More than half a century after John F. Kennedy dismissed the role that his Catholic faith would play when he was elected president, today\u2019s candidates for the nation\u2019s highest executive office still have to navigate the electoral implications of religion. In a talk sponsored by Harvard Divinity School (HDS), four religious scholars took up the question of \u201cReligion and the Election: Does it Matter?\u201d<\/p>\n
The panelists suggested that while the faith of any individual candidate seems less important now to the electorate, Americans remain attracted to candidates whose values mesh with their own views, which are largely informed by specific religious traditions. Religion can help to shed light on important election issues, the panelists agreed, but a couple of them worried that religion can also be a means of defining voters too narrowly.<\/p>\n
Religion and election issues\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n
For panelist J. Bryan Hehir, politics and religion \u201ccertainly should be\u201d connected in domestic policy, foreign policy, and health care. Those issues are part of the secular debate, he said, but should also be discussed in \u201creligious moral terms.\u201d Concern for the poor, a tenet of the Catholic Church that focuses on the welfare of society\u2019s powerless, is useful when thinking about debt reduction and fiscal policy, said Hehir. The same principle is helpful in foreign policy and in nonproliferation, an issue \u201cinherently discriminatory\u201d when viewed through an ethical lens. \u201cWe\u2019ve got to deal with the question, in the wider perspective of the world,\u201d said Hehir, the Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor of the Practice of Religion and Public Life at Harvard Kennedy School, \u201cof how to reduce the privileges that come with nuclear weapons.\u201d Religion can also offer a multidimensional perspective on health care, he said, including the \u201csocial justice\u201d question of medical coverage in the United States. More than half a century after John F. Kennedy dismissed the role that his Catholic faith would play when he was elected president, today\u2019s candidates for the nation\u2019s highest executive office still have to navigate the electoral implications of religion. In a talk sponsored by Harvard Divinity School (HDS), four religious scholars took up the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2251,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1804","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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