Religion and politics, now

More than half a century after John F. Kennedy dismissed the role that his Catholic faith would play when he was elected president, today’s candidates for the nation’s highest executive office still have to navigate the electoral implications of religion. In a talk sponsored by Harvard Divinity School (HDS), four religious scholars took up the question of “Religion and the Election: Does it Matter?”

The panelists suggested that while the faith of any individual candidate seems less important now to the electorate, Americans remain attracted to candidates whose values mesh with their own views, which are largely informed by specific religious traditions. Religion can help to shed light on important election issues, the panelists agreed, but a couple of them worried that religion can also be a means of defining voters too narrowly.

Religion and election issues 

For panelist J. Bryan Hehir, politics and religion “certainly should be” connected in domestic policy, foreign policy, and health care. Those issues are part of the secular debate, he said, but should also be discussed in “religious moral terms.” Concern for the poor, a tenet of the Catholic Church that focuses on the welfare of society’s powerless, is useful when thinking about debt reduction and fiscal policy, said Hehir. The same principle is helpful in foreign policy and in nonproliferation, an issue “inherently discriminatory” when viewed through an ethical lens. “We’ve got to deal with the question, in the wider perspective of the world,” said Hehir, the Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor of the Practice of Religion and Public Life at Harvard Kennedy School, “of how to reduce the privileges that come with nuclear weapons.” Religion can also offer a multidimensional perspective on health care, he said, including the “social justice” question of medical coverage in the United States.
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