Democrats are talking about their faith, most recently in interviews on CNN. Faith helped Hillary Clinton to endure her husband’s infidelity. Because John Edwards sins multiple times every day, he is unable to identify the biggest sin he ever committed. Joe Biden prays the rosary every day. Bill Richardson’s grandmother gave him a tiny crucifix to put in the pocket of his baseball uniform for good luck. Chris Dodd’s children were baptized into the senator’s Catholic faith and blessed into their mother’s Mormon faith. All the Catholics—Biden, Richardson, Dodd, as well as Dennis Kucinich—disagree with the pope about something, but still consider themselves good Catholics. Clinton says Methodists do not wear their faith on their sleeves. Nonetheless, she is grateful for the “prayer warriors” around the world who pray for her. She has been a praying person all her life, and sometimes she asks God why he can’t help her to lose weight. Barack Obama’s faith reminds him that he is part of a community, owing duties to others and not just to himself, in other words that he and people of faith must become “our brother’s keeper, our sister’s keeper.”

 

The candidates also voiced their Christian opposition to poverty and their religious sense of obligation to care for the poor. Debate sponsor Jim Wallis, the director of Sojourners/Call to Renewal, a faith-based organization devoted to social justice, posed pointed questions about the candidates’ commitment to end poverty. In an influential book, God’s Politics, Wallis has argued that progressive Christians must challenge the Republican monopoly on public religion by speaking more openly of their faith and by expanding the debate about moral values beyond abortion and homosexuality to include poverty, war and capital punishment. “The best response to bad religion is better religion, not secularism,” Wallis writes. (66)

 

The debates suggest instead that bad religion has led to more bad religion, and confirm that mixing faith with politics is a bad idea. Wallis is correct that we need to expand the range of moral issues far beyond abortion, but wrong to believe that more faith will help the discussion. Consider the debate we got, with sin and infidelity and weight loss, not to mention Paula Zahn challenging the Catholic politicians about the nature of their disagreements with the pope. Imagine instead a discussion where the politicians spent two hours explaining what their administrations would do to address poverty, including the poverty created by hurricanes and other natural disasters.

 

What is wrong with focusing on faith? Consider the lessons learned from another Democratic presidential candidate who spoke openly about his faith, his sin and his infidelity on the campaign trail. Jimmy Carter was high in the polls in 1976, the “Year of the Evangelical,” until he told Robert Scheer in Playboy magazine that he had “looked on a lot of women with lust” and “committed adultery in [his] heart many times.” Campaigning about faith can be risky; although Carter’s theology was sound, he offended some religious voters, dropped some fifteen percentage points in the polls and almost lost to Gerald Ford.

 

After Carter’s election, many Christians who were originally proud of the Evangelical president became disillusioned with him because he believed in the separation of church and state, supported the Equal Rights Amendment, opposed prayer in public schools and upheld the Supreme Court’s abortion decision, Roe v. Wade. They attacked the president’s faith, accusing the devout Southern Baptist of being a secular humanist and not a good Christian. The major organizations of the Religious Right were founded during the Christian Carter’s presidency, urging a return to . . . Christian values!

 

Carter’s public faith opened the door to his critics’ assessing legal and policy issues in terms of their religious merits. The Right’s successful efforts added more and more religion to our political discourse, culminating in the election of George W. Bush, who believes that God called him to lead the nation.  Tired of government according to the principles of the Religious Right, the Democrats now threaten to govern as the Religious Left. This is a mistake. Faith cannot provide common principles for governing citizens of different religions. Even the seemingly clear principle that Christians should help the poor is subject to debate. Didn’t Jesus also say, “The poor you will always have with you”?

 

Focusing on faith avoids the complex political decisions that await resolution. Adding more religion to policy debates will lead to unending and irresolvable discussions about who is the better Methodist—Bush or Clinton?—or the best Catholic—Giuliani or Dodd, Kucinich or Sam Brownback? In God’s Politics, voters will be pressed to decide whose faith is true or authentic, a decision more appropriately left to…. God.

 

Wallis is wrong. The best response to bad religion is not more bad religion. It is better politics.