After Joe Biden called Vice President Kamala Harris to tell her that he was dropping out of the race for president, “one of the first calls Harris made was to her longtime pastor,” The Rev. Amos C. Brown of San Francisco’s Third Baptist Church, Mississippi Today reported in July.
The vice president was raised in an interfaith household, and she grew up going to both a Black Baptist church and a Hindu temple. She is married to an observant Jewish man. Though her faith is not something she discusses frequently, she has a lifelong, seemingly profound connection to religion. She spoke movingly to the National Baptist Convention in 2022 about attending 23rd Avenue Church of God in Oakland, Calif. In that speech, she directly connected her administration’s policy positions — on health care, the child tax credit and civil rights — to her faith.
For example, when Harris explained the administration’s effort to cut down on health care debt and get prescription drug prices under control, she said, “the church has a role to play, but so does our government. Because we all here know God calls on us — God calls on us to help heal the sick.”
In a close election year, with an opponent who does not appear to have sincere religious convictions of his own, I see an opportunity for Harris to reclaim faith for Democrats. Because of her unique background, I think Harris could talk about her own faith without alienating the big voting bloc of nonreligious Democrats. While white Protestants and Catholics overwhelmingly support Republicans, Black Protestants, Hispanic Catholics and non-Christians are more likely to be Democrats, and getting them excited about voting for Harris matters.
Neither Harris nor Donald Trump talks about faith much on the campaign trail, Axios pointed out on Monday. Though Biden, who is Catholic, appears to have attended church more regularly than any other president in recent history, not many Americans are aware of it — only 13 percent of Americans think he’s “very religious,” according to Pew Research. In general, when Democratic candidates talk about their faith, voters gloss over it.
That’s in part because over the past several decades conservatives have been so successful in tying the Republican Party to the Christian brand, said Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University and a former pastor. “What we’re seeing is religion has become conservative and nonreligion has become liberal.”
Yet Trump has no consistent record of church attendance as an adult. He gets Bible verses wrong and whatever vision of religion he seems to have is based on vengeance. He switched religious affiliations while in office — he came in as a Presbyterian and later identified as a nondenominational Christian. But he has never been afraid to openly court Christians, especially white evangelicals.
As Tim Alberta, the author of “The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism,” told my colleague Jane Coaston in December, Trump forged this alliance during his first run for president. “Trump was promising these people that he would not only deliver them policy wins on abortion and religious freedom and culture war issues but that he would also give them a seat at the table, that he would empower them in ways they had not been politically empowered before,” Alberta said.
Trump intimated that these promises would be permanent earlier this year, when he memorably said to a conservative convention filled with the faithful, “I love you, Christians. I’m a Christian. I love you, you got to get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again.”
Despite the many cursed aspects of Trump’s personal life and years of hateful statements that wouldn’t be welcome at Bible study, “Most Republican voters consider former President Donald Trump to be a person of faith, putting him ahead of other more vocally religious individuals, like his former vice president, Mike Pence,” according to a survey done earlier this year by HarrisX for Deseret.
That same poll shows that only 10 percent of Democrats and 24 percent of independents think that Trump is a person of faith. This leaves a lot of room for Harris to talk about her faith and connect it to her political convictions in a way that is appealing to religious moderates who may be on the fence about her. Some Black Christians, who have become less likely to identify as liberal, may be particularly persuadable.
Harris also has an opportunity to show how some conservatives are using religion to divide rather than unite. She can talk about how they’re trying to dismantle the separation of church and state in Oklahoma public schools, and about the far-right Christian movement to restrict I.V.F. and contraception.
Terrence Johnson, a professor of African American religious studies at Harvard Divinity School, told me that he sees Harris’s public expressions of faith as part of the inclusive and welcoming spirit of the Black church. “Clearly, she’s acknowledging that faith is kind of universal category,” he said, adding that her self-characterization as a “joyful warrior” seems to be part of her Christian identity.
Johnson also mentioned the way Harris has been able to articulate her support for reproductive rights within a faith tradition. As she said in that 2022 speech to the National Baptist Convention: “As extremists work to take away the freedom of women to make decisions about their own bodies, faith leaders are taking a stand, knowing one does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held religious beliefs to agree that a woman should have the ability to make decisions about her own body and not have her government tell her what to do.” Because Black Protestants are far more supportive of abortion rights than white Protestants are, Harris has more room to tie her faith to her social stances without being accused of hypocrisy.
Many Black church leaders have been publicly supportive of Harris already. According to reporting by the Religion News Service in August, “more than 16,000 people attended a ‘Win With the Black Church Kick-Off Organizing Call,’ which fund-raised for Black Church PAC, an organization that encourages individual Black church leaders to influence the outcome of national, state and local elections.”
And there are some white religious moderates in places like the Midwest and Pennsylvania that Harris should be trying to appeal to, said Jason Shelton, a professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Arlington and the author of “The Contemporary Black Church.” He cited the pro-union Catholic voters who may have moved more toward Trump in recent years but are still potentially gettable by Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz.
Walz is a Lutheran — a fact that he mentioned when speaking to the North America’s Building Trades Unions earlier this year. “Because we’re good Minnesota Lutherans, we have a rule. If you do something good and talk about it, it no longer counts. So what you have to do is get someone else to talk about you,” he said, adding, “But I’ll tell you what, I’ll talk about the building trades in Minnesota.”
Because Republicans have been so ostentatious in their embrace of the faithful, Democrats like Walz, in their humility, have ceded ground. There’s still more than a month left for Harris and Walz to make an honest and genuine appeal to religious voters without boasting, division or rancor. Instead, they can talk about the values their religious upbringings taught them, such as supporting working people and caring for the sick. They can use faith as a way to articulate a positive vision for the future. As Harris said in 2022: “Let us continue to have faith in God, in our country and in each other, because together we will continue to usher in the dawn.”
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The post Kamala Harris Is a Woman of Faith. She Shouldn’t Be Afraid to Show It. appeared first on New York Times.
