third Way Consultant

First, we’d like to thank Pastor Dan for responding at length to our paper, "Come Let Us Reason Together: A Fresh Look at Shared Cultural Values between Evangelicals and Progressives" yesterday. We are ourselves baffled, however, with his assertion that "there’s little new here" and that at bottom this careful research and concrete policy recommendations amount to "a less-than-inspiring solution to a phony problem." These hasty conclusions are unfortunately based on a misunderstanding of the expressed purpose of the paper and a misreading of both the data and the real political landscape.

1. Perhaps the most pervasive misunderstanding in PD’s response is that he has imposed a partisan frame on an explicitly non-partisan paper. See his conclusion:

“Come to think of it, why any of this? I really can't see any point to this study other than to provide an intellectual foundation for people who've already decided that the future of the Democratic party lies in attracting "persuadable evangelicals".... but what we need to know is why that would be preferable to concentrating on winning many more non-evangelicals who are solidly and consistently in agreement with the party's core positions. This study doesn't answer that question.”

Likewise, PD criticizes our paper for not taking up a host of issues. He states:
“Meanwhile, the issues that Americans do care about these days - the war, health care, immigration - go unaddressed.”

But both of these criticisms misunderstand the purpose of our paper, which we clearly lay out in the very first paragraph:

“This paper presents a framework for bridging the cultural divide that has existed between many progressives and Evangelicals. Over the last few years, progressives and Evangelicals have engaged in new discussions to find common ground on issues like caring for the poor, eliminating HIV/AIDS in Africa, and more recently, protecting the environment. These groundbreaking dialogues are significant achievements, but they have succeeded largely by agreeing to sidestep so-called “cultural issues.” As a result, many who consider themselves both Evangelical and progressive have held these identities in considerable tension, and those who identify as one or the other still envision themselves on opposite sides of a cultural gulf.

Now, it’s fine if Pastor Dan wishes that our paper laid out an agenda for the Democratic Party or addressed a broader set of issues, but this was explicitly not our purpose. It's a real mistake to criticize the paper on those grounds. Our purpose was to find common ground between Evangelicals and progressives on some of the toughest, most divisive issues of our day—something we’ve achieved (not perfectly but certainly substantively) after numerous, painstaking conversations with progressive and evangelical leaders over the course of this year.

2. Second, and more troubling, is PD’s misreading of the data and the real political landscape, both of which cause him to miss what’s “new” and significant in this paper.

PD asserts that “the data in the back of the study undermines the authors' own points” and cites a chart that shows partisanship by religious subgroups (traditionalist, centrists, modernists). He then goes on to argue that this chart does not show that significant numbers of Evangelicals “are more in play than conventional wisdom suggests.”

But that data is not the relevant data for that argument, and it is not the data we use throughout the paper. PD fails to understand that those categories are, as the title suggests, “religious subgroups” (based entirely on religious belief and practice measures developed by political scientist John Green, senior fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion and Politics) and not political subgroups. We included that data from Green’s analysis in the appendix for reference because he is one of the most respected and cited experts on religion and politics. (Green, by the way, described our analysis as “excellent” in an article in the Christian Science Monitor article published today).

Throughout the paper, our arguments rest on the more appropriate measure of political subgroups (based on political measures such as the Pew social conservatism index), which lead to the new and significant insight about the diversity of Evangelicals that we call the one-fifth, one-third, one-half formula:

• One-fifth of Evangelicals (representing 5% of the general population) are progressive;
• One-third of Evangelicals (representing 8% of the general population) are moderates who share some progressive values; and
• One-half of Evangelicals (representing 13% of the general population) are conservatives who may be partners on particular issues.

Moreover, we note that this pattern persists even on the more challenging terrain of cultural issues. That half of Evangelicals representing 13% of the population (that, by the way, is more than 25 million adult Americans) are social progressives or moderates and open to forming policy alliances is no small insight.

Finally, PD misreads the real political landscape. He notes:

Nobody that I'm aware of believes that churches should be forced to change their theology or sacraments to accommodate gays and lesbians. Nobody thinks that abortion should be encouraged willy-nilly, or that there should be no reasonable limits on the scientific uses of embryos and cloned material. Nobody, umm, even thinks about porno on the internet or fatherhood, much less disagrees with the very mild policy suggestions listed here.

PD’s declarations that “nobody that I’m aware of believes that...” and “nobody thinks that...” remind us of the old joke:

The inmates at the penitentiary know each other so well that they’ve numbered their jokes. Instead of telling the whole joke, one of them will occasionally say, "#37" and the others will laugh. A new inmate decides to give it a try and says, "#54!" But no one laughs. He asks the fellow next to him, "What did I do wrong?" The guy shakes his head and says, "Some people can tell 'em and some people can't."

The point here is that we hardly have to listen to people we know well—we all know what progressives really believe and that many of the stereotypes are false. But when we venture outside our own walls—as we at Third Way have over the past year talking with numerous Evangelical leaders—we find that many of these fears exist (e.g., we included our statement on religion because so many Evangelicals we spoke to indicated a real distrust at that point), our short-hand falls flat, and our positions need to be carefully and explicitly articulated. Both groups also come to understand, if we are honest, that while many stereotypes are based on sheer misperceptions, some are based on real missteps that have given extra life to those misperceptions. The policies we outline here, far from addressing a “phony problem” that only existed in the “mid-90s” (PD, do you really believe America is not divided over these issues?), represent real progress not only in advancing civility in public life but in the concrete policy areas we address.