God in the White House — a new book from religious historian, episcopal priest and editor-at-large of Chrisitanity Today, Randall Balmer — explores the history and the consequences of the “religionization” of the presidency from John F Kennedy through George W. Bush. From an excerpt offered at npr.org:
… [E]xamples suggest that the quest for moral rectitude in presidential candidates may be chimerical. The candidates’ declarations of faith over the past several decades provide a fairly poor indicator of how they govern. Even the record of the two redeemer presidents of the past half century, Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush, is mixed. Carter actually sought to govern according to his moral lights and in fidelity to the principles of decency, honor, and fair play that he articulated on the campaign trail; the American voters resoundingly repudiated him when he ran for a second term.
Bush sought the presidency on a platform of morality and Christian virtues. Yet his policies in the first decade of the twenty-first century reflected those values only dimly, if at all. Perhaps it’s time to shift our attention away from the candidates and toward the electorate. What is it we expect from our presidents? Do we look for charisma and political skills, experience in foreign and domestic policy, and administrative competence? Or do we demand that candidates for the White House pass some sort of catechetical test? It’s not an either-or proposition, of course, but the record of the last four decades of the twentieth century suggests that we’ve moved toward the latter and away from the former.
But at what cost?…
Read the complete excerpt, “Cheap Grace: Piety and the Presidency” at npr.org.
Randall Balmer is also the author of the Encyclopedia of Evangelicalism and Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America.
