Last night's "Compassion Forum" was billed as an opportunity for Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to talk about how their faith influences their public policy, particularly on such issues as poverty, HIV/AIDS, the environment, and human rights abuses around the world. Sen. John McCain declined an invitation to attend, citing a scheduling conflict. But while the religious leaders in the audience asked questions about the candidates' views on torture, Darfur, and climate change, to name a few, the journalist-moderators dumbed down the discussion with insipid questions about creationism and favorite Bible stories.
The event was organized by Faith in Public Life (FIPL), an nonprofit which grew out of a project at the Center for American Progress and seeks to broaden the discussion of faith in public debate beyond dysfunctional culture war rhetoric. FIPL brought together evangelicals and other faith leaders for the Forum in an effort to show that religious voters are concerned about more than condemning homosexuality and abortion, and to give the candidates the chance to discuss a wider range of issues.
CNN broadcast the event live, with the network's Campbell Brown and Newsweek's Jon Meacham moderating. But while many of the religious leaders in the audience asked policy questions, rather than theological ones, Brown and Meacham undermined FIPL's project by quizzing the candidates with inane questions about reading God?s intentions and their views on Biblical literalism. These questions perpetuated the idea that faith is a pabulum litmus tests for candidates, rather a possible source of common ground on policy questions.
If FIPL's purpose is to elevate the broader interfaith agenda beyond the hot-button culture war issues, it would be well-served by sticking with religious leaders posing policy questions to candidates rather than with journalists asking absurd, quasi-theological ones. Meacham, for example, asked Clinton if she believed that God wanted her to be president. She wouldn't presume to know, she finally conceded. Meacham asked Obama whether he believed "that God intervenes in history and rewards or punishes people or nations in real time for their behavior?" Obama responded that God's purposes are often too mysterious for him to grasp. Indeed.
Brown asked Clinton for her favorite Bible story. In a response that demonstrated Clinton's understanding of how to push certain religious voters' buttons, she pointed to the Book of Esther, perhaps attempting to appeal to Jews who just celebrated Purim or evangelicals who see Esther as a heroine standing up to evil, just like America should stand up to evil and bomb Iran. To Obama, Brown posed the question of whether he was comfortable telling his daughters that God did not, in fact, create the world in six days. Has he yet told them the tooth fairy doesn't exist?
Hanging over the Compassion Forum, of course, was a meta-debate about the role of religion in presidential politics, more specifically, whether candidates should be quizzed about their faith, beyond addressing political concerns raised by religious leaders. Many of the questions from faith leaders could have been answered by secularists or humanists just as meaningfully and forcefully -- and hopefully just as satisfactorily to the questioners. After all, if a candidate can't voice compassion for victims of genocide or the poor, for example, he or she shouldn't be running for PTA president, much less president of the United States.
But the journalist-moderators -- and CNN's commentators afterwards -- reveled in the idea of Democrats engaging in God-talk. Democrats finally get it; they can sit in a roomful of religious people and talk about God and the Bible without squirming! (The squirm factor is probably why McCain didn't show up, since talking about faith usually makes the presumptive Republican nominee scrunch his body into a decidedly un-presidential stance.)
There may indeed be many voters who want to hear the answers to Meacham's and Brown's questions. But many do not and in fact find them offensive, irrelevant, and/or unconstitutional. And judging from my conversations with religious leaders, they're less interested in hearing about favorite Bible stories and more interested in hearing the candidates articulate accessible, achievable policy solutions to the pressing issues facing America and the world. In that way, they share goals with secular progressives, like TAP's former editor Michael Tomasky, whose "common good" essay was enormously influential, or psychologist Drew Westen, who has urged politicians to appeal to voters on a visceral level.
The notion that Democrats might be able to connect with both religious and secular voters with the same common good narrative gets lost, sadly, when reporters like Brown and Meacham degrade both politics and religion by asking the kinds of questions they did.
