Prayer and the Presidency

By NANCY GIBBS

Having a President in your Parish can go to a pastor's head, as Dwight Eisenhower learned soon after he took office. Ike, though personally devout, wasn't much of a churchgoer, but he didn't think people would want a President who just played golf on Sundays. So he became the first President to be baptized in office and joined National Presbyterian. The minister had promised there would be no publicity, but as Eisenhower wrote angrily in his diary, "we were scarcely home before the fact was being publicized, by the pastor, to the hilt."

We still have a lot to learn about the choreography of faith and politics. None of the candidates in this year's race have looked very graceful, or sounded very wise, about how they would manage the eternal dance between their personal faith and its public expression were they to become President. And the conduct and coverage of this race isn't making the challenge easier.

For many Democrats, it has been refreshing to welcome a candidate who is not only able but eager to talk about his faith journey, starting two years ago at the Call to Renewal conference when Barack Obama addressed the "God gap" head-on, calling for a "serious debate about how to reconcile faith with our modern, pluralistic democracy," and declared that "secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square." But having brought his own faith and church and pastor into that square, he found them to be serious obstacles on the way to the nomination. Obama said he didn't go to church on Mother's Day because it would have been a circus: "I am not going to burden the church at the moment with my presence," he sighed, and when the point came that he had to resign his membership altogether, he announced that he would not be joining a new one until after November. In the meantime, his campaign continues its aggressive faith outreach, especially to young, culturally flexible Evangelicals. But he can expect to be answering for the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Father Michael Pfleger every day between now and then.

John McCain, meanwhile, has executed some intricate maneuvers of his own. The man who once labeled conservative Christian leaders "agents of intolerance" sought out their endorsements, only to twirl away once again when he too found himself held accountable for their beliefs. He argued that Obama's 20-year devotion to Wright was weightier than his own transparently cynical effort to co-opt megapastors like John Hagee and Rod Parsley. This is just politics, he winked--I don't have to believe everything they say. But social-conservative leaders will expect their voices to count in a McCain White House; if there is a belief that unites otherwise entropic Evangelicals, it is that it's not enough to be patted on the head and told, "Thanks for your votes. Now run along and pray."

In a sense, we lead candidates into these traps, since for as long as pollsters have polled, Americans have said they want a person of faith in the White House. Yet having set that standard, we are actually making it harder for candidates to meet it. Against a religiously vulnerable gop primary field, this year's faithful Democrats were so eager to close the God gap that they willingly relinquished any spiritual privacy and discussed not just the impact of their faith on their policies but also their experience of the Holy Spirit, their favorite Scriptures and the focus of their prayers. And so we treat their pastors as partisan players, their churches as focus groups. How is that likely to affect the choices candidates make, the churches they join, the counsel they seek? Will they have to vet their congregations the way they do their Cabinets? Or follow Richard Nixon's example and move services into the White House, where he found them to be the ideal opportunity to reward friends and woo donors and twist arms, all the while singing, "He will hold me fast/ For my Saviour loves me so"?

This is a bad road to travel. Abraham Lincoln described the presidency as an office that would drive a man to his knees. We should not be making it harder for Presidents to find solace. And their preachers should be able to mount the pulpit and speak from the heart, without obsessing over what it will look like on YouTube. Is there a reason we can't get this relationship right? I don't agree with secular critics that a pluralist democracy has to be a religion-free zone, if only because it's unrealistic to expect voters or candidates to numb the spirit that moves them. But this race has brought us new trials and exposed new challenges: the risk to preachers who get caught up in the game, and the cost to candidates if there is no escape from it, no sanctuary to settle their souls.