If campaign rhetoric is anything to go by, the next American president – regardless of which party eventually prevails – will be a deeply religious person. Chastened by the allegedly decisive role that ‘moral values’ are said to have played in the last presidential election, all the major candidates have sprinkled their policies with the sort of language that is meant to appeal to a notional ‘moral majority’. For governor Romney, this has amounted to a shrewd defence against the hysterical attacks of the Christian right, for governor Huckabee it has meant a quiet encouragement of that constituency’s worst fears. The Iowa and Michigan results have already shown that it is possible to do both in different parts of the country, but these are only prologue to the far wider and more volatile campaign that lies ahead. For candidates with more colourful private lives – senator Thompson and mayor Giuliani and Thompson, for instance – the religious aspect of their public relations efforts has proved slightly more complex, but even they have found plenty of room for the sort of moral posturing that won the earnestly born-again former drinker and apparent wastrel George W. Bush two terms of office.
The Democratic front-runners are also outspoken about their faith. In a rare personal disclosure last year, senator Clinton said her “grounding in faith [had given] me the courage and the strength” to keep her marriage together during the ordeal of her husband’s impeachment proceedings. Senator Edwards recently defended his belief in the theory of evolution with the justification that “the hand of God today is in every step of what happens with me and every human being that exists on this planet.” Senator Obama, who has faced persistent smears that he is a closet Muslim, or an inauthentic Christian – a charge levelled at him by the black Republican (and Roman Catholic) Alan Keyes – has discussed his faith in similarly striking terms. Unusually, Obama’s religious convictions seem to have come to him against the grain of his family’s traditions. His stepfather was a Muslim who became an atheist and his mother was, at best, agnostic. Having initially followed their lead, Obama has said that his experiences as a community worker in Chicago drew him irrevocably toward Christianity.
This background is important, for out of all the current candidates, Obama is the one who has most consistently struck an ecumenical note. In 2006 he observed that “given the increasing diversity of America’s population, the dangers of sectarianism have never been greater. Whatever we once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of non-believers.” Nevertheless, as true as that undoubtedly is, American politics remains overwhelmingly Christian in its public pieties and surprisingly vulnerable to religious fundamentalism. This is not a recent development. In the Reagan years, the corridors of power resonated with talk of “good” and “evil” and much of America’s disastrous involvement with the Afghan mujahedin was driven by the zealous Catholicism of CIA director William Casey. The reasoning at the time was that it was better to kill the godless Communists with the assistance of radical Islamists than to scruple too much over the niceties of competing faiths.
Bad as that time was, the Bush years have been much worse. Famously calling for a “crusade” after the September 11 attacks, the president has missed few opportunities for this sort of gaffe. His remarkable ability to energize his party’s Christian base with divisive social issues may have won him the White House, but his religious views have brought him no larger political advantages. If anything, his religious convictions seem only to have deepened his stubbornness and to have made the kind of multilateral politics so badly needed to solve some of this generation’s more pressing problems, less and less viable. With religious hypersensitivity at a modern high, the faith of the next president will matter a great deal less than his ability to function outside of its confines.
A willingness, for example, to consider that a political mistake is simply a misjudgment of human beings and not actually part of a divine plan that will manifest itself in the fullness of time. Directly addressing this point, Obama has observed that no matter how strong his faith may be: “Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God’s will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.” Compare that with the unyielding religiosity of the Bush years and it is easy to see what a sea-change an Obama presidency might bring about.
America’s founders understood the dangers of religious factions well enough for them to insist that the church and state be kept apart. In recent times the line between the two has become increasingly blurred, often with terrible results (abstinence education programmes, the federal government’s refusal to fund groups that provide family planning advice, bans on stem-cell research, the political opera surrounding Terry Schiavo and so on, almost ad nauseam). Depending on their choice of candidate -particularly within the GOP- the upcoming elections will offer the country a chance to restore some of the system’s lost balance.
What is at stake is not really faith so much as the separation of the executive’s functions from its own exclusive religious beliefs, the relationship between the president’s faith and matters of public policy. America has always been a devoutly religious nation, only recently has it started to become blindly so.
