Tut-Tutting the Growing Faith Debate

There has been some hemming and hawing in the blogosphere over the faith-based forum that the leading Democratic presidential candidates engaged in last night. 

Andrew Sullivan ripped into the “faith-off” as “a spectacle at once spiritually crass, politically vulgar and democratically corrosive.”

Debra Haffner — a religious progressive whom I greatly respect — lamented that “secular CNN gave two hours to covering a program primarily aimed at evangelical Christians and implicitly promoting the idea that personal faith practices are criteria for judging candidates.”

These bloggers, among others, fret about political figures having to answer questions about their sins, their praying habits, and other matters of arguably little significance to public policy.  They fear the intermingling of church and state and want the focus to be on issues.

Those are valid concerns, but my response is this: relax.  That, or be prepared to fight a much bigger battle than faith in the public square.  Let me explain.

First, my premise: if we have religious freedom in this country, that means candidates (like anyone else) should be allowed to talk about their faith if they so choose.  Hardly anyone contests this notion.

What inevitably follows, however, is a bit more controversial: if candidates choose to present faith as something that’s important to who they are — as Obama, Edwards, and Clinton did last night — then questions about that faith are fair game.  Voters want to know what drives candidates — and if faith is part of that equation, then let’s talk faith.

Consider the issue from a different angle — say, economics instead of religion.  When George W. Bush presents himself as a man of the people, it would be perfectly legitimate for reporters (in a fantasy world, of course) to ask, “Aren’t you actually a silver-spoon, upper-crust, old-money WASP who went to the most elite schools in the country due not to your own hard work, but to your father’s influence?”  Most of us at FaithfulDemocrats.com wouldn’t get too stressed about raising a personal, biographical issue like that. I myself would giggle with (unChristian) schadenfreude.  But when Bush talks about how his faith informs his presidency?  Grimaces all around.

Or let’s look at someone from our own side of the aisle — John Edwards.  He likes to point out that he’s the son of a mill worker.  Why?  Because he wants voters to know that his working-class background will inform his values and priorities as president.  Is there something wrong with that approach?  Should Edwards’s childhood class status be off limits for discussion?  Or just his prayer life? 

Unthinkingly accepting the former while squirming over the latter is to suggest that personal attributes are fine conversation fodder unless those attributes are religious ones.

When conservatives talk about a “religion penalty in America” — a hand they vastly overplay, of course — that’s what they mean: a situation where free expression is celebrated until faith enters the picture, at which point we hear solemn (or angry, or nervous) pronouncements about how religion shouldn’t matter in politics.

One could make the argument that personal details about a candidate don’t matter.  Maybe we should disregard Edwards’s $400 haircut — and the class status of his father.  Maybe, for that matter, we should ignore Bill Clinton’s history of adultery — and along with it, his humble beginnings in a small town in Arkansas.  Maybe the gossip and the personality profiles should all go out the window.

But in our current public debate, personality matters.  Voters see personal characteristics as a window into the kind of leader someone will be.  And if we accept the fact that campaigns are about projecting personality traits as well as issue positions, religious traits shouldn’t be deemed less legitimate for public discussion than anything else.

Which brings me back to my initial point: those who are worried about faith-based discussions of the kind that Sojourners hosted last night should either let it go or be prepared to fight a much bigger battle — namely, one to end our cultural obsession with gossip and quirks of personality. 

If you’re going to tut-tut when candidates discuss their private faith, do the same when candidates bore us with anecdotes about their parents, their spouses, their kids, their childhoods, and other things that inform the values they will bring to high office.  If you don’t think personal factors should matter, be consistent about it.

But for God’s sake: don’t reserve the hand-wringing for religious talk.  For that would, indeed, impose a religious penalty in America.

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Update: I just received an email from someone who said discussion of personality quirks is in a different category than a network grilling about candidates’ private faith.  Maybe — but here’s my point.  If there were a race-based forum where candidates were asked (among other things) about their personal experience with minorities, no one would think anything of it.  Same if there were a labor forum and candidates were asked if they’d ever had trouble paying the bills.  But as soon as it’s religion, a very different kind of reaction emerges.