POST-ELECTION ANALYSIS esus is everywhere about me here in Rome. His pierced body hangs on the bar walls, suffers at side- walk corners with flickering lights and fresh flowers. There are also nearly or actually naked women plas- tered everywhere. Living here as a Fulbright scholar in the shadow of the Holy See, America looks Italian—not the naked women, but the memory of those decades after World War II when Catholic priests informed their Italian parishioners that they would be denied the sacraments if they voted for a candi- date from the Communist Party. We just saw American bishops and Evangelical pastors make a similar move with the candidacy of Kerry. The Democrat was a devil. There are Italian lessons for us Americans who believe that the pursuit of a more perfect union requires social justice, who are terrified that the moral preoccupations of the Republicans’religious base doom the Democrats to remain forever in the political wilderness. Remember that it was under the long reign of the Christian Democrats, a Catholic, anti-communist party that ruled Italy for most of the post-World-War-II Cold War era, that the Italians legal- ized both abortion and divorce in the face of determined opposition by the clergy. Today, however, the majority of practicing Catholics here are probably on the Left, not the Right. For example, Romano Prodi, the former Christian Democrat who went on to head the center-left Ulivo coali- tion, Italy’s first left-wing government, is an observant Catholic. Not a few of these Italian Catholic leftists are opposed to abortion, to homosexuality, and indeed to stem cell research. There are three lessons here: first, that religios- ity and commitment to social justice can coincide; second, that people who support religious Christian parties are will- ing to promote views of their own that negate the theologi- cal commitments of the clergy; and third, that support for material redistribution, or economic justice, need not coin- cide with support for cultural change. Understanding each of these elements will be critical if the Democrats are to ever regain the reins of state. To the secular Left here, America stupefies. A few nights ago I met an Italian television journalist just back from Kabul, Afghanistan, where she had been impressed by the thousands of burkah-clad women proudly making their way to the ballot box. She applauded what American might had achieved here. But how, she asked, was it possible that Americans would nearly impeach President Clinton for lying about his private sex life, while American voters barely blinked when President Bush apparently lied, and in pub- lic, about a war in which as many as 100,000 innocent civil- ians died in Iraq? When she had been young, she told me, and divorce had been illegal in Italy, she had envied America’s personal freedom. Now, she confessed, there was no longer anything to envy. How to explain that for Americans the personal, and particularly the personal life of the President, is profoundly political? Americans want to identify with the man who represents them. In this election, George W. Bush’s very weaknesses were his strength—a recovered alcoholic, a man whose businesses had failed, a guy who got Cs in college, who couldn’t pronounce polysyllabic words and knew WHEN J ESUS VOTES 41 When Jesus Votes Roger Friedland Roger Friedland is a Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the co-author of To Rule Jerusalem and co-editor of Matters of Culture. J