Getting Personal: Questions About Presidential Candidates’ Religious Lives Spark Controversy
Is there too much talk about religion in this year’s presidential race?
On Tuesday, three Democratic candidates appeared at an event sponsored by Jim Wallis’ Sojourners. Billed as a forum on “Faith, Values and Poverty” and televised on CNN, the discussion featured questions about a few political issues but also religious inquiries of a rather personal nature.
John Edwards was asked to name the biggest sin he’d ever committed. Hillary Clinton was asked about the role of religion in her life as she dealt with her husband Bill’s infidelity. (Barack Obama – perhaps wisely – launched into a lengthy speech about poverty and didn’t get asked much of anything.)
All three candidates seemed happy to give their personal religious testimonies, in keeping with some Democratic consultants’ advice that they reach out boldly to church-going voters.
In a separate development, the Associated Press has grilled candidates on what their religion is, whether they are members of a church and how often they attend services.
In a country where church and state is supposed to be separate, all of this political focus on personal faith is making a lot of people uncomfortable.
In a provocative essay today in “On Faith,” the Washington Post’s online section devoted to religion, author and reporter Susan Jacoby weighs in on the subject. Headlined “Hail to chief executive, not chief theologian,” Jacoby’s essay laments the growing role of religion in the presidential race.
“I have no quarrel at all,” she says, “with sincerely religious candidates – and I believe that John Edwards, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton all place great importance on their faith – pointing out that religious values can be translated into liberal as well as conservative social policies. But I have a very serious problem with candidates making faith a prominent and primary argument for their political programs. The Bible can be used to justify almost anything.”
And Jacoby doesn’t like what all this portends in a secular democracy.
“The President of the United States is our nation’s chief executive, not its chief theologian,” she says. “It is fine that Edwards’s religious faith plays a role in his conviction that all Americans should have health insurance. But for everyone whose faith tells him that it is our moral obligation, as a people, to provide for the care of the sick and the weak, there is another American who believes that any health program that would result in higher taxes is the work of the devil. That is precisely the problem with basing public policy appeals on private religious belief.
“It is the job of political candidates to convince all Americans that we need to do a better job of providing for the poor and the sick – and to talk to us about the practical steps required to accomplish that end,” she continues. “It is the job of religious leaders to talk about what religion requires the faithful to do in the public sphere.”
Jacoby is a self-professed secularist, but I suspect her remarks on this subject will have a lot of Americans shouting, “Amen!”