39 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting Look at the Attitudes and Perceptions of the Public in Electing Presidents, January 27, 2008
While this is a relatively slim volume in size, similar to a lengthy essay, it is packed with fascinating information and insights into the role God and religion have played in presidential elections since 1960. Beginning with the campaign of John F. Kennedy and ending with the presidency of George W. Bush, the book compares the various religious philosophies of the presidents and how that was perceived by the public.
One of the strongest ironies to appear in the book, and a theme that runs throughout, is the change in religious attitudes over the past 48 years. For instance, many religious leaders were opposed to Kennedy because they feared he would weaken the separation between Church and State, which was a fundamental principal of the Baptist religion. Yet, by the time Reagan was elected, the Church had discovered power and was hoping to lower the bar set between the two. In further irony, Reagan was the least religious of the three candidates, and had one of the most liberal records, yet could speak "the language" of the Religious Right more eloquently than the other candidates.
The author often refers to speeches given by the candidates and Presidents to make his case. To help the reader understand the positions of the candidates, the author has reprinted seven of the most important speeches by the candidates in the appendix.
This is a well written book containing interesting information on the views of those who have led the nation. I think it is an important book for this election cycle and will give readers a new way to evaluate what they are being told from the stump.
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36 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An extraordinary turnabout, January 28, 2008
Shortly after Labor Day in 1960, 150 mainstream Protestant leaders (including Norman Vincent Peale) called a press conference at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington DC to express concerns about a Catholic--John Kennedy--running for president of the United States. A Catholic's loyalties, they insinuated, would be divided between the Constitution on the one hand and the Vatican on the other.
Less than two weeks later, JFK responded to this extraordinary press conference with his now famous speech, delivered in Houston Texas, in which he asked voters to bracket a candidate's religion when deciding how to vote. JFK's speech, plus a public backlash against the brazenness of the Catholic-baiting Protestant ministers, took religion out of presidential politics for the next 16 years.
This is the historical backdrop from which Randall Balmer examines religion and the presidency over the past 50 years in his extraordinarily good book God in the White House. It's as important a study as it is a timely one, tracing as it does the trajectory of evangelical Christianity's entry into contemporary politics. That trajectory is, to say the least, a bit wobbly.
According to Balmer, it was the irreligious Nixon who, ironically, got the evangelical Christian crowd connected with politics and thus broke the 16-year moratorium. Disgust over Nixon's obvious moral corruptness and enthusiasm over Jimmy Carter's born-again purity convinced evangelicals that it was time to drop their traditional distrust of politics in the 1976 Carter/Ford contest. But after Carter's election, evangelicals, under the influence of the political right, repudiated him and began to throw their weight behind the likes of ultra-conservatives like Reagan and the two Bushes.
Contrary to popular opinion, argues Balmer, it wasn't the abortion issue that soured evangelicals on Carter. It was their perception that he had backed the IRS revocation of Bob Jones University's tax-exempt status (because of racial discrimination). Nor was it the abortion issue, much less family values, that made evangelicals so enthusiastic for Reagan. After all, Reagan was a divorced man who, as governor of California, had signed a liberal abortion bill. Instead, it was fiscal conservatism and a hawkish military position, both defended in vaguely biblical language, that appealed to them.
The upshot is that the divided loyalty worry when it came to 1960s-style politics has now evolved into its opposite: a public declaration of faith as a necessary rite of passage for a presidential candidate. Never mind that evangelicals sometimes blur the line between public policy and religious/moral principles, conflating one with the other even when there's no obvious resemblance between the two and tending to support self-identified born again candidates (such as George W. Bush) even when those candidates' positions don't seem to be in accord with Jesus scriptural teachings. This move from bracketing a candidates' religious beliefs to seeing those beliefs as a crucial litmus test is an extraordinary turnabout. The good news is that the old-style evangelical litmus test--abortion and sex--seems to be mellowing. Poverty, human rights issues, and climate change are taking center stage as a new generation of evangelicals comes of age.
Balmer's book is well worth reading for students of presidential politics as well as readers who are concerned about erosion of church and state separation. It's sure to raise hackles. But it also sheds some much needed historical perspective.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
FASCINATING!, May 23, 2008
GOD IN THE WHITE HOUSE: HOW FAITH SHAPED THE PRESIDENCY FROM JOHN F. KENNEDY TO GEORGE BUSH W. BUSH is a fascinating, wonderful introduction to an important topic. Let the work speak for itself. What follows are selected sections from Randall Balmer's book. In a few places I have taken the liberty of conflating quotes from two or more parts of the book, but I have remained faithful to the author's argument.
Balmer labels himself "an evangelical Christian whose understanding of the teachings of Jesus points him toward the left of the political spectrum." He is "no fan of the Religious Right, whose leaders, [he] believe[s] have distorted the gospel - the 'good news' - of the New Testament and have defaulted on the noble legacy of nineteenth-century evangelical activism, which invariably took the part of those less fortunate."
"This book aspires to answer a relatively simple question: How did we get from John F. Kennedy's eloquent speech at the Rice Hotel in Houston on September 12, 1960, in which he urged voters effectively to bracket a candidate's faith out of their considerations when they entered the voting booth, to George W. Bush's declaration on the eve of the 2000 Iowa precinct caucuses that Jesus was his favorite philosopher? Americans were content to disregard religion as a criterion for voting in 1960, whereas by 2004 they had come to expect candidates fully to disclose their religious beliefs and to expound on their personal relationship to the Almighty. This book attempts to trace that transition."
Balmer "offer[s] ... a narrative that tells the story not only of the politicization of religion in the final decades of the twentieth-century, but also the 'religionization' of our politics."
Balmer is "not arguing ... that people of faith should not be involved in the political process. Far from it. [He] happen[s] to believe that the arena of public discourse would be impoverished without voices of faith. And, although [he] [doesn't] think it's necessary, [he] [has] no particular problem with political candidates offering their religious views to public scrutiny. At the same time, however, [he] think[s] there is a real danger to the integrity of the faith when it is aligned too closely with a particular movement or political party, because the faith then loses its prophetic voice. [His] reading of American religious history suggests that religion always functions best from the margins of society and not in the councils of power. Once you identify the faith with a particular candidate or party or with the quest for political influence, ultimately it is the faith that suffers."
"Does a candidate's faith or even his moral character make any substantive difference in how he governs? Does probity translate into policy? [T]he quest for moral rectitude in presidential candidates may be chimerical. The candidates' declarations of faith over the past several decades provide a fairly poor indicator of how they govern. There is, in short, no direct correlation between probity and policy. The lesson of the final decades of the twentieth-century is that voters should approach candidates' professions of faith with more than a little suspicion. Too often, the vetting of a candidate's religion has diverted our attention from other important questions."
"Perhaps it's time to shift our attention away from the candidates and toward the electorate. What is it we expect from our presidents? Do we look for charisma and political skills, experience in foreign and domestic policy, and administrative competence? Or do we demand that candidates for the White House pass some sort of catechetical test? It's not an either-or proposition, of course, but the record of the last four decades of the twentieth-century suggests that we've moved toward the latter and away from the former."
"But at what cost? The president of the United States is not a high priest. He or she is commander-in-chief, not pastor-in-chief. Surely it's legitimate to consider a candidate's faith (or lack of same) as an insight into his character, but it should be only one of many considerations. To put it in the starkest terms, when I enter an operating room or board an airplane, my primary consideration is whether the surgeon or the pilot is competent; if I learn that she attended church or synagogue the previous weekend I might like her better, perhaps, or be more inclined to strike up a conversation. But my principal concern is her ability to perform the task I've asked her to do."
"Perhaps it's inevitable that in the United States, which has no religious establishment, we look to the president as a kind of moral figurehead, the sum total of our projections about the supposed goodness and honor and moral superiority of America and Americans. We expect the president to be the vicarious embodiment of the myths we have constructed about the United States of America."
"But no one - not John F. Kennedy or Jimmy Carter, not Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush - can shoulder that burden. It's too much to ask of any mortal to be the repository of our collective projections, especially when our assessment of America's standing in the world and our aggregate moral character is so inflated. And yet politicians continually invite us to see them as embodiments of our supposed virtue. They assure us that we Americans are good and moral and decent people, and we need only to elect a good and moral and decent president and all will be well. Foolishly, naively, we play along."
"And we play along with this cycle of sin and redemption because it offers a kind of cheap grace. We turned to Jimmy Carter in 1976 to purge the nation of Nixon's sins but also to absolve ourselves of complicity. Simply by casting a vote, we could put the whole sordid matter behind us and not trouble ourselves with nettlesome questions about why we, the electorate, elevated Nixon to the White House in the first place. Here was a man whose entire career was littered with dirty tricks and shady dealings, most of which were well known to American voters. Here was a man who seriously compromised civil liberties and who massively escalated the ruinous war in Vietnam. Yet not only did we elect him president in 1968, we returned him overwhelmingly to office four years later. These circumstances raise serious questions about the American voters who put Nixon in office and allowed him to remain there. Simply pulling the lever for Carter in 1976, however, allowed us to evade those questions. Cheap grace."
"Bill Clinton's history of philandering was hardly a secret when he ran for president in 1992, but the salacious revelations of his sexual behavior in the White House made most Americans squirm. Rather than ask ourselves difficult questions about our collective tolerance for sexual license and promiscuity in American society, transitory relationships, the endless barrage of sexually themed messages on television, or the easy availability of pornography, we simply pulled the lever for George W. Bush, who offered vague promises about restoring integrity to the White House. Cheap grace,"
"Among a people who claim overwhelmingly to be Christian, and in a nation where well over 90 percent of us tell pollsters that we believe in God or a Supreme Being, it is no wonder that politicians clamor to speak the language of faith. For many of those politicians, perhaps, the sentiments are sincere; for others, however, considering their actions once in office, the claims seem questionable."
"The unwillingness of voters to interrogate those claims and to hold candidates and presidents accountable for their professions of piety, however, renders the rhetoric of religion on the campaign trail meaningless. The problem of religiously inflected political rhetoric, it seems, lies not so much with the politicians as with the populace. We allow politicians to hypnotize us with lullabies about faith and morality, and then we fail to take that rhetoric seriously, much less hold them to the principles they articulate so blithely."
"What does this say about us, the voters? I think it suggests that we, too, talk a good game about faith and religion and morality, but the rhetoric fails to match the reality. [I]t seems ... that our collective affirmations of faith are no more sincere than those of our politicians. The American form of government purports to be a 'representative democracy.' That claim elicits all manner of cynicism these days, especially as politicians cavort shamelessly with corporations and moneyed interests in order to finance their elections and re-elections. But on matters of faith, sadly, the United States may well be a representative democracy: The vacuous declarations of faith we hear from our politicians echo our own vacuous declarations of faith. Perhaps our insistence on demanding piety and probity from our politicians is a measure of the deficiency of both we sense in ourselves."
"If we insist on regarding ourselves as a religious people, if we persist in making claims for our nation's moral superiority, then we must hold ourselves and our nation accountable to the values we espouse. Otherwise, we should drop all pretense of piety, political or otherwise. If we want to view ourselves as a religios people, however, it's not sufficient merely to allow politicians to function as the vicarious projections of our faith. We have to engage in the arduous work of living up to our professed ideals, both individually and collectively. Anything less is cheap grace."
One need not accept or agree with Balmer's interpretations and conclusions to enjoy this book. It is fascinating for the history it contains and for line it takes. Though Balmer labels himself...
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