“I LOVE being Jewish,” said Doug Emhoff, the husband of the US Vice-President and presidential candidate Kamala Harris. “I love it. I love everything about it. I want to shout it from the mountaintops.”
Mr Emhoff, The New York Times reports, “was shouting his love not from a mountaintop, but to a living room filled with Democratic donors . . . one week before the Democratic Party would gather to formally nominate his wife to run for president. Mr. Emhoff doesn’t belong to a temple and didn’t raise his children Jewish. . . Thomas R. Nides, a former ambassador to Israel who is close to Ms. Harris and Mr. Emhoff, described Mr. Emhoff as a ‘cultural Jew’.” Democrats want candidates and their kin to affirm ethnic identity.
Meanwhile, on the left coast, The Los Angeles Times reported: “‘I grew up going to a black Baptist Church and a Hindu temple,’ Harris recalled as she sipped an iced soy latte at a Berkeley coffee house.” This seems highly unlikely, since there is no evidence that Ms Harris’s mother or maternal relatives, all academics and professionals, practised any form of Hinduism, or that her father, a Stanford professor emeritus of economics born in Jamaica and baptised Anglican, underwent a born-again conversion to the Baptist faith. On another occasion, Ms Harris claimed that she grew up attending the 23rd Avenue Church of God in her native Oakland. Democrats want Black candidates to belong to traditionally Black churches.
Americans expect political candidates to be at least nominally religious — but most do not expect or want them to be any more than nominally religious. Ms Harris does not disappoint. She wears her nominal religious affiliations, such as the mandatory American-flag lapel pin that all politicians now wear, because it is expected. Harris supporters know that she claims religious affiliation because it is expected, and Ms Harris, for her part, knows that her supporters know that she claims religious affiliation because it is expected. No one intends to deceive or is deceived.
Politicians’ religious affiliations are part of the background noise, like the vacuous commercial slogans and service workers’ formulaic niceties, including the ubiquitous “Have a nice day,” of which we are hardly aware, but whose absence would be jarring. Democrats, in any case, would not want their candidates to be any more than nominally religious: almost half are religiously unaffiliated, and, since the rise of the religious Right, suspicious of religious conviction.
ON THE other side of the aisle, almost no one, including Donald Trump’s white Evangelical supporters, seriously believes that he is very religious. Besides his multiple divorces, serial adulteries, and multiple felonies, his theological ignorance is notorious. Students sniggered when, speaking at Liberty University, a bastion of the religious Right founded by Jerry Falwell, he referred to “Two Corinthians”.
Mr Trump’s relationship to Evangelicals — working-class, disproportionately rural, and socially conservative — is, unsurprisingly, transactional. They support him because they trust him to deliver. Mr Trump promised them that he would appoint conservative Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that legalised abortion; and he did. They trust him to deliver the goods that they most desire — low taxes, cheap gas, and well-paid grunt work for males — and to re-establish the traditional society that they want, where women breed, men fight, and Big Men rule. Evangelical theologians compare Mr Trump to Cyrus, the Persian king, who, although a pagan, delivered the Jews from their Babylonian captivity.
Mr Trump does not appeal only to existing Evangelicals. He has brought supporters into the fold. During his administration, Pew notes, white Americans “with warm views” of Mr Trump increasingly began identifying as born-again/Evangelical Protestants, while, during the same period, almost none who expressed cold or neutral views towards him did.
This was no surprise, since politics drives religion in the United States. During the 1950s, in response to godless Communism, the US adopted “In God we trust” as its official motto; “One Nation under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance; and Americans in unprecedented numbers got religion — then the largely innocuous Judaeo-Christian civil religion espoused by the Harris-Emhoff team.
RELIGIOUS practice and affiliation in the US began its precipitous decline in the 1990s (the Anglican Decade of Evangelism), immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in November 1989, ended the Cold War. Currently, religiously unaffiliated Americans, “atheists, agnostics, or nothing in particular”, now 28 per cent of the population, are the fastest-growing “religious group” in the US. Among Democrats, fully seven out of ten say that they attend religious services no more than a few times a year, if ever, and most are hostile to public displays of religiosity.
Pundits who follow politics have remarked that presidential candidates, for the first time in years, are not making noises about their personal religious convictions, or how faith shapes their politics. This is hardly surprising. Democrats do not want their elected officials to be religious, and Republicans do not care.
Dr Harriet Baber is Professor of Philosophy at the University of San Diego, California, in the United States.