COMMENTARY: Mixing religion, politics is an old story

c. 1999 Religion News Service (Rabbi Rudin is the national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee.) UNDATED _ Even though we won’t be electing a new president for another 13 months, it’s clear religion, spelled with a giant capital”R,”will play a dominant role in the upcoming race for the White House. When I […]

c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin is the national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee.)

UNDATED _ Even though we won’t be electing a new president for another 13 months, it’s clear religion, spelled with a giant capital”R,”will play a dominant role in the upcoming race for the White House.


When I mention this phenomenon to international visitors, they are frequently bewildered and surprised by the strong presence of religious issues in American presidential politics. But actually it’s an old story.

For over 200 years the U.S. Constitution and numerous court decisions have provided strong legal guarantees for the important principle of church-state separation, a hallmark of the American democratic experiment. And for nearly the same length of time, candidates for public office have constantly asserted the familiar mantra that”religion is a private matter.”Yet the reality has always been quite different.

In the early 1800s, Thomas Jefferson’s political enemies called him an atheist, but the label did not prevent him from winning two presidential elections. One of the reasons Republican James Blaine narrowly lost the 1884 presidential election against Grover Cleveland was the infamous”Three R”charge hurled at the Democratic Party by a New York City Protestant minister who said Democrats represented”Rum (Sodom-like big city immigrants), Romanism (Irish Catholic voters), and Rebellion (a decade after the Civil War the Democratic Party was still linked to the Confederacy).” Alfred Smith’s unsuccessful 1928 campaign against Herbert Hoover was filled with ominous charges that Smith, a Roman Catholic, was somehow not fully an American because his ultimate loyalty was to the Vatican and not to the American voters and the U.S. Constitution. Indeed, Smith’s foes charged that as president, he would”bring the pope to the White House.” Ironically, in recent years U.S. presidents like Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton _ Protestants all _ have eagerly welcomed visiting popes to the United States. And during Reagan’s administration, the Vatican and the United States formally re-established long-suspended diplomatic relations.

During the 1960 race John F. Kennedy, the first and only Catholic ever to serve as president, was severely questioned about his religious identity by a hostile group of Protestant ministers in Houston. And 16 years later, the born-again Christianity of Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter had to be constantly interpreted to an inquiring and frequently skeptical electorate.

In the current run-up to 2000, religious themes loom even greater than in the past. Despite its loss of political clout, even within the Republican Party, the Christian Coalition still managed in early October to attract almost every GOP presidential candidate to its forum.

While abortion is still a fevered issue for presidential wannabes, other religious concerns are also on the agenda. These include whether public money can be used as vouchers to help pay the tuition fees of religious schools.

As president, George Bush always described faith-based charities as a”thousand points of light”for America’s citizens. Today all candidates, whatever their party, are being constantly asked whether their administration would strongly support charities sponsored by churches, synagogues and mosques. First Amendment court cases, here we come.

And if you thought the Scopes”Monkey Trial”in Tennessee during the 1920s permanently resolved the question of teaching evolution in public schools, guess again. Kansas educational authorities recently decreed that public schools had to offer creationism (the biblical account of the world’s beginning) alongside the evolution theory. Even though a president has little or no control over local school boards, this issue has become a religious litmus test for candidates.


Another controversial issue is support for parental home schooling. Many observers see home education as a thinly disguised assault on so-called”secular, godless”public schools. The remedy to the alleged”godlessness”in the neighborhood schoolhouse is the introduction of mandated prayers and Bible reading in classrooms even though both activities have been declared unconstitutional.

And just to be sure the children who are required to attend public schools, a youthful captive”congregation,”get the correct message, copies of the Ten Commandments should be posted in every classroom. That many of the public officials who often advocate the”Big Ten”on the walls have themselves committed adultery, stolen from the public till, or coveted a neighbor’s possession or spouse is never mentioned.

But no matter. If you want to live at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., you’d better be prepared to answer these and a host of other religious questions. I wonder: Are we electing a president or a high priest?

DEA END RUDIN

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