This article by Edgar Rivera Colón at Salon.com had a tantalizing intro: Bush, God and Democrats: This country isn’t secular or rational. And if the Dems want to win, they can’t be either.

I thought for a minute he was going to say something that no one else seems to have grasped, that if the Democratic Party wants to win, it will have to abandon its virtual agnoticism and admit that not only do reasonable, intelligent, socially-responsible, devout Christians and Jews exist, but they will VOTE FOR YOU if you give them half a reason to. But alas…

In a country where upward of 75 percent of the population believes in God and an afterlife (in its decidedly Christian registers), only fools do not avail themselves of such a diverse and vibrant rhetoric for communicating concerns around a whole host of issues concerning justice and what possible ethical and social meanings can be attached to our sojourns here on earth.

Well, the Democratic Party leadership is such a collection of secular and rational fools. There are obvious exceptions in the black churches and the mainline Protestant denominations, but the religious rhetorics of these communities have rarely taken center stage in the last decade or so.

In short, the Democratic Party needs to stop pretending it lives in a secular country. Until French citizens are allowed to vote in U.S. elections (as an old-time Socialist, how I would welcome the advent of that political impossibility), the Democratic leadership will have to fashion its messages for the deeply religious country it presumes to lead one day.

Translation: talk Bible talk to these strange and simple folk, and you’ll have them eating out of your hand. From making the point himself that the Dems don’t give a voice to religious people, he concludes only that they should adopt the language of religion. So basically offer up the same sound-bytes in some tasty II Thessalonians sauce.

Amazing. Don’t they understand that we use the language that we do because we believe it, not just as a mind trip or a posture or a power play? Do agnostic liberals (let’s just be crazy and assume the author fits in this category) really not believe that religious people truly and simply believe in God, the Bible and their church? Maybe not.

…Democrats need to make judicious use of the irrational. People are not rational, nor do they make their political choices out of some logic model. Americans voted their fears, their fantasies, their hopes, and their irrationalities. The Republicans banked on these factors and won.

Now that I look at it, I realize that the author isn’t even talking about winning over Jews and Christians with this oh-so-subtle verbal masquerade, just the swing voters, undecideds, independents. So even though 75% of the country believes in God, we’re still not going to track their messy theism into our nice, clean house.

So, false alarm. I still haven’t seen a single commentator on their side that sees any need to give religious people a voice in the Democratic Party. Well, I’ll have to search elsewhere for some sign of intelligent life. If they can get this point, I think they’ll have a shot in two years of re-taking some of the lost ground. Otherwise, I don’t think they will. There. It’s that simple, if you ask me.