The God Talk was kept to a cathedral-like whisper at Thursday’s Democratic Debate in Iowa. Joe Biden cited one line from a Catholic hymn. Barack Obama referred to his church in passing. Hillary Clinton spoke of children reaching their “God-given potential.” And that was the sum total of religious rhetoric at an event which, in terms of set design, graphics, and color schemes, looked like it could have been staged circa 1983. Aesthetically speaking, this was the garage band of presidential debates. Mike Huckabee knows a thing or two about garage bands. At Wednesday’s GOP debate (sponsored by the same news organization) he showed that he also knows how to collapse the distinction between the private and the public. During that segment of the broadcast where candidates aired their promotional videos he opined as follows:
If a person says, "I'm a person of faith, but I don't let it influence me and I don't talk about it," what they just told me is that their faith is so immaterial, insignificant and inconsequential that it really isn't a faith at all. If it's a faith, it will drive their judgment, it will drive their value system and, therefore, it will help define them. It's ludicrous to say that, 'I have faith, but it doesn't impact me at all.'"
I urge readers to think about the implications of this statement very carefully, implications which I will draw out momentarily. But first, let me note that it was only Huckabee, and the always entertaining Alan Keyes, who invoked religious themes. It was Huckabee alone who was guilty of Premeditated Faith and Values Chatter by submitting the aforementioned clip.
So let me do the math. Out of a combined fifteen Republican and Democratic presidential hopefuls only two felt compelled to engage in Faith and Values politicking three weeks before a pivotal campaign hurdle. How to explain this?
Was it the Des Moines Register’s fault? Did the newspaper that hosted the affair fail to provide the candidates with enough faith-based prompts? Perhaps. But they’re not the only ones. Last month, l suggested that the news divisions which have been choreographing the debates are either bored with these issues or uncomfortable scripting them into the proceedings. Interestingly, it was only during the CNN YouTube debates--where civilians (or so we thought) did the asking--that religious concerns were salient.
Rather than claim that the elite media just isn’t “getting” religion (an assertion belied by washingtonpost.com's “On Faith” site, among many other valuable fora), I want to propose that the candidates are being extraordinarily cautious about when, where and how they strike faith-based themes.
After all, a politician rarely feels compelled to answer a question in the spirit it was asked. Any of the Iowa participants could have easily turned a query about, let’s say, biofuels, into a homily on God’s redemptive grace. But few did.
Only Mike Huckabee inserted religious themes into his rhetoric. He even offered us a rationale as to why. As his comments above indicate, he will wear his religion on his sleeve. He will not privatize or compartmentalize his faith commitments. He must let these commitments drive his public actions. No true “person of faith,” Huckabee told America (and, goadingly, the Mormon Mitt Romney who is reluctant to wear his own particular religion on his sleeve) would have it any other way.
Jacques Berlinerblau is the Rabbi Harold White Chair in Jewish Civilization in Georgetown's Walsh School of Foreign Service and senior advisor to the Center for Jewish Civilization, where he was director from 2006 to June 2020. Berlinerblau has published on a wide variety of issues ranging from the sociology of heresy and modern Jewish intellectuals to African-American and Jewish-American relations.
