PIETY AND POLITICS ON THE ROAD TO THE WHITE HOUSE

"Piety and Politics on the Road to the White House"
by John H. Thomas
General Minister and President, The United Church of Christ
Address given at The City Club Forum
Cleveland, Ohio
October 10, 2008
----------------
Long before “God bless America” became the mandatory benediction for
presidential campaign speeches, religion played a shaping role in presidential politics.
George Washington, in his first inaugural address, spent nearly a quarter of his relatively
short speech acknowledging “the Great Author of every public and private good,” and
noting “the Invisible Hand which conducts the affairs of men” and which, he believed,
represented a “providential agency” that had advanced the United States to the “character
of an independent nation.” A recent historical study of the 1840 election between the
Whig, William Henry Harrison, and the incumbent Democrat, Martin Van Buren, reveals
the religious demographic of the vote, with preferences clearly marked by
denominational affiliation and, in some cases, by theological perspective within
denominations. While the fortunes of the economy loomed large in the election – Whigs
nicknamed the president Martin Van Ruin as the economy slipped into recession – the
peculiar pieties of Americans manifested themselves strongly on Election Day.
I begin with these historical references as a reminder that theological perspective,
denominational ethos, and personal piety have played an important role in American
public life for a long time, sometimes in deeply spiritual ways, often in more superficial
veneers or even in embarrassing bigotry and prejudice. Woodrow Wilson’s expansive
internationalist moral vision exemplified in the American crusade to make the world safe
for democracy and in his quest to establish the League of Nations displayed him as an
heir to the impulses of the 19th century Evangelical social reformers who railed against
the evils of slavery and alcohol. Contrast that with Al Smith, the first Catholic candidate
for president who endured vicious attacks from nativist and anti-Catholic antagonists.
When pressed by reporters for how his views contrasted with various papal encyclicals
2
deemed inconsistent with American ideals, is reported to have replied, “Will someone tell
me what the hell a papal encyclical is?”
Jimmy Carter, who spoke comfortably of his own evangelical piety, confounded
liberal Protestants and secularists with the image of a sophisticated President who was
also a regular Sunday School teacher in his Southern Baptist church in rural Plains,
Georgia. Contrast that with Howard Dean who, in his attempt to claim the mantle of
piety famously overreached when asked to name his favorite New Testament book. He
responded, “the Book of Job.” Whoops. Where were Job’s friends when Howard needed
them! Ronald Reagan somehow managed to convey the impression of a deeply personal
Christian piety without any potentially awkward connection to a particular denomination,
tradition, set of doctrines, or local church membership, something Barack Obama no
doubt wished he could have done last Spring when his affiliation with Trinity United
Church of Christ and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright nearly scuttled his candidacy.
George W. Bush is, in an odd and perhaps not immediately apparent way,
reminiscent of Woodrow Wilson, though one would never confuse the two for the
language and style of their piety remains dramatically different. Yet one senses in both
presidents a highly personalized, one might even say pretentious piety that involves an
almost mystical relationship to God or Jesus, a relationship granting them a privileged
and uncontestable moral vision for the world that is inaccessible to the rest of us mere
mortals and, therefore, unaccountable in political terms. There was for Wilson and is for
Bush a principled – perhaps we might say “messianic” – certainty unencumbered by
intellectual or religious doubt that leaves us somewhat breathless, either in admiration or
fear. In the hands of ideological zealots such piety becomes a potent weapon, as likely to
lead to tragedy and disaster as to the Kingdom of God.
On September 12, 1960, Democratic candidate John F. Kennedy gave a major
speech before the Greater Houston Ministerial Association to address the significance of
his Catholic faith in the face of the lingering anti-Catholic feelings of many voters. It
was, from a political standpoint, a successful speech, reassuring the audience of
Kennedy’s commitment to the separation of church and state and stressing that “I am not
the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for president,
3
who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters, and
the church does not speak for me.”
Central to Kennedy’s speech was a tight compartmentalization of faith, personal
piety, and public responsibility. He called for a nation “where no Catholic prelate would
tell the president how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for
whom to vote. . . .” He professed belief in an America “where no public official either
requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of
Churches, or any other ecclesiastical source.” Kennedy noted that pamphlets quoting
Catholic leaders had been circulating. “I do not consider these. . . quotations binding
upon my public acts.” Rhetorically he concluded with what he perhaps intended to
suggest was his true creed and his allegiance to his primary sacred text: “If I should win
the election, then I shall devote every effort of mind and spirit to fulfilling the oath of the
presidency. . . . For without reservation, I can “solemnly swear that I will preserve,
protect, and defend the Constitution, so help me God.”
Kennedy’s attempt to privatize religion was not so much a reaffirmation of the
separation of church and state, or the disentangling of religion and politics, as it was an
attempt to divide private piety and public life into two separate arenas a President can
inhabit at the same time without one shaping the other. It was as if he were saying,
“Don’t worry, there’s nothing about my Catholic faith that will intrude into my public
responsibility.” Given the political needs of the day, Kennedy may have had to say that.
And given what we know of Kennedy, he was perhaps telling the absolute truth about
himself! This makes all the more ironic the near canonization of the Kennedys by many
Roman Catholics of a certain generation. I vividly recall the entryway to Alphonse
Morello’s Funeral Home in Easton, Pennsylvania where I served as a pastor. On one side
were portraits of Pope John Paul II and the Virgin Mary. On the other side of the foyer
were Jack and Jackie. The holy family according to the Democratic Party!
In 2006, forty six years after Kennedy’s speech, another soon-to-be Democratic
candidate for president, Senator Barack Obama, would give a markedly different speech
about the relationship of faith and public life. Much had changed. Evangelicals, and
more conservative Catholics had entered public life with vigor with the rise of the Moral
Majority, the Christian Coalition, and family values leaders like Gary Bauer and James
4
Dobson. The so-called “culture wars” had raged with issues like school prayer, Roe v.
Wade, the rights of homosexual persons, creationism and intelligent design captive to the
political process and exploited eagerly in presidential campaigns, perhaps most
dramatically in places like Ohio in 2004 where Bush’s slim majority rested, at least in
part, on wedge voters provoked to anxiety over the specter of gay marriage. Religion had
roared back into presidential campaigns in highly partisan ways, making candidates’
piety at least as important to many voters as their more traditional credentials.
In the wake of all of this, Obama’s speech proposed a new engagement of faith
and public life, and by extension a new way to view the issue of piety and presidential
politics. “It’s time,” said Obama, “to join a serious debate about how to reconcile faith
with our modern, pluralistic democracy.” Obama was critical of conservatives, “all too
happy. . . to remind evangelical Christians that Democrats [allegedly] disrespect their
values and dislike their church, while suggesting to the rest of the country that religious
Americans care only about issues like abortion and gay marriage; school prayer and
intelligent design.” But his sharper critique went to the Democrats who at best, he said,
“try to avoid the conversation about religion and values altogether,” or at worst, “dismiss
religion in the public square as inherently irrational or intolerant, insisting on a caricature
of religious Americans that paints them as fanatical.” Senator Obama demonstrated his
split with Kennedy most clearly when he said, “secularists are wrong when they ask
believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. . . . To
say that men and women should not inject their ‘personal morality’ into public policy
debates is a practical absurdity.”
One way to read Obama’s speech is to see it as a call for progressives to
reacquaint themselves with the language of piety. But it is certainly also a call to liberate
piety – and the church – from captivity by the far right of the political spectrum. As one
commentator describes the organizers of the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition,
“their primary goal was not religious but political; to enlist evangelicals, many of whom
had eschewed political activism altogether, behind conservative Republican candidates.”
Indeed, one of their colleagues described evangelicals as “the greatest tract of virgin
timber on the political landscape.”
5
Many believe 2004 was the high water mark of the marriage of Evangelicals with
the Republican Party. Sarah Palin’s selection was, in part, an attempt to re-ignite the
wars of religion that had benefited Republicans in previous elections, but the strategy
doesn’t seem to have gained much traction beyond the right wing base of the party. It
does seem to be the case that the dominance of so-called family values as political litmus
tests has slipped in prominence. Even Evangelicals are calling for a broader agenda.
Richard Cizik of the National Association of Evangelicals, responding to critics like
Dobson and Bauer, rejected the notion that an embrace of concern for creation meant
betraying the pro-life cause: “Tell the parents of children who are mentally disabled
because of mercury poisoning – tell them that the environment is not a sanctity-of-life
issue.” And there are many Catholics beginning to stand up to the threats of bishops
refusing communion to candidates over the issue of abortion, recalling their church to the
broader moral agenda of a “seamless robe” concern for the sanctify of life championed by
leaders like Cardinals Bernadin of Chicago and McCarrick of Washington.
I have no doubt that Senator Obama’s reflections on the relationship of faith and
public life are sincere. They are consistent with his own religious biography eloquently
laid out in his book, The Audacity of Hope. But there is also a political calculation. His
speech in 2006 was given at a conference organized by the socially progressive
Evangelical leader, Jim Wallis. Obama’s friendships include the well known Evangelical
and author of The Purpose Driven Life, Pastor Rick Warren, as well as so-called
“emergent church” leaders Tony Jones and Brian McLaren. At a closed door meeting of
religious leaders with Obama in Chicago in June, only a handful of us represented the old
liberal mainline Protestant churches. Most were a new generation of Evangelical leaders
like megachurch pastor Joel Hunter and Rich Cizik who have broken from the old
religious right in their embrace of other moral issues like global poverty, AIDS, the
environment, education, health-care and the like.
At the meeting in Chicago with Senator Obama, Franklin Graham, son of Billy
Graham, played the “guilt by association” ploy, noting Obama’s “Muslim background,”
and then proceeded to relentlessly press the Senator on the question, “Do you believe
Jesus Christ is the way, the truth and the life, the only way to salvation?” Rev. Joseph
Lowrey, the old war horse of the Civil Rights movement, nearly bolted from his chair
6
next to mine in objection to this line of questioning. Do we really need to know what our
president thinks about this complex text from the Gospel of John? The exchange raised
for me the central question of this lecture: “What kind of piety is needed in today’s
public square, and in the occupant of the White House?”
Early in our history, John Adams wrote Thomas Jefferson about the dangerous
and corrupting power of human self-deception: “Power always thinks it has a great soul
and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God’s service
when it is violating all His laws.” Adam’s letter is cited in Reinhold Niebuhr’s book, The
Irony of American History, written in 1952 to address the Cold War struggle between
communism and freedom. Niebuhr was a profound public theologian who distained the
naïve optimism of theological liberalism as well as the privatized piety of those whose
religion actually masked the narrow parochialism of conventionality and American
smugness. He called for an active, “realistic” engagement in the world, tempered by a
healthy regard for original sin and its expression in human vanity and pride, both
expressed in personal and corporate ways. Written in the years following the triumphs of
World War II, Niebuhr’s book challenged the dangers of unrestrained American idealism.
To read it today amid the new American messianic zeal and religious certainty of our
current War on Terror is to be haunted by lessons not learned from Adams.
Not surprisingly, the President to whom Niebuhr turns at the end of his book is
Abraham Lincoln, quoting from the Second Inaugural. It is worth hearing again in the
current context:
Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has
already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease
with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier
triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible
and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may
seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing
their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be
not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been
answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. . . . Fondly do we hope,
fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.
7
Yet if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two
hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of
blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as we
said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, “the judgments of the Lord
are true and righteous altogether.”
Lincoln’s piety – and his rhetoric – saw beyond narrow partisan interest to an arc
of providence that both encompasses and motivates our actions, and at the same time
limits the seductive dangers of our own pretentions. Historian Allen Guelzo of
Gettysburg College leaves us with an agnostic Lincoln in his book Redeemer President,
agnostic in the sense of not being able to claim with certainty a personal relationship to a
divine Father in the more classic evangelical mold. We are a long way from our current
president who seems to have seen God face to face and who hears Him with some
regularity. No, Lincoln’s is a different kind of piety, steeped says Guelzo in “faith in
divine superintendency,” a confrontation “with the Calvinist God who could not be
captured or domesticated. . . , who possessed a conscious will to intervene, challenge,
and reshape human destinies without regard for historical process.” Guelzo suggests,
echoing Niebuhrian themes, that
it was the tension between his Calvinistic “melancholy” and his bourgeois
aggressiveness which acted as the best mutual restraint. . . . His confidence in the
direction of providence kept his determinism from collapsing into helplessness in
the darkest hours of the war, and it was his determinism that prevented his . . .
optimism from soaring into arrogance in victory.
One wonders where we might be today had such a piety and rhetoric guided our
nation through the seven years since September 11, 2001. Could we hope for a
presidential piety and for forms of religious engagement in public life that move beyond
secular distain on the one hand and partisan certainty on the other, in short, a piety rooted
not in utter assurance and arrogance, but in a confident faith tempered by doubt and
humility in our own human capacities? And could we dare hope for a political process
where such a piety might actually be honored and valued rather than swept away before
parochial moral litmus tests or lost in the foolishness of backing a candidate solely on the
basis of whether he or she believes Jesus is the only way to salvation?
8
Niebuhr does not use the term piety. But surely it is to a public and personal piety
that he refers as he draws his book on democracy’s struggle with Communism and his
reflection on Lincoln to a close:
There is, in short, even in a conflict with a foe with whom we have little in
common the possibility and necessity of living in a dimension of meaning in
which the urgencies of the struggle are subordinated to a sense of awe before the
vastness of the historical drama in which we are jointly involved; to a sense of
modesty about the virtue, wisdom and power available to us for the resolution of
its perplexities; to a sense of contrition about the common human frailties and
foibles which lie at the foundation of both the enemy’s demonry and our vanities;
and to a sense of gratitude for the divine mercies which are promised to those who
humble themselves.
American voters are, it seems, easily seduced by optimistic and self-righteous
interpretations of their own history, by messianic convictions about their current
circumstances, and by the notion that their public life, their commonwealth, can easily be
reduced to the diminished virtues of either “blue” or “red.” The road to the White House
has not often been paved with theological subtlety or a piety marked by modesty in the
face of the historical drama in which we are involved. In recent years in particular God
has been enlisted in the partisan fray with an ideological certainty that makes a mockery
of the awe toward which Niebuhr beckoned. But it is worth remembering – both in
gratitude and in hope – that, at the most perilous moment in our national history, we were
guided by a president more trusting in the mystery and majesty of God’s providence than
in the platitudes and certainties of his own faith, a providence in which blue and gray
were both inextricably linked and whose trajectory cannot and must not ever be easily
conformed to our own crusade, no matter how grand or noble it might appear.