Faith Works 10-25-24

Faith Works 10-25-24
Jeff Gill

Religious backgrounds and anticipated outcomes
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In the U.S. Constitution, it's spelled out fairly specifically in Article VI, the third clause:

"The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States."

"No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust."

This is effectively the end of the core, original draft of the Constitution as it was approved in 1787 and referred to the states for ratification; there is one more section, Article VII, but it's all about how the ratification would take place. So in a functional, practical sense, this is the culmination of the U.S. Constitution: "no religious test shall ever be required" for public service.

The pragmatic tension here is that while the Founders made it clear the law can never require a religious affirmation or status as a qualification, that's not quite the same as whether the voters could apply one in their own private decision making about how to vote.

We've had Unitarians (the Adams family) and Catholics (Kennedy and Biden), all manner of Protestants, and even Anabaptists (Hoover, Eisenhower, and Nixon, though they each had journeys away from their roots). Mostly Christians of various sorts, but as yet no Lutherans or Pentecostals or Orthodox incumbents.

The quasi-incumbent, Vice President Kamala Harris, is a long-time member of an American Baptist Church in San Francisco; her pastor, Amos Brown, was a student in the one college class Martin Luther King, Jr. ever taught, and Brown has been noted for his ecumenical engagements throughout his preaching career. Harris's mother is from India, but Hinduism was not a part of their lives growing up by all accounts. Her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, is out of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America tradition.

Also semi-incumbent, former President Donald Trump has roots in Presbyterianism, with a mother from Scotland who grew up speaking Gaelic as her first language; his parents later joined Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan which was the congregation led by Norman Vincent Peale, affiliated with the Reformed Church in America, and Trump's first marriage was in that church, but he continued to claim the Presbyterian faith in which he was confirmed for many years. In 2020 he stated he was "non-denominational Christian." His running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance, was baptized and confirmed in the Catholic Church in 2019, after having a childhood exposure to what he calls "conservative, evangelical Christianity."

In the spirit of the Constitution, I'd say none of this should either qualify or bar any of the leading candidates from their offices. In the spirit of democratic inquiry, I find it a good sign that we have such a range of religious backgrounds in the two top tickets. A non-Christian might say "not such a wide range, Jeff" and a non-believer secularist might call this no range at all, since there is no avowed atheist or agnostic among these four: duly noted.

I would never say a non-religious person couldn't be a good civic leader, but I think it's still true that if you have no religious experience in your portfolio of life involvements, you may be missing something many of your fellow citizens find necessary. There shall be no religious test for public office, but I am reassured that all our leading candidates know something about how faith works for many Americans.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he has his own ideas about what qualifies someone for public office, and it ain't church-going. Tell him what you think they are at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.