The Economist’s “Lexington” column this week is devoted to the challenges that both Obama and McCain are having with faith on the campaign trial:
Few Democrats have seemed more comfortable talking about God than Barack Obama has. And yet few, if any, have had more problems with God at the ballot box—from rumours that he is a Muslim to doubts among Catholic and Jewish voters to repeated “pastor eruptions”.
This is a serious worry for the Democrats as they gird their loins for the general election. Four years ago the party finally grasped what should have been obvious for years: that running as a secular party in a highly religious country is a recipe for defeat. George Bush not only beat John Kerry by huge margins among “values voters”. He also profited from a visceral sense that there was something unAmerican about the Democrats’ secularism. Seven out of ten Americans routinely tell pollsters that they want their president to have a strong personal faith.
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The leading Democratic candidates all talked about God with a gusto that had once been reserved for the Republicans. Hillary Clinton said that she was a “praying person” who had once contemplated becoming a Methodist minister. She also outraged some of her hard-core supporters by describing abortion as a “tragedy”. John Edwards said that his crusade against poverty was rooted in his Christian faith. The New Testament, after all, has a lot more to say about poverty than about gay marriage.
But none of them talked about God as well as Mr Obama. Mr Obama had a great conversion story to tell—he was the child of agnostic parents who had “felt God’s spirit beckoning me” as a young man and had been baptised at the age of 26. And he talked about religion in a way that appealed to both his party’s religious and its secular wings. The Republicans may have co-opted religion for reactionary political ends. But the religion that Mr Obama embraced—the religion of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King—was a force for social reform. In his career-making speech at the Democratic convention in 2004 he noted that Americans worship the same “awesome God” in the red states and the blue states. Surely the Democrats had discovered the perfect solution to their God problem?
Two high-octane preachers in Mr Obama’s hometown of Chicago put paid to that hope. Jeremiah Wright’s cries of “God damn America” almost shook the wheels off his campaign in March. Then last week America witnessed another “pastor eruption”—Father Michael Pfleger, a white Catholic, mocking Hillary Clinton as an “entitled” white crybaby. Hardly the stuff of religious reconciliation and responsible social reform.
Mr Obama’s problems with God are not limited to Trinity United Church, which he formally abandoned this week. He may have done enough to quell worries among Jewish voters with a robust speech on June 4th. But the persistent rumours that he is a Muslim—contemptible though they are—will remain a problem during the general election. A poll for Newsweek in May found that 11% of Americans believe that Mr Obama is a Muslim, and a further 22% could not identify his religion.
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The good news for Mr Obama in all of this is that he is up against a Republican candidate in John McCain who has plenty of God problems of his own. Mr McCain has a tin ear for religion. He is in many ways a throwback to the pre-Reagan Republican Party of Nixon and Ford—a party that regarded religion as something that you did in private. He is much happier talking about courage than compassion. At one point recently he sounded confused as to whether he was a Baptist or an Episcopalian.
Mr McCain has also been making a hash of dealing with his religion problem. He initially embraced the support of the religious right’s own versions of Jeremiah Wright in the form of John Hagee (who believes that the anti-Christ will return to earth in the form of a “fierce” gay Jew) and Ron Parsley (one of the leaders of the anti-gay marriage movement), though he recently rejected both men. He seems blind to the fact that the leadership of the evangelical community is shifting to a new generation of much more appealing leaders such as Rick Warren.
All this makes for a much more even fight for the religious vote than for a long time. But it will also make for a more intense fight—with the Democrats aggressively courting Catholics and evangelicals and the Republicans relentlessly trying to tie Mr Obama to Mr Wright. Those people, in both secular Europe and on the secular wing of the Democratic Party, who had hoped that America’s God-soaked politics would disappear with Mr Bush are in for a disappointment.
Read it all here.