To use a favourite American acronym, WWJD – What Would Jesus Do – in this year’s presi dential election? For which candidate would Jesus vote in a country that is supposed to be 83 per cent Christian? For Senator Barack Obama, perhaps, a biracial yuppie who is a member of a self-described “unashamedly black” and “un asham edly Christian” church? Even if the house magazine of that church voted last year to give an award to a man it said “truly epitomised greatness”: Louis Farrakhan, leader since 1978 of the Nation of Islam, a veteran anti-Semite who describes white people as “blue-eyed devils” and Jews as “bloodsuckers” who control everything? Would the fact that Obama has now disassociated himself from the award make any difference?
Or might Jesus pull his lever, touch the computer screen or tick his ballot paper beside the name of the former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney – a devout believer in a religion which supposedly holds that the Garden of Eden where Adam and Eve first got together was actually in, er, Missouri? And that when Jesus returns to reign over the world he will not only do so from Jerusalem, but also reappear in Jackson County?
Maybe Jesus would prefer the former Arkan sas governor Mike Huckabee, also an ordained Southern Baptist minister, who jokes that the 16 people he had executed while governor “would hardly say I’m soft on crime”? Or Senator John McCain, a self-confessed adulterer shot down over Saigon while bombing a city in which he knew that men, women and children were living? Perhaps Senator Hillary Clinton, a lifelong Methodist churchgoer who was once an avid supporter of the extreme right-wing Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, who wanted to nuke Moscow and believed that pov erty was proof of bad character?
I could go on, but won’t. This is a complicated presidential election. I have always held that America is an infinitely more complex country than most Britons realise. Its religious attitudes and the inherent contradictions of its professed Christianity are uniquely American; the descriptions above of the 2008 US presidential candidates, for instance, may sound like surrealist musings, but they are all factually based. The only surprise is that while the media have been frantically trying to whip up the issues of racism (Barack) and sexism (Hillary) this year, there have been few of the usual squabbles over God or religion in the campaign so far.
The prime reason for this, I suspect, is that, thanks to the diabolical manoeuvrings of Karl Rove et al, voters in 2000 and 2004 were conned into believing they were voting for a man of strong Christian principles and “values”, but instead found themselves landed with George W Bush. The Republicans thus twice hit the jackpot by using Rove’s magic formula, repeatedly appropriating godly righteousness and using that mantra “v-word”.
But Hillary Clinton, among others, vowed that in 2008 the Democrats would “take back” religion; the result is that we may well be witnessing the beginning of the end of the so-called “Christian right”. Symbolically, Reverend Jerry Falwell – far-right king of the televangelists and founder of the hugely influential Moral Majority movement, which was crucial in propelling both Ronald Reagan and George W Bush into the White House – died suddenly last May, and there has been no stampede to fill his shoes.
Most amazingly of all, it is the Democrats who have so far been able to project themselves as evangelicals in the 2008 campaign, while the Republicans come over as secularists: Clinton, Obama and Edwards have each been married only once, to take a simplistic example, but at the start of the campaign the Republican candidates had been married on average 2.7 times.
To the irritation of many Democrats, John Kerry – a practising Catholic in a country where a quarter of the population is also Catholic – was painfully reluctant even to mention his faith in the 2004 campaign, while Bush was shamelessly gathering votes by Bible-thumping away. But Hillary Clinton now freely describes how she was sustained during the Lewinsky saga by “prayer warriors”; John Edwards tells how he “strayed away from the Lord” but his faith “came roaring back” when his 16-year-old son was killed; Obama literally preaches about tearing down the walls of Jericho at Martin Luther King’s Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, his accent and rhetorical flourishes morphing effortlessly into those of King himself.
How times change, then. The only Republican playing the Christian card in this campaign, not surprisingly, is Reverend Huckabee – and he, as a result, has almost certainly put himself out of the running. He won the Republican caucus in Iowa, where 40 per cent of Republican voters describe themselves as evangelicals, and that put a fatal fire in his belly. First, he and his supporters launched nasty attacks on Romney, a Mormon, by putting it about that Mormons are not true Christians. Then he decreed that the US constitution should be amended “so it’s up to God’s standards” – the arbiter of God’s standards presumably being Arkansas’s former executioner himself.
To the countless Republicans who regard the holiness of the US constitution as inextricable from the Bible, that has not gone down well. Therein, in fact, lies the central contradiction inherent in the uneasy mix of American politics and religion. The constitution’s famous First Amendment, ratified in 1791, forbids Congress from making any law “respecting an establishment of religion” – yet it would be politically suicidal, more than two centuries later, for any presidential aspirant to declare him or herself to be a non-believer. Indeed, 61 per cent of Americans say they would simply not vote for a candidate who does not believe in God.
The unresolved paradox in all this is that trillions of pennies carried in every American pocket and handbag proudly proclaim that “In God We Trust”. No presidential speech ever ends with words other than “God bless America”. But in whose God are Americans supposed to believe? A Jewish one? An Islamic one? The knee-jerk belief in America’s “manifest destiny” – that God made a covenant with its people to lead the rest of the world and it can therefore, literally, do no wrong – remains pervasive, justifying everything from the original extermination of Native Americans and the 19th-century “expansionism” into Mexico to the 21st-century occupation of Iraq. Just as God was an Englishman when Britain was the world’s imperial superpower, so He is now, indubitably, an American.
Enter Mitt Romney, and it all becomes much more complicated. Religious freedom, he says, is “fundamental to America’s greatness” – but just as John F Kennedy felt compelled to plead with Americans in 1960 that it would be acceptable for their president to be a Catholic, so Romney is being forced in this campaign to argue that a Mormon would also be OK. “No authorities in my church . . . will ever exert influence on presidential decisions,” said Romney in December, echoing JFK’s reassurances that the Vatican would not take over the US.
But with Huckabee’s piety threatening him daily, Romney felt he could not leave it at that. “Americans acknowledge that [religious] liberty is a gift of God, not an indulgence of government,” he said, neatly personifying his country’s unresolved confusions. “Freedom requires religion, just as religion requires freedom,” he went on, managing to slip in adverse comparisons between feckless European secularism and redoubtably strong American faith.
But faith in what? There are dangerous people about, Romney ploughed on, who are “intent on establishing a new religion in America – the religion of secularism”. Eh? Finally, he made the unequivocal declaration he clearly feels necessary if he is to be perceived by the American electorate as an acceptable US president 217 years after that constitutional amendment: “I believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God and the saviour of mankind.”
The problem facing Romney in his quest for the White House is that because Mormons were persecuted in the 19th century, they became increasingly secretive and defensive about exactly what they do believe. A very familiar Washington-area landmark is “the Mormon temple” that glistens alongside the city’s notorious Beltway – but only Church elders (not even rank-and-file Mormons) have a clue what’s inside. Polygamy was banned by the Church in 1890, but the FBI (it’s interested in this kind of thing) estimates that between 20,000 and 40,000 of America’s 5.8 million Mormons still practise it. A USA Today/Gallup poll found that only 72 per cent of Americans would be willing to vote for a qualified candidate who was a Mormon; a black person or a woman was much more acceptable.
All of which, I am beginning to suspect, could make this a landmark election that will put America’s religious freedom and tolerance to the test every bit as much as its attitudes towards race and gender. McCain (an Anglican-turned-Baptist, incidentally) is, as I write, the Republican front-runner – but Romney is closing in on him. Should McCain fade in this most unpredictable of elections, we will be left with a 60-year-old female Methodist candidate who has already spent two controversial terms in the White House, a 46-year-old biracial Christian with a Muslim middle name, and a 60-year-old near-billionaire Mormon whose seemingly strange religious beliefs are shrouded in secrecy.
Yet being a Christian in America tends not to mean what it means elsewhere: the poor, the meek, the merciful, the hungry and the pure-hearted don’t get much of a look-in, I’m afraid. Huckabee’s tally of 16 executions looks pretty pathetic when compared to the 142 kills George W Bush managed to chalk up while he was governor of Texas, and look where that got Bush. And Obama and Romney are committed to increasing the size of the US military. So WWJD, then? Pray for America, I think.
God and me
Philip Pullman, novelist
What does “God” mean? Given that theologians themselves are still debating the matter, it would be presumptuous of an unbeliever to answer. I’ll wait until they’re all agreed, and then consider the verdict with interest. It still won’t bring him into existence. As for whether he exists or not, I don’t agree with those who say that any sentence containing the word “God” must be meaningless, because something doesn’t have to exist in order to have meaning: mathematicians, for example, make great use of the square root of -1. So I suppose (anticipating the answer of the united theologians) that what the term “God” means is whatever you can make that term do; but that would merely mean that he was useful, not necessarily that he existed.
Has God ever spoken to you? No.
Where would we be without God? In one sense, exactly where we are now. In another sense, many things would be different – including the entire history of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim worlds.
Jon Snow, broadcaster
What does “God” mean? Anything.
Has God ever spoken to you? Not that I know of.
Where would we be without God? In a dreadful state . . . It’s a great comfort to have someone to grieve to or blame, or even thank, when things go wrong and right.
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