The Brody File’s good friend, Dan Gilgoff over at Beliefnet.com has a great interview with Evangelical Public Relations Executive Mark DeMoss. DeMoss has a good read on the climate among Evangelicals. He’s well respected. He believes Barack Obama could get up to 40 percent of the Evangelical vote this November. Read below and then get my take.
Gilgoff: Barack Obama is trying hard to win evangelical voters. Does that effort stand a chance?
Gilgoff: How much of that is because of the testimonial way he discusses his own faith?
DeMoss:Out of curiosity, I’ve been reading up on Obama’s personal faith these last couple weeks. I read all of Dreams From My Father and I got Audacity of Hope and so far I only read the chapter on faith. The chapter on faith in Audacity of Hope actually talked relatively little about his personal faith or his relationship with Christ. I underlined even the remotest references and there might be six or eight sentences at most. For example, he talks about joining Trinity and being baptized there. But for evangelicals, there’s a difference between being baptized—it’s not eh same as acknowledging a decision to accept Christ. He says in other places that he accepted Christ as his savior and I accept that, but if you read [Obama’s books] You’re not going to find the kind of personal testimony in the kind of terms that Mike Huckabee talked about. I’m not saying he has to be a born again or he shouldn’t be president. But he’s going to appeal to a lot of [evangelicals] and raise questions in others. I learned recently of a young woman form a prominent evangelical family who’d been supporting a Republican candidate in the primaries and she stood for four hours in a stadium in a downpour waiting for Obama to speak and signed up to work for him afterward. That’s all it took. It speaks to what we’re hearing about him being a mesmerizing communicator. There will be others who ask tough questions [about Obama] and say “I’m not so sure.” But one of the things that the media had gotten really wrong in recent years that evangelicals are absolutely Republican. Polls don’t show that to be true.
More here.
Look, let me give it to you straight. John McCain doesn’t like talking about his faith in public. Obama doesn’t mind at all. That leaves an impression with Evangelicals who are told to tell others about your faith in Christ.