My Sunday Feeling

Is it just me or is anybody else put off by what I perceive to be an inordinate amount of religiosity being bandied about by our candidates for public office? On the one hand, I don't much care about Mitt Romney's Mormonism or the fact that Southern Baptist Mike Huckabee willingly concedes that there is no disconnect between his politics and his fundamentalist Baptist faith. I don't intend to vote for either of these gentlemen.

But I am very much put off by the candidates that I am interested in discussing matters that I believe are largely the business of nobody but that candidate and his or her immediate family. And I remember a time in the not so distant past when a candidate might identify himself as a member of a particular church and that was that. A person's personal religious preference was just that. Personal.

I concede that it is a near thing. And I concede that it is a complicated thing.

Certainly, all of our actions are informed by our upbringing. A person's worldview is undoubtedly influenced by religious training. This is not necessarily a bad thing. And to that limited extent, knowing that Hillary is a Methodist,for example, is useful information. But so is George Bush. Such knowledge is merely useful. It ought not to be conclusive evidence of fitness to hold public office.

And just as certainly, all of us are informed by our biases concerning religion. I view the historical truth claims of most religions with skepticism. I view the truth claims concerning the Mormon church with complete amusement. Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, was a con artist, pure and simple.

But I don't hold Mitt Romney's Mormonism against him simply because his Church is founded upon the theological equivalent of "three card monte." I know any of a number of "cradle Catholics" who disagree vehemently with certain positions of the Vatican and yet could no more convert to another faith than they could quit breathing oxygen. You are as you are raised. I take it no further than that.

But clearly the candidates for President feel compelled to put the Jesus card in play. It must be important from a strategic standpoint or they wouldn't do it. They do nothing, I mean nothing, that isn't poll-tested or consultant approved. And in that fashion, they run the risk of trivializing faith, of making it a "position" along with farm subsidies and gun control when the reality is more complicated than that. Bill Clinton is a professing Baptist whom history will judge more kindly than not despite his idiotic decisions about his personal life. George Bush is an evangelical Methodist. Yes, they do exist although we are not proud of this fact. And we will be lucky if we can survive the remainder of what may loosely be described as his administration without stumbling into World War III.

The point is, what should matter more than a candidate's religion is his or her positions on the issues and his or her's record for competence in professional life. Certainly a person's religious background is useful information but as a whole it shouldn't be much more of a factor than whether he or she ran cross-country or can play the piano.

I look forward to the day- a day that will never come again-when a candidate says, "Look, everybody knows I belong to First Presbyterian back home. That's where I was raised and everybody knows me back there. I don't feel comfortable talking about such a personal matter in a public forum. But you can go back home and ask the folks there what they think about me."


Most people that run for office are no better or no worse than you and me. And so, if you checked on his story back home you might find that he or she was regarded as a good kid. That she sang in the choir. That he helped with the food drive for the needy. That she looked out for the elderly. And so forth. This is useful information that informs us about a candidate's character.

Conversely, Arkansas's own Mike Huckabee's claim that God is responsible for his recent showing in Iowa, which, with the characteristic modesty we have come to expect from him, he likened unto the miracle of the loaves and fishes. This is not much useful information.

But it sure does speak volumes about the character of the man.