God in the White House: A History by Randall Balmer

Author:Randall Balmer [Balmer, Randall]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Judging by the immediate results of the Iowa precinct caucuses, where Bush finished ahead of the rest of the field, and by his winning the Republican nomination and his victory (albeit contested) in November 2000, many Americans approved of Bush’s faith statements—or at least they didn’t find them objectionable. Voters warmed to Bush’s evangelical narrative of personal dissolution and dramatic redemption. And it is at least possible that they—certainly the partisan conservatives—projected that scenario onto the nation: If Bush could, with Jesus’s help, effect his own reclamation from alcohol, perhaps he could rescue the nation from the tawdriness of the Clinton years. Salvation by proxy.

That is a highly partisan reading, of course, and it fails to account for a multitude of other factors: Gore’s stiff campaign style, for example; the cyclical demand for change; and what at least one pundit called “Clinton fatigue.” The larger point is that, by 2000, the contours of an individual candidate’s faith and system of belief had become firmly ensconced in the arena of public discourse.

The 2000 presidential campaign also suggests that the particularities of a candidate’s faith or religion matter little, so long as the fidelity appears to be sincere. Gore’s running mate, Joseph Lieberman, an observant Jew, was the first Jew in American history to run for national office on a major-party ticket. Because Jews comprise less than 2 percent of the American population in an overwhelmingly Christian nation, some Democrats worried that Lieberman’s faith might be a political liability. Not so. Lieberman answered some queries about his policy of refusing to campaign on the Sabbath, and the issue quickly died.

Americans, apparently, if the Lieberman case provides any indication, want their candidates to profess some kind of faith—and they seem not terribly concerned about the particularities of that faith. “Our form of government makes no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith,” Dwight Eisenhower reputedly declared in 1952, “and I don’t care what it is.” Some variation of that sentiment applies to presidential politics at the turn of the twenty-first century as well.22

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