By Bill Leonard
In Faith of Our Fathers, Edwin Gaustad wrote that, “In 1800 when John Adams and Thomas Jefferson engaged in the first wide open presidential campaign in American history, Jefferson’s political enemies seized the occasion to abuse and condemn him for being opposed to religion.”
Opponents labeled him an atheistic infidel, who “opposed biblical revelation and undermined Christian morals,” concealing “his hostility to religion by talking only of its liberty.” They concluded that, “Anyone who says that it makes no difference [to government] whether one believes in 20 gods or no god cannot be counted a friend to Christianity and certainly ought not to be elected president of the United States.”
Gaustad noted Jefferson’s response was “to make clear that though not hostile to religion he was implacably hostile to any governmental meddling in religion.”
Faith-based issues have been a part of presidential campaigns for at least 200 years. The list is long and varied.
Charged with “infidelity” by his Methodist preacher-opponent Peter Cartwright in their 1846 congressional campaign, Abraham Lincoln responded: “That I am not a member of any Christian Church, is true; but I have never denied the truth of the Scriptures; and I have never spoken with intentional disrespect of religion in general, or any denomination of Christians in particular.”
In 1928, when Al Smith became the first Roman Catholic to run for president, the Fellowship Forum roared: “The real issue in this campaign is PROTESTANT AMERICANISM VERSUS RUM AND ROMANISM.” In opposing Smith’s candidacy Alabama Democratic senator Thomas Heflin attributed his party’s defeat in the 1924 presidential campaign to Roman Catholic (“Al Smith’s crowd”) insistence that “the Ku-Klux-Klan be denounced by the Democratic convention.” Heflin declared that Catholics singled out the Klan because it was “a Protestant order.” Smith’s election, Heflin asserted, would fulfill the pope’s desire “to control this country.”
In 1960, John Kennedy’s candidacy again raised the specter of a Catholic president, prompting Kennedy’s famous address to a Houston ministers’ group. Kennedy insisted: “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute; where no Catholic prelate would tell the president — should he be Catholic — how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference.” He added that “if the time should ever come … when my office would require me to either violate my conscience or violate the national interest, then I would resign the office; and I hope any conscientious public servant would do likewise.”
In 1976, concerns arose over the religious commitments of Jimmy Carter, longtime Baptist Sunday school teacher, who made no secret of being “born again,” a confession fretted over by the media and members of his own denomination. In Living Faith, Carter reports that after his election a “high official” of the Southern Baptist Convention visited the oval office and declared: “We are praying, Mr. President, that you will abandon secular humanism as your religion.”
Early in the 2012 campaign, religious issues abound. Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman are committed Mormons but seem hesitant to tie their religious orientation to positions on public policy. Still, speculation continues as to the electability of a “Mormon president,” especially among voters who view the movement as a cult.
Rep. Michele Bachman and Gov. Rick Perry readily acknowledge that evangelical faith impacts their response to questions of sexuality, evolution and education, global warming and American values. In one debate Perry referenced church history, comparing his “minority” position on global warming with that of Galileo, who challenged ecclesiastical insistence that the earth revolved around the sun. Critics reminded the governor that Galileo’s views reflected the scientific, not the churchly consensus of the day. Perry’s affirmation of scientific creationism extends ceaseless conflicts surrounding biblical and Darwinian texts.
Clearly, presidential elections often revive civil and uncivil debates over religious identity in the United States. Is America a “Protestant nation” as many colonials assumed? Or a “Christian nation” after Catholic immigrants arrived in droves? Or a “Judeo-Christian nation,” a term not used until the 19th century? Or an “Abrahamic nation,” thereby writing Muslims into its religious story?
Perhaps we should be less concerned for America as “faith-based nation” than “conscience-based nation,” where persons are free to live in accordance with or contrary to a specific religious identity, and where religious communities resist implicit or explicit government privilege in the quest for genuine faith. Yet religion is dangerous, and those candidates who make their faith a campaign issue may find themselves judged by the same religion they so proudly hail.
But faith or no faith, candidates and voters alike might cultivate that great religio-humanistic virtue: humility, the knowledge that even with the best convictions we can still go far astray. In A Key to the Language of America (1643) Roger Williams addressed the blind side of a colonial culture claiming to embody Protestantism’s “City on a Hill”:
“When Indians hear the horrid filths,
Of Irish, English Men,
The horrid Oaths and Murders late,
Thus say these Indians then;
We wear no Clothes, have many Gods,
And yet our sins are less:
You are barbarians, Pagans wild,
Your Land’s the Wilderness.”
Some days, I think it still is.