Far from being the mediating force in American politics, religion, when put into the mix, makes the political and racial issues of America stand out in graphic relief. It will be incumbent on those of good will in the 2020 election cycle to try and make peace, not war.
Given the history of divisiveness in religion in American politics, particularly when it comes to Christianity and presidential politics, that probably won’t be the case. But any hope rests upon acknowledging truth about what holds us apart.
History may not provide the best roadmap for possible solutions to the fractures that divide us, but examining some of these inflection points can help us to understand where we find ourselves and how to navigate these tough times. The role of religion in our national political divisions has evolved, but much of today’s difficulty stems from developments set in motion decades before.
Religion and the 1960 election
Consider the candidacy of Al Smith for President of the United States in 1928. Smith, whose Irish parents immigrated to America, was vilified for being Catholic at a time when many immigrants were Catholic, and Catholics
were believed by Protestants to be suspect because of the papacy. Many believed that if a Catholic were to become president, the office would be subject to the whims of the Pope, and not for American concerns.
That sentiment would carry forward to the 1960 election, when John F. Kennedy, an Irish Catholic, ran for president against Richard M. Nixon, a Quaker.
The divisions over Kennedy’s Catholicism didn’t just reflect the fears of mainstream everyday Protestant Americans; for some Protestant leaders and public figures, reactions to Kennedy’s religious beliefs presented an opportunity to seize power by using that fear to their advantage. Their actions represented a growing and interrelated trend in American politics: capitalizing on fear-based religious fervor or racial animosity to direct a political agenda.
Among these leaders was Reverend Billy Graham,
friend to Nixon. Graham would hold a secret meeting of prominent pastors in August 1960 in
Montreux, Switzerland, to plan how to mobilize against Kennedy. The pastors met stateside a few days later in New York City, without Graham, but with Norman Vincent Peale, author of “
The Power of Positive Thinking” and pastor of the Marble Collegiate church (where Donald Trump attended) as the face of their coalition. Peale, best known today as a formative influence on Trump, was notoriously anti-Catholic and
told the gathered ministers, “Our American culture is at stake. I don’t say it won’t survive, but it won’t be what it was.”
According to Peale’s biographer Carol George, Peale met with the press after this gathering and shared a group statement, essentially an indictment of the character of the Roman Catholic Church. The event backfired and gave Kennedy the opening
to deliver a speech to the Houston Ministerial Association on September 12, 1960, assuring the Protestant ministers and others that his Catholic faith would not get in the way of his decision-making ability as president of the United States.
Kennedy’s subsequent win did not stop anti-Catholic bias or heal political divisions, but it clearly put religion-based power-brokering into the presidential mainstream. Kennedy made sure to be seen with Billy Graham
at a golf game right before his inauguration.
Religion and social issues
Presidential elections are not the only space in which faith and politics have collided. Religion has often been the staging ground for stoking more localized fears as well — especially around issues of race. The civil rights movement was fraught with these divisions.
The White Citizen’s Council, (WCC) started in 1954 in Indianola, Mississippi,
formed in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, and councils soon sprang up in communities across the South. Believing that many of the people involved in the civil rights movement were communists, the WCC —
most of whose participants were church members and whose violent activism was hidden behind strong statements about citizenship, politics, and morality — employed strategic ways to hit back at the civil rights movement in cities in the South.
In order to stop the Montgomery Bus Boycott led by Martin Luther King Jr., for example, the WCC pushed insurance companies to cancel auto insurance policies issued to black churches throughout the South. Members also were responsible for violence throughout the South, including the
murder of Mississippi activist Medgar Evers. WCC members are also believed to have
bombed King’s home.
In addition to civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s, religious voices also helped to shape debates in the 1970s over the role of the church on women’s rights. Black and white women would come together to support organizations like the National Organization for Women (NOW) and the Equal Rights Amendment.
Take for example Pauli Murray, a queer African American
lawyer and civil rights advocate who began to argue in the 1960s that the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment
should apply to gender and sex discrimination, as well as to race. Murray was religious and a staunch advocate for civil rights and equal rights who
co-founded the National Organization of Women, supported the Equal Rights Amendment and in 1977 became an Episcopal priest.
In contrast, Catholic laywoman Phyllis Schlafly
mobilized evangelical white women against the ERA with the
Stop ERA Campaign. Schlafly became the face of a formidable conservative force that declared victory in defeating the ERA, and would go on to join forces with other evangelical political action committees in the 1980s by establishing the Eagle Forum to promote the concerns of right-wing Christians.
And perhaps no political issue has been more shaped by religious division than abortion, which brought together two groups who had opposed each other in 1960: white evangelical Protestants and white Catholics. Following the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade in 1973, the anti-abortion movement brought these two groups together
in an effort led in part by a man, Francis Schaeffer,
who would awaken evangelicals like Jerry Falwell to the pro-life cause and motivate him to recruit others to the fold. These pro-life evangelicals would become a potent political force and form the backbone of the so-called “religious right.”
Integration was also a galvanizing issue for the religious right, thanks to the 1971 tax-related ruling by a federal court in
Green v. Connally, which stated that private schools could lose their tax exemptions if they discriminated on the basis of race (a decision backed up by the IRS and later the Supreme Court).
The test case for religious institutions was Bob Jones University, which did not at the time admit African Americans. After a series of failed moves designed
to get around the law, the university ended up having their tax status rescinded — a moment that helped galvanize evangelical leaders, including Falwell, to form the
Moral Majority — a predominately white clergy organization — in 1979.
The political rise of the religious right
The rise of the religious right as a political force would prove a boon for Ronald Reagan, which in turn offered a reciprocal and lasting boost to the religious conservatives’ political fortunes. In a campaign address on religious liberty, Reagan would indicate
his support for the Moral Majority and evangelicals by saying, “You can’t endorse me, but I can endorse you.”
Reagan’s ascendancy in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s energized evangelicals and religious conservatives in the 1980s and beyond, mostly across racial lines. For example, Falwell defended the pro-apartheid government in South Africa, while black churches supported the anti-apartheid movement and figures like Nelson Mandela and Bishop Desmond Tutu.
This decade also brought the growth of organizations like James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, Family Research Council (co-founded by Dobson with Tony Perkins, Gary Bauer and George Alan Rekers) and Donald Wildmon’s American Family Association. These were ostensibly church-related organizations dedicated to family issues and became powerful lobbying organizations in Washington aligning themselves with the Republican Party.
These organizations often found themselves at odds not only with those on the political left, but also with black churches and communities of color who did not benefit from the strict moral and fiscal policies these groups often espoused. They also promoted the business of politics and religion by raising funds and selling promotional materials, becoming multi-million dollar businesses that did not pay taxes while lobbying lawmakers and wielding influence in local, state and national government.
Meanwhile, some black churches, like Eddie Long’s New Birth in Atlanta, embraced the prosperity gospel, a belief that God wants
to bless Christians financially and materially who believe, tithe and give offerings to the church. Long would gain notoriety for rallying for a constitutional march in December 2004 protecting marriage between one man and one woman during the George W. Bush presidency.
The issue of same-sex marriage would be one of the defining political divisions of the early 2000s, in part because many black churches sided with conservative evangelicals in their opposition to gay marriage. This newly-forged political alliance between some black and white evangelical Christians around anti-gay-marriage sentiment would lead some black voters to vote for George W. Bush’s 2004 campaign, and to subsequently speak out against President Barack Obama for supporting same-sex marriage as well.
During the 2012 election, some black pastors questioned whether they could vote for Obama’s re-election — notably Jamal Bryant, who said church
leaders supporting same-sex marriage were “hypocrites.” Same-sex marriage and LGBTQ rights more broadly have continued to be a flashpoint among black and white evangelical voters, even after the Supreme Court upheld marriage equality.
This extended history shows that across decades, in local and national scope, religious institutions have been intertwined with political movements and become instruments of political division. Still, none of these chasms could have predicted the abiding divisions of the 2016 election cycle, in which white evangelicals
would once again side with Republicans and Trump, whose
animosity for immigrants and ethnic groups is well documented.
Trump’s popularity with leading evangelical Christians brings a lot of 20th-century religious history full circle. He attended Peale’s church, and two of his most prominent supporters are Falwell’s namesake son, now the president of Liberty University, and Billy Graham’s son Franklin.
The divisions in Trump’s presidency are carved deep, those divisions echo new versions of a familiar song. Perhaps what the Trump era has laid bare is how nakedly church leaders’ support of him is about political power.
