Religion and the Presidency

We have come a long way in the last 47 years since people wondered if America was ready for a Roman Catholic president. JFK had to promise that as president he would not be too Catholic. Today the controversy around Rudy is not that is a Roman Catholic but that he doesn’t seem Catholic enough. I mean this in terms of how he lives his life and not the outward trappings of religiosity that all the candidates seem to don as a garment.

This season’s race has seemed to have forgotten the Article 5 section 3 of the Constitution that says “..no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” Today the private faith of every candidate is on display. And while it is good that we no longer worry about electing a Catholic, we have shifted our anxiety to Mormons, and also, just under the surface, to a man with two traditionally Muslim names.

The religion question has come center stage, but a candidate’s private faith really is not the business of public politics. We have the right to know what a candidate’s values are. His or her character is certainly admissible into our national dialogue. But the individual faith of a potential president is really not any of our business.

We have effectively created a religious test and all the pretenders to the throne would be thrown off the hustings if they confessed to atheism or even agnosticism. There is, in fact, only one avowed atheist in the Congress—and that is H. Fortney “Pete” Stark of California. There are, I’m certain, many more, but like gays and lesbians, they are closeted by an implicit understanding of “Don’t ask. Don’t tell.”

Aside from the Constitutional impropriety of religious tests, the more immediate concern is that they are worthless. We seem to believe that someone’s religion or denomination conveys valuable information about both their character and their future policies. This is demonstrably false. Knowing that Rudy calls himself Catholic does not tell us what he would do about abortion, stem cell research, the death penalty or war. Christopher Dodd is also Catholic, and I suspect he and Rudy would govern differently.

Nor does Huckabbee’s Baptist ordination tell us anything about him that is intrinsic. Bill Moyers is also an ordained Baptist minister. I suspect they come to different conclusions on some values issues—even though their values are legitimately and sincerely derived from the same source. George W and Hillary Clinton are both Methodists. And from this we can infer exactly what?

Expecting policy and character to proceed predictably from religious affiliation or public displays of religiosity is like assuming all Americans see the Constitution as saying the same thing. We may all be lovers of the Constitution but we certainly understand that precious document differently.

Remember that Jesus warned against the ostentatious displays of piety by the hypocrites and said in Matthew 6:6, “But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.” Good advice from the Good Book.