RELIGION and electoral politics tend to be mutually debasing. Take the apparent exception, Jimmy Carter. His politics were informed by his theological insights: a regard for the poor and despised (he was the first U.S. president to take the Third World seriously); a sense of human limit (he did not take it for granted that Americans have a right to consume a disproportionate share of the world's goods); and a recognition of the humanity of others, even of enemies (the Soviet Union was not the Evil Empire for him).
The result of this conjunction of theological and political views was a resounding rejection from the electorate, and especially from those who seemed closest to him on the theological spectrum, Southern Baptists. The lesson seems to be that it pays, in presidential politics, not to take your religion seriously.
Some of Carter's failure was undoubtedly the result of bad luck and plain error on his part. But the preference of evangelicals for the religious stance of Ronald Reagan proved that pseudo-religion works best in our political races.
President Reagan's religiosity barely rises above the level of superstition. Michael Deaver, so close to him over the years, says that the president consults his horoscope every day, regularly carries five or so lucky charms in his pocket, and is "nuts for religious phenomena." Catering to this taste, Deaver tried to stage one of Reagan's photogenic European stops at the shrine of Fatima. This, he knew, would excite a man who prefers movies and television shows about paranormal religious experiences.
Yet Carter was the one who was considered a little weird on the subject of religion, while Reagan's grab bag of credulous notions is reassuringly familiar. We tend to forget that more people read The National Enquirer than The New York Times, and what we find in the Enquirer is America's folk religion -- where psychics and astrologers deliver the political news, weeping Madonnas and other miracles abound, and Satan is rebuked by obscure preachers who have learned a gimmick for controlling him. The Soviet Union is only one of many evil empires in the "ordinary" world of possession and exorcism worked by the dense group of preachers of whom we normally see only the shiningest exemplars on television. The world in which Jimmy Bakker was a "star" swarms with mini-Bakkers and Bakkers on the rise.
It is against this background that we should weigh the accounts of Reagan's interest in biblical prophecy. He plays with the ideas of Armageddon and other apocalyptic visions, but only as he reads his horoscope. We should not be as frightened as some of his critics are that he will push the nuclear button in response to a biblical signal; but neither should we mistake his wistful or fearful fantasies about various Santa Claus and Darth Vader figures for serious religion.
Why would evangelicals and others reject a sincere believer in the gospel, like Carter, for Reagan's profession of a hodgepodge of make believe beliefs? The reason is that Reagan brings them a more marketable God.
Reagan's God prefers Americans to his other creatures -- he has appointed them an empire, and he means to let it grow and prevail. He likes all Americans except those who ever criticize America. This clearly sets him apart from the God of Jewish scripture, whose friends were the prophets who scourged their own people.
But if Reagan's God likes Americans more than the members of other nations, he does not like all Americans equally. He far prefers the rich, whose prosperity is a sign of his favor. He also likes those who encourage wars, whether constitutionally declared or not. The most favored man of this God, during the last year, was Oliver North, who prays and breaks the law with the same fervor.
RECENT ELECTORAL HISTORY makes it clear to candidates which God they should be doing business with. Jimmy Carter's God is a "downer." Reagan's God cheers you up, makes you stand tall, and fills your pockets; Reagan's God makes no demands for repentance, for humility, personal or national. And he is a whiz of a vote-getter.
The Republican candidates in general have been genuflecting to Reagan's God. Gen. Alexander Haig is a Catholic, but the bellicose God of West Point visits all its chapels on a non-sectarian basis. George Bush and Jack Kemp assure us that they are born again. Bob Dole cultivates the abortion lobby (whose sharp eyes may have helped deter Jeanne Kirkpatrick from entering the race). Pete du Pont is so rich that God obviously dotes on him, so much so that the presidency may seem a needless added luxury.
Only Pat Robertson is so close to Reagan's God that he has had to cultivate a little distance from that deity, sprucing up his legal credentials on the chance that people might have been scared into thinking he believes in Bible prophecies beyond their political usefulness. He is trying to sound so secular that he quotes Machiavelli as the author of the plea "Would that my enemy would write a book." This is less a sign of his worldliness than of his biblical illiteracy. He does not know a line from the book of Job even when he uses it as part of his regular political pitch.
The Democrats seem more different from the Republicans than they are. They are wary of Reagan's God, but they are having little truck with Jimmy Carter's. They all promise defense cuts and arms reductions. But not one of them will admit that a first nuclear strike or a nuclear retaliation would, equally, be mass murder of innocents, and that even playing with such possibilities is sinful. Jesse Jackson, with whom I discussed this concept at length, shows sympathy for it but will not adopt it -- understandably; it would be political suicide to do so. None entertains the notion that the American empire has entered into a decline and must be conducted with fewer resources and less arrogance -- another suicidal view at the polls.
There are decent men among the candidates, to be sure. Paul Simon probably comes closest to Jimmy Carter in his views -- which may be the real obstacle to his being elected. Another Bible-school teacher who admires the Baptist Harry Truman (that first nuclear bomb-dropper), Simon is a Lutheran, whose belief he took seriously enough to write a book with his Catholic wife on the difficulties of ecumenical marriage.
On the economy, Simon's combined expansionist and budgetary emphases sound contradictory, but so did Franklin Roosevelt's. He is not triumphant enough for Reagan's God. He might even wear a sweater in the Oval Office, which means he may not be able to get there.
Jesse Jackson best articulates the test for a just society -- the ones Jesus submitted to authenticate himself with the Baptist: The blind, the lame, the plague-stricken, the deaf are restored to life in the community. Jackson alone of the candidates attended the Washington rallies for the jobless and for persons with AIDS. But his ecumenical charity toward Jews is still suspect, and humility is not a posture that comes naturally to him.
Bruce Babbitt is a Catholic with some social conscience and awareness of women's issues. Albert Gore has latterly been flirting with the Reagan God's attitude toward war, and Richard Gephardt's trade stance favors the idea of American empire. Gary Hart spent some time in divinity school and, so far as I know, has not lied about that (as about his name or age or liaisons), but his stay there did not seem to convince him that the truth would make him free.
Michael Dukakis, though baptized into the Greek Orthodox Church as a child, does not even pay dues to the archdiocese. His hero is that other thoroughly secular man, John F. Kennedy, a nominal Catholic. He lacks Kennedy's Cold War ardor, but shares some of his technocratic credulity -- there is not a problem that a missile-crisis-style executive committee cannot solve, if it just applies Kennedy School of Government procedures.
THE SECULARISM OF THE POLITICAL establishment in the American political system is the best protection of religious life we have. It allows the combination of moral energies from various sects and faiths; it impedes (though it has not entirely prevented) the establishment of a false god, the idol of "civil religion" who exalts the state and flatters its rulers in terms of a pseudo-theology of nationalism.
The idea of such a "god" is unworthy of the God of Jewish or of Christian scripture, to name just two of the major faiths in America. This means that religion is not irrelevant, even in a secular system, especially in a secular system. Believers in the scripture messages of repentance, conversion, and service to others are the ones who should most oppose the idol -- that "God" Reagan carries around in his pocket with his other amulets and rabbit's feet. If there is little hope of a massive rejection of that idol in the coming election, that is the fault of the electorate, whose attitudes circumscribe the possibilities of political office-holding.
Luckily, the moral life of a nation goes on through many more channels than the holding of political office. Abolitionism, women's suffrage, the union movement, the civil rights movement -- all these grew and "saved" the nation long before they attained electoral success. Most of them grew out of religious circles.
The prophets are the real teachers of a nation, and they are not often found on thrones. While concern for the moral order of the nation makes participation in the political process a duty, it is not an obligation that cancels other ones, including that which instructs us to put not our trust in princes.
Garry Wills was a Sojourners contributing editor and is the author of Reagan's America: Innocents At Home (Doubleday, 1987).
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