Washington National Cathedral

Dean Lloyd: Good morning and welcome to the Sunday Forum as we continue our exploration at the intersection of faith and public life. In case you hadn’t noticed, there is an election coming up in just a couple of days, so we thought it might be a good time to talk about the presidency and in particular the role of faith in the White House over the last almost fifty years. There will be no predictions about what happens on Tuesday, no inside scoops, so if you’re looking for that you’re at the wrong place.

But you’re at the right place if you want to hear a fascinating scholar talk about the role that religion has played through the years in the White House. Randall Balmer is a professor of American religious history at Barnard college in New York City and visiting professor at Yale divinity school. He is also filmmaker as you can tell by his attire, an Episcopal priest, and the author of some dozen books. God in the White House: How Faith Shaped the Presidency from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush is his most recent book, but he has written two in particular about Evangelicalism I hope we can talk about. One called Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture and one called Thy Kingdom Come: An Evangelical Lament. Randall, great to have you with us today.

Rev. Balmer: Thank you. Good to be here.

Dean Lloyd: Well, let’s start your exploration of God in the White House. You begin the story with John F. Kennedy in 1960 and in that campaign where he gave one of the defining speeches about that whole topic. Say something about how that began a trajectory of different ways of doing this.

Rev. Balmer: What I think happened was that in 1960 Kennedy, of course, was battling against anti-Catholicism, the bias of many Protestants against the Roman Catholic. The argument at the time was that Roman Catholicism was fundamentally incompatible with the canons of American democracy, and he had to address that at some point during the campaign. He thought he had finally put the Catholic issue to rest after the West Virginia primary, when he defeated Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic senator from Minnesota.

And what I found in the course of doing research for the book was a letter in the JFK Library from Billy Graham to Senator Kennedy, the Democratic nominee, saying that there had been a lot of speculation that he, Graham, planned to introduce the religious issue in the fall campaign. And he was writing to assure Senator Kennedy that he would not raise the religious issue. The letter was dated August 10, 1960.

Eight days later in Montreux, Switzerland, Graham convened a group of Protestant ministers, including Norman Vincent Peale of Marble Collegiate Church in New York City, for the purpose of discussing how they could deny Kennedy’s election in November. And the upshot that was another gathering at the Mayflower Hotel here in Washington right after Labor Day.

Dean Lloyd: Excuse me. Just ten days between me...

Rev. Balmer: Eight days.

Dean Lloyd: Eights days... assuring him that...

Rev. Balmer: Right.

Dean Lloyd: ...that he was out of the whole thing.

Rev. Balmer: Exactly. The upshot was another gathering here the Mayflower Inn in Washington—Mayflower Hotel—150 Protestant ministers gathering again to discuss ways to warn their congregants, and by extension all Protestants in America, against the dangers of a Roman Catholic as president. And that’s what set the stage for Kennedy’s remarkable speech at the Rice Hotel in Houston on September 12, 1960, in which he told voters essentially to bracket out a candidate’s faith when they went into the voting booth.

Dean Lloyd: It was really an extraordinary speech, in that he was declaring one’s faith should have nothing to do with one’s politics.

Rev. Balmer: That’s right.

Dean Lloyd: He was creating a concrete wall, wasn’t he?

Rev. Balmer: He was. And my argument is that what I call the Kennedy paradigm of voter indifference toward a candidate’s faith really prevailed in American politics to the next several election cycles until 1976 for reasons that we can explore here a little bit later, and one that of evidence that I would cite for that is that in 1968, the leading contender for the Republican nomination was the governor of Michigan, George Romney, Mitt Romney’s father, also Mormon.

And I happen to be living in Michigan at the time. I remember nothing whatsoever about George Romney’s Mormonism being a factor, and I went back to see if I had missed something and I found nothing; but the Kennedy paradigm was still very much in effect during those presidential election years, and it wasn’t until really the corruptions of the Nixon administration brings it back into presidential politics.

Dean Lloyd: You say that LBJ himself did not make much reference to faith itself.

Rev. Balmer: He didn’t. LBJ is a fascinating character I became kind of newly enchanted with him as I was writing the book. He is a figure Shakespearean dimensions. Bill Moyers said he was thirteen of the most interesting and difficult people you never met. And actually, while I was down in Austin doing research at the JFK library, I came across a story about LBJ that I will relate rather quickly. According to the story, Johnson was working late one night in the White House with his aides at a dinner meeting, which he did all the time—he was tireless—and before the meeting started, he asked Bill Moyers, his assistant and also a Baptist minister, at the other end of the table, to say grace. And so Moyers starts praying, and almost immediately Johnson interrupted and bellowed, “Speak up, Moyers, I can’t hear you.” Whereupon, according to the story, Bill Moyers said in a quiet, even voice, “I wasn’t speaking to you sir.”

As it happens, when I was writing the chapter, Mr. Moyers contacted me about something—and I don’t want to give the impression that we are in regular communication—we’re not. But he just happened to contact me about something and I asked if I could send him a draft the chapter. And he was very gracious in his comments, but he confirmed that that story is true.

But with Johnson, he was not a demonstrably pious or religious man, but there was a simple moral principle that guided his years as a politician, especially his later years. And that was that the strong have an obligation to care for the weak. And that helps to explain, I think, why Lyndon Johnson, a white southerner, expended so much political capital as majority leader of the Senate to push through the civil rights act of 1957 and also as president, of course, the landmark legislation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—even though he recognized that it would be damaging to his party to do so. But the strong have an obligation to care for the weak. It’s also what animated his Great Society ambitions, the war on poverty, Medicare, and so forth. Much maligned these days in the current political climate, but he saw that as necessary because the strong have an obligation to care for the weak.

Tragically, he also applied that to Vietnam. He justified the deepening of America’s involvement in Vietnam because the strong had an obligation to care for the weak.

Dean Lloyd: In the Nixon years, your book is about God in the White House. He brought God into the White House didn’t he? They had their regular Sunday services there. What was that for?

Rev. Balmer: I think it was quite frankly political theater. I came across a letter from, or memorandum, that Chuck Colson had written when Colson was in the White House, and it was a very clear directive that the staffers were invited to these White House worship services, people who were contributors or at least potential contributors to the Republican Party and so forth, and I think largely these were a kind of dramatic exercise relatively devoid of a religious content. Billy Graham was of course a frequent guest, Norman Vincent Peale again, and other religious leaders. It wasn’t simply Protestant, but it was fairly generic Protestant worship services is what it amounts to.

Dean Lloyd: But things start shifting in 1976.

Rev. Balmer: Dramatically. Dramatically. I think it’s impossible to imagine Jimmy Carter, the one-term governor of Georgia, ascending to first of all the Democratic nomination and then later to the presidency, had it not been for the corruptions of the Nixon administration. He bursts on the scene, Carter does, a southern Baptist Sunday school teacher. He promises never knowingly to lie to the American people. He says he wants a government as good and decent as the American people. And I think, in the wake of the Nixon debacle, Americans were attracted to that sort of language. And I remember being so myself, and I see him in some ways as a kind of redeemer president, campaigning for the presidency with a promise that he will cleanse the temple of the Oval Office from the sins of his predecessors, and he does that.

The other thing that happens in the 1976 campaign is that Jimmy Carter begins to lure Evangelicals out of their political torpor. For roughly half a century before that time, beginning really with the Scopes trial in 1925, Evangelicals had mounted this massive retreat from American society. It was a defensive posture. They constructed what I call an Evangelical subculture. This vast and interlocking network of Bible camps, Bible institutes, mission societies, publishing houses, churches, denominations, seminaries, and so forth, as a kind of defense from the larger society, so that it was possible in the middle decades of the twentieth century—and I can attest to this personally—it was possible to grow up within that world and have very, very little commerce with anyone or anything outside of that subculture.

Evangelicals during those years were not politically engaged, certainly not in any organized way. Many of them were not even registered to vote. But Carter, speaking the language of being a born-again Christian, thereby sending every journalist in New York to his Rolodex to figure out what he’s talking about.

Dean Lloyd: What is that?

Rev. Balmer: Exactly. But speaking that language, he begins to lure them back into the political arena and they help to provide the margin of victory for him in 1976, Southerners especially. The great irony of course is that they turned dramatically against him four years later.

Dean Lloyd: How... talk about that transition. He began mobilizing the Evangelical, what became the Evangelical base, the Evangelical cohort, got some real support from them. But it was broader support than that, but then all of a sudden, that group shifts quickly and dramatically.

Rev. Balmer: There is a lot of mystery surrounding this, and a lot of misconceptions, so let me take a minute to try to clear that up.

The religious right would have us believe that the galvanizing, catalyzing force behind their engagement in politics was the Roe v. Wade decision of January 22, 1973. Up until that time, Evangelicals were not mobilized politically, as I just said. But the sheer moral outrage prompted them to organize into a political bloc in order to reverse this abominable ruling.

They even went so far as to characterize themselves as the new abolitionists, trying to draw a parallel, a moral parallel, between their opposition to abortion and the opposition of antebellum Evangelicals to the scourge of slavery.

It’s a great story and it’s also utter fiction. In 1971, the Southern Baptist Convention, meeting in St. Louis, Missouri, passed a resolution—and the Southern Baptist Convention is not actually a redoubt of liberalism—passed a resolution calling for the legalization of abortion. A resolution they reaffirmed in 1974 and again in 1976.

When the Roe v. Wade ruling was handed down, several prominent Evangelical leaders—including, not incidentally, W. A. Chriswell, pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas, at that time the largest Baptist Church in the world—issued statements applauding the Roe v. Wade ruling as marking an appropriate distinction between personal morality and public policy.

I call this the abortion myth.

Yes, Evangelicals did galvanize as a political movement in response to a court ruling, but it was not Roe v. Wade. It was a lower court ruling here at the district court in District of Columbia handed down on June 30, 1971, in a case called Green v. Connally, and the background for that was that by 1970, the federal government was trying to find, was to extend the provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that forbade discrimination and segregation. In so doing the Internal Revenue Service issued an opinion that said any organization that engages in racial segregation or racial discrimination is not by definition a charitable organization; therefore, it has no claim on tax-exempt status. The Green v. Connally ruling upheld that opinion, and in the ensuing years, the IRS started going after some of these schools, many of them so-called segregation academies, mostly in the south, that had sprung up after the Brown ruling of 1954.

But onE of the schools they targeted was a fundamentalist college in Greenville, South Carolina, called Bob Jones University, which until 1971 did not admit African Americans to the student body, until 1975 did not, out of fears of miscegenation, did not admit unmarried African Americans to the student body. And when the IRS went after Bob Jones University, that finally is what galvanized these Evangelical ministers into action. And that was the basis of the religious right in the late 1970s, not in response to the Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973.

Dean Lloyd: And so what was the first political presidential campaign that they were major players in?

Rev. Balmer: No question, it was 1980 with Ronald Reagan. The leaders of the religious right saw Ronald Reagan as their political Messiah, which was not a logical choice at the time. There were actually three candidates for president that year, all of whom claimed to be evangelical Christians: Jimmy Carter, of course; John B. Anderson, Republican congressman from Rockford, Illinois, who was part the Evangelical Free Church, which happens to be the denomination in which I was reared; and then Ronald Reagan, who had in many ways the slimmest claim on that designation.

And the other problem with Reagan, at least on the face of it, was that, as governor of California, in 1967 he had signed into law the most liberal abortion bill in the country. Not to mention he was divorced and remarried, which for Evangelicals up until that time, and that really does mark a turning point, Evangelicals had a very dim view of divorce. And what happens is, in part because of the embrace of Reagan, that ethic, that attitude shifts rather dramatically.

Dean Lloyd: And so the power grows through the Eighties with their presence in the White House.

Rev. Balmer: Right, and by this time abortion is part of the agenda. The abortion issue—let me go back just a minute if I could—the abortion issue really proved itself as, proved its potency as an electoral issue in the Iowa U.S. Senate race in 1978, when Dick Clark, the Democratic incumbent, was narrowly defeated by Roger Jepsen, the Republican challenger. And the best evidence, even though he was thought to be shoo-in for reelection, and what happened in that campaign is that the pro-life folks, mostly Catholic still at this point, leafleted church parking lots the final Sunday before the election. And on the strength of the pro-life vote, the Democratic incumbent was defeated.

Dean Lloyd: Let’s break off the narrative for a minute and step back and hear little bit about you. You’re an Episcopal priest with a very strong Evangelical background yourself, and you spend a lot of your academic career looking closely at the impact of Evangelicalism, not uncritically. So why don’t you say something about your own Evangelical background that turns you up the Episcopal Church at some point and how that became your academic interest as well.

Rev. Balmer: Oh, boy.

Dean Lloyd: In two minutes.

Rev. Balmer: In two minutes.

Dean Lloyd: Just kidding.

Rev. Balmer: My father was for forty years a minister and the Evangelical Free Church of the Americas, as I mentioned earlier. I love and admire and respect him very much. He passed away about eleven years ago and I think that his passing away kind of freed me to pursue my own ordination. I have only been ordained less than two years.

I consider myself Evangelical. Some days I hang on by my fingertips, especially with all the political stuff that has been associated, I think wrongly, with Evangelicalism, and I see myself as trying to call Evangelicals back to their best selves. Not only in terms of the Scriptures, taking seriously the words of Jesus, but also to honor once again the noble legacy, the noble heritage of nineteenth-century evangelical activism, which invariably took the part of those on the margins of society.

And try as I will, I simply don’t see that disposition in the policies, the actions, the agenda of the religious right at the turn of the twenty-first century.

I’m a historian. I am reluctant project into the future, but I think that in fifty years or one hundred years, historians will look back on this era of Evangelical political activism as a real aberration, and see this as a time when Evangelicals really lost their moorings and were co-opted by a particular political party and a political agenda.

In terms of my own journey, my introduction to the Episcopal Church really occurred when I was grad student at Princeton University and I wandered into Trinity Church, which was just a couple of blocks from where I was living, and I felt like I had come home.

The space itself was really wonderful. It gave off the aura that something important happens here. And I thought that’s really pretty important itself. I very much like the historical connections, the beauty of the liturgy, the music and so forth. I sometimes joke that the reason people ask how I came from Evangelicalism to be an Episcopalian, and I have a couple of shorthand answers to that. One is that it’s a reaction to the aesthetic deprivation of my childhood, which... there something to that I think. But also I grew tired of the cult of novelty. In evangelical congregations, especially the mega churches, it’s always, well, let’s do something new. And I came to the point where I was ready to say, let’s try something old.

Dean Lloyd: In your bringing those two strands of now mainline Anglican Christianity and Evangelicalism, do you find a healthy fit? I mean, my sense is that you do, and I would love to hear something about that, because you’re bringing together this free church, conversion of the heart, biblically centered tradition with this much more structured, liturgical tradition, but finding them mutually reinforcing.

Rev. Balmer: I do. I don’t see any inherent contradiction between the two. I think what Episcopalians can learn from Evangelicals is the virtue of experimentation. I think trying new things is not a bad thing. And the other thing about Evangelicals is that, if they don’t work, they are not afraid to abandon it. They don’t cling on to programs or ideas that don’t seem to be working.

Evangelicals have a very finely tuned populist ear. Now I think that can be dangerous, and I think it sometimes and very often gives rise to what I call the cult of personality in Evangelical circles. But I think they also understand how to speed the idiom of culture, and we Episcopalians could learn to do that, I think, probably a little bit better than that.

I think the biblicism, the emphasis on biblical literacy for Evangelicals, at least in the abstract or theoretically, is very good, and we could you more with that. I would love to see Evangelicals learn from up and beauty of worship, the dignity of space and music. There is something uplifting and the filling with that, and I simply can’t get with praise bands and all this stuff.

Dean Lloyd: In a minute we’re going to go to questions from the audience, but first let’s go back to your narrative for minute and what you’ve been saying about Evangelicals. It is a great tradition. Evangelicals give us the abolitionist movement, a great deal of that, they were as you say involved with major social causes all through the decades and centuries. Why do you think they lost their way here?

Rev. Balmer: That’s a wonderful question, and I spent the better part of the last decade thinking about that, and I’m not sure that I have the answer. I think historically what happened is that late nineteenth-century Evangelicals responded, or rather reacted, to social changes in America, particularly urbanization, industrialization, the influx of non-Protestant immigrants, and they did so in a reactionary way.

And what happens is that, along about 1880, certainly 1890, and absolutely by the turn of the twentieth century, they really were abandoning the agenda of social reform that had been their trademark earlier in the nineteenth century.

And they came away from that, from this whole program of social amelioration, into an emphasis on individual conversion at the same time that more liberal Protestants were embracing what was called at the time the social gospel, which said that Jesus redeems not only sinful individuals that Jesus is capable of redeeming sinful social institutions as well, and this marked the great divide in American Protestantism. It still has not healed. The two strands have gone their different ways. Evangelicals in the twentieth century, there is no short answer to this, a lot of it gets tied up the Cold War, I think Billy Graham’s very public friendship with Richard Nixon is enormously important for skewing Evangelicals toward the right politically and eventually into the public realm. It’s a complex story.

Dean Lloyd: A complicated story. Questions from the audience.

Q: Hi. There’s been a lot written in the last year or so about the newer generation of Evangelical leaders, Rick Warren being one of them. How do you see this? Do you see this as part of a shift?

Rev. Balmer: I do. I think the religious right is beginning to collapse beneath its own weight, and particularly in this election cycle.

I think there are two broad categories of change; one is external and the other is internal. Externally, I think throughout this primary season, and through the campaign, there was no logical Republican candidate who was able to really galvanize passions of religious right voters. Some people talk about Mike Huckabee, I think other people recognize he kind of wandered off the reservation sometime ago; Mitt Romney—a Mormon, that still is a very big issue, and I think actually Romney handled that situation all wrong. I’m not in any position to advise him, and he didn’t ask my opinion, but I’m giving it anyway. And John McCain, the eventual nominee, has of course had a very troubled and very tempestuous relationship with the religious right and particularly the leaders of the religious right for many, many years.

Internally, I think, what’s happening is that there is a generational divide that’s beginning to open and is yawning ever wider. You have at the top the kind of old-line leadership, people like James Dobson and Chuck Colson and Richard Land and so forth, who, for example, insist that the only salient moral issues are abortion and same-sex unions or same-sex marriages they call it.

And I think a younger generation begs to differ. And what I find more and more, as I travel in these Christian college campuses in particular, is that the younger generation first of all is pretty much indifferent toward issues of sexual orientation. It’s just not... if you press them, they’ll say yes it’s important, but there’s no real fire behind that conviction. They’ll recognize that issues of the environment, global warming, are, in fact, real issues, whereas Dobson and Colson have said no, they’re not.

They recognize that issues of poverty, AIDS as Rick Warren has talked about, are important. I think the issue of... I happen to think that the defining moral issue of our age is our government’s persistent, systematic use of torture. And the younger generation recognizes that. And why we are not marching in streets over that is to me in itself a moral abomination.

The morality of the war in Iraq, which by my judgment doesn’t meet any of the just war criteria that have been around in Christian thinking and writing for centuries—I think the younger generation recognizes that. So I think the religious right is beginning to enervate. But they’re very good at reinventing themselves, they are very good at kind of recasting themselves, and I expect after Tuesday there will be a major reconfiguration and will see where it goes from there.

Q: Pat Robertson and the current sitting president felt called to run for president. Do you know of any examples where Evangelicals, or citizens kind of like the Cindy Sheehans, out of their faith have lobbied White House for various policies and have either been successful or not successful, faith in the White House, individuals, you know, felt called to make a difference and have?

Rev. Balmer: I’m sorry I’m not sure I caught the question.

Dean Lloyd: You’re going to have to say that again. We couldn’t quite see what the question was.

Q: I always thought the citizens were responsible for their government, and citizens should take action and seek to their leaders. Are there people that you know of who have pushed for this policy or that policy, and moved a president or administration by organizing a movement or something? I guess the best example but I can think of is Cindy Sheehan, who worked on Iraq but out of her son’s death. I don’t know her religious...

Rev. Balmer: Sure, I mean that happens all the time, I think, and I want to be clear about a couple of things. I think the example of the religious right, and by the way it’s not only the religious right, I would say this same thing for a lot of mainline political activism in the 1960s in the civil rights era, and also the opposition to the war in Vietnam. I think there is a real danger to the integrity of the faith when the faith becomes aligned with a particular political movement or political party or as, arguably in recent years, a specific administration, because I think the faith is devalued when that happens, and the faith loses its prophetic edge, its prophetic power. And I think it’s a real, real danger to the integrity of the faith.

So to the collusion of religion and politics, church and state. As Roger Williams recognized back in the 1630s, the entity that loses in that collusion is the faith. Roger Williams, the Puritan turned Baptist, kicked out of Massachusetts in 1636, wanted to protect the garden of the church from the wilderness of the world by means of the wall of separation. Puritans did not have a high value on wilderness, they were not environmentalists by any stretch of the imagination. So he wanted to protect the two.

He recognized that, if the faith became associated with the state, that it would be fetishized and trivialized. Let me give you quickly a recent example. I was one of the expert witnesses in the Alabama Ten Commandments case when Judge Roy Moore plopped this two-and-a-half ton granite monument in the lobby of the judicial building, at the same time refusing any other religious representation in that space.

And my testimony then is what remains today: that religion has flourished in this country precisely because the government has stayed out of the religion business. We have this vital, salubrious religious marketplace unequal to anywhere else in the world. It’s precisely because there is no state church and the government does not intrude into that arena.

When Judge Thompson ruled correctly that the Ten Commandments monument in Alabama represented a violation of the establishment clause of the First Amendment, and workers were preparing to remove the monument, one of the protesters screamed, get your hands off my God. Unless I missed my guess, one of those Commandments etched on the side of that monument says something about a graven image, and that illustrates for me the dangers of fetishizing or trivializing the faith.

Q: My question is about the interface of God and our government. Congress opens with prayer, we have “In God we trust” on our money, and I wonder what is your perspective of the appropriate role of an individual president’s faith in our governance?

Rev. Balmer: I have to say, sadly, on the basis of history, not much. In the survey that I did from 1960 to the present, my judgement was, and I think it’s a considered judgement, that only one president in that span of time actually sought to govern according to the moral or religious principals he articulated when he was campaigning for office and that was Jimmy Carter. I think that...

Dean Lloyd: Let’s... can we stay with that for a minute? That’s quite a statement. Many presidents ran with some version of a public attachment to religious faith. You found one that you think can trace direct connections between his faith in his work.

Rev. Balmer: Yeah, I do.

Dean Lloyd: Just checking to make sure I heard you right.

Rev. Balmer: People talk about Ronald Reagan, the abortion thing, he ran for presidency twice—’80 and ’84—promising, you know, saying that abortion was the defining moral issue of the time and promising to outlaw it. Even his most stalwart defenders these days concede he made no serious effort to do that.

What I found intriguing is that in Ronald Reagan’s autobiography, which extends more than seven hundred pages, the issue of abortion appears not once. Who else... this, the current president, what really prompted the book was his declaration on the eve of the Iowa precinct caucuses that Jesus was his favorite political philosopher. And I was kind scratching my head trying to figure out what that meant. And I wish... I am hard pressed... to find tangible evidence that... and I’m not picking on him, because I can pick on others as well, but is there tangible evidence that this person who made a great deal about his evangelical conversions, two of them as far as I can tell, and his evangelical faith... has it really affected his governing? I’m hard pressed to find that.

I wish that... I think part of the blame lies with we the voters, and because we have come to accept the sort of gauzy affirmations of faith from our presidential candidates and not really interrogated those claims. I wish very much, for example, that when George W. Bush declared that Jesus was his favorite philosopher, somebody had followed up of with a couple of questions. Gov. Bush, your favorite philosopher calls on his followers to be peacemakers, to turn the other cheek, and love their enemies. How will that affect your foreign policy? Especially in the event of say an attack on United States? Or: Gov. Bush, your favorite philosopher expressed concern for the tiniest sparrow. Will that sentiment find any resonance in your environmental policies as president?

Dean Lloyd: You know, one thing I would say that, we’ve heard it some of these conversations, is that out of the Bush administration has begun more a commitment to AIDS, for example, and to commitment for global poverty than any president ever has, and most people including Michael Gerson sitting here would have said that was because of his faith. So there certainly are some pieces of that there.

Rev. Balmer: Okay.

Dean Lloyd: Just to say it’s complex. To hear you speak, Randall, makes me think that it might be best of all if we just a way from the subject entirely.

Rev. Balmer: I think that’s legitimate. And that’s a conclusion I came to reluctantly in the course of writing the book. I would be happy to go back to the Kennedy paradigm of voter indifference to the candidate’s faith. Because I don’t think it makes any difference.

Dean Lloyd: And it is so quickly trivialized and used politically that it’s almost hard to articulate an authentic word in a political campaign about something as fundamental and crucial and sacred as that.

Rev. Balmer: Or, if we don’t do that, then at least we need to probe and find out what’s behind that. I mean, Bill Clinton, people know Bill Clinton well say that, you know, he’s very well versed and very conversant with Scriptures, he is a person of faith. But my calculation, it’s a rough calculation admittedly, but over the last half-century, aside for Jimmy Carter, he’s the most churchgoing president we’ve had, and yet we have this radical disjunction between the affirmations of faith and personal behavior, and I think that if the issue comes up, we need to interrogate these claims rather seriously.

Q: Can you speak to the issue of the religious right in this election, especially with McCain’s relationship with them? Do you see it kind of splitting up this year and being a lot different from 2004?

Rev. Balmer: I think is a lot different from 2004. I think part of it is a broadening of the political agenda on the part of Evangelicals generally. I think that McCain himself was kind of a flawed champion for them in many respects, and I’m no political scientist, but it seems to me that, if any major political party candidate has to wait until the nominating convention to shore up the base of his party, he’s probably in some trouble politically would be my guess. I think the Palin candidacy did do that but, you know, we’ll find out on Tuesday whether or not it was able to be advantageous to him beyond that particular base.

But I think what is changing is that we’re seeing, at least in this election cycle, the fact that the most solid dependable base of the Republican Party is no longer quite so solid or dependable and in that sense is a mirror reflection of the Democratic Party and what has happened to them over the last several decades. It used to be the most solid dependable base, the Democratic Party was labor union, labor unions, and now that is no longer the case, so both parties, I think, probably are in the midst of redefining themselves.

Q: You haven’t spoken much about Richard Nixon and his Quaker background. How do you think that his Quaker background affected or disaffected his presidency?

Rev. Balmer: The founding fathers, when they were drafting the Constitution, made a remarkable concession to religious pluralism all the way back in the eighteenth century. And the concession may made was that, when the new president take the oath of office, he has the option either to swear that he will uphold the Constitution of United States or merely to affirm that he will uphold the Constitution of the United States, and that was a concession to Quakers. And in fact, when Herbert Hoover to the above office on March 4th 1929, Herbert Hoover the only other Quaker to be, to serve as president, affirmed that he would uphold the Constitution of United States. Richard Nixon was given that option as inauguration day rolled around, and it turned out, as we all learned later, that he had no aversion to swearing. So.

Dean Lloyd: I thought there was one more standing there. Yes.

Q: Well, I just wondered, is there... do you... is there a paradigm for how a president would use his faith in governance, like Lincoln comes to mind. Was your perspective on that?

Rev. Balmer: I don’t know if there is a paradigm.

Dean Lloyd: If you will write the memo about how you think candidates and presidents should deal with their faith, what would you tell them?

Rev. Balmer: Well, I think I would encourage them to be more explicit about that, and I think that the Rick Warren forum probably got us moving in that direction, to put a little more meat on these rhetorical declarations. I think Barack Obama has said, I think quite eloquently, that his faith certainly informs his disposition on certain issues, including, rather controversially, gay marriage, as the article in the Times the other day pointed out.

But he has also said that that is not good enough, it’s not good enough for me simply as a Christian to impose my views, interject my views into public policy, I have to kind of universalize these arguments. And I think is absolutely right about that. We live in a pluralistic diverse multicultural society, and no one person has the right, in my judgment, to impose his or her views on the rest of the electorate.

We have to find this sort of common language of rights, whether it’s from our charter documents, recognizing the rights of minorities, for example, as an argument for the approval of gay marriage, if a politician wants to go in that direction. But I don’t think any president can kind of cavalierly impose his views on the electorate. We have a checks and balances system, if nothing else, to try to guard against it, and I think that’s important.

Dean Lloyd: We should stop there. I want to thank you for being with us today, Randall, and invite you all to be with us next week, when one of the foremost Christian thinkers who’s taking on the new atheists is going to be with us—Dr. Keith Ward, an Oxford theologian, brilliant writer, writes book after book, taking on all the major challenges to Christian faith. He will be with us for the Forum, so we hope you’ll join us for that. In the meantime we would love for you to linger for some coffee and conversation back in the west end of the cathedral, and join us at 11:15 for the service that takes place here. For now, please join me in thanking Randall Balmer for being with us.