The Presidential Race and Religion

David Aikman

Candidate affiliations and the role of ‘the religious factor’

They’re off! But with what interesting stories.

There are many fascinating aspects of the U.S. presidential election campaign that has been unfolding before us in the last three weeks, fully a year before the first primary vote will be cast in 2008. One is that the 2008 election is a nearly half-century rarity in that no incumbent president or vice-president is running. So far, former Vice President Al Gore has not indicated whether he will throw his hat into the ring. It is, as they say, a wide-open race, with nine announced candidates for the nomination in both the Republican and the Democratic party races.

Another part of the story is the skyrocketing expense of presidential electioneering this year—and we refer only to the pre-nomination process. Some of the candidates in both parties have indicated that they will not accept matching federal campaign funds from the government. The reason: to do so would require them to limit their initial spending, and the front-runners for the nomination cannot afford to do that. It is estimated to require the amassing of $120 million by the end of 2007 just to secure a political party’s nomination in 2008. No one knows what the actual cost of the general election will be in 2008. It is now the conventional wisdom that the determination of potential party nomination winners will be decided months before any primary vote is cast due to the ability—or failure—of some campaigns to lock up big money contributions early on.

But one aspect of the upcoming presidential campaign that has barely begun to attract the attention it deserves is the religious affiliation of the candidates. Religion turned out to be a major factor in the 2000 presidential race, and in 2004 it was an accurate predictor of voting patterns. Not since the Nixon v. Kennedy race in 1960, when JFK became the first Roman Catholic to be elected to the White House, has religion played such an important role for voters. There are fundamental demographic reasons for this. It has been estimated that Americans who identify themselves as evangelical Christians constitute around 24 percent of the electorate. Another 25 percent is Catholic. Obviously, the voter preferences of these blocks, while in no way monolithic, and perhaps more subtle than they are often assumed to be, could be crucial in the victory or defeat of a candidate who aroused strong passions—positive or negative—among them.

The Democratic Party has taken to heart the stark polling truth that in the 2004 election, evangelicals split for President Bush against Democrat John Kerry by a startling ratio of 74 to 25. Prominent evangelical Christian specialists and consultants have been taken on by the presidential campaigns of Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator Barack Obama in order to help the campaigns attract far more evangelical Christian voters than Democrats have been able to draw to their side in the past.

Yet it is the broad variety of religious affiliation among the candidates themselves that is most interesting. The Democratic front-runner, Hillary Clinton, comes from a Methodist background. The Methodists are among the most liberal of the mainstream Protestant denominations. When Mrs. Clinton was first lady, she and President Clinton quite frequently attended Foundry Methodist Church in Washington DC, a church with distinctly liberal political leanings. She brings to the table of religious conversation some awkward baggage in the form of past statements highly critical of Republicans of strong Christian convictions. “I wonder if it’s possible,” she said in a C-SPAN television broadcast in 2004, “to be a Republican and a Christian at the same time.” Americans who describe themselves as “Christian Conservatives” are, among American voters, the group most intensively opposed to the prospect of a Hillary Clinton presidency.

On the Republican side, a major conundrum is how evangelical Christian voters will respond to the candidacy of former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. While handsome, eloquent, and personally likable, Romney is a member of the Latter-Day Saints’ Church—a Mormon. He is not the first Mormon to run for the presidency (his father did, briefly in the 1960s, and Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah ran in 2000), but his prominence as a near-front runner in the Republican race makes him vulnerable to what might be called “the religious factor” among Christian conservatives. There is evidence that, if Romney seemed close to winning the nomination, several evangelical Christian groups would oppose him solely on the grounds that they considered Mormonism a cult, and would not want a “cult” member in the White House. If similar factors had been in consideration one hundred years ago, there would never have been a President Taft: he was a Unitarian.

As for the current Republican front-runner, Senator John McCain, he is not at all popular with Christian conservatives, being considered insufficiently conservative on social issues and too bipartisan for many conservative tastes. In the 2000 primary season, McCain angered some evangelical Christian leaders by referring to them as “agents of intolerance.” James Dobson, founder of the influential Christian conservative organization, Focus on the Family, said in mid-January that he wouldn’t support McCain “under any circumstances.” Gamely, but a little lamely, McCain said he hoped to “mend fences” with the evangelical Christian leaders he seemed to have offended. McCain is considered by some of them insufficiently zealous in support of traditional marriage.

The Republican candidate who is viewed most favorably by Christian conservatives (both evangelical and Catholic) is Kansas Senator Sam Brownback. A recent convert to Catholicism from evangelical Protestantism, Brownback is anti–embryonic stem cell research and vigorously pro-life (that is, opposed to abortion). Brownback is also the most self-consciously “religious” of all the candidates of either party, appealing to the example of nineteenth-century English Evangelical reformer William Wilberforce, who successfully campaigned against slavery within the British Empire. The conventional wisdom is that Brownback is too much of a dark-horse to win the GOP nomination and will have difficulty raising the money necessary to campaign successfully in the primaries. But if Brownback ignites the evangelical Christian base in the country that prediction could be overturned.

The other candidates, except for one, fall into the category of politicians with generally moderate religious convictions. Among the interesting candidates on the Republican side is former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. A Catholic, he is currently married for the third time, and his most recent divorce and remarriage was a public matter colored by much animosity between him and his former wife.

What is manifestly new about the religious component of the race for the presidency in 2008 is the situation of one of the most prominent Democratic candidates, Barack Hussein Obama. The candidate has, for a few years, been a professing Christian and a member of the United Church of Christ, a denomination that is generally liberal in politics and theology. Obama was born to an American mother—according to most observers, an agnostic—and a Kenyan Muslim father. When his father abandoned the family, his mother then married another Muslim, an Indonesian, who became Obama’s step-father. The family lived in Indonesia until Barack was nine and he attended a Muslim school for at least three years. According to Muslim law, the son of a Muslim father is automatically considered a Muslim. Also according to the shariah, the Islamic religious law, if a Muslim converts to another religion he becomes an apostate. By tradition within Islamic law it is required that apostates from Islam be killed, and many Muslim countries do not punish murderers who carry out such a killing.

Obviously, all Americans of goodwill will earnestly desire that Senator Obama not suffer any physical harm while he campaigns around the U.S., and indeed afterwards. But he may be asked by journalists if he is willing to call upon Muslims around the world to abandon their tradition of calling for the death of apostates. It will be interesting to hear how he responds to that question.

Oh yes—there is one other interesting detail relating to the Christian faith of Senator Brownback and Senator Clinton. Both attend a weekly Senate Christian prayer meeting. It has been reported that at one such session, Senator Brownback asked Senator Clinton her forgiveness for having hated her.

Politicians asking each other’s forgiveness? Now that is a true miracle. Between Mormonism, Catholicism, insufficiently zealous Protestantism, and Islam, may there be a few more such before 2008 and afterwards.  

Dr. Aikman is a Senior Fellow of The Trinity Forum and writer in residence at Patrick Henry College in Purcellville, Virginia. His website is www.davidaikman.com.

1 Responses (comments are closed) • Columns, David Aikman, Public Square, Tue 06 Feb 2007