If you read out of this or into this a partisan endorsement or non-endorsement, I am not making myself clear. It is a comment on media and history. Media: the mantra or codified way of treating Democratic presidential candidates’ public expression of religion in 2007, as in last week’s TV special, is to say that they are playing catch-up ball against Republican candidates, reaching for the religious constituency out there that the secular-minded modern Democrats abandoned. That may or may not be true in respect to strategy. It is historically inaccurate to suggest that this is a new virus.
To review: after Woodrow Wilson’s overplaying of the religious hand, Republican presidents Harding (Baptist), Coolidge (Congregationalist) and Hoover (Quaker) added little to public discourse about public religion. In World War II Roosevelt began to restore such discourse, manifesting and promoting the life of prayer, demonstrating a kind of Episcopal serenity when facing crisis.
Then Truman, to whom I paid attention while living briefly in his Washington. “I am not a religious man,” he would say, “Mrs. Truman takes care of that.” He despised what he thought was the political use of religion, but evidenced a Baptist Sunday School boyhood-grounding in biblical knowledge and did some public praying, without advertising or fuss. [Interregnum: Eisenhower, ‘I am the most religious man I know.”]
Back to Democrats, our subject today: LBJ, a member of the Disciples of Christ (Christian) Church was at ease with faith, while JFK (Catholic, did you notice?) found his religion a public subject, whatever his personal faith might be. Jimmy Carter? How can mass communicators think and act as if the new candidates are inventing religious language in public life? Bill Clinton, like Carter, a Baptist, was a regular worshiper, accused of hypocrisy when he took a Bible to church, as most Baptists do. He was at home with it. One year we heard of Rev. Jackson, ministerial-familied Mondale, ex-seminarians Gore and Hart and who knows who else, running.
Why the perception of non-religion among people of that pious party? 1) Maybe things have changed and there’s been a secular take-over, causing religious amnesia in the party. 2) It could be that in reaction to Nixon-Reagan-Ford-Bush-Bush styles of public piety and the perceived “use” of religion, Democrats backed off. 3) If there were signs of verbal ungainliness in the pious sections of last Monday’s CNN show—Peter Steinfels found them in the three candidates’ words (New York Times June 8)—it may be because the planners of the program (Jim Wallis & Co.) wanted to stress how specific religious convictions do or should affect policy (e.g., on poverty). Having to be creedal and confessional and pious does make many, including many of us who are not candidates, a bit nervous. Diffidence here is less a matter of faith than style.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer and other theologians have counseled some restraint in public God-talk. Since both parties’ candidates are Bible-folk, maybe some of them are responding to Sermon on the Mount text: Matthew 6:1, 5-8. You could look it up. Baptist memorizers Truman and Carter and Clinton wouldn’t have to. While the Bible is open, note how Isaiah 58 shrieks out at a “prayerful” nation.
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