In a presidential election that has paid less attention than recently to candidates’ personal faith, religion is a rare sight on the campaign trail this week.
Vice President Kamala Harris plans to attend and speak at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church outside Atlanta on Sunday, while her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Waltz, will visit Victorious Believers Ministries in Saginaw, Michigan.
Meanwhile, former President Donald Trump criticized Harris on Thursday for skipping the Al Smith dinner, a high-profile fundraiser for Catholic charities in New York, calling her absence “very disrespectful to our great Catholic community.” Harris posted a video instead.
While candidates from both parties have traditionally sought to display their religiosity to appeal to religious voters and express their personal integrity, Harris, Trump and their fellow candidates have not made their faith central this year.
That’s in marked contrast to President Joe Biden, a lifelong Catholic who regularly attends services, quotes hymns and figures like St. Augustine, and appears with ashes on his forehead on Ash Wednesday.
Barack Obama’s religion was a major factor in the 2008 election campaign, both in terms of its influence on his rhetoric and criticism of Obama’s relationship with his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, a controversial figure. rebuke.
Obama cut his teeth as a community organizer working for a coalition of Catholic churches in Chicago. And his comfort in religious settings was evident throughout his presidency, from invoking God five times in his first inaugural address to singing “Amazing Grace” at Mother Emanuel AME Church after a white racist killed nine people at a historically Black church. Charleston, South Carolina ;
But in the eight years since Obama left office, the United States has become more secular A record 28% of US adults Now defined as religiously unaffiliated, evangelicals are now the largest religious group in the country, surpassing Protestants and Catholics, according to Pew.
Back in 2007, when Obama was preparing his first presidential bid, Pew’s data showed that the religiously unaffiliated made up just 16% of the country, including people who identified as atheists, agnostics, and “nothing in particular.”
Presidential historian Michael Beschloss said Americans have become more cynical about their politicians and what their religious affiliations might say about their character.
“We’ve learned a lot about a lot of politicians who seem very religious, but who in one way or another don’t follow the tenets of their faith,” Beschloss said, noting that religion is as much about politics as it is about personality. “So for many people, religion may no longer say much about someone’s personal character.”
Massimo Faggioli, a theology professor at Villanova University, said there’s now less incentive for candidates to play up their religiosity and even irreligious voters, especially with the potential threat from the left. spiritual biography Biden.
Harris and Trump, along with their fellow candidates, said Biden has a complicated religious background that is harder to “sell” politically than his familiar Catholicism.
“On one side is secularism and on the other is a more complex religious confusion,” Faggioli said. “And for Harris, there is a risk that religion will be associated in the eyes of some voters as a form of oppression.”
Trump’s coalition is largely supported by evangelical Christians, but their support for him is based more on a shared political agenda than a moral connection. Just 8% of people had a favorable opinion of Trump earlier this year thought he was “very” religiousAccording to Pew.
Trump was raised Presbyterian, but in 2020 he said considers himself a non-denominational Christian, although not known to attend services regularly.
“There is no longer any pretense that this is a true love story. It’s a marriage of convenience,” Faggioli said. “Relationships have become more transactional.”
Indeed, at the Al Smith dinner, Trump made it clear: “Catholics, you should vote for me. Better remember: I am here, and he is not.’
Harris, on the other hand, is the rare political figure who has played down his spiritual life in public, given his anti-religious sentiments in his native California Bay Area and his complicated personal religious journey.
Harris is a Baptist who was raised by a Black Anglican father and a Hindu Hindu mother and is now married to her Reform Jewish husband.
He is a longtime member of San Francisco history Third Baptist Church and has a deep relationship with his pastor, Rev. Amos Brown. As vice president, he attended services at Washington-based Baptist churches and spoke at the 2022 National Baptist Convention.
Harris was one of Brown’s first callers after Biden decided not to seek re-election, and he managed his 1999 campaign for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.
“He’s a strong, spiritual person who comes from a strong, spiritual family that we’ve known for a long time,” Brown said said in an interview earlier this year with a newspaper in his native Mississippi.
Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, said in a speech at the Democratic National Convention that “Kemala made me more connected to my faith,” and they attended both synagogue and church on the holy days.
In her 2019 memoir, Harris wrote about making sure her mother was exposed to both Hindu and African-American Christian religious traditions, adding that she and her sister Maya sang in the choir at Oakland’s 23rd Avenue Church of God.
“I believe we have to live our faith and put our faith into action,” he said.
But aside from asking Brown to give his closing prayer at the convention this summer and some occasional references to his church, especially when speaking to black audiences, Harris rarely talks about God, and his speaking style is more accusatory than preachy.
“I grew up in a Black church,” Harris told radio host Charlamagne tha God last week when a pastor asked about collaborating with faith communities. “Our God is a loving God. Our faith prompts us to act in a way that is about kindness and justice and mercy.”
He reflected on Trump’s belief that power is “who you beat” and called it “totally antithetical to the church I know.”
Waltz, on the other hand, was raised Catholic, but became Lutheran after marrying his wife, Gwen. Lutheranism is the main Protestant denomination, but in the United States it is concentrated almost entirely in the Upper Midwest and receives little attention in the rest of the country, where it makes up only a small percentage of the population.
Walz rarely talks about his religion, sometimes joking that his Midwestern sensibility makes it difficult to divulge.
“Because we’re good Minnesota Lutherans, we have a rule: If you do something good and talk about it, it doesn’t matter anymore,” Walz said. he joked in his speech to the unions this year.
Meanwhile, Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, has written about his personal journey. He grew up evangelical but rarely attended services, before becoming an atheist in his young adulthood converts to conservative Catholicism as an adult.
Vence’s wife Usha grew up in a Hindu family.religious household,” and he and Vance did both Bible readings and A Hindu Pandit.
These stories of conversion, marriage, and backseat piety reflect the spiritual lives of Americans today, but may not make for neat stories on the stump.
“If you’re not comfortable talking about religion, it really shows, so it makes sense not to,” Faggioli said.