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By Randall Palmer
As the 1980 presidential campaign reached its climax, an interested citizen, a preacher, picked up the telephone. Although the race was still fluid, his preferred candidate was trailing in the polls, and yet inserting himself explicitly into the race was dicey. His ability to sway voters, especially religious voters, was undisputed, but that influence derived precisely from his ability to appear above the fray. Over the course of a long and distinguished career, he had perfected the art of the discreet political gesture—a strategic handshake, a brief touch on the shoulder, a whispered aside in front of the cameras—to telegraph his preferences.
But this election was especially risky. One candidate, the incumbent, was known as a family man who shared the preacher’s evangelical theological convictions. The other major candidate, divorced and remarried, had spent much of his career in Hollywood, a province not known to evangelicals as an outpost of piety.
Receiver in hand, the preacher considered his options one last time and punched the numbers. At the other end of the line was Paul Laxalt, United States senator from Nevada and national chairman of the Reagan campaign. A memorandum in the Reagan Library tells the remainder of the story. “Billy Graham called,” the senator wrote. “Wants to help short of public endorsement.” Then, Laxalt added: “His presence, in my view, would be exceedingly helpful in some of our key states.”
Graham was not the only cleric with ties to the presidency. Ford had Zeoli. Lyndon Johnson had Bill Moyers, an ordained minister, although Moyers was a White House aide and not primarily a spiritual guide. Ronald Reagan, a man given to speculations about apocalyptic prophecies, enjoyed a good relationship with Don Moomaw, pastor of Bel Air Presbyterian Church in California, although there is little evidence to suggest a deep spiritual friendship. Bill Clinton, another Southern Baptist, often relied on his pastor back in Little Rock, Ark., Rex M. Horne, Jr. While in the White House, Clinton assembled a group of spiritual advisers, especially after the Monica Lewinsky affair came to light. George W. Bush also claimed Graham as a spiritual guide, crediting the evangelist with one of his conversion experiences during their famous—and disputed —“walk on the beach” in Kennebunkport, Maine, in the summer of 1985. As president, Bush fielded a conference call every Monday morning with a variety of evangelical preachers, including Ted Haggard, head of the National Association of Evangelicals.
Carter, on the other hand, was a loner, not only in his political associations but also in spiritual matters, a tendency that reflected both his personality as well as evangelicalism itself, with its emphasis on individual responsibility before God. The Carpenter’s Apprentice: The Spiritual Biography of Jimmy Carter, written by Carter’s pastor at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains as well as by a member of the congregation, offers genuine and respectful appreciation for Carter’s piety, but there is little to suggest any deep spiritual connection between Carter and his pastor.
Barack Obama’s conversion from secularism to Christianity came under the preaching of Jeremiah Wright at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. Wright became a mentor and spiritual adviser, but the disclosure of some of Wright’s more incendiary rhetoric together with Wright’s implosion in the summer of 2008 very nearly derailed Obama’s candidacy for president. Pressed both by supporters and by the downstream media, Obama delivered a speech in Philadelphia that addressed his relationship with his former pastor. Obama’s remarks did not absolve Wright from some of his overheated rhetoric, but it sought to place it in the context of the 1950s and 1960s. Following his break with Wright, Obama has relied on the spiritual counsel of people like T. D. Jakes, Joel Hunter, and (within the White House) Joshua DuBois, a young pentecostal minister who, Obama said at the 2011 National Prayer Breakfast, “starts my morning off with meditations from Scripture.”
The pattern of the past half century or so suggests that presidents have rarely been without some form of spiritual counsel. Several presidents, notably Carter, Reagan, Obama, and George W. Bush, have talked frequently about how the burdens of office regularly drove them to their knees. But what have been the effects of this collaboration between preachers and presidents? Surely we can agree that it’s generally a good thing for presidents to be grounded in faith of some kind; at its best, faith has the effect of pointing an individual beyond himself, of reminding him that he is accountable to a larger entity.
And it’s also clear that a majority of Americans like the idea of their president being a person of faith, although that sentiment clearly intensified after the disastrous Nixon presidency. Indeed, following the Kennedy paradigm of voter indifference to a candidate’s faith, which obtained from 1960 until the mid-1970s, Carter rode to office on the strength of his moral character and his promise never to “knowingly lie to the American people.”
Since 1976, declarations of faith and demonstrations of piety have been all but compulsory for any serious candidate for president, an axiom proven by two exceptions: Michael Dukakis in 1988 and Mitt Romney in 2012. In short, especially after the nation’s moral misadventures with Nixon, we want to know that our presidents are good, moral, and decent characters.
Ascertaining the probity of presidential aspirants can be dicey, however, and the difficulty is compounded by the fact that we Americans go about it in the wrong way. For many, perhaps a majority of Americans, religion serves as a proxy for morality, so we generally frame the question as some variation of, “Are you religious?” That’s a deeply flawed question because it rests on the assumption that someone who does not purport to be religious or who does not claim a religious affiliation cannot be a person of good moral character.
So asking whether or not a candidate is religious doesn’t really get us much closer to a determination about whether the candidate has any real moral compass. What makes matters worse is that we tend to take a candidate’s response at face value. When George W. Bush declared just prior to the 2000 Iowa precinct caucuses that Jesus was his favorite political philosopher, for instance, no one thought to interrogate that claim.
“Governor Bush, your favorite philosopher called on his followers to be peacemakers, to love their enemies, and to turn the other cheek. Will that have any effect on your foreign policy as president, especially in the case, say, of a foreign attack on the United States?” Or: “Governor Bush, your favorite philosopher expressed concern for the tiniest sparrow. Will that sentiment find any resonance in your environmental policies?”
The point here is not to engage in a game of theological “gotcha”; there are good, theologically informed arguments for the use of military force, to take one example. But we, as voters, should have learned by now not to take a candidate’s religious claims at face value.
So what about this desire to see our presidents on good terms with religious advisers? There’s scant evidence that such a mixture of religion and politics has had an adverse effect on the policies of the nation. In fact, despite fears surrounding the election of a Southern Baptist Sunday school teacher in 1976 or worries about Reagan’s apocalyptic musings, historians would be hard-pressed to come up with instances where the policies of the state were unduly influenced by preachers.
My concern, as a person of faith, is quite the opposite. I worry that too close an association between a president and his religious adviser compromises the integrity of the faith. And here I must disclose my observation that the most successful— and by that I include the notion of faithful—religious movements in American history have always positioned themselves on the margins of society and not in the councils of power. My corollary observation is that anytime a religious movement or individual seeks after political influence, that movement or individual compromises the prophetic voice.
There are other examples as well, instances when a cautionary note or a reminder from a cleric may have made a difference. Did no cleric associated with Ronald Reagan offer a dissenting word when the Republican nominee, a master of symbolism, opened his fall 1980 presidential campaign in, of all places, Philadelphia, Miss., site of the most horrific Ku Klux Klan murders of the civil rights movement? What message did it send when Graham accepted George Bush’s invitation to stay at the White House just prior to launching the first Gulf War? What if Bill Clinton’s advisers had been more vigilant about guarding against his known weakness for sexual misbehavior? How different might the nation’s tax code look today if the people around Reagan or George W. Bush had reminded them about Jesus’ injunction to care for the least of these? What if George W. Bush’s spiritual advisers, rather than serving as sycophants, had rehearsed with him the centuries-old just-war arguments before the invasion of Iraq or challenged him on the torture of human beings?
Because of the counterfactual nature of these questions, the answers are unknowable. And it is certainly true that people of good will can arrive at different conclusions or pose different questions.
Politics is a tricky business, of course, and even the best intentioned of politicians cannot always deliver on their promises. But if the proximity to power of so many religious leaders with so many presidents has produced such paltry results, it’s appropriate to question the value of such access.
I return to my earlier maxim: Religion functions best from the margins and not in the councils of power. That was certainly the example set by the Hebrew prophets, and neither Jesus nor his first-century followers ever sought to pitch their tents in the councils of power. The corrosive effects of access and proximity to power are simply too overwhelming.
I’m confident that, on balance, those who have served as religious advisers to various presidents have had a salutary effect. But we must never forget the seductions and the perils of power. Religion always functions best from the margins, and prophets must always be mindful that their allegiances and their obligations are eternal, not temporal.
Randall Balmer, an Episcopal priest, is chair of the religion department at Dartmouth College and author of a dozen books, including God in the White House: How Faith Shaped the Presidency from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush.
