Pentecostals leading Democrats’ faith outreach

c. 2008 Religion News Service (UNDATED) As the Democratic National Convention unfolds in Denver, the prominence of African-American Pentecostals within the Democratic Party is gaining a national spotlight. Leah Daughtry, the CEO of the Democratic National Convention Committee, leads a small Pentecostal church in Washington. Joshua DuBois, religious outreach director for Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential […]

c. 2008 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) As the Democratic National Convention unfolds in Denver, the prominence of African-American Pentecostals within the Democratic Party is gaining a national spotlight.

Leah Daughtry, the CEO of the Democratic National Convention Committee, leads a small Pentecostal church in Washington. Joshua DuBois, religious outreach director for Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, is an associate minister in a small Pentecostal denomination based in Cambridge, Mass.


“There’s always been a group of African-American Pentecostals who’ve been involved in the political arena for most of the 20th century,” said the Rev. David Daniels, a Church of God in Christ minister and a professor of church history at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago.

“Very few of them were able to emerge to the national scene.”

Some Pentecostal leaders and scholars hope Daughtry and DuBois will help expand understanding of their branch of Christianity, whose exuberant worship is sometimes mistaken for lack of intellectual or theological depth.

Asked if her Pentecostal faith might be “too demonstrative for Democrats,” Daughtry, 44, told a reporter in 2007: “Have you been to our conventions? Music and waving and happiness, it’s perfect.”

Daughtry’s father, the Rev. Herbert Daughtry, is a well-known activist and the national presiding minister of about a dozen churches and ministries in the House of the Lord Pentecostal Church. Daughtry is the granddaughter of the founder of the denomination. Her congregation grew out of a Bible study she began when she was a Labor Department official, said A.G. Miller, associate professor of religion at Oberlin College and an Ohio pastor in Daughtry’s denomination.

The Rev. Marlon Millner, a Pennsylvania writer and Pentecostal minister, said Daughtry and DuBois can also bring sensitivity to race and religion to their posts.

“Respectable black people that go to a Congregational church or Presbyterian church might look down on African-Americans who are Pentecostals,” said Millner. “It just makes us able to reach out to all kinds of people and be OK with who we are.”

The mixing of religion and politics seems to come naturally to DuBois, 26, who was struck by Obama’s 2004 DNC speech about Democrats worshipping “an awesome God in the blue states.”


He told the Boston Globe: “I had been struggling with whether I should go into ministry or politics, and I felt that God was leading me to find a way to do both, but I didn’t know any politician that got that intersection right.”

DuBois remains an associate minister with a small evangelical congregation in Massachusetts that is affiliated with the United Pentecostal Council of the Assemblies of God.

Bishop Brian Greene, the international leader of the denomination, which has about 35 churches in the U.S. and the Caribbean, said the inclusion of DuBois and Daughtry demonstrates an intentional new openness in the Democratic Party to people of faith.

“It’s obvious that they’re trying to make sure that the Republicans don’t think they have a, for want of a better word, corner market on God,” said Greene. “So I applaud Barack for aggressively pursuing the religious community in a manner that has not been done by the Democratic (Party).”

In recent decades, politicians have come to recognize the clout of major black Pentecostal churches. Obama made his Father’s Day speech this year at Apostolic Church of God in Chicago. Presidents Bush and Clinton also have appeared in prominent pulpits in Milwaukee and Memphis, Tenn., respectively.

Prominent white Pentecostal Republican leaders such as former Attorney General John Ashcroft and Reagan-era Interior Secretary James Watt have been known on the national scene for decades, but this election seems to be prompting new activism among black Pentecostals.


They are now are on the floor of the DNC and at the podiums, even if they do not always agree with the party.

Bishop Charles E. Blake, presiding bishop of the Church of God in Christ, a historically black Pentecostal denomination, said at an interfaith gathering Sunday that many religious African-Americans have issues with the Democratic Party’s stance on abortion.

“Those of us who support the Democratic Party despite our disagreement on this issue support it because the Democratic Party articulates and pursues more of the positions that are relevant to the lives and circumstances of our people, the people of America in general and the people of the world,” he said.

Assemblies of God General Superintendent George O. Wood, who leads a predominantly white but ethnically diverse Pentecostal denomination, said he’ll judge the Democratic Party’s openness to evangelicals, including Pentecostals, by future actions.

“Proof is in the pudding. Are we just being used or are we … going to be included in policy considerations, in appointments?”

(David Finnigan contributed to this report from Denver.)

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