August 9 1999

ARTICLE TOOLS

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Even before the current crop of presidential hopefuls admitted they were running for office, they began delivering religious messages. George W. Bush and Elizabeth Dole told audiences how they came to faith. Gary Bauer, whose faith commitment was well known, was provoked by the Littleton tragedy (wrote Fred Barnes in the Weekly Standard) to abandon his plan to avoid political speech about God. And Al Gore stopped by a Salvation Army facility to issue a public call for "a new partnership" between government and "faith-based organizations."

The nattering classes could not keep quiet: Harvard's Elaine Kamarck, a senior Gore adviser, told the Boston Globe his comments were part of a campaign to "take God back" for the Democrats in 2000. Hannah Rosin explained to Washington Post readers how Bush's testimony made him "pre-forgiven" for whatever might later be revealed about his past life. And novelist and biographer A. N. Wilson took up his antireligion cudgel on the pages of the New York Times.

None of the candidates' statements were odd or offbeat. They all merely said what believers have long said to other believers about being once lost and now found, and about the relevance of belief in God to moral improvement. Nevertheless, noted William McGurn in the National Review, "While the denominational affiliations of Mrs. Dole, Gore, Bush, and Bauer are well within the American mainstream, their every utterance about faith is treated by the press as exotic, outside the pale."

Wilson, author of a scurrilous 1992 book on Jesus, did not see candidate religion as normal. He called it "a strange prospect that the United States, whose Constitution so carefully separated the roles of church and state … should have politicians ...