God in the White House: A History - How Faith Shaped the Presidency from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush

by Randall Balmer

Overview

How did we go from John F. Kennedy declaring that religion should play no role in the elections to Bush saying, "I believe that God wants me to be president"?

Historian Randall Balmer takes us on a tour of presidential religiosity in the last half of the twentieth century—from Kennedy's 1960 speech that proposed an almost absolute wall between American political and religious life to the soft religiosity of Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society; from Richard Nixon's manipulation of religion to fit his own needs to Gerald Ford's quiet stoicism; from Jimmy Carter's introduction of evangelicalism into the mainstream to Ronald Reagan's co-option of the same group; from Bill Clinton's covert way of turning religion into a non-issue to George W. Bush's overt Christian messages, Balmer reveals the role religion has played in the personal and political lives of these American presidents.

Americans were once content to disregard religion as a criterion for voting, as in most of the modern presidential elections before Jimmy Carter.But today's voters have come to expect candidates to fully disclose their religious views and to deeply illustrate their personal relationship to the Almighty. God in the White House explores the paradox of Americans' expectation that presidents should simultaneously trumpet their religious views and relationship to God while supporting the separation of church and state. Balmer tells the story of the politicization of religion in the last half of the twentieth century, as well as the "religionization" of our politics. He reflects on the implications of this shift, which have reverberated in both our religious and political worlds, and offers a new lens through which to see not only these extraordinary individuals, but also our current political situation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780060872588
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	01/06/2009
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.36(w) x 7.92(h) x 0.51(d)

About the Author

Randall Balmer is professor of American religious history at Barnard College, Columbia University, and visiting professor at Yale University Divinity School. He is editor-at-large for Christianity Today, and his commentaries on religion in America have appeared in Sojourners, The Nation, the New York Times, and in newspapers across the country. He regularly appears on television and radio to discuss contemporary religious issues in America. Balmer has published eleven books including, Thy Kingdom Come: An Evangelical's Lament and Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America, which was made into a three-part documentary for PBS. He lives in Woodbury, Connecticut, with his wife, Catherine Randall, who is also a professor and an author.

Read an Excerpt

God in the White House: A History
How Faith Shaped the Presidency from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush

Chapter One

Protestant Underworld

John F. Kennedy and the "Religious Issue"

On a Monday evening, September 12, 1960, the junior senator from the commonwealth of Massachusetts approached the dais in the ballroom of the Rice Hotel in downtown Houston. "While the so-called religious issue is necessarily and properly the chief topic here tonight," John F. Kennedy began, "I want to emphasize from the outset that we have far more critical issues to face in the 1960 election." The Democratic nominee for president had just completed another hot, exhausting day of campaigning across the state of Texas. Together with his running mate, Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy had already visited El Paso, Lubbock, and San Antonio in what the New York Times characterized as "the largest aerial campaign armada in history."¹

Kennedy had been greeted by "tumultuous cheers from many thousands of Texans" that day, but his reception at the Rice Hotel was noticeably more tepid. "I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish," Kennedy continued, "where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source—where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials—and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act againstall."²

Kennedy issued a ringing endorsement of the separation of church and state that evening—"I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute," he said—but he clearly wanted to be addressing issues other than religion. And by standing before the gathered members of the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, the Democratic nominee had entered the belly of the beast. Houston was not exactly friendly territory for a Roman Catholic running for president, and the events of the preceding weeks clearly had frustrated the young senator, who had hoped that, by this late stage in the campaign, he would have been able to shrug off what was almost universally described as the "religious issue."

Kennedy, of course, was not the first Roman Catholic in American history to run for the presidency. In 1928 Alfred E. Smith, the governor of New York, had won the Democratic nomination and the right to square off against Herbert Hoover, secretary of commerce under Calvin Coolidge and the Republican nominee. In December 1923, as Smith was gearing up for an earlier run at the Democratic nomination, William MacDonald, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Queens, New York, had organized an anti-Smith rally. Five thousand -people attended, according to the New York Times; MacDonald led the congregation in the singing of "Stand Up for Jesus" as white-robed Klansmen processed into the auditorium. A particular Klansman, known as the "Human Dynamo," concluded his remarks by shouting, "Thank God there are six million -people in the United States who have pledged their lives that no son of the Pope of Rome will ever sit in the Presidential chair!" Several days later, two fire companies were summoned to tear down a flaming cross, twenty-five feet high and fifteen feet wide at the crossbar, near the site of the Klan rally.³

In the course of the 1928 campaign, Smith sought to defuse the issue of his religious affiliation with a speech in Oklahoma City, but his Catholicism continued to dog him throughout the campaign. He tangled with John Roach Straton, the arch-fundamentalist pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in New York City, who identified the Democratic candidate with "the forces of vice, lawlessness and drunkenness." Nativist groups charged that Smith would be a tool of the Vatican, and scurrilous pamphlets warned that as president, Smith would annul Protestant marriages and establish Roman Catholicism as the religion of the United States. Although the Democratic platform promised "an honest effort to enforce" Prohibition, Smith's long-standing opposition to the Eighteenth Amendment revived the nineteenth-century nativist associations between "Rum and Romanism." Hoover, on the other hand, defended Prohibition as "a great social and economic experiment noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose." In the traditionally Democratic South, the Ku Klux Klan campaigned for Hoover, a Quaker, and against the Roman Catholic.⁴

When Hoover won decisively in the 1928 election—58 percent of the popular vote and 444 to 77 in the electoral college—popular lore had it that Smith sent a one-word telegram to the Vatican: "Unpack."

Protestant suspicions of Roman Catholicism, however, refused to abate. The fact that the sons of Catholic immigrants enlisted for military ser-vice during World War II demonstrated their patriotism, even though they sometimes fought against the countries from which their parents and grandparents emigrated. The G.I. Bill of Rights, passed by Congress in 1944, provided these same second-generation immigrants the opportunity to attend college and thereby to toe the first rung on the ladder of upward mobility toward the middle class.

Many American Catholics made that ascent in the postwar years, but not without resistance. In 1949 nativism once again reared its ugly head. In March of that year, Beacon Press, a liberal publisher in Boston, issued the first edition of Paul Blanshard's American Freedom and Catholic Power. "When a church enters the arena of controversial social policy and attempts to control the judgment of its own -people (and of other -people) on foreign affairs, social hygiene, public education and modern science," the author warned, "it must be reckoned with as an organ of political and cultural power." The book cited Catholic efforts to oppose birth control and divorce laws, noted the segregation of Catholic children into parochial schools, and suggested that the political muscle of American Catholics was being exerted "to bring American foreign policy into line with Vatican temporal interests."⁵

What made Blanshard's treatise so remarkable was its provenance. Unlike the sensationalist nineteenth-century nativist literature, much of which salaciously conjured the supposed goings-on in Catholic convents, Blanshard was both a journalist and an attorney, educated . . .

God in the White House: A History
How Faith Shaped the Presidency from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush. Copyright © by Randall Balmer. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Table of Contents

Preface     1
Protestant Underworld: John F. Kennedy and the "Religious Issue"     7
Do Unto Others: Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the Improbable Presidency of Gerald R. Ford     49
Born Again: Jimmy Carter, Redeemer President, and the Rise of the Religious Right     79
Listing Right: Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and the "Evil Empire"     109
Dualistic Discourse: The Clinton Interregnum and Bush Redux     133
Conclusion: Cheap Grace: Piety and the Presidency     155
John F. Kennedy in Houston, Texas     175
Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society     181
Gerald Ford's Preemptive Pardon of Nixon     189
Jimmy Carter's "Crisis of Confidence" Speech     195
Ronald Reagan's "Statue of Liberty" Speech     209
Bill Clinton on Billy Graham     215
George W. Bush on September 11, 2001     221
Acknowledgments     225
Index     227
About the Author     245

Editorial Reviews

Balmer traces the culture’s journey from the days of Kennedy and his famous speech promising to keep religion out of politics to George W. Bush trolling explicitly for believers’ votes . . . Balmer wisely counsels skepticism that candidates’ religious statements foretell moral governance.

The Boston Globe

A thoughtful analysis of the nine presidents from Kennedy to George W. Bush. Balmer contends that no clear connection exists between a president’s faith and personal morality and his policies. . . Balmer’s critique of American Christian’s self-delusion and hubris is commendable.

Books & Culture

How did personal faith go from something John F. Kennedy needed to distance himself from to something recent presidential candidates have been eager to embrace publicly? Balmer, an eminent historian and first-rate storyteller, recounts familiar material in a way that's fresh. He wisely suggests that genuine blame for misuse of religion in public rests with voters, not politicians. But a running quarrel with the "religious right"-unannounced in the title-seems the real raison d'être for this book, and many arguments and examples will be familiar to readers of the author's Thy Kingdom Come. Balmer marshals impressive evidence that the religious right arose in reaction to government interference with racist religious schools. But he often tends to overstate and sometimes omits key facts. Balmer traces the right's slow response to 1973's Roev. Wadedecision by quoting the Southern Baptist Convention's initial support of Roe, without noting that the takeover of that church by fundamentalists came later and largely over that issue. Most oddly, Balmer describes the war in Iraq as America's first aggressive military campaign "in history." These eccentricities make the book feel agenda-driven, and render questionable even its many points of wisdom. (Mar.)

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