With the Democratic presidential campaigns in full swing, it’s a good time to talk about how not to fall for thinly-veiled appeals and arguments you might hear in debates and interviews with candidates.
A 2017 Gallup poll found that 78% of Americans identify with a specific religion. Religious freedom is even written into our constitution.
From the outset, the United States was founded on a principle of religious freedom, after colonists endured a long period of religious oppression.
Religion is written into the DNA of the United States, and they are completely inseparable from one another.
But, in many ways, religion is used as a weapon rather than a support system, especially in the context of politics.
The phrase “separation of church and state” appears nowhere in the U.S. constitution. “Separation of church and state” is actually just a commonly used paraphrasing of an 1802 letter written by Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptists.
In the letter, Jefferson says “…legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”
There is no law mandating the separation of a person’s religion from their political decision-making, in-fact it would be regarded as unconstitutional to remove religion from the political discourse.
However, at the core of the spirit of the U.S., there is a desire to remove religion from the political proceedings of the U.S. in order to create a nation which perpetually attempts to form a more perfect and more free society. In the pursuit of a free nation, allowing religion to control the political decision-making of our politicians and our voters creates an insurmountable roadblock that will forever set back the nation and divide its citizens.
Religious rhetoric is rarely used to strengthen policy or policy proposals. An overwhelming majority of the time, the use of religious rhetoric’s only purpose is to manipulate voters.
Politicians take the largely protestant ideals and beliefs of the United States and hide behind them, so as to never be questioned on their morality or their foundations as people.
Religious rhetoric isn’t needed to win a campaign, it’s only needed to establish a base and a foundation that feels familiar that also double as a hiding place when a politician’s actual policy comes into question.
Donald Trump, John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama are all politicians who won the presidency not only disregarding the use of their religion as a political weapon, but despite their displays of religion.
Trump won the presidency by ignoring all of the rhetoric associated with protestant candidate. Instead, he appealed to those protestant religious groups through policy proposals and worldview instead of by citing the Bible (in fact, in one Bloomberg interview on the campaign trail, Trump couldn’t cite a single Bible verse as his favorite). He also used the alternative tactic of invoking outrage over how the Democratic party, alongside may minorities, have abandoned many of the poor people of the U.S., attracting many poor Protestant people from the midwest and swing states.
Kennedy was the first and, to date, only Catholic president despite a distaste for Catholics that was still being felt to some degree in the early 60s.
Obama won the presidency despite baseless allegations of being a non-native born Muslim, which at the time (and still certainly now), should have been a damning blow to the campaign if it were true.
An outwardly Muslim candidate wold be hard-pressed to find their way onto a depate stage, let alone into the general election, regardless of the legitimacy of their political viewpoints and policy ideas. To top it all off, even Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln’s religions were never specified.
The use of religion as a political tactic exists only as a streamlined path to establishing voter base when a politician’s own ethos isn’t strong enough to carry a campaign.