The role religiosity has played in this electoral season thus far has been uncanny in a very nearly Freudian sense. Everything seems upside down. The Republicans have a de facto nominee of at best questionable and untested religious commitment. The Democrats have a presumptive nominee who has a clear religious record and fairly clear, demonstrably Liberal, religious values. The man with no religious record to speak of has virtually been given a free pass by his own party’s evangelical base—however lukewarm their support—and the man with a religious record of some depth has been paying for it on a regular basis.
Senator Obama is faulted for going to the wrong churches, hearing the wrong sermons, possessing the wrong religious convictions. And all the while, John McCain, unquestionably a man who has sacrificed and suffered for his country, gets by with scarcely a religious word in utterance. As many times as we have heard the harrowing tales of his captivity in North Vietnam, the way he turned to the thought of his fellow captives, the code of honor of the US military, to the Constitution itself, one never hears that he turned to his God, or to prayer. I do not suggest that he ought to have done, of course. I simply note that this absence is glaring, and his religious silence is deafening.
That is what made the appearance of both men together on the bizarre political platform of a Baptist church all the more jarring and, well, uncanny. That McCain has been praised in the main by the very evangelicals he was courting is uncannier still. For what he offered was a vacuous equation of a certain kind of religion with a certain kind of morality, as only one with no real fluency in the flavors of the faith could do.
What, he was asked, is his greatest moral failing? The failure of his first marriage. What, one wonders, must his current wife make of such an answer. By contrast, Senator Obama answered that it was his troubled teen years, the drinking, the drugs, everything he has already written very publicly and thoughtfully about.
Senator Obama was asked when he believed life began, and he offered a thoughtful response, beginning with the observation that where religious traditions and scientists do not agree, he is not in a position to say with confidence. Senator McCain was asked when a human being first possesses rights that may be protected, and he answered “at conception.” He went on to tout his long and utterly consistent “pro-life” voting record. One wonders. Certainly if one considers it a principle of the pro-life platform to refuse all stem cell research, as the current US President does, then his voting record is not really consistent at all. Much hinges on who is evaluating these things.
The problem is, neither are his answers. McCain shared moving and important stories about his life and life-choices. He told a fascinating story about the spontaneous decision to adopt a young girl who is now sixteen years old and flourishing. But Senator McCain consistently answered questions that probed at his “religious“ beliefs with statements of his “moral“ beliefs. And the audience ate it up.
The Senator from Arizona is a man of character, whatever that means, and a man of principle—most of the time. But his recent decision to utilize attack ads, and his willingness to kow-tow to an evangelical script runs the very real risk of derailing the very thing that had made his candidacy viable to begin with: his maverick status and his straight talk. The more he begins to sound and to look like Mitt Romney—saying what he believes the base he is courting wants to hear—the more he runs the very real risk of undercutting his strongest selling point.
Senator Obama has a different, and I suppose a more difficult challenge. He needs to own his Liberal religious credentials and to explain why they are sensible. And he must do so in an increasingly “know-nothing” religious atmosphere. His most reasoned issues are taken as evidence that he’s had too much legal training and isn’t really religious. Meanwhile, McCain’s strident univocality is taken as a sign of faith. It really is all upside down. But the challenge on the left in this election season will be to drive a wedge between religion and ethics and to make clear how and why a man of faith is not necessarily a man of virtue. Like the current president.
