Making the moral case for politics
In 1936, President Franklin Roosevelt invoked for a crowd of partisan Democrats the core tenets of the Christian faith. Revealed by the apostle Paul in I Corinthians, these are faith, hope, and charity, according to the King James version of the Bible
Roosevelt proclaimed, “In the place of the palace of privilege, we seek to build a temple out of faith, hope, and charity.”
The setting for the speech is significant: FDR was accepting the Democratic party’s nomination for president for a second term.
During his 12 years in the White House, Roosevelt not infrequently turned to religion in his speeches. Following the D-Day invasion of June 6, 1944, he famously offered a prayer in a broadcast to the nation.
The U.S. is in a different place now as far as religion goes. Americans are far more secular, less church-going. According to the Religious News Service, a 2023 survey found that some 40% of Americans had little if any interest in religion.
There’s a growing cohort of the religiously unaffiliated, according to the 2023 survey. Of this group, only 9% said they were looking for a religion that was right for them.
That said, leading Democratic politicians would do well to follow the example set by Roosevelt and some of his more immediate successors in the office. For instance, in 1961, John F. Kennedy invoked the Almighty in his inaugural address, declaring that freedom and liberty come not from “the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God.”
One present-day Democrat who doesn’t hold religion at arm’s length is Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia. Religious trappings come naturally to Sen. Warnock. Since 2008, he has been senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, the religious home of Martin Luther King Jr.
The late civil rights leader deployed the tenets of Christianity in the service of equality and opportunity for all. Like Dr. King, Sen. Warnock fuses political action with religion’s moral imperatives.
Speaking Dec. 12 at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think-tank, Warnock said that creating “the conditions for human striving” and success are “part of the spiritual work we must do. It is holy work…. It is about restoring the covenant that we share with one another.”
The vocabulary of our politics “is too puny” for the moment we are in, Warnock believes. American politics suffers “from a poverty of moral imagination and moral courage.”
The message to Democrats is especially telling. The champions of government, Democrats frequently lose the political high ground, not because they are short of morals, but because they are reluctant to articulate the moral implications of public policy.
Democrats have taken too much to heart the separation of church and state, which is a governmental mandate, not a political one.
According to Warnock, every American shares the virtue of loving his children. The senator told his Center for American Progress audience, “Part of the spiritual work that we have to do through public policy is to enable each other to look into the eyes of other people’s children and see our own.”
Warnock’s father, also a pastor, spent his time between Sunday sermons as an Atlanta “junkman,” who devised a mechanism of his own rigging to pick up “old cars.” Come Sunday morning, his dad, Warnock said, “lifted up” broken men and women and “told them they were somebody.
“My dad discovered strength in the broken places” of people’s souls, the senator said.
Like Roosevelt, Warnock doesn’t hesitate to use moral suasion to hammer away at political opponents. In the FDR mold, he also makes explicit the link between religion and government action for people down on their luck.
Concluding his remarks to the 1936 Democratic convention, President Roosevelt quoted “the immortal Dante [who] tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the warm-hearted in different scales.”
For sure, there are all kinds of ways religion can be abused by politicians. Beware of the politician who is ever ready to tout his attachment to religion. Neither can references to religion be simply layered into a speech for effect. Voters are smart; they are more than capable of sniffing out the religious fraud.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.