COMMENTARY: Politicians Talking Like Clergy

c. 2004 Religion News Service (Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is Distinguished Visiting Professor at Saint Leo University.) (UNDATED) The 2004 presidential race is becoming an old-time religious revival with both candidates rushing to declare their spiritual convictions. Both President George W. Bush and Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., seem more like […]

c. 2004 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is Distinguished Visiting Professor at Saint Leo University.)

(UNDATED) The 2004 presidential race is becoming an old-time religious revival with both candidates rushing to declare their spiritual convictions. Both President George W. Bush and Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., seem more like clergy than politicians seeking America’s highest elective office.


It was different in 1960 when John Kennedy and Richard Nixon competed for the White House. Because JFK was only the second Catholic presidential candidate _ in 1928, Gov. Al Smith of New York was the first _ he faced opposition from some Protestant leaders, including the late Norman Vincent Peale.

Late in the campaign Kennedy met with Protestant ministers in Houston and assured them his religion would not interfere with or unduly influence his constitutional obligations as president. Although Nixon was usually identified as a Quaker, many historians dispute that description. As evidence that Nixon deserted his mother’s Quaker faith, they point to his hosting formal religious services inside the White House and his bellicose foreign policies, including waging war in Vietnam.

Now, four decades later, Bush, a United Methodist, proudly affirms that his “born again” religious experience influences his decision-making and presidential duties. During the Republican primaries in 2000, Bush told an audience that Jesus was the political philosopher he most admired.

In his recent prime-time news conference, Bush described freedom as “the Almighty’s gift” to humanity. The president several times mentioned that his policies, especially the war in Iraq, were intended to increase God-given freedom, and said contemporary events represent a “historic opportunity to change the world.”

Kerry, a Roman Catholic, has been speaking in African-American churches around the country, a time-honored practice of many candidates. In February he was warmly welcomed by Coretta Scott King at Atlanta’s famous Ebenezer Baptist Church where Martin Luther King Jr. once preached.

More recently Kerry spoke in a St. Louis church where he criticized “our present national leadership” with a quote from the New Testament book of James (2:14): “What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but no deeds?” Kerry asked the congregation: “Where are the works of compassion?”

The media covered Kerry’s Easter Sunday attendance at Boston’s Paulist Center where he received communion even though some of his Catholic political foes called upon American bishops to deny that sacrament to the Massachusetts senator. The argument was that Kerry supports legal abortion, a position at odds with one of the church’s basic teachings.


At the same time Kerry supports his church’s position in opposing capital punishment (except for terrorists) along with many other fundamental Catholic social justice teachings.

Kerry’s critics call this “cafeteria style” Catholicism. The internal Catholic firefight is likely to intensify as we near Election Day.

What is frequently overlooked is that Bush, a strong supporter of capital punishment, is at odds with the United Methodist Church’s General Conference, his denomination’s top policy body.

Since 1980 the UMC has opposed capital punishment: “In spite of a common assumption to the contrary, `an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’ does not give justification for the imposing of the penalty of death. Jesus explicitly repudiated the `lex tallionis’ (Matthew 5:38-39), and the Talmud denies its literal meaning and holds that it refers to financial indemnities.” In 1996 the UMC declared, “We oppose capital punishment and urge its elimination from all criminal codes.”

Opposition to strict gun control is a major plank in Republican platforms, but the UMC supports “federal legislation to regulate the importation, manufacturing, sale, and possession of guns and ammunition by the general public.”

Is Bush practicing “cafeteria style” Methodism?

The selective mixture of politics and piety is nothing new. Religious leaders and political candidates have long focused on widely diverse public policy issues including the death penalty, bioethical concerns including abortion and withdrawal of life support systems, public monies for religious/parochial schools, mandated prayer in public school classrooms along with Bible reading, the public display of religious texts and symbols, support for civil and human rights, anti-war campaigns, homosexual unions and even the theological necessity for tax cuts.


Despite the candidates’ public confessions of faith and their use of traditional religious language, one hopes the American electorate will recognize we are not electing a national high priest or spiritual leader in November.

Bush or Kerry will be the political, not the religious, leader of Americans for the next four years. And that is quite enough responsibility.

DEA/PH END RUDIN

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