November/December 2000 | Contents

GOD AND MAN ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL

BY CHRISTOPHER HANSON

In the modern era of "objective" journalism, political campaign reporting at its best has been a rational, empirical process. Journalists press candidates for specifics on their programs and probe for inconsistencies and weaknesses in their policies. They sniff out lies and dig for evidence to expose them. They tell us exactly how and by what techniques campaigns are propagandizing the voters.

But in at least one important respect, 2000 has not been a traditional campaign year. Candidates have injected religion into the debate more often and with greater fervor than in any presidential contest in memory. In the face of these religious stirrings, the standard empirical approach to covering candidate claims has revealed its limitations, which is hardly surprising. How could reporters be expected to verify a candidate's claim to be a believer? How could reporters effectively apply rational analysis and enterprise reporting to assertions of divine instruction? Even a dogged investigator like Michael Isikoff would be hard-pressed to prove or disprove the existence of God. And a flexible deadline wouldn't help.

Despite the difficulties, news organizations have made a serious effort to cover the religious side of the present race for the White House. These efforts and their shortcomings suggest lessons for future coverage. I'll get to these after a brief review of the course of the religious revival in campaign 2000.

One got an inkling of what was to come as early as May 1999, when Vice President Al Gore declared in a speech: "Faith is the center of my life . . . . I don't wear it on my sleeve." Sleeve display was not long in coming, however. In a July 12 Washington Post profile, the Democratic front-runner said he always asked himself a simple question when faced with tough decisions -- "What would Jesus do?" or WWJD for short. The candidate later declared himself born again to an audience of millions in a December 1999 interview on 60 Minutes.

Gore was only the beginning. When Republican presidential candidates squared off in Iowa in December, a debate panelist asked them to name their favorite philosopher.

"Christ, because he changed my heart," replied the GOP front-runner, Governor George W. Bush, who in June proclaimed "Jesus Day" in Texas. Jesus is not generally categorized as a mere philosopher, but one got the impression that Bush was primed and that other questions might have drawn the same response. (Who is your favorite c.e.o.? Celebrity? Political consultant?) In any event, candidates Orrin Hatch, Gary Bauer, and others rushed to echo W.'s praise of Jesus. Religious testimonials became a significant news angle in the debate story.

It may be mere coincidence, but two candidates who were slow to sing hallelujah lost out in the primaries -- Republican John McCain, who said in the debate that his favorite philosopher was Theodore Roosevelt, and Democrat Bill Bradley, who tried to play by the old rules, insisting that religious beliefs were private. Later, however, Bradley tossed out the occasional platitude about his belief in God; and McCain, the salty ex-naval aviator, pointed out in campaign ads that he had preached sermons to fellow P.O.W.s in the Hanoi Hilton. But by March the two latecomers were history.

The campaign's religious rhythm quickened in August when nominee Gore threw the Old Testament into the mix, selecting Connecticut's Senator Joe Lieberman to be the first Jewish member of a major-party ticket. Declaring that religious values had to play a greater role in political life, Lieberman, an observant modern Orthodox Jew, drew enthusiastic crowds (and extensive, largely favorable news coverage), even in the Bible Belt. When he asserted that "morality cannot be maintained without religion," however, he drew criticism from the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, which warned that government should never support "the religious over the nonreligious." Lieberman then acknowledged that an atheist could be a good president and seemed to temper his religious rhetoric slightly. Even so, he evidently "boosted the Democrats' standing with voters on the moral issue by 7 percentage points," The Washington Post reported September 30, citing its own poll.

What were reporters to make of Lieberman and his message, and the power of religious themes in the campaign overall?

Journalists wrestling with these questions tended to agree on some key points, according to my informal survey of news analyses of the religious issue in five major newspapers (The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, USA Today). They agreed that years of unprecedented prosperity had left voters yearning for some deeper meaning in life. They agreed that years of being exposed to one Clintonian ethical lapse after another had left voters bitter about current presidential mores. (Sixty-two percent said more religion is needed in public life, according to the Post's September poll.) The newspaper analyses also agreed that the candidates, by stressing their own religious values, were responding to the public's spiritual yearning and at the same time working to inoculate themselves against the presidential-image blight The Man From Hope had spread.

One might add that neither Bush nor Gore was a candidate of strong ideological fervor, so each was vulnerable to being tagged an opportunist, offering the country little more than his own ambition. Religion was the antidote, a way of ennobling their respective campaigns. As the historian Daniel Boorstin wrote in The Image, "One of the oldest of man's visions was the flash of divinity in the great man. He seemed to appear for reasons men could not understand, and the secret of his greatness was God's secret . . . ." If the two campaigns could not generate a flash of divinity, they were at least trying to create a small spark.

Seeds of this new religious campaigning can also be found in the relentless probing by the press corps itself. Since The Miami Herald launched its investigation of Gary Hart and Donna Rice in 1987, "character reporting" has expanded to squeeze out all but the tiniest zone of privacy for candidates. They now fear exposure of any unfavorable detail of their lives. They vie to counter the potential damage by shoveling out intimate details that voters will see as positive -- the declaration of religious faith, once a largely private matter, being the most striking example in this campaign.

And the hardest for journalists to handle. Ignoring such a declaration because it is, at some level, unverifiable and propagandistic would be shirking the duty to report what happens. Reporting such a declaration uncritically would make the media mere conduits for the candidate's "message." Questioning the sincerity of the candidate's faith would be unfair, unless the reporter could document insincerity -- an impossible task in most cases. In short, covering the religion angle is highly frustrating. But as an old-time journalist once put it, "That which ye sow also shall ye reap, and the fool shall be servant to the wise in heart."

Despite the frustrations, traditional fact-based skeptical reporting can be of some use in covering politicians' God-talk. Here are some guidelines to keep in mind.

PUSH to get candidates to spell out connections between their religious declarations and their political policies. It was not difficult to establish such connections back when the Religious Right was at the height of its power. That movement's candidates sought the repeal of Roe v. Wade, supported school prayer and the teaching of "creation science," and so on. But with the Religious Right fragmented between GOP candidates in 2000, George W. Bush was able to duck some of the right's most controversial agenda items. He was able to use religious rhetoric to rally support not only from conservatives, but from moderates.

Gore, meanwhile, countered an elitist image by casting himself as one of the tens of millions of mainstream "born-again" Americans. Both Bush and Gore agree that government should help faith-based charities minister to the poor and that issue was amply covered by the press this year. But typically the candidates worked to blur any policy implications in their religious rhetoric, to squeeze the ideology out of revivalist politics. Religion, in short, moved from being a polarizing force (mainly on the right) to being the latest version of "mom 'n' apple pie" politics. Religion became a weapon in the see-saw battle between Democrats and Republicans to capture the "mainstream" flag.

It is always incumbent on reporters to try to expose platitudes and irrelevancies for what they are, and to tease out campaign agendas and policy implications that lie hidden in revivalist politics. To some extent, media tried to do that this year, writing extensively, for instance, about the apparent strategic rationales behind campaign God-talk. On one occasion, Tim Russert boldly asked Bush -- who as governor has presided over some 140 executions, including that of the born-again Christian Karla Faye Tucker -- if Jesus supported capital punishment. Bush squirmed away, passing the judgment buck to Higher Authority, but seeing him do so was no doubt instructive for Meet the Press viewers. More of this sort of questioning was called for, especially on TV forums with large audiences. Take Gore's "What Would Jesus Do?" mantra, for example, and his support for Clinton's bombing campaign in Kosovo. Imagine the questions a Bernard Shaw might have asked: "What targets would Jesus have selected? How many 'missions' would He have dispatched?"

PRESS candidates to address other implications of their religious rhetoric. I would like, for instance, to have seen reporters probe whether born-again Protestantism is necessarily comparable with the candidates' rhetoric of inclusion and inter-denominational bliss. Media did make much of Bush's visit to Bob Jones University, whose president is an ardent anti-papist and whose code of conduct has barred interracial dating. Beyond that, a suitable question to Gore and Bush might have been: "Given your belief in salvation by conversion through a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, don't you have to maintain that Joe Lieberman is barred from the Kingdom of Heaven because he is Jewish?" Bush once dealt with such a question as a candidate for governor. He passed the buck to God, saying that George W. Bush was not the one to decide on salvation -- but adding, paradoxically, that the New Testament did seem to say that only true Christians could make it into heaven. A reporter should have pressed the question again, and harder, in 2000. If a candidate's faith is deemed relevant to the voters by the candidate himself, then the broad implications of his beliefs deserve to be covered.

PROBE to determine how well the contenders understand the theologies they profess. Several columnists challenged Bush's statement that "our nation is chosen by God and commissioned by history to be the model to the world of justice and inclusion and diversity without division." Moderator Lehrer might have pressed the matter in one of the live presidential debates, asking, "What is the scriptural basis for your claim that God selected America to be such a model? Did God make that decision before or after the Emancipation Proclamation? Before or after Vietnam tore the country apart? Before or after the race riots in Los Angeles that followed acquittal of police officers in the Rodney King beating case? Are you saying we are now the very model of justice and unity?"  

AVOID stereotyping. Most coverage of Gore's selection of Lieberman did so, but there were some disturbing exceptions, which the Anti-Defamation League brought to cjr's attention. An editorial in the Amsterdam News, which has a largely African-American readership, declared: "Gore and his minions did it for the money . . . . The word went out all over the world to Jews in every pocket of civilization and near-civilization, that the major protector of Jews in this world, the American government, is now available. But in order to get it, you've got to buy it." The column was exceptional for its bile and crudeness, but caricaturing was apparent in some other coverage as well. The New York Post ran the Yiddish expression OY VEY! as a massive headline on its August 7 front page.

WNBC, a New York City network affiliate with a huge audience, ran a story strongly implying that Lieberman had violated Jewish law by campaigning on Tisha b'av, a holy day commemorating the Jews' endurance despite their oppressors. The piece quoted the rabbi at the modern Orthodox Lincoln Square Synagogue saying that Lieberman should have been in temple. The broadcast went on to report that Lieberman would have to miss eight days of campaigning because of high holy days and the sabbath. The insinuation of the piece, inadvertent perhaps but surely unfair, was that Joe Lieberman is either a bad Jew or a bad candidate, or both. By singling out issues of Judaic observance, the report reinforced the view that Jews are alien, not like "the rest of America." To my knowledge, there was no comparable scrutiny of the religious observance of other candidates -- no investigations of whether Gore or Bush could be violating the Christian sabbath or how much money the GOP vice presidential candidate, Dick Cheney, was putting in the collection plate.

The problem of singling out Jews also came up when Lehrer asked the following question during the August 9 NewsHour on PBS: "Is it safe for [viewers] to expect that when, if [Lieberman] becomes vice president of the United States, that he's confronted with a government situation, that he would go first to Jewish law or Jewish custom or his beliefs or his orthodox Jewish beliefs in making that decision?" One of Lehrer's guests, the Columbia University journalism professor, Samuel Freedman, author of Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle For the Soul of American Jewry, replied that the question was "nonsensical and ill-grounded," like the questions in 1960 about whether Catholic candidate John Kennedy would take his orders from the pope. In fact, Lehrer's question was not nonsensical: Kennedy, after all, insisted that his political decisions would be based strictly on secular considerations; Lieberman, on the other hand, was urging that faith play a big part in political life, which made the question fair game potentially. The question was indeed "ill-grounded" under the circumstances, however, because similar questions were not being asked of the gentile candidates. Lehrer's query thus reinforced the notion that Jews are strange outsiders, demanding special scrutiny.

Beyond the question of equal treatment is the matter of that small sphere of what remains private. Unless there is a connection between a politician's means of worship (or lack thereof) and public performance, one would hope that reporters would respect some zone of religious privacy, even given today's obsession with character. Do we want WNBC to determine whether the Reform party's candidate, Pat Buchanan, a Catholic, is making it to confession -- or even to plant a hidden camera to see if he is doing his penance? ("Buchanan 'Hail Mary' shortfall! Film at 11!") Do we want Geraldo Rivera to investigate whether Lieberman's wife, Hadassah, is obeying Orthodox law by taking the prescribed ritual baths at a mikvah to "cleanse" herself each month? These might seem far-fetched examples, but the principle behind them seems very much in keeping with the Tisha b'av "exclusive." Where is the link to performance in office?

SHUN hagiography. There is no clear connection between religiosity and effectiveness in office. Even so, the year 2000 witnessed something new in campaign reporting -- massive newspaper profiles that chronicled the spiritual progress of the candidates. Some of these profiles came close to puffery. Consider, for instance, The Washington Post's sixty-seven-paragraph July 24 piece on Bush's path to salvation and personal growth. It recounts how the candidate transformed himself into a serious public servant with the help of Jesus Christ. Once, W. was something of a wiseacre and a lightweight, the Post tells us. When the discussion leader in his Bible study group asked him about the day's reading -- "What happened to the Jew on the way to Jericho?" -- the unprepared Bush could only quip: "He got his butt whipped." Once, W. drank to excess. But with the help of his Bible group and the encouragement of the Rev. Billy Graham, W. grew in spirit and depth until he had his epiphany, his "born again" conversion. He quit drinking and smoking, seized control of his life, grew dramatically more mature. "Bush was now changed," the article declared. He was ready to face the mounting challenges of business and politics with the help of personal prayer. "Mostly, it's just him and his Bible," a Bush associate told the Post.

Wait a minute. Bush might indeed be a fundamentally changed man, but how can we really know? The only sources quoted to back up this thesis of transformation were Bush, his friends, and his family. These are not exactly unbiased witnesses. Indeed, the Post's story-line was the very one the Bush campaign itself is anxious to promote -- in order to assure voters that the candidate's barstool days are over and that his finger on the nuclear trigger would be cautious and controlled, not impulsive or shaky.

Since heavy drinking does affect performance in office, perhaps the newspaper should not have taken the word of the Bush camp at face value. A pinch of skepticism would have been welcome. At the very least, the Post should have acknowledged directly that it was accepting the idea of a New Bush based on the testimony of interested parties and on limited personal observation -- that is, essentially only on faith. As H. L. Mencken once wrote, "There are times and occasions . . . when a newspaper's duty to its readers requires it to tell them not only what has happened but also . . . what is merely said. What I contend is simply that such quasi-news, such half-baked and still dubious news, should be printed for exactly what it is." In other words, make clear to readers what the reporter does -- and doesn't -- know.

The words "half-baked" and "dubious" are perhaps too pejorative in the present context. "Unknown" would be an appropriate substitute, for deep personal change based on born-again faith is surely too existential an experience for any uninitiated outsider to comprehend, let alone verify. Even so, outward signs of personal transformation can be investigated by traditional news methods up to a point. Does everyone who knew Bush agree that he is a new man? Has he ever fallen off the wagon? Somewhere there might be evidence to help answer these questions.

Of course, there are limits to scientific or "objective" reporting and these extend beyond the facts. The empirical journalist's mind-set is not just skeptical but often almost hostile to faith-based beliefs. Mencken himself dismissed fundamentalists as dupes of superstition who were blind to hard, scientific facts. Many national political reporters -- including yours truly and many of my colleagues -- brought a similar bias toward coverage of the Religious Right in the 1980s. We had a hard time taking seriously or respecting the political legitimacy of those who believed, for instance, that God created the world in seven literal, twenty-four-hour days. In the interest of fairness, any reporter covering religion in politics should try taking stock of his or her own prejudices and assumptions, including, perhaps, even the assumption that "objective" reporting is a method of truth seeking. It can, of course, be viewed alternatively as an assertion of faith -- faith that skeptical inquiry will result in sounder voting. By this light, uncovering facts and placing them before the voters is an act of prayer -- a prayer that the journalist hopes will be answered in voting booths across America on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November.

Christopher Hanson, a contributing editor to CJR, teaches journalism at the University of Maryland. He worked for twenty years as a reporter in Washington, D.C., and overseas.