God in the White House: A History 1960-2004 By Randall Balmer, Harper One 2007, $24.95, pp. 240

Hail to the Pastor in Chief

John Kennedy’s victory in the 1960 presidential election did more than install a Roman Catholic in the White House for the first (and thus far the only) time in history. It also delivered a knockout blow to the prevailing wisdom that a candidate’s religious views were legitimate concerns for the voters, no less so than his foreign and domestic policies.

Or so most Americans thought back then. For a decade and a half it looked as if they were right. Religion as a litmus test—specifically, the longstanding requirement that presidential candidates be Protestants, preferably of the white Anglo-Saxon variety—seemed to have gone the way of the Inauguration Day top hat that Kennedy disdained.

Those too young to remember 1960 may not appreciate what a milestone that election was. As Randall Balmer ably recounts in God in the White House, Kennedy’s religion unleashed fierce reactions from Protestant leaders. Should a Catholic become president, they warned, the pope in Rome would hold the reins of American power. W.A. Criswell, pastor of the First Baptist Church in Dallas, the nation’s largest Southern Baptist congregation, was typical of the doomsayers. “Roman Catholicism is not only a religion, it is political tyranny,” he said. And his unhappiness was mild compared with one anti-Kennedy tract that likened a ballot cast for a Catholic to “voting for a Fascist, a Nazi.”

These fusillades forced Kennedy to tackle the so-called religion issue head-on, in a speech that resounds even today. Speaking to Protestant ministers gathered in Houston two months before the election, he said he was not “the Catholic candidate for president” but rather “the Democratic Party’s candidate for president, who happens also to be a Catholic.” The presidency, he said, “must be neither humbled by making it the instrument of any religious group, nor tarnished by arbitrarily withholding its occupancy from the members of any religious group.”

Anti-Catholic diehards may have been unimpressed, but the speech won over more moderate Protestants who recognized bigotry when they saw it. In one of the closest elections in American history, Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon and, at the same time, the notion that religion deserves to be front and center in voters’ minds. The next few presidential elections, from 1964 to 1972, unfolded without significant attention paid to the candidates’ thoughts about God.

As present-day events make abundantly clear, that supposed knockout blow turned out to be a phantom punch. Professions of faith dominate our national politics more than they have in decades.

Witness Mike Huckabee, the pastor-politician who sees himself as a “Christian leader.” Witness the cross that Mitt Romney has had to bear as a Mormon: Is he a Christian or part of some weird cult? This particular religious issue is stunning when you recall that Romney’s father, George, ran for president in 1968 with barely a ripple caused by his Mormonism.

We hear the whispers about Barack Obama: that he is not a Christian but (gasp!) a closet Muslim. Our modern elections feature candidates offering W.W.J.D.—What Would Jesus Do?—as their guiding spirit. Whom did George W. Bush describe in 2000 as his favorite philosopher? Jesus. Four years later, some Catholic bishops vowed that they would deny communion to John Kerry, a pro-choice Catholic. And any Catholic voting for him, they said, would be committing a sin. Kennedy’s pronouncement about separating church dogma from politics had, four decades later, been turned fully on its head.

Consider, while we’re at it, the unspoken requirement that presidential candidates claim inspiration from a Supreme Being, whoever He or She may be, Christian or not. Senator Joseph Lieberman, an observant Jew running with Al Gore, was popularly elected vice president in 2000. There is no reason to believe that his Jewishness hurt him then or four years later, when he ran for president on his own. The only thing that seemed to matter to many voters was that he was a believer, regardless of the Constitution’s insistence in Article VI that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”

Balmer, a professor of religion at Columbia University and a self-described evangelical Christian who leans leftward politically, is appalled by all this. It makes for bad politics, he says. It leads to bad public policy. Worse yet, it is bad for religion, which “always functions best,” he writes, “from the margins of society and not in the councils of power.” Modern America seems determined, he says, to turn its commander-in-chief into a pastor-in-chief, the “vicarious embodiment” of what he calls “the supposed goodness and honor and moral superiority of America and Americans.” It is, Balmer concludes, nothing but a search on the part of the electorate for “cheap grace.”

How did we reach this state of dubious grace?

Balmer says the big change came in 1976 with the election of Jimmy Carter, a born-again Christian. “Born-again” was then a phrase that sounded strange to many Americans, but it quickly became part of the standard political lexicon. The governor of Georgia rode to the White House by offering himself as a man of faith and decency. After the turmoil of the Watergate scandals that had driven Richard Nixon from office in 1974, Americans were in search of some form of absolution. They thought they found it in this peanut farmer from Plains who seemed guided by moral, Christian principles.

At first, Carter enjoyed the support of many evangelicals. They saw him as one of their own. But disillusion set in soon enough, Balmer writes, though not for the reason that many think. It wasn’t the Supreme Court’s 1973 pro-abortion ruling in Roe v. Wade that drove them toward the political right. Not at all, Balmer says. Rather, it was a court-upheld government decision to deny tax-exempt status to church-based institutions engaging in racial discrimination. Abortion was tacked on later as a defining issue.

Among the first targets of the new tax policy was Bob Jones University, a fundamentalist school in South Carolina. Balmer quotes several conservative activists on the importance of this issue to evangelical leaders, who, incorrectly, blamed Carter. Actually, Balmer notes, Bob Jones’s tax-exempt privileges were stripped away under Gerald Ford's administration a full year before Carter took office in January 1977. But the born-again president was the one who caught hell. As events unfolded, ardently religious Protestants were already turning sharply to the right. By the 1980 presidential campaign, Southern Baptists and others had switched their loyalties to Carter’s Republican opponent, Ronald Reagan.

That era saw the ascension of Bible-thumping ministers in search of political influence, men like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. Their immersion in temporal affairs represented a break with history, Balmer says. In the 17th century, Roger Williams founded the Baptist tradition in Americans, one built on the premise of church and state separation. That concept, in good measure, fueled the opposition to Kennedy in 1960. But in the late 1970s, the wall of separation crumbled. Two remarkably different statements from W.A. Criswell, the Southern Baptist leader from Dallas, crystallized the shift. “It is written in our country’s Constitution,” he wrote in 1960, “that church and state must be, in this nation, forever separate and free.” By 1984, Criswell had undergone a conversion worthy of Paul on the road to Damascus. “I believe this notion of the separation of church and state was the figment of some infidel’s imagination,” he said. Apparently, the minister did not deem consistency to be a supreme virtue.

The fact is that evangelical leaders have conveniently overlooked serious personal flaws in their preferred candidates as long as their political goals were well served. In the 1980 election, Balmer notes, they supported Reagan, ignoring his divorce and remarriage, estrangement from his children and spotty church attendance. Recently, though this is not in the book, we witnessed similar behavior from Pat Robertson, who endorsed former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani of New York for the Republican presidential nomination. Never mind Giuliani’s three marriages, a publicized courtship of his mistress who became his third wife, estrangement from his children—not to mention Giuliani's support of gay rights and abortion rights. Robertson was looking for a winner, and his bets were on Rudy.

The mingling of faith and politics does not speak well of either the clergy or the candidates, Balmer says. Worse, it speaks ill of an electorate seeking “cheap grace.” The search led 32 years ago to Jimmy Carter and in 2000 to George W. Bush, a more publicly and fervently born-again Christian, who frequently invokes the Almighty in speeches. Balmer can barely tolerate Bush. “We simply pulled the lever for George W. Bush, who offered vague promises about restoring integrity” after the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, he writes, only to take the country to war based on a lie about illicit weapons in Iraq, only to condone interrogation methods defined by much of the world as torture.

The lesson, Balmer says, “is that voters should approach candidates’ professions of faith with more than a little suspicion.” The White House, he leads us to conclude, is the wrong place to find God. It is not nearly a high enough mountain top.

Clyde Haberman writes a column about New York City for The New York Times. He previously was a metropolitan reporter and foreign correspondent for the paper, stationed in Japan, India, Italy and Israel.