Skip to content
Link copied to clipboard

Campaign is a victory for tolerance

By Jeffrey W. Robbins Don't look now, but with only a few days left until the presidential election, one of the most potentially explosive and divisive issues has not become a factor: religion.

By Jeffrey W. Robbins

Don't look now, but with only a few days left until the presidential election, one of the most potentially explosive and divisive issues has not become a factor: religion.

Consider what happened only four years ago, after Mitt Romney and Barack Obama were first introduced to the American public as presidential candidates.

In addition to the stubborn, vicious, and baseless rumors that Obama is a Muslim, there was the controversy over his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. When videos of Wright condemning white privilege went viral, his church's variant of black liberation theology came under assault. By virtue of his religion, Obama was portrayed as outside the American mainstream; the place where he and his family chose to worship became a political liability.

Romney, meanwhile, was unable to survive the Republican primary partly because conservative evangelicals were deeply suspicious of his Mormon faith. Early in the nomination fight, Romney and Mike Huckabee, a former Southern Baptist minister, had emerged as the main challengers to the eventual nominee, John McCain. While Romney earned widespread support from fiscal conservatives, Huckabee made frequent veiled references to religion. They included an infamous Christmas message in which a white bookcase in the background formed the image of a cross, underscoring Huckabee's evangelical bona fides - and, by implication, Romney's lack thereof.

It was during that election cycle that both Obama and Romney felt compelled to deliver major speeches explaining their faiths to the public. Both were well-considered and well-received. And both took John F. Kennedy's speech about his faith, nearly 50 years earlier, as their template, though with important differences. Kennedy was the nation's first Roman Catholic president, and he remains the only non-Protestant to have occupied the White House.

While Kennedy articulated a strict secularist stance, advocating an unbreachable wall of separation between church and state, both Obama and Romney reflected changed public attitudes about the proper role of religion. While both celebrated the United States' historical commitment to religious liberty, they also testified to the important role faith plays in their lives and their views on public service and policy.

Obama acknowledged that race can complicate and inflame the already incendiary mix of religion and politics. He expressed gratitude to his former pastor and spoke to many African Americans' continued indignation at the legacy of racism and discrimination. But in the end he distanced himself from Wright and called for mutual understanding, sympathy, and healing.

Romney used his speech to explain the beliefs, traditions, and values his Mormon faith shares with the more familiar variants of Christianity. In so doing, he sought to defuse religious differences. At the same time, he took direct aim at the stance articulated by Kennedy, arguing that secularism, too, can function as a kind of religion, leading to exclusion and narrow-mindedness.

That was then. Today, polls show 17 percent of registered voters still believe Obama is a Muslim, and 22 percent admit they hesitate to vote for a Mormon. Yet somehow religion has not become the divisive issue it can be in this race.

With all the partisan bickering and mounting challenges we face, might this be a sign that the religious tolerance enshrined in our Constitution, and fought for by our Founding Fathers for practical and principled reasons, has finally become a reality? We'll have to wait and see - and maybe even hope and pray - but I, for one, am heartened.