Franklin Graham, a Trump supporter, has told audiences in North Carolina to beware of preachers like Dr. Barber who “call themselves progressive,” warning: “It’s just another word for ‘I’m an atheist.’”
And Gary L. Bauer, the social conservative leader, said he worried more about nonbelievers than about the religious left, citing what he called its affinity for government solutions to social problems.
“It never arrives because the left (or at least the Democratic Party) is too diverse
and its priorities too different for anything like a mirror image of the religious right to coalesce.”
Sister Simone Campbell, a liberal Catholic lobbyist who also barnstormed with Dr. Barber, said the movement’s diversity
could be an obstacle, as she discovered in a room full of white Catholics, black Baptists and agnostic Unitarians.
During his ill-fated 1988 presidential campaign, Mr. Hart said, he was often asked, “‘Why don’t you talk about your religious background more?’
And the answer was, ‘I don’t want to be seen as pandering for votes.’”
Issues on which the religious left is at odds with Democratic doctrine include military spending
and the death penalty, though the most polarizing is abortion — the main barrier, for many liberal evangelicals and Catholics, to voting as Democrats — as could be seen when the party split recently over whether to endorse an anti-abortion Democrat running for mayor of Omaha.
“The fact that one party has strategically used and abused religion, while the other has had a habitually allergic
and negative response to religion per se, puts our side in a more difficult position in regard to political influence,” said the Rev.
In April, to mark the 50th anniversary of the landmark sermon at Riverside Church in Manhattan in which King denounced the Vietnam War, saying, “I cannot be silent,” Dr. Barber preached against Mr. Trump from the same pulpit
and denounced what he saw as pervasive racism across the political right.
