Ross K. Baker: Religion Always Divides Americans When It Becomes the Subject of Politics

by Ross K. Baker

Ross K. Baker is a political science professor at Rutgers University. He also is a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors.

Ross K. Baker, in USA Today (12-27-04):

Gen. George Marshall, who served as Army chief of staff during World War II and later as secretary of State, was once asked which political party he favored. He replied, "My father was a Democrat, my mother was a Republican, and I am an Episcopalian." Marshall's wry response underscores the fact that, after religious affiliation, the trait that children are most likely to inherit from their parents is party identification.

Nonetheless, it is unusual for religious issues to dominate presidential campaigns. What this country saw in this past election season was a higher-profile role for religion, faith and ultimately values. The election, and its aftermath, followed a familiar pattern in U.S. history: When matters of faith enter the political equation, the result is often division.

Although religious or moral questions are generally quiescent in American politics, they are never entirely absent. It is mandatory for presidents to have a connection to some recognizable religion, even if their attendance at church is spotty. And even those presidents who strike us as secular, even earthy, figures know the proper religious invocations.

Theodore Roosevelt certainly did in his speech to the Republican convention in 1912, when he warned the delegates that, "We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord." Despite Roosevelt's apocalyptic tone, the ensuing campaign, in which Roosevelt bolted from the Republican Party, saw religious and moral issues playing almost no role.

When religious issues have been injected into our presidential contests in the past, they have produced stark divisions. The pre-Civil War campaigns conducted under the shadow of slavery were rife with moral fervor, as were those after 1865 in which the temperance movement played such an active role. It is, however, too soon to tell whether this year's contest, in which questions of morality and values seem to have played some role, heralds a future in which religious and moral questions will again loom large in our presidential elections.

In those elections in which spiritual matters were broadly and openly discussed, it was usually the candidates themselves and the beliefs they espoused that brought the issues to the fore.

In the contests in which William Jennings Bryan was the Democratic candidate — 1896, 1900 and 1908 — his strong evangelical tone caused him to be one of the most passionately adored of all American politicians, and also the least successful. His three defeats, at the hands of William McKinley twice and William Howard Taft once, doomed the Democratic Party to minority status for more than a decade....

We are a nation that has always been honeycombed with moral impulse, and knowing the wellsprings of spiritual strength a candidate draws upon is as important as his positions on discrete issues — more important in some ways because it provides us with clues as to how that person will behave in circumstances that we cannot anticipate.

So Election '04 may have triggered a unique discussion of a values divide in this country. But in truth, it fits into a well-worn pattern in U.S. history — one that will surely stoke familiar moral flames in the generations to come.