One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (48 page)

T
HAT YEAR
,
THOUGH
,
THE
D
EMOCRATS
refused to cede religion to the Republicans. Unlike Dukakis, whom historian Garry Wills called “the first truly secular candidate we ever had for the presidency,” Arkansas governor Bill Clinton was proudly religious. A Southern Baptist who attended church regularly and even sang in the choir, Clinton recalled that his grandmother had told him he “could be a preacher if I were just a better little boy. So I ended up in politics.” Not surprisingly, the Democratic nominee made liberal use of religious references in his acceptance speech at the convention, citing Scripture, referring to God, even reciting that
key passage of the Pledge of Allegiance. Most tellingly, Clinton framed his grand plan for the country in explicitly religious terms, calling for the creation of a “New Covenant, a solemn agreement between the people and their government based not simply on what each of us can take but what all of us must give to our Nation.” Locking hands with running mate Senator Al Gore Jr.—a fellow Southern Baptist—Clinton made it clear that the politics of piety and patriotism would no longer be confined to the Republican Party.
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Bush denounced his opponents for a lack of faith all the same. In a speech to evangelical Christians in Dallas, he said he had been “struck by the fact that the other party took [thousands of] words to put together their platform and left out three simple letters:
G
-
O
-
D
.” Clinton quickly hit back, denouncing Bush's attacks outside a Methodist church where he and his running mate had just attended services. “He has basically said that unless you believe in the Republican platform, you don't believe in God and you're not an American,” Clinton claimed. “The implication that he has made that the Democrats are somehow Godless is deeply offensive.” Liberal religious figures agreed that Bush had crossed a line. Dozens of church leaders, including the heads of the National Council of Churches and the president's own Episcopal Church, wrote an open letter that claimed it was “blasphemy” for anyone “to invoke the infinite and holy God to assert the moral superiority of one people over another or one political party over another.” Another fifty clergymen issued a warning of their own: “Faith in God should unite us, not divide us.” Bush overreached with a strident brand of religious politics, and Clinton's softer touch won out.
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As president, Clinton applied the same soft religiosity to national political life. He faithfully participated in the National Prayer Breakfasts, as his Republican predecessors had, but unlike them, he used the events not to advance a legislative agenda but rather to shield himself from criticism. “Sometimes I think the commandment we most like to overlook in this city is ‘thou shall not bear false witness,'” he said at the 1994 breakfast. At the next year's event, he condemned the rise in negative political attacks and encouraged the worshipers to heed Paul's advice to the Romans: “Repay no one evil for evil.” He used the 1997 breakfast to urge attendees to “rid ourselves of this toxic atmosphere”; a year later, as the Monica
Lewinsky scandal threatened to end his presidency, he asked his audience for their prayers so he could survive the crisis and “take our country to higher ground.” At these events and others, Clinton emphasized an inward-looking salvation. While his Republican predecessors had aligned themselves with leading social conservatives of the religious right, Clinton's “spiritual soul mate” was instead Reverend Robert Schuller, the apparently apolitical pastor of the extravagant Crystal Cathedral and noted practitioner of a spirituality of self-esteem and enrichment. “This is the ideal theological accompaniment to the presidency of Bill Clinton, which operates on smoke and mirrors rather than hard labor,” observed the
Washington Post's
Jonathan Yardley. “A match made in Heaven.”
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W
HEN HE RAN FOR THE
White House, Texas governor George W. Bush took a similarly soft approach, though one that came from the right. A born-again Christian, he shared Clinton's ability to discuss his faith openly. When Republican primary candidates were asked to name their favorite philosopher in a 1999 debate, for instance, Bush immediately named Christ, “because He changed my heart.” Despite the centrality of faith in his own life, Bush assured voters that he would not implement the rigid agenda of the religious right. Borrowing a phrase from author Marvin Olasky, Bush called himself a “compassionate conservative” and said he would take a lighter approach to social issues including abortion and gay rights than culture warriors such as Buchanan. But many on the right took issue with the phrase. For some, the “compassionate” qualifier implicitly condemned mainstream conservatism as heartless; for others, the phrase seemed an empty marketing gimmick. (As Republican speechwriter David Frum put it, “Love conservatism but hate arguing about abortion? Try our new
compassionate conservatism
—great ideological taste, now with less controversy.”) But the candidate backed his words with deeds, distancing himself from the ideologues in his party. In a single week in October 1999, for instance, Bush criticized House Republicans for “balancing the budget on the backs of the poor” and lamented that all too often “my party has painted an image of America slouching toward Gomorrah.”
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In concrete terms, Bush's “compassionate conservatism” constituted a promise to empower private religious and community organizations and
thereby expand their role in the provision of social services. This “faith-based initiative” became the centerpiece of his campaign. In his address to the 2000 Republican National Convention, Bush heralded the work of Christian charities and called upon the nation to do what it could to support them. After his inauguration, Bush moved swiftly to make the proposal a reality. Indeed, the longest section of his 2001 inaugural address was an expansive reflection on the idea. “America, at its best, is compassionate,” he observed. “Church and charity, synagogue and mosque lend our communities their humanity, and they will have an honored place in our plans and in our laws.” Bush promoted the initiative at his first National Prayer Breakfast as well. But it was ill-fated. Hamstrung by a lack of clear direction during the administration's first months, it was quickly overshadowed by a new emphasis on national security after the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
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Bush continued to advance his vision of a godly nation. Soon after 9/11, he made a special trip to the Islamic Center of Washington, the very same mosque that had opened its doors to celebrate the Eisenhower inauguration a half century earlier. No sitting president had ever visited an Islamic house of worship, but Bush made clear by his words and deeds there that he considered Muslims part of the nation's diverse religious community. He denounced recent acts of violence against Muslims and Arab Americans in no uncertain terms. “Those who feel like they can intimidate our fellow citizens to take out their anger don't represent the best of America,” he said; “they represent the worst of humankind and they should be ashamed.” Referring to Islam as a “religion of peace” and citing the Koran, he closed his address with the same words of inclusion he would have used before any audience, religious or otherwise: “God bless us all.” The president was not alone in enlisting religious patriotism to demonstrate national unity after the attacks. On September 12, 2001, congressional representatives from both parties joined together on the Capitol steps to sing “God Bless America.” Meanwhile, several states that did not already require recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance in their schools introduced bills to do just that.
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But the efforts to use the pledge as a source of unity were soon thrown into disarray. In June 2002, a federal court ruled that the phrase “one nation under God” violated the First Amendment prohibition against the
establishment of a state religion. The case
Newdow v. Elk Grove Unified School District
had been filed in 2000 by Michael Newdow, an emergency room doctor who complained that his daughter's rights were infringed because she was forced to “watch and listen as her state-employed teacher in her state-run school leads her classmates in a ritual proclaiming that there is a God, and that ours is ‘one nation under God.” In a 2-to-1 decision, the court agreed. It held that the phrase was just as objectionable as a statement that “we are a nation ‘under Jesus,' a nation ‘under Vishnu,' a nation ‘under Zeus,' or a nation ‘under no god,' because none of these professions can be neutral with respect to religion.” The reaction from political leaders was as swift as it was predictable. The Senate suspended debate on a pending military spending bill to draft a resolution condemning the ruling, while dozens of House members took to the Capitol steps to recite the pledge and sing “God Bless America” one more time. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer announced that the president thought the decision was “ridiculous”; Democratic senator Tom Daschle called it “nuts.” The reaction was so pronounced, in fact, that the appeals court delayed implementation of its ruling until an appeal could be heard.
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As the case made its way through the courts, the nation had to reckon anew with the meaning of “one nation under God.” According to Newdow, an atheist, the language of the amended pledge clearly took “one side in the quintessential religious question ‘Does God exist?'” The Bush administration, defending the pledge, asserted that reciting it was no more a religious act than using a coin with “In God We Trust” inscribed on it; both merely acknowledged the nation's heritage. A separate brief filed by conservative religious organizations, however, argued that the pledge was “both theological
and
political.” Reviving claims of the Christian libertarians, it asserted that the words “under God” were added to underscore the concept of limited government. They were meant as a reminder that “government is not the highest authority in human affairs” because, as the Declaration of Independence claimed, “inalienable rights come from God.” In June 2004, the Supreme Court ruled that Newdow technically lacked standing to bring the suit and thus dismissed the lower court's ruling, dodging the issue for the time being.
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Having survived that challenge in the courts, the concept of “one nation under God” thrived on the campaign trail. Seeking to rally religious
voters for the 2004 election, Republican strategist Karl Rove advocated a “play-to-the-base” plan to exploit the concerns of the religious right for electoral gain. The president passed two major pieces of pro-life legislation and then joined the campaign for a Federal Marriage Amendment to ban homosexual unions. Many on the right saw the coming campaign as the kind of “religious war” that Pat Buchanan heralded a decade before. The Bush campaign worked to capitalize on “the God gap” in the electorate, mobilizing religious conservatives in record numbers. In Allentown, Pennsylvania, one backer erected a billboard that summed up the unofficial strategy of the Republicans: “Bush Cheney ‘04—One Nation Under God.” The Democrats, meanwhile, gave the politics of religion comparatively little attention. John Kerry's presidential campaign relegated much of its national religious outreach to a twenty-eight-year-old newcomer who had virtually no institutional support, not even an old database of contacts. “The matchup between the two parties in pursuit of religious voters wasn't just David versus Goliath,” the journalist Amy Sullivan wrote. “It was David versus Goliath and the Philistines and the Assyrians and the Egyptians, with a few plagues thrown in for good measure.”
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T
HE NOTABLE EXCEPTION TO THE
Democrats' avoidance of religious rhetoric came at the party's national convention. Then a largely unknown state senator from Illinois, Barack Obama introduced himself to the country with a stirring speech that emphasized religious values as a source of national unity. Obama dismissed those who would “use faith as a wedge to divide us,” proclaiming to loud applause that “we worship an ‘awesome God' in the blue states.” “We are one people,” Obama insisted, “all of us pledging allegiance to the Stars and Stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.” Citing the Declaration of Independence, he rooted his fellow citizens' rights in their Creator but insisted that their responsibilities stemmed from God as well. What “makes this country work,” Obama observed, was a belief based on lessons in the Bible: “I am my brother's keeper; I am my sister's keeper.” He ended his address with an optimistic invocation of piety and patriotism reminiscent of the speeches of Ronald Reagan. “The audacity of hope!” he proclaimed. “In the end, that is God's greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation.” As
the crowd roared, he completed his speech with a now-familiar ritual: “God bless you.”
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The keynote address made Obama a contender in the presidential contest just four years later, but it did not protect him from doubts about his commitment to his God and his country. In early 2008, inflammatory comments made by Reverend Jeremiah Wright, his longtime pastor at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, came to light, threatening to cripple his campaign. In an excerpt from a 2003 sermon replayed endlessly on cable news networks, the fiery preacher told his congregation that African Americans should condemn the United States. “God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human!” Wright shouted. “God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.” Obama stated that he thought his pastor's “rants” were “appalling,” and in March 2008, he confronted the controversy in a major speech in Philadelphia. Though race, rather than religion, emerged as the central theme, Obama employed the language of faith to explain his pastor's statements and, at the same time, distance himself from them. “I have asserted a firm conviction—a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people,” Obama insisted, “that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice if we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.”
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