Do These Issues Matter? Trump Utters Religious Slur While Harris Underlines Biden's Catholic Questions
The DNC has opened several discussions of religious issues in Joe Biden’s Catholic faith and other outlets. Photo taken from the Interfaith Welcome Service on Aug. 16.
(OPINION) This week’s Joe Biden and Kamala Harris nominations are an appropriate moment to look at the religious angles that writers are encountering in the 2020 campaign.
To begin, a Wall Street Journal column by Brookings Institution political scientist William A. Galston observes that in today’s United States “the level of religious polarization is the highest in the history of modern survey research.”
Which immediately brings up the Quote of the Year. It’s hard to think of any remark by a U.S. president more invidious than Donald Trump’s characterization of Democratic opponent Biden: “No religion, no anything. Hurt the Bible. Hurt God. He’s against God.”
Reporters seeking balance, and any Republicans who were embarrassed by this, could have noted that the 2020 food fight previously featured Democrats belittling the quality of Trump’s religiosity. Biden himself joined that chorus after the president’s walk from the White House to fire-damaged St. John’s Episcopal Church to hold a Bible aloft for the cameras: “I just wish he opened it once in a while instead of brandishing it. If he opened it, he could have learned something.”
Responding to Trump’s new insult, Biden said that “to profane God and to smear my faith in a political attack” was “shameful,” and showed “a man willing to stoop to any low.” Biden insisted that “like so many people, my faith has been the bedrock foundation of my life.”
Considerable news coverage, typified by this Religion News Service article, portrays the fourth Catholic to achieve a major party nomination as a regular Mass attender who often invokes his conventional Catholic heritage.
Though some of Biden’s personal beliefs echo his church’s teachings, the press regularly notes that he spurns its admonitions on issues like same-sex marriage and abortion, and even dropped his stand against public funding of abortion in the current campaign. For more on this, examine the latest political guidance (.pdf here) issued by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
There have been symbolic actions, as well, such as same-sex marriage rite that Biden performed for two colleagues in 2016. Three prominent bishops — including the leader of the USCCB — posted a message online stating that this would cause confusion about Catholic doctrines on sex and marriage. Questions about that event could resurface.
Meanwhile, white evangelical Protestants tend to monopolize coverage of U.S. religion and politics, so I once again remind reporters that these believers will be a minor factor in the 2020 outcome unless their customary heavy Republican support slides. Likewise, Black Protestants’ enthusiasm for Democrats can be taken for granted, though with both religious groups turnout can be a factor.
The news media need to closely monitor Biden’s fellow white Catholics in pivotal states like Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Wisconsin. They could determine whether he wins the White House if the race tightens up. (Hispanic Catholics are a different matter.)
White Catholics’ powerful shift away from historic loyalty to the Democratic Party is one of this generation’s major political stories. As Galston notes, their Republican identification has grown from 45 percent to a 57 percent majority since 1994. There’s been a second earthquake in those same years. The increasing population of religiously unaffiliated Americans has grown from 52 percent pro-Democratic to a commanding 67 percent.
In the current presidential contest, a churchgoing Democrat counts on secularists while a secularized Republican counts on churchgoers.
As for running mate Kamala Devi Harris (scorned by Trump as “sort of a madwoman”), RNS reporter Yonat Shimron says that she “embodies the future of American religion,” referring to expanding interfaith diversity. The senator’s parents were immigrants, her father from Jamaica and her mother from India. She has a Sanskrit name meaning “Goddess Kamala” in honor of a Hindu divinity. Though raised to appreciate Hinduism, she identified as Protestant and currently belongs to San Francisco’s Third Baptist Church. And her husband and stepchildren are Jewish.
Fox media critic Howard Kurtz said that after Biden’s pick Harris received “walk-on-water coverage from most news outlets.”
But there is online grumbling from conservative Catholics, and National Review’s Alexandra DeSanctis accused Harris of “reprehensible anti-Catholic bigotry” in her 2018 questioning of Brian Buescher before the Senate confirmed him as a federal judge for Nebraska. Harris emphasized his membership in the Knights of Columbus, noting that the Catholic organization is all-male and opposes abortion and gay marriage. She implied he should be disqualified but did not flatly assert this, which would violate the spirit of the “no religious test” clause in article 6 of the Constitution.
As California attorney general, Harris filed against a birth-control exemption for the owners of Hobby Lobby that the U.S. Supreme Court eventually approved, opposed exemption for the Little Sisters of the Poor, advocated a law to restrict pro-life pregnancy centers’ advertising, rankled Catholics with her handling of a deal to rescue the Daughters of Charity hospitals and prosecuted a pro-life journalist who secretly recorded Planned Parenthood workers offering to sell body parts of fetuses.
Polls show a majority of Americans who identify as Catholic do not feel bound by church dictums on abortion or gay marriage, so presumably this will only hurt Biden with a segment of conservatives.
However, Washington Post pundit Michael Gerson, an evangelical anti-Trumper, warned that Catholics and Protestants alike could be nervous if they view Harris or Biden as committed foes of religious Americans’ conscience claims, rooted in the First Amendment.
Richard Ostling is a former religion reporter for the Associated Press and former correspondent for TIME Magazine. This piece first appeared at Get Religion.