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

Randall Balmer has written a fascinating non-denominational account of the views on religion of our U. S. Presidents from J. F. Kennedy to George W. Bush. He describes the differences in their beliefs in God and how strongly they supported the separation of church and state. These differences shifted with time as the country became more involved in this debate, as the presidents both influenced the electorate with their views and were influenced by the shifting political winds. Richard S. Greeley

Randall Balmer is a professor of American religious history at Columbia University and here offers a fine survey of the interactions between religious belief and politics in modern times, from Kennedy's promise to keep faith and politics separate to Bush's focus on linking religion with the Presidential office. Faith has changed modern presidencies: this book offers a contemporary history examining the presence, influences and choices of faith in the White House and is a pick not just for American Christians, but for any library strong in American political history, from the high school level on up.

GOD IN THE WHITE HOUSE: HOW FAITH SHAPED THE PRESIDENCY FROM JOHN F. KENNEDY TO GEORGE BUSH W. BUSH is a fascinating, wonderful introduction to an important topic. Let the work speak for itself. What follows are selected sections from Randall Balmer's book. In a few places I have taken the liberty of conflating quotes from two or more parts of the book, but I have remained faithful to the author's argument. Balmer labels himself "an evangelical Christian whose understanding of the teachings of Jesus points him toward the left of the political spectrum." He is "no fan of the Religious Right, whose leaders, [he] believe[s] have distorted the gospel - the 'good news' - of the New Testament and have defaulted on the noble legacy of nineteenth-century evangelical activism, which invariably took the part of those less fortunate." "This book aspires to answer a relatively simple question: How did we get from John F. Kennedy's eloquent speech at the Rice Hotel in Houston on September 12, 1960, in which he urged voters effectively to bracket a candidate's faith out of their considerations when they entered the voting booth, to George W. Bush's declaration on the eve of the 2000 Iowa precinct caucuses that Jesus was his favorite philosopher? Americans were content to disregard religion as a criterion for voting in 1960, whereas by 2004 they had come to expect candidates fully to disclose their religious beliefs and to expound on their personal relationship to the Almighty. This book attempts to trace that transition." Balmer "offer[s] ... a narrative that tells the story not only of the politicization of religion in the final decades of the twentieth-century, but also the 'religionization' of our politics." Balmer is "not arguing ... that people of faith should not be involved in the political process. Far from it. [He] happen[s] to believe that the arena of public discourse would be impoverished without voices of faith. And, although [he] [doesn't] think it's necessary, [he] [has] no particular problem with political candidates offering their religious views to public scrutiny. At the same time, however, [he] think[s] there is a real danger to the integrity of the faith when it is aligned too closely with a particular movement or political party, because the faith then loses its prophetic voice. [His] reading of American religious history suggests that religion always functions best from the margins of society and not in the councils of power. Once you identify the faith with a particular candidate or party or with the quest for political influence, ultimately it is the faith that suffers." "Does a candidate's faith or even his moral character make any substantive difference in how he governs? Does probity translate into policy? [T]he 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. There is,

Jimmy Carter? Likely the most decent, moral and religiously active president of the last 50 years. Yet, ditched by the Religious Right. And, not because of abortion. But, because the Religious Right wanted segregated Southern private schools to keep tax exempt status, even as they saw the handwriting on the wall for Bob Jones University. That's the biggest debunking of conventional wisdom you'll find in this slim volume. Normally, I don't five-star books this size, but, this one is on the 4/5 star border and deserves the bump. Randall Ballmer does an excellent, nonpartisan job of looking at how faith and presidential politics have mixed from the 1960 campaign, in which John Kennedy defended the right of a Catholic to run for the White House, up through George Bush's talking about the immorality of abortion without doing anything about it, while claiming moral stature for torture. That, then, leads to one of two highlights of this book. Ballmer lists sample questions the mainstream media should have asked presidential candidates of the past, both liberal and conservative politically or religiously, both Democratic and Republican. Specifically, these are follow-up questions the MSM should have asked presidential candidates of the past after particular faith-based statements. In these sample questions, Ballmer said the MSM should have asked Bush just how he squared abortion talk with lack of action, or how Clinton squared Baptist piety with Monica Lewinsky. That fact, right there, belies one current three-star rater, and others to come, who claim Ballmer doesn't know what he is talking about just because his definition of "evangelical" isn't limited to "conservative, Republican-voting evangelical." The second special area is major religion-related speeches of modern presidents, from Kennedy's legendary talk to the Houston Ministerial Association, to LBJ's "Great Society" speech, on to Ford's defense -- with his mentioning of the role of prayer and faith -- in his pardon of Nixon, through Carter's "crisis of confidence" (NOT "malaise") speech, Reagan on the Statue of Liberty centennial, Clinton on presenting Billy Graham the Congressional Medal of Honor, and George W. Bush on 9/11.

Shortly after Labor Day in 1960, 150 mainstream Protestant leaders (including Norman Vincent Peale) called a press conference at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington DC to express concerns about a Catholic--John Kennedy--running for president of the United States. A Catholic's loyalties, they insinuated, would be divided between the Constitution on the one hand and the Vatican on the other. Less than two weeks later, JFK responded to this extraordinary press conference with his now famous speech, delivered in Houston Texas, in which he asked voters to bracket a candidate's religion when deciding how to vote. JFK's speech, plus a public backlash against the brazenness of the Catholic-baiting Protestant ministers, took religion out of presidential politics for the next 16 years. This is the historical backdrop from which Randall Balmer examines religion and the presidency over the past 50 years in his extraordinarily good book God in the White House. It's as important a study as it is a timely one, tracing as it does the trajectory of evangelical Christianity's entry into contemporary politics. That trajectory is, to say the least, a bit wobbly. According to Balmer, it was the irreligious Nixon who, ironically, got the evangelical Christian crowd connected with politics and thus broke the 16-year moratorium. Disgust over Nixon's obvious moral corruptness and enthusiasm over Jimmy Carter's born-again purity convinced evangelicals that it was time to drop their traditional distrust of politics in the 1976 Carter/Ford contest. But after Carter's election, evangelicals, under the influence of the political right, repudiated him and began to throw their weight behind the likes of ultra-conservatives like Reagan and the two Bushes. Contrary to popular opinion, argues Balmer, it wasn't the abortion issue that soured evangelicals on Carter. It was their perception that he had backed the IRS revocation of Bob Jones University's tax-exempt status (because of racial discrimination). Nor was it the abortion issue, much less family values, that made evangelicals so enthusiastic for Reagan. After all, Reagan was a divorced man who, as governor of California, had signed a liberal abortion bill. Instead, it was fiscal conservatism and a hawkish military position, both defended in vaguely biblical language, that appealed to them. The upshot is that the divided loyalty worry when it came to 1960s-style politics has now evolved into its opposite: a public declaration of faith as a necessary rite of passage for a presidential candidate. Never mind that evangelicals sometimes blur the line between public policy and religious/moral principles, conflating one with the other even when there's no obvious resemblance between the two and tending to support self-identified born again candidates (such as George W. Bush) even when those candidates' positions don't seem to be in accord with Jesus scriptural teachings. This move from bracketing a candidates' re