My friend Jason writes to share this column by the often wonderful Peggy Noonan who thinks that the intense interest in our political candidates' religious faith is both novel and unseemly. I think she's not quite correct on either count. She writes:
...we have come to an odd pass regarding candidates and their faith. It's not as if faith is unimportant, it's always important. But we are asking our political figures--mere flawed politicians--to put forward and talk about their faith to a degree that has become odd. We push them against the wall and do a kind of theological frisk on them. We didn't use to.
We have the emphasis wrong. It's out of kilter. And the result is a Mitt Romney being harassed on radio shows about the particulars of his faith, and Hillary Clinton--a new-class yuppie attorney and board member--announcing how important her Methodist faith is and how much she loves wearing her diamond cross. For all I know, for all you know, it is true. But there is about it an air of patronizing the rubes and boobs.
No one cared, really, that Richard Nixon was a Quaker. They may have been confused by it, but they weren't upset. His vice president, Spiro Agnew, was not Greek Orthodox but Episcopalian. Nobody much noticed. Nelson Rockefeller of New York was not an Episcopalian but a Baptist. Do you know what Lyndon Johnson's religion was? He was a member of the Disciples of Christ, but in what appeared to be the same way he was a member of the American Legion: You're in politics, you join things. Hubert Humphrey was born Lutheran, attended Methodist churches, and was rumored to be a Congregationalist. This didn't quite reach the level of mystery because nobody quite cared.
If we didn't care it was because no one thought that most politicians took their faith too seriously. We didn't think that their religious beliefs would make any substantive difference in how they governed. Moreover, we didn't care too much because everyone shared a common value system. Almost every candidate for president was a protestant until Jack Kennedy in 1960 and then there was a lot of concern about his Catholicism.
We should also note that many of the people who are making an issue of Romney's Mormonism or Huckabee's evangelicalism are opponents, or potential opponents, hoping to make these men look weird or otherwise attempting to drive a wedge between the candidate and the electorate. On the other hand, those who point to Hillary's manifestations of faith are often trying to make her look mainstream so that religious voters don't shun her.
In any event, on the question whether a candidate's religious assumptions should be talked about during a campaign, of course they should. The problem isn't that candidates are being asked about their faith, it's that the questions they're being asked are often about trivial aspects of their beliefs. They're too frequently being asked questions by people who themselves lack a fundamental understanding of the significance of religion in a believer's life and unfortunately that tends to cheapen the discourse.
One's religious convictions shape who a person is. A man who believes that Armageddon is just aound the corner may govern very differently than someone who doesn't believe Armageddon is going to happen at all. A man who believes we have an obligation imposed by God to work for peace, preserve our natural lands and help the poor is going to be a very different president than one who believes that God helps those who help themselves. A man whose belief in a personal God leads him to be pro-life and in favor of traditional marriage is probably going to make different appointments to the Supreme Court than someone whose concept of God is vaguely deistic.
I wonder if Ms Noonan has really thought this matter of the role of religion in a political campaign through very far. Suppose the Muslim congressman from Minnesota, Keith Ellison, were to run for nationwide office. Would Ms Noonan think then that certain inquiries as to his religious beliefs would be unseemly, out of place, or irrelevant? I doubt it.
RLC