{"id":1518,"date":"2004-08-10T12:14:05","date_gmt":"2004-08-10T16:14:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/nateptest\/2004\/08\/10\/religious-men\/"},"modified":"2004-08-10T12:14:05","modified_gmt":"2004-08-10T16:14:05","slug":"religious-men","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/2004\/08\/10\/religious-men\/","title":{"rendered":"“Religious men”"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

The Revealer has had some excellent essays of late on religion in political life.  Amy Sullivan pens one<\/a>, and ponders the following:<\/p>\n

\nThroughout the spring and early summer, photos of a church-going,
\ncommunion-receiving John Kerry were still plentiful every Monday
\nmorning. While the “Wafer Watch” continued unabated, there was
\nvirtually no coverage of the worship habits of President George W.
\nBush, perhaps the most vocally religious president in our history.<\/p>\n

 
\nThe distinction highlights one of the most pervasive double standards
\nin political journalism – the treatment of Democratic and Republican
\npoliticians’ personal faith.<\/p>\n

 
\nBroadly speaking, most political reporters regard Democrats as not
\ngenuinely religious. When it comes to the question of a Democratic
\ncandidate’s faith, therefore, reporters typically retreat to the
\ncomfortable political game of “Gotcha,” trying to trip him up and
\nexpose his insincerity. Time<\/b><\/i><\/a>
\nmagazine’s Karen Tumulty has presented as evidence of Kerry’s lack of
\nfaith the fact that he didn’t want to discuss papal infallibility with
\nher. The fact that it really isn’t a issue on which voters should judge
\nhis qualification for the Oval Office did not seem to faze her. In the
\nsame vein, when Kerry attended Protestant churches during a springtime
\nswing through the Midwest, campaign reporters feverishly speculated
\nthat it was because he was “afraid” to go to a Catholic church for fear
\nof being denied communion. When, upon his return to the Northeast,
\nKerry resumed his attendance at Mass, these same reporters wondered if
\nhe was trying to make a show of defying Church leaders.<\/p>\n

 
\nPerhaps Kerry should have taken a page from Bush’s playbook. What
\nRepublicans have learned is that if a candidate asserts his religiosity
\nvigorously enough, political writers will label him a “religious man”
\nwithout asking what that really means or why voters should care. This
\nhands-off approach usually favors Republicans, who get a pass from
\nreporters reluctant to engage in Scripture-quoting contests, but it can
\nalso be seen in the treatment of African-American politicians, who are
\nassumed to be more sincere about their faith, and in the way the press
\napproached Joseph Lieberman’s religiosity. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You can find the whole series of article from the Revealer here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Here’s a hypothesis as to why one is religious-labeled and the other not.<\/p>\n

Republicans and Democrats who are religious take very different
\napproaches to the religious lives that they lead, largely. Reps (where
\nReps are religious)tend to be conservative evangelical Christians (of
\nvarious denominations), a group that places a high premium on
\nexpressive, public announcement of religious beliefs and affiliation
\nand individual conversion. Dems tend to be Roman Catholic, “moderate to
\nliberal” Episcopalian, or mainline Protestant, groups that currently
\nand generally place more emphasis on communal redemption. You see this
\nperfectly represented in religious groups doing work in the Third
\nWorld: evangelical groups tend to focus on how many people have been
\n“saved” and the latter grouping above focuses more on service
\nprovision, speaking about religious belief as the motivating factor
\nbehind that provision.<\/p>\n

The communal approach sits at odds with much of American political
\nideology, and it’s still somewhat foreign to our idea of radical
\nindividual achievement. It’s also quieter (no judgment is meant by
\nthat, just that the communalists tend not to talk so much about their
\nreligion as the individualists do).<\/p>\n

I think the answer to the partisan divide over religious labelling
\nhas two answers. I think that part of the explanation lies in a simple
\nvolume issue. Evangelicals, who have allied with Republicans largely,
\nspeak much more “loudly” in the public sphere about their religious
\nbelief and affiliation. The press, like any of us, hears that nrrative
\nover and over and makes the (faulty) conclusion that people who have
\nfaith talk about it all the time and that people who don’t, don’t. But
\nyou can see the logical fallacy there. The conclusion they make is
\nfaulty (just because a phenomenon is a marker of an identity does not
\nmean that it is definitive of an identity) and the evidentiary leap is
\nfaulty, too (a lack of a particualr type of evidence for religiousness
\ndoes not mean that the people involved are irreligious).<\/p>\n

The second reason seems to lie in the coalition that is the
\nDemocratic party. Both religious and secularists exist in the
\nDemocratic party, and their co-existence has been an uneasy one. But
\ncombined with the general character of Democratic Christians, the
\nsecularists have become the more vocal group in the Democrats, in
\nsomething of a mirror image of the Republicans. Again, however, this is
\nneither an entire nor entirely accurate vision of the Democratic
\ncoalition.\n<\/p>\n

In both cases, I think that the answer lies largely in volume, not
\nin any real differences between the “true” religiosity of the party
\nmembers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Revealer has had some excellent essays of late on religion in political life.  Amy Sullivan pens one, and ponders the following: Throughout the spring and early summer, photos of a church-going, communion-receiving John Kerry were still plentiful every Monday morning. While the “Wafer Watch” continued unabated, there was virtually no coverage of the worship […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":709,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rayleejun"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5G3PH-ou","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/709"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1518"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1518\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}