CRISSA NELSON | features editor

The religious line is blurring between the Red and Blue.

“I believe in keeping guns out of our inner cities, but I also believe that when a gang-banger shoots indiscriminately into a crowd because he feels somebody disrespected him, we’ve got a moral problem. There’s a hole in that young man’s heart—a hole that the government alone cannot fix,” Barack Obama said at the Sojourners’ Call to Renewal Gathering in 2006.

Obama led the democrats to begin openly discussing their personal religious beliefs at the Christian-based organization Sojourners’ “Call to Renewal” gathering, where he was joined by democratic candidates Hilary Clinton and John Edwards in June to discuss issues of Faith, Values and Poverty.

For too long evangelical Americans have been pressured to see the political world only in shades of red, and those who resist are told they have compromised their faith. American voters have been forced to choose between a religious right or secular left, rather than individual candidates and their personal beliefs; the beliefs that will direct their decisions and course of action.

As Obama continued his discussion on the importance of faith, including his own, within politics, most would be shocked to find that Obama was not running for president of the traditionally conservative religious Republican Party. As a leading democratic candidate for the 2008 presidential election, Obama’s words signified the start of a campaign season saturated in religious talk, leaving the religious right of America praying for direction.

The 2008 presidential election season has earned the title ‘Faith Race ’08.’ Not only have republicans recognized, with the election of President Bush, that religious beliefs and personal values play a large role in voter support for a candidate, but the democrats have finally caught on too.

According to Obama’s speech, “Ninety percent of us [Americans] believe in God, 70 percent affiliate themselves with an organized religion, 38 percent call themselves committed Christians, and substantially more people in America believe in angels than in evolution.”

The leading democratic candidates for this presidential election are not only open about their faith, but also active in allowing it to influence their political ideas, regardless of the traditional stance of their party.

Simultaneously, the republican presidential candidates have not made issues of Christian faith and values a priority in their campaigns, leaving traditionally religious republican voters with what appears to many as unconventional republican options. These options include Mitt Romney, “a politically elastic Mormon,” Rudy Guliani, “the twice-divorced, pro-choice, gay-friendly former New York City mayor,” and John McCain, “a maverick who called conservative religious leaders ‘agents of intolerance’ the last time he ran,” according to Michael Duffy and Nancy Gibbs in a Time Magazine article “Leveling the Praying Field.”

From the side where religious jargon is typically in abundance, republican candidate John McCain paradoxically differs.

“[My faith] plays a role in my life,” McCain said in an Associated Press interview Sept. 15. “Do I advertise my faith? Do I talk about it all the time? No.”

Ironically, McCain has also taken a strong stand in support of embryonic stem cell research, despite his pro-life abortion views.

Traditionally, it is the democrats who have stayed far away from any discussion of religion, values or morality within the political culture, while taking a strong liberal stance on moral questions. While this stance appeals to secular America, issues of abortion, gay marriage, school prayer and stem-cell research typically repel 55 million Americans who consider themselves pro-life, Bible-reading, evangelical Christians.

The sudden abundance of religious talk from the mouths of democrats has left many, especially the religious right, with valid skepticism of whether their religious jargon is just a pawn in the election game, or if it’s genuinely revealing their beliefs.

Obama’s speech addressed the democratic tendency to fail to acknowledge the importance of the debate on how to “reconcile faith with our modern, pluristic democracy.”

“If we scrub language of all religious content, we forfeit the imagery and terminology through which millions of Americans understand both their personal morality and social justice,” Obama said.

As Obama told of dedicating his life to discovering God’s truth, he boldly spoke out that his faith impacts every aspect of his life, and the religious people of America are no different.

“It is not something they [Americans] set apart from the rest of their beliefs and values. In fact, it is often what drives their beliefs and their values,” Obama said.

Obama has since run six faith forums in New Hampshire, where local clergy and laypeople discuss religious engagement in politics.

Conservative Christian Americans predominantly align with the Republican Party. Twenty-two million voters, referred to as “freestyle Evangelicals” by John C. Green, a political scientist and senior fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, have in the past voted republican because of the party’s strategic portrayed themselves as faith supporters and the democrats as immoral secularist.

Yet the trends are changing, and the traditionally defined Red and Blue has become a muddy shade of purple.

As this election season approaches, the once starkly dividing issues of faith and morality are less definable. We are progressively moving toward a purple politics with less labels to determine stances or divisions. A purple politics where candidates are finally standing up for what they believe, not merely their parties’ stance, forcing voters to really think outside their typical ballot box.