Could 2024 Presidential Campaign Include a Religious Awakening?

“Could America be on the cusp of another Great Awakening?” a Boston Globe columnist, Jeff Jacoby, asks, suggesting that a broad return to religion might be the right remedy “at a time when civil society has grown so dysfunctional — when Americans fear their nation is on the wrong track, when negative politics are making people sick, when happiness is at its lowest ebb.”The Wall Street Journal headlines what it calls “The Surprising Surge of Faith Among People,” which is being explained as a response to the pandemic. “Young adults, theologians and church leaders attribute the increase in part to the need for people to believe in something beyond themselves after three years of loss.” If there’s something more here than wishful thinking — and I am inclined to believe there is — the political implications are potentially profound. I wrote earlier this month about the possibility that 2024 would shape up as what I called the Psalm 121 Election, with religion playing a unifying, rather than a dividing, role. Since then, the likelihood has only increased.President Biden announced his re-election campaign with a video that included a kippah-wearing, bearded Jew and also the cross-shaped neon sign outside the 16th Street Baptist Church at Birmingham, Alabama, which was bombed by the Ku Klux Klan in 1963. Mr. Biden tells one voter, “Well, God love ya.” A minister opens the doors of a church and then Mr. Biden is shown inside, hugging a child while sitting in a pew. Senator Scott of South Carolina, a Republican, launched his own presidential exploratory committee with a video talking about “one nation under God” and “America’s soul.” Inside a church, Mr. Scott promised, “I will defend the Judeo-Christian foundation our nation is built on and protect our religious liberty.” He spoke of “faith in God, faith in each other, and faith in America.”Even the No Labels movement, one of the most newsworthy developments in a political landscape characterized by the rise of independent voters, has a religious background. Its national chairmen are an Orthodox Jew who was the Democratic Party’s 2000 vice presidential nominee, Joe Lieberman; a former Republican governor of Maryland, Larry Hogan, who is a graduate of Catholic schools; and Benjamin Chavis Jr., a civil rights leader who is an ordained minister of the United Church of Christ and who traces his family history to the Reverend John Chavis, the first African American to be ordained as a Presbyterian minister in America.The secular press often depicts religion in politics strictly as a wedge used by the “religious right” to divide Americans, and sometimes, it can function in that way. The historical record clearly shows, though, that Democrats have also drawn extensively on religious language at key moments in their campaigns and in their presidencies in ways that have helped to animate the American spirit.President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1940 speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination included the line, “We face one of the great choices of history…. the continuance of civilization as we know it versus the ultimate destruction of all that we have held dear — religion against godlessness.”During FDR’s May 27, 1941, radio address announcing a national emergency, he said, “Today the whole world is divided between human slavery and human freedom — between pagan brutality and the Christian ideal. We choose human freedom — which is the Christian ideal.” President Johnson, in March 1964, observed, “In more than 3 decades of public life, I have seen first-hand how basic spiritual beliefs and deeds can shatter barriers of politics and bigotry. I have seen those barriers crumble in the presence of faith and hope, and from this experience I have drawn new hope that the seemingly insurmountable moral issues that we face at home and abroad today can be resolved by men of strong faith and men of brave deeds. We can only do this if the separation of church and state, a principle to which Baptists have given personal witness for all their long history, only if the separation of church and state does not mean the divorce of spiritual values from secular affairs.” Barack Obama, in his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, said, “We worship an awesome God in the Blue States…. In the end, that is God’s greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation; the belief in things not seen; the belief that there are better days ahead.”If today’s political leaders don’t succeed immediately in transforming bitterness and polarization into kindness, humility, tolerance, and civility, perhaps college campuses will show the way to the “better days ahead” Mr. Obama describes.The universities are often caricatured in the press as battlegrounds or hotbeds of extreme left wing intolerance, and sometimes they are. The reality, though, is more complex, and more encouraging, at least in some places.A two-week-long spontaneous Christian revival drew 50,000 people to the campus of Asbury University at Wilmore, Kentucky, the New York Times reports on its front page. Attorney General Barr may be best known for his landmark speech about how “in the Framers’ view, free government was only suitable and sustainable for a religious people” — a speech he chose to deliver at the University of Notre Dame at South Bend, Indiana.At Brown University, President Christina Paxson has gone about intentionally improving the civility of its campus climate by deliberately cultivating religious life. Ms. Paxson said in a February 2022 interview with Bloomberg that religion was an elemental part of the diversity she was seeking in recruiting incoming classes. “I want students who are from tight-knit Christian communities,” she said.In February 2023, in remarks at Israel Summit East, Ms. Paxson talked about Brown’s plans to open “a full kosher kitchen” and “an expanded halal station” in its main dining hall. Ms. Paxson said “college campuses may be the best possible laboratories for building strong and cohesive communities.” At Harvard, the outgoing president, Larry Bacow, headlined his penultimate column in the university’s alumni magazine “Mitzvot,” recounting his advice “to do good deeds, or mitzvot in Hebrew, and to give voice to those whose voices have been silenced.” If religion on campus shows the way toward humility, civility, kindness, gratitude, and community, Mr. Obama’s prediction of “better days ahead” may yet prove prophetic, if not in 2024 then in some future election year, God willing.

Could 2024 Presidential Campaign Include a Religious Awakening?

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