Faith & Reason on the Campaign Trail

It’s a variation of an old Groucho Marx line, I know, but when I was in graduate school years ago I heard of a young philosophy PhD who went interviewing for a job at a small Quaker college. He was certainly well enough qualified for the job and they didn’t expect or require their candidates to be members of the Society of Friends, but he went through a very protracted interview process addressing what we might call questions of character and ethics. As some philosophers are wont to do, he danced around most of these questions, giving carefully nuanced and qualified answers requiring more parsing than the school officials cared to do. Finally, one of them said with some exasperation, “What we want to know is whether you are a man of principles.” “Don’t worry, sir,” came the too clever reply, “I have principles I’ve never even used.”

He didn’t get the job.

Fast forward. Polls show that some 40% of the voting population attend some sort of formal worship service weekly. No doubt that is way down from generations previously, and one might question further whether many of those in attendance take it as seriously as the non-churched (to use an insider’s phrase) suspect they all do. In fact, there is a substantial body of evidence that many congregants of various faiths and denominations routinely hold ethical positions contrary to the official teachings of their faith and, indeed, many who regularly attend some sort of organized religious community do so more for the community than for the religion.

The point is that 40% of American voters doing anything is a big deal, especially if you’re trying to get them to vote for you. I suspect few Americans are so parochial in their religious views (or lack thereof) that because they are, say, Baptists or Roman Catholics or atheists they will vote only for fellow Baptists, Roman Catholics or atheists. But it does appear to matter to many voters that prospective candidates, especially for president, pay some sort of deference to religion, preferably of the organized variety. And it obviously is some sort of a disadvantage, though no one can say for sure how much, not to claim to be a mainstream Christian. No one asks whether someone can win the presidency because he’s a Presbyterian or she’s a Methodist, so the mere fact that the question is raised whether a Jew or a Mormon is electable means that it is, to some extent, a real issue.

Thus we have the rather peculiar spectacle, for example, of Mitt Romney attempting simultaneously to downplay the specifics of his faith while emphasizing, when needed, that he is a man of faith. Meanwhile, the Democrats, in their efforts to woo back religious voters without alienating those who view any profession of religious belief at all with varying degrees of scorn and skepticism, are groping for ways of expressing (or at least professing) a political perspective infused by religious faith.

There is no little irony in this latter fact. If liberalism and the Democratic party had any legitimate claim to the “high moral ground” of 20th century politics, it was on the subject of civil rights. But the civil rights movement from the 1950s onward was motivated extensively by religious liberals and “secular humanists” whose ethics were significantly informed by their Judeo-Christian tradition and culture. Of course, that is a tradition and culture also informed by the Enlightenment and, for that matter, by philosophical developments antithetical to the tenets of theism, especially including socialism; but the fact remains that liberalism of the 1950s and 1960s and the civil rights movement in particular found some of their most passionate and persuasive spokesmen and dedicated activists from believers.

But that was then. The number of nonbelievers in America has grown to the point where they now publicly complain about being a discriminated-against minority. (No doubt they always felt that way, but getting burned at the stake is a pretty harsh result for speaking out. How, one wonders, will nonbelievers treat the faithful if and when nonbelievers are in the majority?) Today, the candidate who believes in the Median Voter Theory (and they all do) has the growing dilemma of a sort of naïve Kantianism among both secular and religious voters. It may not be enough for a candidate to claim to believe X is right or wrong, he may also have to try to convince voters that he believes it for the same reasons they do. Those who care about such things as logical rigor and intellectual integrity might find this an impossible challenge. Luckily for them, politicians care about neither. Unluckily for us, one or more of them always do get the job.