Religion rarely features in the campaign in a presidential election where less attention has been paid to the candidates’ personal faith than in recent history.
Vice President Kamala Harris attended Sunday’s services and spoke at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church outside Atlanta, while her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, visited Victorious Believers Ministries in Saginaw, Michigan.
Former President Donald Trump criticized Harris on Thursday for skipping the Al Smith Dinner in New York City, a high-profile fundraiser for Catholic charities, saying her absence was “deeply disrespectful to our great Catholic community.” Harris sent a video instead.
While candidates in both parties have traditionally sought to play up their piety to appeal to religious voters and demonstrate their personal integrity, Harris, Trump and their running mates have not made their faith central this year.
That’s a stark contrast from President Joe Biden, a lifelong Catholic who regularly attends services, quotes hymns and figures like St. Augustine, and can be seen on Ash Wednesday with ashes on his forehead.
Barack Obama’s religion played a major role in his 2008 campaign, both because of its influence on his oratory skills and because of criticism of his relationship with his former pastor Jeremiah Wright, a controversial figure whom Obama ultimately rebuked.
Obama cut his teeth in Chicago as a community organizer working for a coalition of Catholic churches. And his comfort in religious settings was evident throughout his presidency, from the five times he invoked God in his first inaugural address to his impromptu singing of “Amazing Grace” at Mother Emanuel AME Church after a white supremacist murdered nine people in the historic Black Church. in Charleston, South Carolina.
But the US has become even more secular in the eight years since Obama left office, with a record 28% of adults now identifying as religiously unaffiliated, according to the Pew Research Center, surpassing evangelical Protestants and Catholics and are now the largest religious group in the world. the country.
As recently as 2007, when Obama was preparing his first presidential bid, the religiously unaffiliated — including people who identify as atheists, agnostics and “nothing in particular” — made up just 16% of the country, according to Pew data .
And presidential historian Michael Beschloss said Americans have become more cynical about their politicians and what their religious affiliations might say about their character.
“We learned a lot about a lot of politicians who seemed to be very religious, but who somehow didn’t necessarily follow the tenets of their faith,” Beschloss said, noting that religion is as much about policy as it is about personality . “For many people, religion may no longer say much about someone’s personal character.”
There is now less incentive for candidates to play up their religiosity — and even potential danger among nonreligious voters, especially on the left — said Massimo Faggioli, a theology professor at Villanova University who wrote a spiritual biography of Biden.
And Harris and Trump, along with their running mates, have complicated religious backgrounds that are more difficult to “sell” politically than Biden’s well-known Catholicism, he said.
“There is secularism on the one hand and a more complicated religious mix on the other,” Faggioli said. “And for Harris, there is a risk that religion will be associated with a form of oppression in the eyes of some voters.”
Trump’s coalition is powered in large part by evangelical Christians, but their support for him is based more on a shared political agenda than a spiritual connection. According to Pew, only 8% of people who had a positive view of Trump earlier this year thought he was “very” religious.
Trump was raised Presbyterian but said in 2020 that he considers himself a non-denominational Christian, although he is not known to regularly attend services.
“There is no longer any pretense that this is a true love story. It is a marriage of convenience,” said Faggioli. “The relationship has become much more transactional.”
At the Al Smith dinner, Trump made it clear: “Catholics, you need to vote for me. You better remember: I’m here, and they’re not.
Harris, on the other hand, is a rare political figure who has publicly downplayed her spiritual life, given anti-religious sentiments in her native San Francisco Bay Area and a complicated personal religious journey.
Harris is a Baptist raised by a black Anglican father and an Indian Hindu mother, and she is married to a Reform Jewish husband.
She is a long-time member of San Francisco’s historic Third Baptist Church and has a deep relationship with her pastor, Rev. Amos Brown. As vice president, she has attended services at Baptist churches in the Washington, D.C. area and in 2022, she spoke at the National Baptist Convention.
Brown, whose 1999 campaign for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors she managed, was one of the first people Harris called after Biden decided not to seek re-election.
“She is a strong, spiritual person who comes from a strong, spiritual family that we have known for a long time,” Brown said in an interview with a newspaper in his native Mississippi earlier this year.
Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, said in his speech at the Democratic National Convention that “Kamala has connected me more deeply with my faith” and that they attend both synagogue and church on holy days.
In her 2019 memoir, Harris wrote that her mother made sure she was exposed to both Hindu and African American Christian religious traditions, adding that she and her sister, Maya, sang in the choir at the 23rd Avenue Church of God in Oakland.
“I believe we must live out our faith and demonstrate faith in action,” she wrote.
But aside from asking Brown to deliver the closing prayer at the convention this summer and some references to her church, especially when speaking to black audiences, Harris rarely speaks about God, and her oratorical style is more accuser than preacher.
“I grew up in the black church,” Harris told radio host Charlamagne Tha God last week when a pastor asked about working with faith communities. “Our God is a loving God. Our faith drives us to act in ways that revolve around kindness, justice and mercy.”
She contrasted that with what she said was Trump’s belief that strength is “whoever defeats you,” which she called “absolutely antithetical to the church I know.”
On Sunday at New Missionary Baptist Church, Harris spoke about how faith can guide people.
“When the path is not clear, it is our faith that guides us forward – faith in what we often cannot see, but what we know to be true,” she said.
“I say that because right now, across our country, we see some who are trying to deepen divisions among us, spread hatred, sow fear and cause chaos,” she added. “There are those who suggest that the measure of a leader’s strength is based on who you defeat rather than what we know. The true measure of a leader’s strength is based on who you elevate.”
Walz was raised Catholic, but became Lutheran after marrying his wife Gwen. Lutheranism is a major Protestant denomination, but in the US it is almost entirely concentrated in the Upper Midwest, with little conspicuousness in the rest of the country, where it makes up only a small percentage of the population.
Walz rarely speaks about his religion and sometimes jokes that his Midwestern sensibilities make it difficult to open up.
“Because we’re good Minnesota Lutherans, we have a rule: If you do something good and talk about it, it doesn’t count anymore,” he joked during a speech to unions this year.
Meanwhile, Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, has written about his own personal journey. He was raised evangelical but rarely attended services, becoming an atheist as a young adult before converting to conservative Catholicism as an adult.
Vance’s wife, Usha, grew up Hindu in a “religious household,” and she and Vance were married in an interfaith ceremony that included Bible readings as well as a Hindu pandit.
Those stories of conversion, intermarriage, and background religiosity reflect the spiritual lives of Americans today, but may not make for neat stories.
“If you don’t feel comfortable talking about religion, it’s clearly visible, so it makes sense not to,” Faggioli said.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
