Short on questions of faith
IF HE'S getting tired of answering questions about his religion, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is working hard not to let it show. But it wasn't surprising when Romney's wife, Ann, told George Stephanopoulos of ABC News that it's "a little unfair" that Romney has to talk about his Mormonism so much.
She's right -- not because the former governor is answering too many questions about his faith, but because the other presidential candidates are answering too few. Nearly all of the major contenders want to have it both ways on religion: They want credit from religious voters for having a strong faith, but they don't want to talk about what they actually believe.
News stories about Romney's religion often invoke the 1960 presidential campaign, in which John F. Kennedy went before an audience of Baptist ministers in Houston and assured them that his duties as president would not be affected by his Catholic faith.
"I do not speak for my church on public matters," Kennedy said. "And the church does not speak for me." We've certainly come a long way since then.
Today, candidates for the White House feel compelled to do the opposite of what Kennedy did: convince voters not that their religion will be irrelevant, but that their faith will guide them each and every day.
Yet paradoxically, we've moved further and further from any substantive discussion of what it means to be led in office by religious faith.
Listen to candidates talk about religion and they seem to be following two rules:
1) Profess that nothing is more important to you than your religion.
2) Be as vague as possible about your religion.
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York has repeatedly mentioned her time in a church youth group, and the Methodist faith she has maintained all her life. A spokesperson for Senator John McCain of Arizona described him as "devout, but very private about it." Republican Mike Huckabee of Arkansas -- an ordained Baptist minister -- had this response when asked how his own faith influences his decision-making: "It totally drives it. It makes everything click for me."
If we take most candidates at their word, then there may be nothing we want to know more about than their religious faith.
There are a lot of relevant questions we could and should ask of those seeking to occupy the world's most powerful office. Do you believe that every word of the Old and New Testaments is true? (If so, the implications are dramatic, to say the least.) Do you believe that the earth is only 6,000 years old? Do you believe that people who do not share your faith are destined for eternal damnation? Do you believe that women should be allowed to be ministers?
The answers to such questions as these will not be a perfect predictor of a president's behavior -- Ronald Reagan, for instance, believed Armageddon was not far off, but that thankfully didn't stop him from negotiating to reduce tensions with the Soviet Union. But the answers will tell us important things about the candidates' views on the world -- things they don't seem to want us to know.
It might sound inappropriate to start quizzing presidential contenders about the fine points of theology. Indeed, Romney argued as much when he said, "I'm not running for pastor-in-chief."
But think about it this way. Imagine that a major candidate for president said, "I'm an existentialist, and that philosophy will guide me every day I sit in the Oval Office." Journalists would quite reasonably start asking him questions about existentialism.
If the candidate then said he didn't want to talk about existentialism and its implications for the presidency, we would think he was trying to hide something. Yet despite the candidates' assertions of the centrality of their respective faiths to their lives, journalists almost never explore in detail just what those candidates believe about religion.
Candidates who tell us how important their faith is to them are hoping that religious Americans will come away with warm feelings about them. But if they aren't willing to discuss just what that faith entails, they're saying they want people to vote for them because of their religion, but they don't want anyone to vote against them because of their religion.
They can't have it both ways: either religion is important to them or it isn't. And if it is, then we as voters have a right to know everything we can about what they believe.
Paul Waldman is a senior fellow at Media Matters for America and author of "Being Right Is Not Enough: What Progressives Must Learn From Conservative Success." 
