God in the White House: A History: How Faith Shaped the Presidency from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush
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God in the White House: A History: How Faith Shaped the Presidency from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush Customer Reviews
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An extraordinary turnabout
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Shortly after Labor Day in 1960, 150 mainstream Protestant leaders (including Norman Vincent Peale) called a press conference at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington DC to express concerns about a Catholic--John Kennedy--running for president of the United States. A Catholic's loyalties, they insinuated, would be divided between the Constitution on the one hand and the Vatican on the other.
Less than two weeks later, JFK responded to this extraordinary press conference with his now famous speech, delivered in Houston Texas, in which he asked voters to bracket a candidate's religion when deciding how to vote. JFK's speech, plus a public backlash against the brazenness of the Catholic-baiting Protestant ministers, took religion out of presidential politics for the next 16 years.
This is the historical backdrop from which Randall Balmer examines religion and the presidency over the past 50 years in his extraordinarily good book God in the White House. It's as important a study as it is a timely one, tracing as it does the trajectory of evangelical Christianity's entry into contemporary politics. That trajectory is, to say the least, a bit wobbly.
According to Balmer, it was the irreligious Nixon who, ironically, got the evangelical Christian crowd connected with politics and thus broke the 16-year moratorium. Disgust over Nixon's obvious moral corruptness and enthusiasm over Jimmy Carter's born-again purity convinced evangelicals that it was time to drop their traditional distrust of politics in the 1976 Carter/Ford contest. But after Carter's election, evangelicals, under the influence of the political right, repudiated him and began to throw their weight behind the likes of ultra-conservatives like Reagan and the two Bushes.
Contrary to popular opinion, argues Balmer, it wasn't the abortion issue that soured evangelicals on Carter. It was their perception that he had backed the IRS revocation of Bob Jones University's tax-exempt status (because of racial discrimination). Nor was it the abortion issue, much less family values, that made evangelicals so enthusiastic for Reagan. After all, Reagan was a divorced man who, as governor of California, had signed a liberal abortion bill. Instead, it was fiscal conservatism and a hawkish military position, both defended in vaguely biblical language, that appealed to them.
The upshot is that the divided loyalty worry when it came to 1960s-style politics has now evolved into its opposite: a public declaration of faith as a necessary rite of passage for a presidential candidate. Never mind that evangelicals sometimes blur the line between public policy and religious/moral principles, conflating one with the other even when there's no obvious resemblance between the two and tending to support self-identified born again candidates (such as George W. Bush) even when those candidates' positions don't seem to be in accord with Jesus scriptural teachings. This move from bracketing a candidates' religious beliefs to seeing those beliefs as a crucial litmus test is an extraordinary turnabout. The good news is that the old-style evangelical litmus test--abortion and sex--seems to be mellowing. Poverty, human rights issues, and climate change are taking center stage as a new generation of evangelicals comes of age.
Balmer's book is well worth reading for students of presidential politics as well as readers who are concerned about erosion of church and state separation. It's sure to raise hackles. But it also sheds some much needed historical perspective. |
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