In an earlier diary I reported on Obama to launch "Joshua Generation Project", outreach to young evangelicals and Catholics.
The New York Times has just announced the results of a new PAC formed for outreach to Evangelical and Catholic adults.
New PAC Seeks to Court Christians for Obama
By Michael Luo
A fund-raiser is being held tonight in Washington for a nascent political action committee that is hoping to reach out to Christian communities on behalf of Senator Barack Obama.
Called "The Matthew 25 Network," the new organization, which is still in its earliest stages, is being spearheaded by Mara Vanderslice, who was director of religious outreach for the Kerry-Edwards campaign in 2004 and did similar work for several statewide Democratic candidates, including Governor Ted Strickland of Ohio, Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania and Governor Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas.
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/...
The name of the group is based on a biblical text:
The new group’s name takes its inspiration from the 25th chapter of the gospel of Matthew in which Jesus talks about how he will select people like a shepherd separating sheep from goats, saying, "For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me."
David Brody reports:
"What we found are thousands of Christians across the country who want to find a way to put their faith values in action through supporting candidates and there was no long term organization that existed to galvanize and capture and give voice to that energy that we found around the country. The Matthew 25 network has endorsed Barack Obama . He will be our first candidate but the hope is that this will be an effort that will live long beyond this election cycle and will help give voice to Christians whose gospel values are expressed or lived out in the passage of Matthew 25 that we should care for the least of these as Jesus did and we're going to be seeking to endorse that agenda and then we will endorse them."
http://www.cbn.com/...
I realize that many folks here are uncomfortable about religion and candidates dealing with those who profess faith, but IMHO for too long the faith community has been viewed as a bastion of the right wing, which is a false perception, since much of the Civil Rights Movement was spearheaded by Christian pastors and Jewish rabbis.
John C. Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, has described evangelicals as falling into three camps — traditionalist, centrist and modernist — on how rigidly they adhered to their beliefs and their willingness to adapt them to a changing world.
The traditionalist evangelicals are those who are usually labeled as the Christian right, while the centrists might be represented by a newer breed of evangelical leaders who remain socially and theologically quite conservative but mostly sought to avoid politics previously. The two camps are roughly the same size, each representing 40 to 50 percent of the total population.
Experts agree, though, that the centrist camp is growing. Centrist evangelical leaders have been at the vanguard of efforts to broaden the evangelical agenda to include issues like global warming, poverty and AIDS.
This certainly will create problems for John McCain, who is having his own evangelical crisis, and will target those people of faith committed to social change.
For background on Mara Vanderslice PBS has a long interview from 2004 in which she states:
I think that the "moral values" term has become code in some ways for a certain set of conservative values. We really have an obligation now, I think, as progressive people in the faith community, deeply grounded in religious values and moral values that we would like to put forward. Many people saw the unjust war in Iraq as a moral issue. Many people see 5 million people falling into poverty the last four years of this administration as a moral issue. It's our responsibility as Democrats to broaden the definition of the conversation about morality in this country. I believe that once we begin to engage in that more as a party, we'll see people's understanding of what moral values are expand and understand that those people who voted for us also see the issues upon which they voted as moral issues. But [they] didn't define it that way because of this narrow definition that we have right now.