Running on Their Faith
Bush and Gore are making religion a big issue, and praying voters buy the sermon
But does the public crave this much talk about faith? While polling suggests a resurgence of religiosity, history suggests an aversion to gaudy displays of faith. Democratic contender Bill Bradley, for one, is hoping for a backlash. At every turn, Bradley has declined to discuss his beliefs (Page 30) and, according to an aide, he hopes to turn his silence into an electoral virtue: "There's still a sizable segment of our party that isn't comfortable with politicians who wear Jesus on their sleeves."
Bush and Gore, baby boomers both, have led parallel spiritual lives. In the postwar decades when they grew up, faith played a decreasing role in American life. In the '60s, when they came of age, old orthodoxies (religious and otherwise) weren't cool. Then they acquired children, midlife anxiety, and spiritual hunger.
Old-time religion. Their stories begin in homes largely devoid of religious fervor. True, in eighth grade, Bush had been an altar boy. But there wasn't much talk of God at the Bush family dinner table, friends say. Likewise, Al Gore Sr., an old-fashioned populist and nominal Baptist, didn't much trust big institutions, including organized religion. But both young men walked between two worlds--the Northeastern elite and the Bible Belt. In his days playing on the streets of Midland, Texas, how could Bush avoid fundamentalism? And during his summers in Tennessee, Gore caught a glimpse of old-time religion. "I attended revivals regularly," he told U.S. News. "I felt very much a part of it." In conversation with friends--let alone reporters--Gore speaks only elliptically of his most powerful spiritual experiences. He says: "As a young child I made a commitment in prayer." Then as a Harvard junior in 1968--the height of the counterculture protest movement--he was born again: "I felt a transformational relationship with my own interpretation of God, and Christ in God."
"My own interpretation of God." The words recur in Gore's musings about faith. Gore concedes that he is theologically eclectic--melding Baptist conservatism with progressive Christianity, learned at Vanderbilt Divinity School. He wasn't baptized until his mid-30s, in a tub at his suburban Virginia church, after he'd been elected to Congress. Some evangelical leaders have criticized Gore's mismatched doctrine as being "profoundly out of step with his denomination," as Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention puts it.
Gore never aspired to join the ministry. Entering Vanderbilt, the 23-year-old seemed more interested in resolving existential questions preying on his mind after a disillusioning stint in Vietnam. Prof. Jack Forstman says Gore told him he "wanted some kind of grounding that might make it possible to reconstruct things for himself." He found himself immersed in a 1970s hotbed of Protestant ultraliberalism. (Vanderbilt became a hub of support for Latin American revolutionaries.) Sitting in his suburban home, he'd later tell his children parables, with Jesus playing the role of liberal activist, eschewing materialism and striving for social justice. The seeds of Gore's environmentalism were sown in a course on "Theology and the Natural Sciences," which stressed the doctrine of "stewardship." Drawn from the New Testament, "stewardship" teaches that Earth is the domain of the Lord, not man. Man has a duty to God to preserve it.
advertisement
