Loudly and eccentrically religious candidates represent the Republicans’ best chance of losing to Obama
Atlanta, Georgia
The prelude to the first presidential primaries is always an entertaining phase of the American electoral cycle. Exotic blooms flower for a moment or two, but shrivel almost as quickly when the voters discover what they actually represent. Two of this year’s morning glories are Michele Bachmann, a Minnesota Congresswoman, and Rick Perry, the governor of Texas. Both, in addition to being highly photogenic, are serious evangelical Christians, possibly even ‘dominionists’, who seek to consecrate America’s political life to their religious convictions.
When Bachmann declared her candidacy this year Rolling Stone described her as ‘a religious zealot whose brain is a raging electrical storm of divine visions and paranoid delusions’. She regards homosexuality as a form of illness and as a sin that separates the practitioner from God. Her husband runs a clinic that tries to ‘cure’ homosexuals. In August Perry convened ‘The Response’, a day of prayer, fasting and Christian rock music in the 71,500-seat Reliant Stadium, Houston, that was broadcast to more than 1,000 churches around the country. To the assembled throng he declared: ‘We see discord at home. We see fear in the marketplace. We see anger in the halls of government. And as a nation we have forgotten who made us, who protects us, who blesses us — and for that we cry out for your forgiveness.’ Perry affirms the inerrancy of scripture and the belief that all who do not accept Jesus will go to Hell.
Journalists in the US have been squabbling recently over whether dominionism is a real phenomenon or just a label stuck by liberal journalists on Christian candidates they dislike. The phenomenon is real, though more of a tendency than a sharply defined movement. The term comes from Genesis, where, shortly after the Creation, God tells Adam and Eve to ‘have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth’.
The evangelical theologian Peter Wagner was one of the religious leaders to endorse Perry’s ‘Response’ meeting in August. He is also the author of Dominion!: How Kingdom Action Can Change the World, in which he urges evangelicals to step up their involvement in every aspect of contemporary life. He denies his critics’ claim that he is aiming for theocracy. Rather, he wants to see ‘Kingdom-minded’ people involved with all the ‘seven mountains’ of society: religion, family, education, government, media, entertainment and business. Kingdom-minded people, as he describes them, have personal relationships with Jesus, perform miracles, fight witchcraft and know how to cast out demons.
Wagner is a successor to the theologian Francis Schaeffer (1912-1984), an eccentric fundamentalist guru whose Swiss chalet, ‘L’Abri’, became a kind of Protestant pilgrimage site. He told his fellow evangelicals in the 1970s that they had blundered in recent decades by concentrating too much on personal salvation. They had withdrawn too far from the world and let its governance fall into the hands of ‘secular humanists’. That was his explanation for the ban on school prayers, the rise of feminism, abortion, gay liberation, high divorce rates, pornography and other affronts to the godly ordering of society.
Michele Bachmann cites Schaeffer as a ‘profound influence’ on her life and political outlook. Earlier manifestations of the Christian right, including the Reagan-era Moral Majority and the Clinton-era Christian Coalition, acclaimed Schaeffer and sought to restore Christian principles in public life and legislation. These activists were strikingly unsuccessful at reversing the trends that dismayed them most. Abortion remains legal, gay rights continues to make steady gains (most recently with New York recognising gay marriage), prayer in state schools is still prohibited and the once-radical feminist claims for equal opportunity and equal pay have been widely institutionalised.
The reason for the failure of political evangelicals’ plans is not hard to find. The United States has enjoyed two centuries of stability by keeping militant religion of all kinds out of politics, and by welcoming practitioners of all faiths. The approach is codified in the first amendment of the US Constitution, which specifies that there will be no form of established religion, but that all citizens are free to worship whomever and however they please. It is also codified in the Constitution’s checks and balances, which ensure compromise and conciliation, placing a premium on pragmatic concessions to the secular interests of many interest groups. It is a system that requires its visionaries — men like John Brown in the 1850s or Martin Luther King, Jr., in the 1950s — to work outside the political system. King’s flinty determination not to compromise would have made him a hopeless president, and he would never have attracted a majority of the electorate if he had run.
Americans certainly like their presidents to be religious, but they mustn’t be too religious. President Eisenhower declared, back in 1954, that the nation’s institutions made no sense without ‘a deeply held religious faith — and I don’t care what it is!’ The remark made observers chuckle at the time but it embodied an accurate and durable reading of the religious mood. For decades, mild religiosity has been synonymous with good manners, intelligence and compassion on this side of the Atlantic, but it has always been linked to the principle of mutual tolerance. Even Jimmy Carter, the most devout ‘born-again’ figure ever to enter the White House, was meticulous about not imposing his religious views on voters or on other members of his party.
Vigorous evangelicals like Bachmann and Perry thrive in the early stages of a presidential campaign because they appeal to the most highly motivated political activists, many of whom share their views. These are the voters who campaign locally and turn out for the primaries. In the later stages of a campaign, however, idealistic or zealous candidates are a liability. As election day approaches, each major-party candidate has to try to capture the loyalty of the middle of the political spectrum. Only by attracting the independent voters, who sometimes lean one way, sometimes the other, can they hope to win. Middle-of-the-road voters are not fanatics, don’t have vivid imaginations, aren’t looking for revolutionary transformations and are as averse to living under biblical law as they are to living under sharia law. They want moderation and continuity. If the GOP offers them a candidate who could even remotely be accused of religious zealotry, that candidate will lose.
Republican professionals understand this perfectly well, and must already know that Bachmann and Perry can’t win. They’re probably having bad dreams about the other front runner too, Mitt Romney. Although he has been less outspoken about his Mormonism, it’s a faith most Americans find unfathomably weird and one that many evangelicals actively deplore. Were Romney to become the GOP candidate, the press would soon be full of stories about how Mormon teenagers are asked to participate in ‘vicarious baptism’ ceremonies, taking on the identity of people from former eras who died before having the chance to join the Latter-Day Saints. American Jews were horrified to discover in 1995 that among the candidates for vicarious baptism were victims of the Holocaust. Mormons also believe that Jesus visited America after his sojourn in Roman Palestine, and that in the 1820s Joseph Smith, then a farm boy in New York state, was given the text of the Book of Mormon written on a series of golden plates, by an angel named Moroni.< /p>
The United States is a very religious country, but it’s a very secular one too, whose citizens have consistently repudiated efforts to strengthen ties between particular faiths and government. Republican strategists must be hoping that from within their ranks will emerge a candidate who’s tough as steel on the policy questions but no more than a mild Episcopalian or a moderate Presbyterian when it comes to worshipping God.