Bush and Gore out-Jimmy-Carter each other in US News

"We haven't seen anything like this since William Jennings Bryan," religion and politics quotemeister John Green tells U.S. News in its December 6 issue. No, he's not referring to Bryan's role in the earlyEvolution Wars—the most likely reason you'll hear Bryan's name invoked these days—but for his 1896 presidential campaign. "It's been generations since so many politicians have talked so much about Jesus—and their personal relationship with him," writer Franklin Foer begins his article, "Running on Their Faith."

There's surprisingly little media cynicism here. "When candidates make public displays of religion, a common reflex is skepticism: American politicians have always found votes in church. But with the governor and vice president [Bush and Gore], there is evidence of devotion," Foer writes. "There is a bigger point than piety here. For both frontrunners, their political agendas are bound to their religious agendas."Foer describes how Gore's spiritual background—a mix of conservative Baptist revivalism bred in his youth and undergraduate days and "Protestant ultraliberalism" learned at Vanderbilt Divinity School—results in a social justice-oriented campaign that's supportive of faith-based charities and even teaching creationism in schools. Bush, on the other hand, "is the first major politician to emerge from the new milieu of suburban megachurches." His ideas on racial reconciliation and his embrace of self-help theories are straight out of Promise Keepers. (Extended interviews with Bush and Gore on faith are posted exclusively on the U.S. News Web site.)Though he never comes out and says it, Foer's main argument is how, despite all the warnings about religious extremism, Gore and Bush both owe their moderate streaks to their deeply held faith. The candidates who are more vocal about their faith aren't mentioned, but those who aren't saying much of anything—Bill Bradley and John McCain—are discussed and given a sidebar. Especially interesting is Foer's take on the silence of Bradley, once very well known for his faith. "Liberal activists—with the notable exception of African-Americans—tend toward the secular side of the spectrum. Bradley has subtly played to these voters, emphasizing that religion is private business." As Foer quotes one Bradley aide, "There's still a sizable segment of our party that isn't comfortable with politicians who wear Jesus on their sleeves."

Bradley backslides his way to the White House

Bradley's silence—and apparent renunciation of the orthodox Christianity of his teens and 20s—is also the subject of "Unborn Again Bill Bradley," in the December 1999/January 2000 issue of The American Spectator. The article, by Paul Sperry, is a mirror of the kind that sometimes appear in the gay press, "outing" some politician or public figure who's deemed not supportive enough of the homosexual movement. Only this time, it's a conservative magazine outing a candidate for being a closet evangelical: "The younger Bradley wasn't just religious in the sense of going to church on Sundays and saying grace before supper. He was an evangelical. A full-fledged member of the Religious Right. A true believer." The article pulls out the evidence: Bradley's participation in a Billy Graham crusade in London, his teaching Sunday school during his Princeton days, his boostering of Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA), his bestselling evangelistic tract for the American Tract Society (selling 300,000 copies). In light of this, recent statements are just plain weird. A campaign aide now says Bradley was never a born-again Christian. And he's apparently become a utilitarian universalist: "People everywhere in the world seem more than ever to yearn for inner peace, a oneness with themselves an their world," Sperry quotes Bradley as writing. "Christianity offers one way to achieve it; Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, Confucianism, Hinduism offer others." Now Bradley puts "accepted" Christ and "converted" to Christianity in quotes—"as if to say: Those are their terms," Sperry notes. Bradley claims that he walked away from "the absolutism of fundamentalists" during the civil rights struggle, particularly when hearing an Oxford minister defending white Rhodesian power. Sperry finds the story "a convenient and noble ending to what, in the worldly eyes of many of his backers, could be construed as an ignoble chapter in his life." The article tells a sad story of an evangelist's walk away from the faith (though FCA founder Don McClanen still thinks Bradley might secretly be one), but left unanswered are some political questions, such as whether evangelical voters should be concerned about a consciously ex-evangelical in the White House.

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