GetReligion

Jerome Weeks of the Dallas Morning News recalls the golden days when John Adams, a “more traditional Christian” than Thomas Jefferson (Adams was a Unitarian), declared that “the Government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”

Weeks presents a contrast between thoughtful skeptics like Abraham Lincoln and the image of George Bush as too certain about everything.

Weeks writes:

While doubt is often seen as fuzzy and skepticism as counterproductive, rock-solid certitude is generally prized as a strength — in business leaders, public officials, ministers and action heroes. Yet Ronald Reagan, Phil Gramm, Charlton Heston, St. Paul and St. Augustine — among many others — changed their moral stances, their theological or political views.

Weeks’ report is informative, especially its argument from Jennifer Michael Hecht, a history professor at New York’s Nassau Community College, that many people perceive doubt as a sign of weakness.

Os Guinness plowed this ground many years ago in his book In Two Minds: The Dilemma of Doubt and How to Resolve It. As Guinness wrote, doubt is not the opposite of faith. Disbelief is. (Some theological liberals say certainty is, but I’ll leave that argument for another time.)

I would love to see an affable, unapologetic skeptic or nonbeliever running for the presidency, if only to test how such a candidate would fare. Howard Dean came close, despite his verbal slip about the book of Job being in the New Testament. Here, after all, was a public servant who broke with the laissez-faire Episcopal Church because his local congregation resisted a bike path along its property.

Perhaps there is a skeptic out there who could run for the presidency and win it. Leaving aside other considerations, I could envision voting for outspoken atheists Nat Hentoff (for his understanding of Culture of Life issues) or Christopher Hitchens (for his foreign policy) if only they had gone into politics instead of journalism.

Do our readers know of any skeptics who show potential on the national political stage?

In the three years I have lived in Palm Beach County, I have met legions of people who have stopped their subscriptions to the Palm Beach Post, in large part because of the newspaper’s relentless attacks on religious believers who take a traditional approach to faith and morality. I started out trying to calm these people down, assuming they were blowing things out of proportion.

Well, I finally broke down and stopped taking the Palm Beach Post the other day. I can’t defend it anymore, especially on its coverage of religious and cultural issues. It shows no interest in diversity, zero evidence that it wants to be fair to competing religious voices.

So what do I do with my journalism students? As it turns out, the Sun-Sentinel down in Fort Lauderdale has made a strategic decision to try to attract readers in Palm Beach County, so I’m giving them a try. It helps that they have a veteran religion writer — James Davis — whose work I have followed for quite some time. It seems like a pretty normal paper for progressive South Florida, but it does offer interesting voices a chance to make a case for a variety of beliefs. Amen.

For example, this past Sunday reporter Gregory Lewis took on a hot election-year topic down here in the kingdom of chads — Republican efforts to court African-American voters. The story was pretty straight forward, which meant it quickly ran into the ghosts in the pews and, thus, voting booths. Lewis gets right down to business in the lead paragraphs:

The Rev. O’Neal Dozier recently spent a weekend knocking on doors in West Palm Beach’s black community canvassing votes for President Bush.

“The results were very mixed,” said Dozier, pastor of Worldwide Christian Center in Pompano Beach. “At one house they’d tell you, `I’m not interested. I’m going to vote for Kerry.’ But at the next house, they would sit and listen.”

Dozier, who was appointed by Gov. Jeb Bush to Broward County’s judicial nominating committee in 2001, said his pitch might emphasize the Republican Party’s abolitionist roots. If the family regarded themselves as Christians, he would focus on the president’s opposition to homosexual marriage and abortion.

Over and over, religion hooks keep showing up in this political story.

It’s clear that loyalty to the Democratic Party remains high, but not as high as it once was. Lewis quotes a DC think-tank study indicating that blacks between the ages of 51 and 64 had shifted their support this year from 75 percent Democrat and 5 percent Republican, to 66 percent Democrat and 12 percent Republican. The issues that are peeling away some some black voters are religious and moral, including the tricky issue of government vouchers that help parents evacuate their children from low-grade public schools.

Some leaders in African-American institutions, such as churches, think the Democrats take them for granted. Some believe that the Democrats are automatically hostile to any public action that seems “faith-based.” Some think it’s time to spread their chips around on the political game board.

But the religion card is crucial. Jamaican-American Andre Cadogan, chair of the Black Republican Caucus of Palm Beach County, throws down these fighting words:

“We’re all Republicans,” Cadogan said. “Some of us are aware of it and others are not. The values of Republicans are shared by blacks. We agree on church, faith-based initiatives and the sanction of marriage.”

So far so good. What bothered me about this piece was that it never dug into the reasons that so many other black voters stay loyal to the Democrats and, in many cases, believe they have faith-based reasons for doing so. In other words, if this is an emotional topic in these church pews, let us hear from the preachers on both sides. Let both choirs sing.

Then it would help to dig deeper into the black church’s struggles to address the shattered lives of many of its families, especially the painful fallout of so many young black males growing up with little or no contact with their fathers. What do the black Republicans say about that? What do black Democrats have to say about that?

So it was a good story. Now let’s hang on for the other side. I expect high-ranking Democrats to be in those pulpits sooner, rather than later.

Cathleen Falsani of the Chicago Sun-Times moves well beyond the pedantic slogan that God is neither a Republican nor a Democrat by touching base with her former roommates from Wheaton College.

The result is a friendly survey of how evangelical students who attended the Harvard of evangelicalism and who still attend evangelical churches have reached very different conclusions — from fear of four more years to a steadfast commitment to reelect Bush to not feeling able to vote for either candidate.

Here’s how Falsani describes one of her friends:

Kathy is a stay-at home mom and philanthropist who lives in Manhattan, where she regularly attends an evangelical Protestant church.

Her faith deeply influences the choices she makes politically, particularly, “the part of my faith that manifests itself in caring for people with AIDS and viewing everybody as a creation of God with worth, which is a typical, more liberal thing,” she said.

She thinks she’ll vote for Kerry, but Ralph Nader has a certain appeal, too, she said.

“I don’t trust any of them,” she said. “I don’t think a good man can be president. Jimmy Carter was a good man, but he was a horrible president.”

I’d like to say this as one more week of fierce campaigning dawns, and especially before we can know how the election will turn out: I do think a good man can be president. I’m thankful for the democratic republic that gives us this choice between two good enough men. I’ll pray for both these candidates during the week ahead. And I’ll say a heartfelt prayer of thanks when it’s all over, which I hope will be sometime on the night of Nov. 2.

How does that old saying go? Presidential politics makes for interesting one-night stands. In pursuit of a singular goal — getting more votes than the other guy — arguments are advanced during election season that would not be tolerated by the parties’ bases at any other time.

Witness President Bush advertising his pork-barrel tendencies to the wider electorate, and spinning his restrictive ruling on embryonic stem cell research as evidence that his administration is already cranking up the wattage to Dr. Frankenstein levels. Most on what we clumsily call the right (though not all) have come to accept this as part of the price of doing business with the Bush administration.

Similarly, most liberal Democrats are tolerant of Senator Kerry’s on-again, off-again warmongering; his softness on gun-control; and his rhetorical opposition to gay marriage. There’s an election to win, after all, and at least Kerry’s not Bush.

The amplified religiosity of this election has made things more interesting. Many observers have noted the diabolization of the president by his opponents. To quote, well, myself:

[S]ome protest signs show actual horns and fangs dripping with blood. In the Evil Bush version of history, he stole an election and then took food from babes with his tax cuts. He exploited the tragedy of September 11 to his immense political benefit and the country’s harm. Egged on by a neoconservative cabal, he fought a war for oil and Israel, and he threatens to further upset the global balance of power. Our commander-in-chief hates gays and minorities and wants to give industry free reign to pollute rivers and belch toxic gasses into the air. If he had his druthers, Bush would impose his own born again kind of Christianity, and perhaps his Southern drawl, on the rest of us.

If anything, things have gotten worse since I penned those lines, as the hostility has spilled over from demonizing Bush to demonizing his supporters. The most extreme manifestation of this is the fact that several Bush campaign headquarters have been attacked and vandalized. More mundanely, Richard Rushfield, stringing for Slate visited both Bush and Kerry strongholds in California. The trick is that he wore a pro-Bush shirt in Kerry country and an advertisement for Kerry in GOP territory.

Rushfield worried about a violent reaction from the Bushies, but he encountered “only shades of indifference — head shaking, ‘crazy idiot’ expressions from older, very wealthy, very white folks in Newport Beach; terse nods from the middle- to working-class citizens of Bakersfield.” In the Silverlake/Los Feliz and Brentwood areas of Los Angeles, he was called an asshole a few times and drew all kinds of comment and looks of undisguised hostility. One six-year-old girl stared at him “with a look so forlorn, I expect[ed] to learn that Dick Cheney just stole her crayons.”

The shrillest opposition to Bush in the press has come from the alternative weeklies. [Alternative to what? - ed. Beats me.] The Stranger‘s endorsement of Kerry began “George Bush is pure scum.” The illustration for Rick Perlstein’s story in the current Village Voice (pictured above) is of Bush as a vampire, sucking the blood out of Lady Liberty’s neck.

GetReligion has already covered one tack of the saner press’s overreaction to Bush’s faith. Go here for my take on last week’s New York Times Magazine Ron Suskind cover story or here for Terry Mattingly’s take on Jeff Sharlet’s “Bush the magic Christian” piece over at The Revealer.

But another line of criticism has emerged, which we might call the Geraldine Ferraro approach. Several left-of-center pundits and pundettes have charged that Bush is a bad Christian, if that. It started with criticism of Bush’s lack of regular church attendance and his unwillingness to fess up to mistakes he’s made and finally metastasized into Ayelish McGarvey’s article on the website of the American Prospect: “As God Is His Witness: Bush is no devout evangelical. In fact, he may not be a Christian at all.”

McGarvey’s arguments for this accusation:

1) The president is “neither born again nor evangelical” since he “did not have a single born-again experience.”

2) He “does not live or govern under the complete authority of the Bible — just the parts that work to his political advantage.”

3) His refusal to publicly admit to error is evidence that he doesn’t believe in sin.

4) He has money and is not a socialist.

5) He doesn’t try to aggressively proselytize.

6) He is not Jimmy Carter.

Therefore: Conservative Christian voters should reject Bush at the ballot box.

What’s the word here? Crassness? Irony? Opportunism? What McGarvey advocates, in the American Prospect, is nothing less than a religious test for public office.