Two weeks ago, NYT columnist Frank Bruni wrote a column titled “The Democratic Primary’s God Deficit.” In it, Bruni argues the Democtratic candidates should talk more about God and religion. This, according to Bruni, would help connect them to religious Americans and increase their appeal with such voters. Moreover, it would be smart politics because it would not cede this block of voters to President Trump. This is an interesting proposition but not without problems and challenges notwithstanding certain opportunities.
First, should voters be interested in a candidate’s religious beliefs? The constitution does not permit any test based on religious persuasion for those seeking a political office. Then, why would pubic knowledge of the religious beliefs of a candidate matter? The constitution also provides for a separation of church and state. Therefore, voter awareness of a candidate’s religious affiliation should not matter, unless a voter expects favorable treatment of his or her church and faith from a coreligionist candidate, which in essence would be contrary to the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
Second, bringing God into political debates frivolously and selfishly might also offend Christians and Jews in light of the third Commandment “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.” Finally, how are atheists, agnostics and nones (i.e., those unaffiliated with any church) supposed to talk about religion? These are some of the challenges I see in inserting God in politics.
Having said that, I recognize that given the separation of church and state and the right of religious liberty enshrined in the First Amendment, the public has a legitimate interest in knowing a candidate’s views in regards to these matters regardless of the religious persuasion of a politician. The point of interest then is how politicians respond to this challenge.
In 2016, Christian conservatives (comprised mostly of Evangelicals) saw an opportunity to further their religious agenda by decidedly siding with Donald Trump in spite of his revealing a character and using tactics that would have little chance meeting the moral test question “Would Jesus do this?” Interestingly, the Christian Right saw in Donald Trump a stronger crusader of its cause than Ted Cruz, who also campaigned for that block’s support. Even, Trump’s unfounded and scurrilous accusations against Cruz’s father and wife were not enough to halt conservative Christians’ enthusiasm for Mr. Trump.
Religions have a long history of seeking alliance with and protection from state leaders in order to survive or to dominate the spiritual domain. As Ross Douthat (NYT, 9/16/2018) put it, Christian conservatives made a Trump bet that his support of their religious agenda justified his personal moral failings just like fourth century Christians made a bet with Emperor Constantin in order to secure religious freedom, and whom they even elevated to sainthood despite that Emperor’s involvement in family murders. In a similar fashion, the leaders of conservative Christian churches have lost no time to declare that God’s will is behind Mr. Trump’s ascendancy. Thus, they admonish their faithful to “render to God and Trump”; that God “wanted Donald Trump to become president”; that President Trump is meant to be a new King Cyrus sent by God to save Christians as the real Cyrus delivered the Jews from Babylonian captivity. Many more such messianic pronouncements are in record.
The anxiety, rational or not, of the Christian Right, has been masterfully manipulated by Mr. Trump and his closest associates. Several examples prove the point. “If you don’t win this election, you’ll never see another Republican, and you’ll have a whole different church structure,” candidate Trump said on the Christian Broadcasting Network. Not to be overshadowed by the President, Vice President Mike Pence has not let up in his persistent support of religious causes with little regard to the First Amendment. More recently, Attorney General William Barr, in a speech at Notre Dame University, reportedly derided secularism and called it a threat to America aiming at destroying the traditional moral order. This from the guy who is supposed to enforce the Establishment Clause; the clause that guarantees both freedom for religion as well as freedom from religion.
Here, the invocation of God and religion is part of a political agenda that leaves many Americans dismayed and uncomfortable in its sectarian partisanship. To accept a generalization of this approach across political parties and campaigns risks taking us all down a very slippery road.
So, how should politicians talk about God and religion? I would argue that politicians can address the public’s interest in the First Amendment while respecting the constitution by avoiding language that politicizes favoritism for this or that religious sect or for people of faith versus those without. Expressions of personal religious beliefs should inform us about the person’s moral compass and not signal endorsement of a religious establishment. In the same context, secularists can also discuss how reason and universal humanism informs their morality and their views about religious liberty and the separation of church and state.
I believe the public service both Democratic and Republican politicians can render to their country is to educate their fellow Americans about the proper role of religion in politics, the rights of all regardless of adherence to faith or not, and the perils of letting sectarian politics dominate political discourse and competition.
And a final note. Contrary to Bruni’s column, Democrats have been talking about God in their campaign trails.* See the Atlantic article in https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/2020-democrats-are-talking-about-religious-faith/592966/
Let's Reason 
The Constitution should be overpowering the religious beliefs of any Candidate and future president.
And should be the filter for its governing guide only, to keep America first.
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The historical fact is that, from its earliest beginnings, America was founded on theocracies — an intimate formal governmental/legal connection between religion and politics. We all remember the lessons in elementary school about the pilgrims (the Puritans more accurately) coming to America to escape religious persecution in England, perpetrated by a centralized Anglican Church, and landing in Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts on the Mayflower to practice “religious freedom.” In fact, the Puritans established a theocratic government where the leaders of the government were the church leaders (i.e., Cotton Mather) who had dedicated the political/lawful purposes of the new colony to creating a “Godly Commonwealth on earth” reflecting Puritan religious practices and mores. The Puritan experience was duplicated in other colonies (for example, the Quakers in Pennsylvania, Roger Williams in Rhode Island, and similar developments in other colonies). After the Revolution was fought, formally freeing the colonies from English control (and further affirming separation from the Anglican Church), and approximately 130 years after the founding of the colonies, the Constitution, and then the Bill of Rights (including the First Amendment) were ratified. During that time, maybe 2-3 generations of colonists had been living in America. They understood what their predecessors had come here for —among other things, freedom from a centralized church. The former colonists wanted protection/assurance against the newly formed Constitutional federal government instituting a new centralized church which they had fought the Revolution, in part, to prevent. The Constitution was drafted by brilliant philosophic, legal theorists who understood law, language and politics (in its highest practical and theoretical sense). The language of the Constitution in general, and the First Amendment in particular, is purposeful and written with an eye to avoid ambiguity. The First Amendment stated that
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” This is no accidental language. It was aimed at assuring that those who fought the Revolution, and whose recent ancestors had come here to practice their own form of local religion, would not be subject to the control of a centralized religious institution at the newly formed federal level. Critically, the language of the First Amendment only addressed the power, or more accurately, the prohibition against Congress exercising a power to create a centralized religion. The language of the First Amendment is silent— purposefully so— about local religious affairs or local government. Those matters were left to the localities (i.e., the historical local theocracies) where government and religion had always overlapped. It was not until the mid- 1900s that the Supreme Court began deciding the so-called “religious clause” cases using a ratio decedendi to strike down certain local laws on the grounds that there was an alleged “historical wall between church and state.” However, an alleged historical basis for such a purported “wall” is historical fallacy. America has its roots in theocracy, and the cultural tradition of the overlapping of religious and political institutions has persisted ever since. It is an endemic, and palpable part of our inherited political culture. Correspondingly, ethnocultural and religious matters drive voting behavior. Denying the existence of the overlap between religion and political institutions (for example, a candidate saying there is no connection between religion and politics) is either outright fallacy or a reckless disregard for the truth. We have been struggling, as a country made up of pluralistic religious backgrounds, throughout our history. The continuing challenge is not to simply intone a simplistic fallacy that there is a wall between church and state, but rather how we approach this complex political and cultural/sociologic reality realistically, taking account of our history and the language of the First Amendment, properly and accurately construed.
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