The Relevance of Religion

When a voter is being asked to vote in a presidential primary, and one of the candidates doesn't have much experience and wants voters to assess his judgment as a yardstick for his potential, is it fair game to evaluate the organizations to which he has belonged (such as his church) and the people who have been in leadership roles in those organizations (such as his pastor)?

These are, after all, the organizations he has chosen to join and the people he has chosen to follow.

So I think the answer to that is yes -- to a certain extent.

Personally, I don't care where a candidate goes to church -- or if the candidate goes to church at all. I think that is the candidate's business, not mine.

I must admit, though, that I do like to know that a candidate for president is committed to something he/she believes in -- besides obtaining and holding on to power. But I don't want to be told that a candidate believes in something. I want to see evidence of it.

In matters of faith, it's easy for politicians to deceive the voters.

In the final two seasons of The West Wing, Alan Alda played a moderate Republican running for president. His character had been through a crisis of faith when his wife died, and he had not been to church since -- except for weddings and funerals.

Alda's character's church habits became an issue in the campaign, and he was finally forced to hold a press conference to defend his right not to attend church. In so doing, he spoke of how easy it is for a politician to lie about his faith. "It's the easiest lie they'll ever tell," he said. And he was right.

In this country, people like to talk about the separation of church and state, but as I've pointed out before, that has never really existed in the United States.

There is no state religion in this country, except to say that Christianity is the prevailing faith. That's just the way it is -- the same way that English is the primary language. It's not mandated by law. It's simply a fact. It has its roots in the settlers who came to the New World 400 years ago.

And, while Protestants and Catholics tend to live in harmony in this country, Catholics have only recently (in the last 50 years) been capable of receiving enough votes to win a national election.

And John F. Kennedy had to address the issue of his Catholicism head-on before being elected -- narrowly -- in 1960. No Catholic has been elected president since then -- unless you count Ronald Reagan, who had Catholic ancestry but wasn't a practicing Catholic.

Sometimes, the religion factor isn't what some voters would prefer. Gen. Dwight Eisenhower had no formal affiliation with any church before he became president in 1953. He was baptized, confirmed, and became a communicant in the Presbyterian church less than two weeks after his first inauguration.

Some of our presidents, including Abraham Lincoln, had no religious affiliation. Does that mean they didn't believe in God? No. There seems to be some disagreement among scholars about Lincoln's faith in Christ, but he seems to have had a belief in God -- for most of his life, at least.

And religion continues to be a factor in national politics.

Jimmy Carter's "born again" religion was an issue -- for a time -- during the 1976 campaign.

Mitt Romney had to speak in defense of Mormonism a few months ago.

And today, Barack Obama is trying to deal with issues raised by his relationship with his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

In my "heart of hearts," as the saying goes, I don't think that what a minister (who isn't running for the presidency) says has very much to do with what someone who is running for president will do if elected.

In this case, Obama has been running for president with only a few years experience in national politics and policymaking. So he has been asking voters to assess him on the quality of his judgment.

Based on that, I think it is just as fair to question his relationship with his pastor as it was for reporters to accept Gary Hart's challenge to them to catch him in the act of being unfaithful to his wife 20 years ago.

You could argue -- as some people did -- that Hart's infidelity had no bearing on the kind of president he would be. Just as some people argue today that what Rev. Wright says doesn't necessarily have any bearing on the kind of president Obama would be.

In Hart's case, his infidelity went to (pardon the pun) the heart of his campaign. Questions had been raised about his honesty, integrity, trustworthiness. When reporters caught him in an extramarital affair (after they had been dared to follow Hart), it confirmed a lot of suspicions voters had about him. It reflected poorly on the argument he made for being nominated for president.

Obama is the front-runner for the Democratic nomination. His relationship with Rev. Wright reflects on the quality of his judgment, the same as his remark about "bitter" voters clinging to guns and religion (two of the sacred cows -- so to speak -- of American politics) and his appearance at William Ayers' home in Obama's 1995 campaign for the state senate did.

When one enters the race for the presidency, one enters the "big time." If one is not prepared to be scrutinized, one does not need to enter the presidential arena.

Obama could run for the Senate and encounter far less scrutiny three years ago. The scrutiny level was even lower when his campaigns were for a seat in the Illinois state legislature. The typical voter does not feel it is necessary to know everything there is to know about the candidates for the state senate -- or even the U.S. Senate.

But voters feel they need to know everything there is to know about those candidates who seek to be president.

Voters get to evaluate candidates by any means they wish. Candidates do not get to choose how they are evaluated, but they certainly should know that voters tend to use a candidate's political record and political statements in making their decision.

And voters may focus on seemingly irrelevant factors because they want to know as much as possible about a candidate, about how he/she thinks, about what he/she believes, before trusting him/her with the most important office in the land.

One of the things voters want to know is whether they can believe what a candidate says. When that candidate is trying to sell his/her judgment as the reason for being elected, a candidate's truthfulness is particularly important. And voters are going to use all sorts of methods to evaluate the candidate's truthfulness.

In this campaign, Kennedy's name has been mentioned frequently. Kennedy also had to sell the public on his judgment -- his opponent, as vice president under a popular president, had the advantage of semi-incumbency, even though his tenure in Washington was no longer than Kennedy's. And, when things backfired on Kennedy, as they did during the Bay of Pigs invasion, he had to be candid with the public.

He had to admit that his judgment had been faulty.

These days, it's the judgment of Obama that is being questioned. And, whatever mental image one has of Obama, the reality is that he is a politician. And he hasn't shown much hesitation to throw his inconvenient associates -- William Ayers, Tony Resko, Jeremiah Wright -- under the bus in order to further his political goals.

A lot of people are writing about Obama and Wright these days. The longer the questions linger, the longer attention will remain focused on this instead of the economy, gas prices, the war, health care, etc.

(By the way, if you'd rather be reading about something more relevant to the economic problems we face, may I suggest Thomas Friedman's column in the New York Times about our energy policy?)

In the meantime, we're getting a steady dose of writings about Obama and Rev. Wright. And we're going to continue to get that until all the questions are answered. When will that be? That depends on how candid Obama is -- or is perceived to be.

* Charlie Cook calls Rev. Wright "the Rev. Kamikaze" in the National Journal.

"Just days ago, it seemed that the only way that Barack Obama could fail to clinch his party's nod would be to leave his wife and move in with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright," writes Cook. "That is, until Wright took to the lectern at the National Press Club to launch what amounted to a kamikaze attack on Obama's candidacy, sputtering nonsense that must have left the senator's campaign operatives wondering whether they had accidentally tuned their TVs to the political horror channel."

* In the National Review, Byron York writes that the danger from this Wright affair isn't over for Obama. "The most damaging thing Rev. Jeremiah Wright said at the National Press Club on Monday had nothing to do with God damning America, or AIDS, or chickens coming home to roost," York says. "It had to do with whether Barack Obama is telling the American people the truth about himself."

* Peter Carnellos' piece in the Boston Globe carries the headline, "Candidate faces down his former pastor, but what took so long?"

Canellos raises a point that may be troubling many voters, even if they can't articulate it as well as he can.

"On Monday ... Wright took another shot: 'I said to Barack Obama last year, 'If you get elected, November the 5th, I'm coming after you, because you'll be representing a government whose policies grind under people,'" Canellos writes. "If Wright really had issued such a warning, Obama should have smelled trouble immediately. His failure to do so, and his decision to portray Wright as a distraction, inevitably raises the question of whether Obama is too naive to be president -- the very insinuation he ridicules on the campaign trail."

* Dick Morris writes in The Hill about "Obama's opportunity" to "define himself." He needs to seize that opportunity before others do.

* Richard Baehr writes, in American Thinker, about "Obama's Wright turn" at his Tuesday press conference -- in which Obama "condemned Wright and claimed that Wright had offended him."

* Mary Mitchell claims, in the Chicago Sun-Times, that "Obama opens a can of worms" and suggests, "This is a sad day for black America."

* In the Boston Globe, Scot Lehigh says, "What's really relevant here is not what Jeremiah Wright says but what Barack Obama believes. And in his remarks yesterday, Obama said unmistakably that Wright does not speak for him."

* Ralph Peters writes, in the New York Post, about "The Rev & The Global Victims' Club."

* Also in the New York Post, Michelle Malkin writes about the "Jive Talk Express." She casts doubts on Obama's judgment by raising a point that Republicans will be sure to bring up in the fall campaign.

"Who knew that the greatest threat to his presidential campaign would come from the preacher who married him, baptized him and prayed with him?" writes Malkin, a well-known conservative. "Obama should've known -- that's who. 'Yes, we can'? Try: Yes, you should have."

* John Nichols writes, in The Nation, that "[t]he problem is not Jeremiah Wright. The problem is a contemporary political culture that has come to rely on character assassination as an easy tool for reversing electoral misfortune -- and a media that willingly invites manipulation."

* Mark Brown writes, in the Chicago Sun-Times, that "it's gut check time for white Americans."

* In the New York Observer, Steve Kornacki writes about "Obama and the Benefit of the Doubt."

These are just the articles that have popped up in the last couple of days. There will be more articles written on this subject in the days and weeks ahead.

Obama has addressed this issue twice in the last six weeks. His original speech was hailed for its oratorical qualities, his press conference was hailed for other reasons.

But the questions persist.

It reminds me of something Dr. Samuel Johnson, the 18th century British author, said: "(The) manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good."