Page 267 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

256 Public religious culture post-09/11/01

attention devoted to religion by the campaigns and the media. Early in the
cycle, stories about the “religion gap” began to surface, and a seemingly
confused press had some difficulty moving beyond a rather superficial
reading of the situation. Clearly, Evangelicalism found a place at the table
in the second Bush administration in an unprecedented way. Press
coverage, however, showed a tendency to emphasize Evangelical influence
in a kind of self-fulfilling way, concentrating on some of the most powerful
“social issues” that linked Evangelicals and conservative Catholics,
primarily abortion and gay marriage. In a National Public Radio commen-
tary eight months before, Daniel Schorr had predicted the significance of
religion in the upcoming contest, and illustrated the range of ways, from
concrete to metaphoric, that “religion” might be read as an element of
political discourse.
“I believe in an America where the separation between church and
state is absolute.” That was presidential candidate John Kennedy
before an association of Protestant ministers in Houston in 1960
assuring them that being a Catholic would not affect his policies. I
doubt whether a candidate would speak with such secular absolutism
today when religion has become a familiar part of campaigning.
President Bush has spoken of his religious journey starting in 1986,
when he gave up drinking and committed his heart to Jesus Christ.
Before him, there had been President Reagan, who spoke in almost
prophetic terms of the Soviet Union as “the evil empire.” 60
Consistent with many commentators, Schorr referred to a time when reli-
gion was assumed to be outside the bounds of political discourse. An
“elephant in the room,” in the 1960 election, it had been taken off the
table by Kennedy’s strong affirmation of secularism. To Schorr and many
others, the 2004 election had changed that, and religion would more and
more be part of the mix.
In the end, religion was not just part of the discourse; it was taken to
have made the difference in the election. While any of the various compo-
nents of the Bush coalition could be said to have played the critical role, a
higher turnout of Evangelicals and voters who listed “moral values” as their
primary motivation for voting was widely looked to as the most significant
difference between the 2000 and 2004 plebiscites. Twenty-two percent of
those responding to exit polls identified values as their top concern,
compared with 20 percent who listed the economy. The prominence of reli-
gion and values may have been an artifact of the polling, but the underlying
reality of a deepening and strengthening relationship between religion and
politics seems to have become a fact of political life in the US.
Nicholas Kristof summed up some of the prevailing concerns about this
turn of events in a New York Times Column.