A White House Declaration of Faith
In the culture wars that freighted American politics during the last quarter of the twentieth century, Republicans routinely charged that the Democratic Party had become the party of secularists while theirs was the party of religious believers. The most provocative thrust came from President George H. W. Bush at the start of the 1992 campaign. Addressing a gathering of Religious Right leaders, Bush declared that the Democratic platform had “left out three simple letters, G-O-D.” That line provoked an editorial warning from the New York Times that such rhetoric threatened to “divide the nation along religious lines.” The charge of irreligion also rankled the Democratic leadership. After all, Jimmy Carter, the only Democratic president during the Seventies and Eighties, was a born-again Southern Baptist and probably the most rigorously religious president since Woodrow Wilson. More to the point, Bush’s opponent that year was another Southern Baptist, Bill Clinton, who enjoyed listening to preachers as much as he enjoyed hearing a good saxophonist: indeed, as candidate and as president, Clinton never found a pew he couldn’t sit in.
What sort of man was it, I wanted to know, who could borrow the very words of Jesus at the Last Supper, “new covenant,” for his inaugural theme? But every time I asked to interview President Clinton about his religious views, the White House turned me down. Finally, two years into the Clinton administration I got a go-ahead. But it wasn’t the president who agreed to see me at the White House. It was First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, already a figure of nearly equal public fascination.
A cynic would say that the White House agreed to the interview for political reasons and a cynic would probably be right. The interview was scheduled to appear a week before the 1994 midterm elections, which eventually saw the Republicans gain control of both the House and the Senate for the first time in forty years. But even a cynic would have to acknowledge that a religious profile of the controversial First Lady just before an election was an unnecessary political gamble unless the president were confident that a story reflecting his wife’s manifest religious sincerity could only help the party’s cause.
From my pre-interview research and reporting it was clear that Mrs. Clinton was one of those rare figures in public life whose political views cannot be separated from their religious convictions. Long before Hillary Rodham was a Democrat, a lawyer, or a Clinton, she was a Methodist. She can trace her family roots back to eighteenth-century England and Wales shortly after the Methodist movement began. Unlike many baby boomers, she had a deep immersion in Methodist youth organizations during high school and, unlike most college students in the mid-Sixties—especially brainy women who studied at elite women’s colleges like Wellesley during the feminist awakening—she continued her involvement with the religious groups. Indeed, her political transformation from Goldwater Republican to McGovern Democrat owed a great deal to the progressive movements within the Methodist Church.
The interview took place in the White House Map Room around a makeshift folding table that looked like it had just been cleared of dishes. I placed two tape recorders on the table: one to listen to the next day and the other for transcription. I had only forty-eight hours to write a profile that editor Maynard Parker wanted as the lead story to the National Affairs section. But as soon as Mrs. Clinton arrived (black dress, string of pearls), she asked me to turn the recorders off so we could get to know each other a bit before taping began. That the First Lady seemed nervous dissolved any remaining anxiety I had brought with me to the White House.
I was surprised to learn that Hillary Clinton’s religious reading habits ran toward Evangelical books and magazines about prayer and spiritual growth rather than those that provide religious arguments for progressive politics. On the other hand, she assured me that upstairs in the family area of the White House she kept the latest edition of the Methodist Book of Resolutions, which records the denomination’s consistently liberal stands on a wide range of moral, social, and political issues. Piety plus politics was her message.
On two moral issues that were politically fraught in the 1994 midterm elections, Mrs. Clinton took positions that did not quite fit with those of her husband’s administration. On the subject of contraception, she said she was “not comfortable” with condom distribution in public schools, which contradicted the policy of Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders. A fellow Methodist whom the Clintons had brought with them from Arkansas, Elders was known for keeping a “condom tree” on her desk. On the subject of abortion, the First Lady’s view neatly captured both the contradictions of the pro-choice position and the moral ambivalence of the electorate: she allowed that abortion is morally “wrong,” but not so wrong as to override a woman’s right to have one. Not surprisingly, that was also the official position of her church.
As Arkansas’s First Lady, Hillary Clinton had taught Methodist Sunday school and occasionally preached at church conferences. When her husband was elected president, the Methodist bishop of Little Rock declared that in Hillary the White House would have its first “theologian-in-residence.” But her range of theological reading, she said, did not include much in the way of feminist theology. She knew nothing of the much-discussed Minneapolis conference (noted in Chapter 8) the previous year, in which several thousand Protestant churchwomen sang hymns to Sophia and gave thanks for the “honey in my loins” and “the perfume in my breasts.” When I described the goings-on to her, her eyes widened in disbelief. “Sounds like a good thing not to know about,” she said laughing. Then, on impulse, I asked her what she did believe. To my surprise the First Lady cheerfully submitted to a brief examination of faith.
“Do you believe in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?” I asked.
“Yes”
“The atoning death of Jesus?”
“Yes.”
“The resurrection of Christ?”
“Yes.” The entire interview lasted about an hour and at the close I called attention to the fact that in six more years—or possibly only two—she would no longer call the White House home. “Have you ever thought of becoming an ordained Methodist minister?” I asked.
“I think about it all the time,” she blurted out, but after glancing at her press secretary, Lisa Caputo, she quickly added: “But you can’t use that.”
“Why not?”
“Because it will make me seem much too pious,” she insisted. I pleaded—I could see the headlines this would make. But then so could she. Conservatives would doubt her statements anyway and liberals would wish them away. So I kept my word—until now, when it no longer seems to matter.
It was only when the interview was over that I discovered that I never did reactivate my two tape recorders after Mrs. Clinton had asked me to turn them off. Nonetheless, in less than twenty-four hours I had a nearly complete transcript. The same White House taping system that had snared Richard Nixon had saved my butt.
That weekend, the White House ordered a load of advance copies of Newsweek containing my religious portrait of the First Lady. The president was flying to Israel and wanted to distribute the story to the clutch of editors from The Christian Century and other liberal Protestant publications whom he had invited to join him on Air Force One. Like Ronald Reagan before him and George W. Bush afterward, Bill Clinton courted only those religious figures who supported his policies. He also used them as moral focus groups for his programs. In flight, Clinton asked his guests for their reactions to my piece. I don’t know what they said but I do know that the president strongly objected to one quote, a wry but knowing comment by Hillary’s former youth minister in Park Ridge, Illinois: “We Methodists know what’s good for you.” The reason he objected, I suspect, is that it echoed criticism of Hillary for what many thought was her I-know-best attitude as head of the president’s (failed) commission on health-care reform.
“We Methodists know what’s good for you”—to me this was the most revealing quote in the entire article. It captured not only the righteous ethos of American Methodism but also the politics of moral righteousness that had characterized the Democratic Party since its transformation under another prominent Methodist politician.
McGovern and the Transformation of His Party
In The Irony of American History, published in 1952 when the cold war with the Soviet Union was at its frostiest, Reinhold Niebuhr wrote: “All men are naturally inclined to obscure the morally ambiguous element in their political cause by investing it with religious sanctity.” Twenty years later, with the nation deeply divided over the war in Vietnam, there was no appetite on either side for irony, much less moral ambiguity. Within the Democratic Party, especially, the antiwar movement had developed the single-mindedness of a religious crusade. In 1972, the movement’s most outspoken U.S. senator, George McGovern of South Dakota, captured the party’s presidential nomination, vowing to end what he regarded as the “criminal, immoral, senseless, undeclared, unconstitutional catastrophe” in Vietnam. In his campaign McGovern called for the creation of a “coalition of conscience” not only to end the war but also to “reorder” the basic institutions of American society.
In terms of campaign strategy, McGovern’s rhetoric was aimed at attracting younger, affluent, mostly suburban and better-educated voters who were more interested in “cultural” than economic issues. Together with blacks and members of the emerging women’s movement, they were projected as the constituents of a new, more activist, and more secular Democratic Party. As it turned out, McGovern’s coalition of the morally convicted excluded several pillars of the old New Deal coalition—chiefly blue-collar workers, Catholics, and the traditional trade union leaders, an overlapping constituency—that had helped elect Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson. Without these traditional Democrats, McGovern lost every state but Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.
To be sure, the old coalition was already fractured. In the mid-Sixties, as President Johnson foresaw, passage of his administration’s passel of civil rights legislation ensured the loss of the party’s conservative (and largely segregationist) white Southern Protestant wing. Then came the street battles outside the riotous Democratic National Convention of 1968, in which antiwar demonstrators and activists representing a host of countercultural causes fought the Chicago police of Mayor Richard J. Daley while the entire nation watched on television. As Bill Clinton later observed in the first volume of his memoirs, Vietnam was only one point of contention in what was really a wider clash between generations, social classes, and moral cultures: “The kids and their supporters saw the mayor and the cops as authoritarian, ignorant, violent bigots. The mayor and his largely blue-collar ethnic police force saw the kids as foul-mouthed, immoral, unpatriotic, soft, upper-class kids who were too spoiled to appreciate authority, too selfish to appreciate what it takes to hold a society together, too cowardly to serve in Vietnam….”1
But an equally consequential event at the 1968 Democratic convention occurred inside the convention hall and virtually escaped media notice. That was the delegates’ approval of a new Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection, with McGovern as chairman. The goal was to replace the old nominating system, in which big-city bosses and state party chairmen (a great many of them Catholic) determined who would run for the party’s presidential nomination, with a more democratic procedure based on state primaries and caucuses, which advantaged the new breed of party activists. Over the next four years the McGovern Commission, as it came to be known, pushed through a sequence of reforms ensuring that, culturally as well as politically, the delegates to the 1972 convention would resemble the activists who had rallied outside the 1968 convention more than those who had been seated inside. Republican strategists were delighted. In The Emerging Republican Majority, published in 1969, Kevin Phillips accurately predicted, “The Democratic Party is going to pay heavily for becoming the party of affluent professionals, knowledge industry executives, social-cause activists and minorities of various sexual, racial, chronological and other hues.”2
For the 1972 convention, the Democrats did in fact establish an informal quota system for women, racial minorities, and youths that, by 1980, became a mandate that half of every state delegation must be women. As proof that the times were indeed “a-changin’,” the convention’s credentials committee rejected an elected Illinois state delegation controlled by Chicago’s Mayor Daley in favor of a nonelected delegation headed by civil rights leader Jesse Jackson.
Another sign that the Democratic Party was assuming a left-wing ideological character could be seen in the party platform. In a key section on “Rights, Power and Social Justice” the platform announced: “We can no longer rely on old systems of thought….It is time to rethink and reorder the institutions of this country so that everyone—women, blacks, Spanish-speaking, Puerto Ricans, Indians, the young and the old—can participate in the decision-making process inherent in the democratic heritage to which we aspire.” This was an endorsement of identity politics, wrapped in the moral rhetoric of the junior faculty lounge.
But there was more: “We must restructure the social, political and economic relationships throughout the entire society in order to ensure the equitable distribution of wealth and power.” To that end, the platform proposed that the federal government guarantee a job for every worker. To the working class of the old coalition, this sounded like socialism. Two of the new classes of citizens whose rights were in need of protection were “children” and “youth.” And among the new rights were a number of novel ones, including “the right to be different” and “the right to the lowest possible cost on goods and services in the market place.” And all of these rights, the platform asserted, were to be enforced by expanding the authority and reach of government agencies.
Apart from editorial writers, political junkies, and opposition leaders, few Americans actually read twenty-five-thousand-word party platforms. But on television everyone could witness the fierce debates over the platform that made the 1972 convention as contentious as the one that preceded it. A plank commending forced busing of students in order to achieve racial balance in public schools survived challenge but a minority plank in favor of gay rights did not. On the second night of the convention, Eleanor Holmes Norton and other feminist leaders fought until 4 a.m. for a minority plank recognizing “reproductive freedom,” a euphemism for abortion on demand, as a basic human right. Concerned that the abortion plank would cost them the election, the McGovern campaign worked the hall to defeat it and even allowed a speech from a pro-life congressman. The plank failed, but it was the last time the party would allow any pro-life Democrat to address its national convention.
The last night of the convention devolved into political farce. Delegates insisted on nominating their own candidates for vice president to compete with McGovern’s choice, Missouri senator Thomas Eagleton. Still smarting from the previous night’s defeat, feminists mounted a campaign for Frances “Sissy” Farenthold, then the only woman in the Texas House of Representatives. Gloria Steinem gave the nominating speech despite the fact that she was not even a convention delegate. In the final ballot, Farenthold did well against a field of seventy-seven that included prankish votes for CBS Television’s Roger Mudd, China’s Mao Zedong, Yippie Jerry Rubin, and Archie Bunker, the central character of television’s All in the Family. The prolonged exercise pushed McGovern’s acceptance speech back to 2:48 a.m., well beyond the bedtime of most Americans in the continental United States—and even of those on ships at sea.
National conventions normally give presidential candidates an initial boost, but the 1972 convention pushed McGovern farther down in the polls. Even after McGovern replaced Eagleton (following revelations that he had been hospitalized three times for depression and had undergone shock therapy) on the ticket with Sargent Shriver, John F. Kennedy’s ebullient brother-in-law and the clan’s most ardent Catholic, President Nixon went on to win 59 percent of the Catholic vote—a record for Republican presidential nominees. Nixon also carried 55 percent of blue-collar voters. Altogether, 37 percent of Democrats cast their ballots for the Republican ticket, a crossover never seen before. As McGovern later put it with his typically self-deprecating wit, “I opened the doors of the Democratic Party and twenty million people walked out.”
The transformation of the Democratic Party had several long-term consequences, two of which I want to emphasize. First, it dislodged the Catholic vote from its traditional moorings in the Democratic Party, paving the way for the Reagan Democrats of the 1980s and the emergence of Catholics as the nation’s largest swing vote. Second, by expanding the concept of individual rights (with no corresponding concept of responsibility) into the domestic sphere of marital and family relationships—thus echoing Steinem’s resonant axiom that “the personal is political and the political is personal”—the party planted its flag in the emerging culture wars firmly on the side of hyperindividualism. In doing so, the Democrats virtually ensured the emergence of the Christian Right a decade later.
The Democrats’ Methodist Moment
Politics is a secular pursuit but George McGovern was not a secular man. The son of a Methodist minister, McGovern grew up in a small-town pastor’s manse. His first calling was to the pulpit. After graduating from Dakota Wesleyan, a Methodist college, he studied for the Methodist ministry at Garrett Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, and spent a summer preaching in Chicago churches. Changing course, he earned a doctorate in history at Northwestern and returned to Dakota Wesleyan to teach before accepting a call to rebuild the state’s moldered Democratic Party. In his run for president, McGovern came across as an earnest, upright prairie preacher—one reason why, I always thought, even the most ardent Democrats among urban Catholics and Jews were reluctant to accept him as their party’s standard-bearer. He just didn’t sound like the typical Democratic politician. That’s because he wasn’t.
The reform of the Democratic Party that began under the aegis of George McGovern gave birth to what I call the party’s “Methodist moment.” If the party became a vehicle for secular liberalism, as conservative critics argued, it also became a mirror image of the United Methodist Church, echoing many of the social policies adopted by the nation’s largest mainline Protestant denomination, suffering similar internal conflicts, and, above all, projecting the same ethos of moral high-mindedness. Indeed, over the last three decades of the twentieth century it was often hard to distinguish the righteous politics of the Democratic Party from the political righteousness of the Methodists and their mainline Protestant allies.
Four months before the Democratic convention of 1972, for example, the United Methodist Church held its quadrennial General Conference, the denomination’s highest legislative body. There a thousand delegates updated the church’s social principles and adopted positions on a panoply of issues ranging from U.S. foreign policy toward various countries to city planning to the regulation of products advertised on television. A review of the Methodists’ 1972 Book of Resolutions reveals an extraordinary symmetry between the party platform subsequently adopted by the Democrats and the positions approved by the church. Both documents opposed the war in Vietnam and called for immediate withdrawal of all American troops. Both saw the nation’s economic ills as “systemic” and therefore proposed wholesale transformation of economic and social institutions.
Methodists didn’t need McGovern or the Democratic Party to tell them that society was rife with social discrimination. Appropriating the moral authority of the civil rights movement—as would the party—the church called for recognizing new rights for an expansive list of Americans perceived as victims of families, schools, and other putatively repressive institutions. In many cases the church went well beyond what even the most liberal party loyalists could wish for. Among the “Rights of Children,” for instance, the Methodists included the right “to a full sex education, appropriate to their stage of development.” In a statement on the “Rights of Youth,” aimed mainly at universities, the church demanded an end to “discrimination” against young people and urged their inclusion in unspecified “decision-making processes.” Affirming the “Rights of Women,” the Methodists called for equality with men in “every aspect of our common life” and demanded elimination of “sex-role stereotypes.” To counter overpopulation, the convention recommended the distribution of “reliable contraceptive information and devices.” Writing less than a year before Roe v. Wade, the church urged the “removal of abortion from the criminal code,” but stopped short of approving abortion on demand.
Like the McGovern Commission, the 1972 General Conference embraced “inclusiveness,” eventually establishing racial/ethnic quotas for membership on the church’s national boards and agencies. Even though a bare 6 percent of United Methodists were nonwhite (African Americans established their own Methodist denominations in the early nineteenth century), long-serving white members of the church’s activist General Board of Church and Society were fired on short notice—at Christmastime, yet—in order to reserve 30 percent of seats for nonwhites.3
There’s no question that McGovern had a hand in shaping the Democrats’ 1972 party platform. But then so did other party activists of different, indifferent, or no religious faith. As a church, Methodists could and did appeal to Scripture in support of their social and political policies. For the party, it was enough to claim the high moral ground of enlightened conscience in framing its platform. In other words, a Democrat did not have to be a Methodist to think and act like one. Indeed, history shows that the vein of moral righteousness in American politics owes as much or more to Methodism as it does to any other religious or secular tradition.
Piety and Social Reform
Methodism’s drive to reform others goes back to its origins in eighteenth-century England as a revivalist movement within the Anglican Church. After experiencing the “assurance” that he had truly been reborn as a child of Christ, founder John Wesley, an Anglican priest and Oxford don, formed a network of like-minded lay preachers organized into small, itinerant evangelistic societies. Like Ignatius Loyola, who had founded the Jesuits two hundred years earlier, Wesley provided his disciples with detailed methods of prayer, repentance, self-examination, and Scripture study—all with the aim of perfecting personal holiness in this life. Opponents sneered at him and his hymn-composer brother Charles for being too methodical—hence the term “Methodists,” which was hardly a compliment. Early on, Wesley also devised precise rules for assisting the poor, founding schools, and carrying out other forms of Christian benevolence, which he saw as the natural fruit of anyone who has experienced a “New Birth” in Christ.
After the United States won independence from England, Wesley organized American Methodists into an independent church. Through the waves of evangelist revivals that swiftly followed, Methodism spread rapidly across the western frontier through the energy of its circuit-riding preachers. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Methodists represented a third of all churched Americans, making their church not only the “the largest religious body in the nation,” according to historian Nathan O. Hatch, but also “the most extensive national institution other than the Federal government.”4
After the Civil War, Methodists made common cause with other English-speaking Protestants in promoting revivalism, perfectionist piety, and moral reform. Through domestic and foreign missions, they sought to create a righteous empire that would hasten the return of Jesus Christ and the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth. Before the end of the century, however, the churches divided into what historian Martin Marty has called “two-party Protestantism”: a private party (the larger) that stressed personal transformation through evangelization and individual conversion, and a public party that focused on transforming the sinful social structures created by the rapid industrialization and urbanization of postbellum America.5
Both parties faced a daunting task. Between 1840 and 1890, the nation’s urban population increased thirtyfold: Chicago alone grew from a town of 5,000 to a metropolis of 1.1 million. Most of the newcomers were immigrants from south and central Europe who, together with domestic migrants from rural America, lived in urban squalor and worked at the whim of capitalists in the nation’s new industrial sweatshops. In 1908, Methodists adopted Protestant America’s first “Social Creed,” which put Wesley’s heirs firmly behind the Social Gospel of the Progressive Era. But while public-party Protestants lectured the nation’s elites on structural reform, private-party Protestants—a mix of Methodists, Pentecostals, and Fundamentalists—founded churches in dirt-poor farming communities and inner-city slums.
As if to emphasize Protestantism’s role as custodian of the nation’s social conscience, the Methodist Church in 1924 moved its most powerful national agency, the Board of Temperance, Prohibition, and Public Morals, from Topeka, Kansas, to a brand-new Methodist Building overlooking the U.S. Capitol and the U.S. Supreme Court. There the church became landlord to Washington lobbyists from the other mainline Protestant churches, an ecumenical collectivity that, by its lights, was called to proclaim the will of God to the federal government and—not incidentally—form a Maginot Line against the growing influence of Catholics in national politics.
Thirty years later, in the small towns and cities like the one where I grew up, the local Methodists still fought for Sunday blue laws and against gambling and other threats to public morals. In the next decade, Methodist bishops and church boards also provided much of the Protestant leadership in support of civil rights, the Equal Rights Amendment, and other progressive causes. After McGovern’s disastrous run for president, Methodism’s Washington representatives realized that prophetic witness alone was insufficient to influence national politics. They also had to master the arts of influencing legislators and assisting in getting specific bills passed. Although they had little access to the White House between the Johnson and Clinton administrations, Methodist and other liberal Protestant lobbyists worked closely with liberal Democrats, whose party controlled both houses of Congress. For example, staffers on the Methodist Board of Social Concerns, successor to the old Temperance Board, teamed with the office of Senator Ted Kennedy in his persistent efforts to pass a universal health-care bill. The election of Bill Clinton in 1992 made liberal church lobbyists West Wing players again, and in Hillary Rodham Clinton the Methodists had their own in-house advocate. When Bill appointed Hillary to lead the party’s charge on health-care reform, she could draw on fourteen years of Methodist position papers—plus the pious assurance that Methodists know what’s good for the nation.
Of Rights and Righteousness
By the time the Clintons took up residence in the White House, the transformation of both major parties was complete. There was no longer a liberal wing to the Republican Party nor a conservative wing among the Democrats. Eventually, this ideological realignment would make it virtually impossible in Washington to assemble bipartisan teams to advance legislative projects.
The Republicans’ mix of piety and politics was dictated by the party’s need to expand its southern base, the most religious sector of the country, and to establish its image as the party of “family values.” In need of new constituencies to replace the ones they had jettisoned in 1972, the Democrats expanded McGovern’s original “politics of righteousness” by making their own the burdens and grievances of all those who felt oppressed by sexual, racial, class, and economic oppression. To McGovern’s coalition of conscience the party sought to add a coalition of the excluded. Hence the rebirth of the Democratic Party as the party of “inclusion.”
How do you include the excluded? Beginning in the Sixties, it was done by appealing to state and federal legislators—and especially to the courts—to recognize, defend, and advance an ever-widening range of individual rights for American citizens. With amazing alacrity, our political discourse was subsumed under the legal and moral language of rights: the rights of racial and sexual minorities, of women, of children, of the handicapped, the poor in general, and immigrants in particular, to name just a few. And with these was a range of rights to: health care, jobs, housing, education, and other social and economic goods.
In some instances, reliance on rights talk has led to real advances in social justice. But just as often it has issued in competing abstract claims, hardened ideologies, and, more recently, stale and stagnant politics. As sociologist Robert Bellah and his colleagues pointed out in their farsighted 1991 study, The Good Society, “To cast a social question in terms of rights tends to make the answer to it an all-or-nothing affair….The most troubling problem with ‘rights’ is that everyone can be said to have them and when rights conflict, the rights language itself offers no way to evaluate competing claims.”6
The Social Offspring of Roe v. Wade
The most consequential demonstration of the limits of rights language was Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court case that established a woman’s absolute right to abortion on request through the first two trimesters of pregnancy while asserting a very limited state interest in regulating abortion after viability, which occurs in the third trimester. The plaintive was Norma McCorvey, a twenty-year-old Dallas waitress who found herself poor, unmarried, and pregnant in a state that permitted abortion only to save the life of the mother. To make her case more dramatic she claimed that she had been gang-raped, a story she later admitted was false. Although Justice Harry Blackmun, who wrote the 7–2 majority opinion, denied that the decision “entitled a woman to terminate her pregnancy at whatever time, in whatever way and for whatever reason she alone chooses,” that was in fact the effect of the ruling. That’s because, under Roe, the child in the womb has no right to legal protection before viability and very little afterward. As Blackmun argued, “The word ‘person’ as used in the Fourteenth Amendment does not include the unborn.”
Feminist groups, abortion providers, and civil liberties organizations hailed Roe for establishing a woman’s constitutional right to “control her own body,” as the slogan had it, but it was much more: women now had the unprecedented right to decide who shall be allowed to live and who shall not based on whether the unborn child was “wanted.” Exponents of the sexual revolution like the editors of Playboy and Penthouse magazines also applauded the decision: after all, abortion is a far simpler and cheaper way to deal with a lover’s unwanted pregnancy than to support a child into adulthood—especially since men do not have to undergo abortions themselves. But some prominent legal scholars were more critical. Constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School, though personally pro-choice and pro-Roe, chided the court for “reaching beyond the facts of the case to rank the rights of the mother categorically over those of the fetus, and to deny the humanity of the fetus….” He also regretted that Blackmun did not show “a more cautious sensitivity to the mutual [emphasis his] helplessness of the mother and the unborn that could have accented the need for affirmative legislation to moderate the clash between the two.”7 Another critic at Harvard Law School, Professor Mary Ann Glendon, contrasted Roe’s absolutist rights position with the ways in which various societies throughout Western Europe fashioned “compromise statutes that gave substantial protection to women’s interests without completely denying protection to developing life.”8
The immediate effect of Roe v. Wade was to remove the abortion issue from the political process at a time when several states were moving toward more liberal abortion statutes. But the long-term effects, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg observed four decades later, was to stimulate the “right-to-life” movement, divide the country, and pollute American politics.9 Henceforth, as Ginsburg herself could attest, abortion became a not-so-hidden litmus test for Supreme Court nominees, producing a great deal of disingenuous questions from their congressional interrogators and evasive answers in response.
To an even greater depth, Roe v. Wade poisoned party politics. It could do so because Americans themselves—especially women—were so deeply divided over the morality of abortion. In her pioneering study of California women active in the pro-choice and pro-life movements, sociologist Kristin Luker found in 1984 that the former tended to be highly educated, well-paid careerists with few children, with little or no ties to religion and a strong vested interest in their work roles. The pro-lifers, by contrast, tended to be practicing Catholics with large families, with no or low-paying outside jobs, whose self-esteem derived from their maternal roles. For the first group, loss of the right to abortion would threaten their place in the work world and hence their self-identities. For the second, the very notion of abortion called the value of their self-defining role as mothers into question. For the first, motherhood was an option and children a project. For the second, motherhood was a calling and children a gift.10
Post-Roe, Democratic Party platforms came to reflect the values and fears of the first group of women, the Republicans’ the second. But since there is no way to overturn Roe except through the Supreme Court or—even less likely—a constitutional amendment—abortion politics produced a lot of pious dissembling by politicians from both parties. Neither Ronald Reagan nor George H. W. Bush was pro-life until the party’s marriage to the Religious Right forced them to reconsider their stance. Even then, the GOP remained sufficiently elastic to support dissenters, like Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, who—if only for their support of abortion rights—were labeled Republican “moderates” by the media.
Even after Roe, the Democratic Party was for a time more pro-life than the GOP, largely because there were so many Catholics in positions of leadership. Any number of the party’s liberal Catholic members of Congress could have written the sort of letter that Senator Ted Kennedy sent to a constituent who asked where he stood:
While the deep concern of a woman bearing an unwanted child merits consideration and sympathy, it is my personal feeling that the legalization of abortion on demand is not in accordance with the values which our civilization places on human life. Wanted or unwanted, I believe that human life, even at its earliest stages, has certain rights which must be recognized—the right to be born, the right to love, the right to grow old.11
The Democratic Party and the Catholic Dilemma
At the time of the Roe decision, opposition to abortion was widely regarded in both religious and political circles as an essentially Catholic position. Most mainline Protestant denominations accepted Roe largely because of the Reformation principle of liberty of conscience, though they generally opposed abortion for purely therapeutic purposes. Partly because the Bible does not explicitly mention abortion, and partly because they were not inclined to make common cause with Catholics on any front, most Fundamentalist and Evangelical leaders ignored the abortion issue until 1979, when a revered Fundamentalist sage, Francis Schaeffer, produced a book and (with Dr. C. Everett Koop, later Reagan’s surgeon general) a video series both titled Whatever Happened to the Human Race? In them Schaeffer urged reluctant Christian Fundamentalists and other conservative Christians to join Catholics in “co-belligerency” against abortion, euthanasia, and infanticide. Jerry Falwell, Tim LaHaye, and psychologist James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, all cited Schaeffer as the goad who helped move them to political action as leaders of the Religious Right.
But the Catholic Church was big enough and experienced enough in addressing issues of public policy that its leaders were prepared to go it alone. The American bishops could draw on a long line of papal teaching that condemned abortion as the deliberate taking of a human life—and therefore mortally sinful—but also on a secular tradition of social justice in which killing the unborn is seen as a violation of the very basis of all human rights—namely, the right to life itself.
But a decade after Roe, Catholic and other pro-life Democrats had to answer to a different magisterium. By then the party’s position on “reproductive rights,” as the pro-choice argument now was reframed, was firmly under the control of the party’s extensive feminist apparatus. Particularly in presidential election years, the party depended heavily on the National Abortion Rights Action League, Emily’s List, Planned Parenthood, and similar organs of the nation’s sprawling abortion lobby to turn out the vote by raising the specter of Roe’s reversal and even of threats to access to contraception if the Republicans should win.
By then it was clear that no Democratic senator or congressman who did not support abortion rights could expect support from the party’s coffers or appointment to select legislative chairmanships. They certainly couldn’t run for the nation’s highest office with the party’s backing. Thus, formerly pro-life politicians like the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Edward Kennedy, Joe Biden, Christopher Dodd, Dennis Kucinich, John Kerry, and Mario Cuomo quietly joined the pro-choice ranks.
Caught between the church’s absolutist position that abortion is always evil and the party’s equally absolute insistence that abortion is every woman’s right, Catholic Democrats aspiring to high office adopted a common posture: though personally opposed, they were obliged by Roe to uphold a woman’s right to abortion. Going into the presidential election season of 1984, this seemed like a tenable way to make the Democratic Party politically safe for personally pro-life Catholic candidates or—alternatively—to make publicly pro-choice Catholic Democrats acceptable to their church. Except it wasn’t. Which is the main reason why many American Catholics remember a former governor of New York.
The Political Conscience of Mario Cuomo
The first time I met Mario Cuomo the first words out of his mouth were “Teilhard de Chardin.”
It was early September 1984 and Newsweek’s editors had invited the governor of New York over for an off-the-record lunch. Cuomo’s rousing keynote address to that year’s Democratic National Convention (though he was out-roused that night by Jesse Jackson) had vaulted him onto the party’s list of possible future presidential candidates. Newsweek was preparing a cover package on religion and the presidential race for which I was to write the concluding essay. We were waiting at the elevator on the fortieth floor for Cuomo, and when the doors opened the name of his favorite Catholic theologian were the first words any of us heard from his lips.
It appeared as if the governor had been having a deep discussion with his two aides on the ride up from the lobby. But my own surmise was that Cuomo had timed his opening words to impress his Newsweek hosts. Teilhard’s daring theological interpretation of evolution had been the rage when Cuomo and I were both undergraduates, and the governor had every reason to believe that Newsweek’s editors knew nothing of the long-deceased Jesuit’s work. My instinct told me that the governor, who relished his reputation as an intellectual Catholic, wanted to throw the editors off their game and begin our noontime conversation with the ball firmly in his own court.
Sure enough, the lunch began with Cuomo going on about Teilhard for five minutes before Editor in Chief Rick Smith could turn the discussion toward politics. I waited until the main course was served before telling Cuomo, as politely as I could, “Governor, I think you’ve got Teilhard’s theory wrong.” Cuomo shot me a quick glower, the kind reporters in Albany who criticized him often saw, and the conversation moved on. At the end, the governor announced that he would be giving a major lecture at Notre Dame in a few days and invited me to ride with him in his official plane. With the cover package on Cuomo nearing deadline I had to decline, but I promised to read his every word.
In the run-up to the 1984 presidential election, every aspirant had a religious card to play. Rev. Jesse Jackson’s bid for the Democratic nomination was launched, funded, and sustained by black churches—“Big Church,” he called it—with nary an eyebrow raised by the IRS. Jackson finished third behind former divinity student Gary Hart and nominee Walter Mondale, who was the son of a Methodist minister and married to the daughter of another Methodist minister. The Republican National Convention featured an address by Rev. Jerry Falwell who, as noted, blessed President Ronald Reagan and his running mate, George H. W. Bush, as “God’s instruments for rebuilding America.” A great many American Jews felt so perplexed by all the God talk that the first audience Mondale and Reagan jointly addressed was a convention of B’nai B’rith, whose members wanted to hear their views on the proper role of religion in public life. As it turned out, neither party’s candidate’s views on the relationship of religion to politics mattered as much as those of Mario Cuomo, who appropriated that issue for himself.
Going into the convention, Mondale made it clear that he wanted to make history by having a “minority”—meaning a woman, an African American, or a Hispanic as a running mate. The National Organization for Women got behind New York congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro and Mondale chose her with the hope of attracting women’s votes and winning back some of the white ethnic and Catholic voters who had flocked to Reagan in 1980. Ferraro was the first woman and the first Italian American to run for the vice presidency on a major party ticket. She was also the first Catholic on either party’s ticket since Roe v. Wade and thus occasioned the first national test of the personally-opposed-but-publicly-in-favor position on abortion rights.
Shortly after the convention, Pope John Paul II selected John J. O’Connor to be the new archbishop of New York. An admiral in the Navy and former head of military chaplains, the garrulous O’Connor noted on arrival in New York that unlike politicians he had been appointed to his post, not elected. His political naiveté soon became evident during a locally televised Sunday morning press conference not long after Governor Cuomo had signed rather than vetoed a bill providing state Medicare funding for elective abortions. His rationale was fairness: the poor should not be denied a service that the rich can afford. Asked for his own views, O’Connor replied, “I don’t see how a Catholic in good conscience can vote for a politician who explicitly favors abortion.” Asked whether such a politician ought to be excommunicated, the archbishop demurred: “I’d have to think about that,” he said.
O’Connor’s comments were quickly forgotten until, two months later, Governor Cuomo summoned a New York Times reporter to his office and accused the archbishop of telling Catholics how they should vote. The way Cuomo inflated the importance of O’Connor’s words, one might have supposed the archbishop had issued a pastoral letter ordering Catholics not to vote for any pro-choice candidate. Cuomo’s rebuttal prompted the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to issue a statement saying that the hierarchy does not take positions on political candidates, and O’Connor himself released a press release saying that at no time had he said Catholics could not vote for any candidate. Even so, the verbal jousting between Cuomo and O’Connor continued in the New York media.
Why had Cuomo decided to create a public controversy where none before existed? The reasons range from the purely political to the patently psychological to the traditional ethnic conflict between Irish and Italian Catholics, and all of them were probably true. Tim Russert, at the time Cuomo’s administrative assistant, thought the governor felt snubbed at O’Connor’s inaugural mass when he gave a pulpit shout-out to Cuomo’s party rival, Mayor Ed Koch—“How’m I doin’, Mr. Mayor”—but not to Cuomo. The major reason, I believe, was that invitation to speak at Notre Dame. For an Italian grocer’s son from Queens this was an opportunity as big in its own way as his invitation to keynote the Democratic convention. And what better way to ensure the attention of the national press than to pick a fight with the archbishop (and soon-to-be cardinal) of New York? Hence his invitation to me to come fly with him to Notre Dame.
Cuomo’s speech was by turns humble and self-assured, professorial and prosecutorial, with enough caveats about the relationship between personal and public morality to make even a medieval casuist wince. At the core of his argument was the right of any politician to exercise his own prudential judgment on issues of public morality. On the issue of abortion, his own conscience told him that there was no way to reverse or even limit the effects of Roe that would be both reasonable and fair given the country’s morally pluralistic polity. Nor should Catholic politicians try. “We know,” he warned his Catholic audience, “that the price of seeking to force our beliefs on others is that they might someday force theirs on us.”
Then, as now, I found Cuomo’s line of argument fraught with pious dissembling. First, he mischaracterized the church’s teaching on abortion as simply one “belief” among others that loyal Catholics like himself accept on faith—in other words, a plank in a sectarian belief system imposed by the bishops as official church teachers. The clear implication was that if Cuomo belonged to some other church that found no evil in aborting the life of an unborn child, his personal belief as a loyal member would be just the opposite. Nowhere did the governor argue that he, Mario Cuomo, like millions of other Americans who are not Catholic or even religious, had through any kind of moral intuition or reasoning of his own concluded that abortion was morally abhorrent in and of itself. Instead, his argument inadvertently resurrected the hoariest of anti-Catholic slurs—namely, that “loyal” Catholics do not think for themselves.
But of course the governor did regard himself as a man who thinks for himself on matters of right and wrong; otherwise he would not have been invited to speak at Notre Dame. Well before the American hierarchy did, Cuomo had come to the conclusion that the death penalty is immoral and that the state had no business inflicting such a penalty even for the most heinous of crimes. This personal moral conviction was one of the reasons why Cuomo lost his bid to become mayor of New York City in 1977, a time when street crime made even an evening out in Manhattan dangerous. Even so, as governor he continued—as a matter of personal conscience—to push for a state ban on the death penalty, despite the opposition of the majority of New York’s legislators and, according to the polls, a majority of its citizens.
On abortion, however, Cuomo argued precisely the opposite. Because there was no public consensus on the morality of abortion—indeed, as he pointed out, polls showed that Catholics barely differed from the rest of Americans in their opposition to a constitutional amendment outlawing abortion altogether—it would be both politically futile and morally wrong for any Catholic politician to work to limit the reach of Roe v. Wade.
This, the second of his faulty assumptions, clearly begged the question. Those same opinion polls also showed that throughout the Seventies and Eighties a majority of adult Americans supported limiting abortion rights to the “hard” cases—rape, incest, and immediate physical harm to the mother—and rejected the right to abortion upon demand as enshrined in Roe v. Wade. In short, most Americans rejected the reasons why nine out of ten women sought abortions in the first place. This was clearly a consensus that a master politician like Cuomo might nurture to legislative effect—if he so chose. Indeed, the governor allowed that he could, “if so inclined, demand some kind of law against abortion not because my bishops say it is wrong, but because I think that the whole community, regardless of its religious beliefs, should agree on the importance of protecting life—including life in the womb, which is at the very least potentially human and should not be extinguished casually.”
This wink and nod in the pro-life direction led many of those in the audience to assume that down the line and if the political conditions were right Cuomo would do as he said he could. I took him to mean that the choice was his to make and that bishops like O’Connor should get off the backs of pro-choice Catholics like Geraldine Ferraro and himself.
Notre Dame, of course, was pleased to be the site of the only memorable speech given during the 1984 campaign. But one person in the audience with wider political experience than Cuomo could claim was not impressed by his arguments. Father Theodore Hesburgh, Notre Dame’s longtime president, had served on the U.S. Civil Rights Commission under four presidents, two Democrat and two Republican, among many other presidential appointments. He had seen John Kennedy pushed into proposing civil rights legislation when there was no consensus to support it, and he had seen Lyndon Johnson twist arms in order to pass his landmark civil rights legislation knowing it would cost his party the South. Still, Hesburgh was willing to cut Cuomo some slack. “His position on abortion is part of a whole climate of opinion in New York State, New York City and the New York Times,” he ventured. “If he were from a Prairie state he could take a different line.”12
In fact, Cuomo rarely traveled outside his home state and never stayed long when he did. He had not come to South Bend to address the locals but looked immediately to see how his speech played back east and in the national media housed there. It played very well, especially among secular intellectuals who could read it for themselves in the New York Review of Books. But neither Cuomo nor Ferraro was of help to Mondale in the November election. President Reagan won the women’s vote, the Italian American vote, and a record 55 percent of the Catholic vote. Mondale set a record, too: he garnered the fewest number of Electoral College votes in the history of presidential elections.
In 1986, Cuomo was reelected governor in a landslide and there was talk among New Yorkers that he could be the first president from their state since Franklin Roosevelt. There was a biography in the works, with publication slated to coincide with the 1988 election. Seeing this, Newsweek again put Cuomo on its cover in March 1986 with a package that examined him from four angles: as governor, as potential candidate, as an Italian American, and (my contribution) as a Catholic. He was the only major politician of his era whose ethnicity and religion were considered integral to his public persona.
When I arrived at his Manhattan office to interview him, the governor reminded me of what I had missed by not flying with him to Notre Dame. A storm had rocked the plane so severely that one of his aides—probably Russert—pulled out his rosary beads and the governor himself was moved to nervous prayer. “You should’ve come,” he said. With that opening I recited poll data, mentioned above, and asked him why he couldn’t build on that consensus of limitation to create public policies that would reduce the number of abortions, which had reached more than a million a year. “I don’t believe in polls,” he said—an odd statement since Cuomo maintained a full-time pollster on his staff. “There is no consensus. You can’t describe it. Cardinal O’Connor can’t describe it, even the Jesuits with all their subtleness can’t.”
The fundamental issue, he went on to say, was personal liberty, and reading from another speech he’d given, he said that “only when liberty intrudes on another’s right, only when it does damage to another human being, only when it takes or hurts or deprives or invades may it be limited.”
“But surely abortion damages another human being.” I interjected.”
“Not everyone agrees on when human life begins,” he shot back. “Even theologians can’t say when the soul enters the body.”
“Come on, Mario,” I said, getting into the shoot-back mood myself, “all you have to do is wait 266 days and see what you get. A human embryo does not turn out to be a cat or dog.” And so it went.13
It was obvious we had reached an impasse on the subject. The governor was not about to waste any of his political capital on aligning his public with his private conscience. But then neither was any other Catholic running for the Democratic nomination. Cuomo eventually opted not to run in 1988 but another Catholic who did, former governor Bruce Babbitt of Arizona, praised Cuomo for providing moral cover on abortion. “Geraldine [Ferraro] got in trouble on the issue because she didn’t have her facts straight,” he told a press conference. “Mario got it right.”
Bob Casey and the Politics of Inclusion
The last time I heard Mario Cuomo speak in person was at the 1992 Democratic National Convention, at Madison Square Garden. Bill Clinton chose him “as our best orator” to give the first nomination speech. A major convention theme was the party’s inclusiveness—what the Democratic National Committee called “the big tent,” which in contrast to the Republicans’ welcomed Americans, as Cuomo put it, “of whatever color, of whatever creed, of whatever sex, of whatever sexual orientation….” Down on the convention floor, where I spent my time, there were waves of placards identifying Native Americans, Hispanics of assorted Latin American backgrounds, African Americans, at least a dozen feminist groups, lesbians, transsexuals, bisexuals, plus a parade of whooping, placard-waving gays. (The sexual alliance signified by the initialism LGBT had yet to congeal.) I bought a selection of campaign buttons for my children and noticed that in every delegation I passed there was a clutch of women wearing a button for the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL). But hands-down the most provocative button featured Pennsylvania’s two-time governor Robert Casey Sr. dressed as the pope.
Bob Casey was probably the most progressive governor in the country and programmatically far more successful than either Cuomo or Clinton. He created a model school-based child-care program that offered infants and preschoolers—including poor children—full-day services so that teenage parents could stay in school and impoverished adults could work with the assurance that their children were safe. He pushed for universal health care for Pennsylvania residents. When that failed, he secured passage of a bill that provided health insurance for children whose parents could not afford it but whose incomes were too high to be eligible for public assistance. Casey also appointed the first black woman anywhere to a state supreme court and more female cabinet members than any other Democratic governor. In his first five years in office, state contracts to female- and minority-owned firms increased by more than 1,500 percent. In short, he was a model liberal Democrat.
But unlike Governors Clinton and Cuomo, Casey was also a pro-life politician who found ways to limit the sweep of Roe, a stand that made him a target of NARAL, Planned Parenthood, and other pillars of the party’s pro-choice base. In 1989, he helped push through the Pennsylvania legislature a law that limited access to abortion in four ways. It required doctors to inform women about the health risks of the procedure; it required minors to get consent from a parent or guardian prior to having an abortion; it imposed a twenty-four-hour waiting period before obtaining an abortion; and it required wives planning an abortion to give their husbands prior notice. In response, the Republicans ran a pro-choice woman against Casey, which indicated that on the abortion issue, at least, the GOP had the bigger tent. Casey won by a million votes, thereby proving—contra Cuomo—that being pro-choice was not a political necessity for every Democratic politician.
That was the message Casey took to the party platform hearings, where his views were summarily dismissed. In the run-up to the convention, Casey asked to present the delegates with a minority report on abortion. The DNC did not bother to reply. Instead, the committee invited six women to speak on abortion rights. Among them was Kathy Taylor, a pro-choice Pennsylvania Republican who had helped thwart Casey’s progressive tax reforms. At that point, I began to search out Casey for a comment. It wasn’t easy since the DNC had seated the Pennsylvania delegation in the Garden’s equivalent of the bleachers. I arrived there just before Kathy Taylor did, trailed by a camera crew sent by the DNC to film the expected confrontation. But the governor had been tipped off to the vindictive ploy and had left the convention before either Taylor or I could speak to him. Thus was an honorable man dishonored by his fellow liberals. Clearly the party’s inclusiveness excluded pro-life Democrats.
In his run for president in 1992, Bill Clinton pledged to make abortion “safe, legal, and rare.” He was as good as his word on the first two. As noted earlier, one of Clinton’s first acts as president was a series of executive orders nullifying several Reagan-era rules prohibiting federal funding of abortions. Three years later, he vetoed a bill passed by both houses of Congress that would have banned “partial-birth abortion,” a late-term procedure in which the live fetus is partially removed from the mother, exposing the head so that the skull can be pierced and crushed. Democratic senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan aptly described partial-birth abortion as “the closest thing to infanticide,” but a bill banning the ghoulish procedure would not be passed until 2003, under Republican president George W. Bush with the support of a minority of Democrats in both houses.
Abortion and the New American Way of Life
By the time of Bill Clinton’s second term, a new generation of Americans had come of age since the passage of Roe v. Wade. By then abortion rights were essential to a new social fabric woven by the sexual revolution, the decline of the family as an institution, the postponement of marriage among the college educated, and the increase of cohabitating couples at all socioeconomic levels. Already in 1988, a nationwide survey of women who had had abortions, conducted by the Guttmacher Institute, the research arm of Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in the United States, showed that most women decided to abort for a mix of three reasons: giving birth would interfere with school, work, or other responsibilities; lack of financial support; and “relationship problems” with the unborn baby’s father.14 These were not irrational reasons. But they also were not the usual reasons put forward in defense of abortion rights, which is why the Guttmacher Institute never—to my knowledge—repeated the survey.
In May 1997, U.S. News & World Report did something that neither Newsweek nor Time dared do. Editor James Fallows published a cover package on who gets an abortion and why and gave it a provocative title: “Was It Good for Us?” At the time, politicians from President Clinton on down were expressing concern for teenage mothers—“babies having babies,” as they were called. But as the magazine reported, more than half of children born out of wedlock were to women in their twenties, compared to 22 percent to teenagers. Moreover, more than half of the abortions performed each year in the United States were also to women in their twenties, most of them unmarried. In other words, this was a cover story about abortion as a social consequence of sex among unmarried young adults, and it went on to note the almost total silence on this subject from any pulpit, in the White House or in churches. The main reason for this silence was evident from the magazine’s own poll: three out of four respondents regarded nonmarital sex between consenting adults as never or almost never wrong.15
Development of sonogram technology augmented both pro-life and pro-choice positions. Ultrasound images of the developing fetus can and do cause some women to reconsider a planned abortion. On the other hand, sonograms can also detect fetal abnormalities as well as the sex of the fetus, information that a mother can use to decide whether to abort or give birth. For example, nine out of ten babies identified as having Down syndrome are now aborted. But since not all fetal abnormalities are as easily detected, some gynecologists as well as feminist theorists argued that because a newborn baby is wholly dependent on its mother, mothers ought to have a grace period of at least a month after birth to have their babies thoroughly checked out for undetected defects. In this way, the right to choose was expanded to include the right to reject the less than perfect.
The effects of Roe v. Wade extended well beyond politics. Language was one of the first areas to register the cultural divide over abortion. The New York Times and other liberal publications studiously avoided normal usages such as “unborn baby” or “unborn child” because, one gathers, these terms suggest that abortion involves the destruction of a human being. Instead they used the word fetus, which is at once more “scientific” and nonrelational, or evasive abstractions like “conceptus” or “contents of the womb.” When the debate over “partial-birth abortion” arose, the Times disallowed use of the term by its reporters and headline writers because it had first been used by opponents of the procedure, thus saddling the paper’s copy desk with vague and awkward neologisms like “a form of late-term abortion” and “a procedure that opponents call ‘partial birth abortion.’ ”16
John Kerry and the Politics of Abortion
The abortion issue emerged in yet another form during the 2004 election, when Democratic senator John Kerry of Massachusetts became the first Catholic since John F. Kennedy to be nominated by either party for president. Like fellow Massachusetts senator Edward M. Kennedy, Kerry owned a perfect record in support of abortion rights, including six straight votes against bills banning partial-birth abortion. Coming from a liberal state where most Catholics are baptized into the party as well as into the church, Kerry naively assumed that taking a personally opposed but politically pro-choice position was a safe political bet. After all, hadn’t Cuomo’s Notre Dame speech settled that issue for Catholic politicians? Kerry’s commitment to abortion rights as one of the Democrats’ nonnegotiable “core values” surfaced early when he floated the idea of asking his Senate friend and fellow Vietnam War veteran John McCain, a pro-life Republican, to be his running mate. The prospect of a bipartisan ticket excited many leading Democrats, especially after early polls showed such a ticket would trump Bush-Cheney by 14 points. The deal carried only one caveat. “Senator McCain would not have to leave his party,” Kerry explained. “He could remain a Republican, would be given some authority over selection of cabinet people. The only thing he would have to do is say, ‘I’m not going to appoint any judges who would overturn Roe v. Wade.’ ”17 McCain refused the gambit.
Kerry’s high-profile embrace of abortion rights vexed the bishops of his church. The previous November they had formed a task force on Catholics in Public Life and agreed not to release their guidelines until after the 2004 election, lest they be accused of trying to influence its outcome. But this restraint did not apply to individual bishops as heads of their own dioceses, and a half-dozen (out of 194) published guidelines of their own. The archbishop of Newark, New Jersey, issued a pastoral letter asking all pro-choice politicians not to present themselves for Holy Communion at any of the churches under his jurisdiction. Another in Missouri directed his priests specifically to refuse Communion to candidate Kerry if he campaigned in the state. A third bishop in Colorado Springs, Colorado, went even further: in a pastoral letter he directed Catholics who knowingly vote for candidates supporting abortion rights, euthanasia, same-sex marriage, or embryonic stem-cell research to confess their sins before returning to the Eucharist. But these were outliers. The majority of the nation’s Catholic bishops opposed, as Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington, D.C., put it, “a confrontation at the altar rail with the sacred body of the Lord Jesus in my hand.”
This intra-Catholic squabble probably embarrassed the bishops more than it did Kerry, who could and did argue that on the other social and economic issues dear to the Catholic hierarchy he and his fellow Democrats were closer to the bishops than the Republicans were. And like Ted Kennedy and other patrician Catholics in the party, Kerry exuded an air of confidence that in due time the bishops would catch up with the party’s more enlightened views on abortion as well. In the meantime, though, Kerry became the first Catholic presidential candidate to lose the Catholic vote, and with it a close election.
Abortion was not the only or even the most consequential issue for what pollsters identified as “values voters.” Same-sex marriage, an issue new to a presidential election, was far more prominent, and in all six states where measures supporting such unions were on the ballot the initiatives were defeated. Nor were Catholic bishops the only religious voices heard. At least fifty organizations—some of them secular, most of them religious—worked to advance the moral agenda of one or the other major parties. Indeed, in the morning-after judgments of many liberal and conservative pundits, Bush won on the back of a zealous and intolerant Fundamentalist Christian horde that Garry Wills likened in an Election Day essay in the New York Times to Al Qaeda. In fact, postelection analysis showed that Bush marshaled a coalition of constituencies, any one of which could claim to have ensured his narrow victory over Kerry.
The Retro Campaign of 2012
How important, then, is the religious vote? According to political scientist John Green, the acknowledged dean of studies on the faith factor in American politics, religion typically turns out to be a more powerful variable than gender, age, income, or class in predicting how a citizen will vote in a presidential election.
It wasn’t always thus. Prior to the McGovern revolution in the Democratic Party, the Roe v. Wade decision, and the rise of the Religious Right, most white Protestants voted Republican and most Jews and urban Catholics voted Democrat. It was only in the late Seventies that moral issues like abortion and same-sex marriage began to rival and at times supersede issues of domestic and foreign policy, thus making religion a factor to reckon with on Election Day.18 Until then, as Senator Eugene McCarthy (the only theologically sophisticated Catholic who ever ran for president) liked to say, only two kinds of religion were tolerated in a presidential election: “vague beliefs strongly affirmed and strong beliefs vaguely acknowledged.” McCarthy’s witticism bespoke the genial religiosity of presidents like Dwight Eisenhower (vague expression) and Ronald Reagan (vague beliefs), but for different reasons it also characterized the candidates for president in 2012.
Republican Mitt Romney was the candidate with strong beliefs. He was not the first Mormon to run for president of the United States: that honor belongs to the Mormon Prophet himself, Joseph Smith Jr., who mounted a brief and little-noticed independent campaign in 1844 before his murder a few months later. At the outset of the 2012 campaign season, a poll by the Pew Research Center found that 51 percent of Americans said they knew very little or nothing at all about Mormonism, and Romney chose to keep it that way. He referred all reporters’ questions about his religious faith to the church’s public information office. To talk openly about his religious convictions would certainly have led to a distracting public discussion of the deep differences between Mormonism and the biblical beliefs of the party’s core religious constituency. Which was too bad, I thought, because the story of his polygamous grandfather’s flight from the law, his hazardous new life in Mexico, and the family’s return to the United States and eventual prosperity was just as compelling as Barack Obama’s family narrative. In any case, Romney’s strategy worked, even though he lost. Right after the election, a second Pew poll showed that 51 percent of Americans still knew little or nothing about the LDS church.19
Barack Obama’s religion problem was the opposite. As in the 2008 election he had to convince skeptics, including a majority of Democrats, that he really is a Christian. The president was not raised in a church. Indeed, having grown up in a Muslim country (Indonesia) and with Hussein as a middle name, Obama went into the final three months of the campaign with at least 20 percent of registered voters thinking his religious commitment was to Islam. Nor did it help that, like George W. Bush, the president and his family chose to worship out of public view at the nondenominational chapel at Camp David.
But what kind of Christian is he? The more Obama mentioned “our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,” the more obvious it became that he is uncomfortable with Evangelicalism’s emphasis on personal witness. Perhaps his most forthcoming statement came in 2008 at a faith and politics forum sponsored by Rick Warren, where Obama declared, “My Bible tells me that when God sent His only son to earth, it was to heal the sick and comfort the weary and feed the hungry and clothe the naked and befriend the outcast and redeem those who had strayed from righteousness.” The language was right out of the nineteenth-century Social Gospel movement and in perfect key with the Democratic Party’s Methodist moment.
Who’s Got a “God Problem”?
Just before Obama’s first run for president, John Green published a study of voting patterns that vindicated the view that the Democrats have a “God problem.” According to his analysis of survey data, those voters who say they attend religious services once a week or more, or pray frequently and regard religion as important or very important in their lives, most often vote Republican. Conversely, those who rarely or never attend worship services, seldom or never pray, and say religion is of little or no importance in their lives typically vote Democrat. Moreover, Green found, this new “religion gap” cut through the various communities of faith, whether Evangelical or Catholic, Jewish or African American, Mormon or mainline Protestant. The key to the religious vote was not just religious identity but the intensity of a voter’s religious commitment.20
Yet the question remains: in a presidential election, how significant is the vote of those who are serious in their practice of religion? More recent survey data finds that at most one voter in four fits this description. We’re not talking about Mother Teresas here, just ordinary religiously convicted voters whose moral and spiritual values are important factors in deciding how to vote. On the other end of the spectrum are the 23 percent of Americans who identify as either atheists or agnostics (about 6 percent) or who simply do not identify with any religious institution or tradition. Two-thirds of these nonaffiliated voters are millennials who, unlike previous generations, no longer feel constrained to claim a religious identity just because they were baptized or sent to church as children. As of 2014, the nonaffiliated represented 24 percent of the Democratic vote—a constituency larger than the African American, feminist, or any other of the party’s core constituencies. What these numbers suggest is that while religion may still be a significant factor in congressional elections, Democrats do not need to capture the “religious vote” in order to win the White House. Republicans, on the other hand, cannot win without it. In politics, that may be the real God problem.