Alex Seitz-Wald and Katherine Koretski and Nnamdi Egwuonwu
Sun, October 20, 2024
Religion is making a rare appearance on the campaign trail this week in a presidential election that has dwelled less on candidates’ personal faith than any in recent memory.
Vice President Kamala Harris is planning to attend services and speak at the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church outside Atlanta on Sunday, while her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, will visit Victorious Believers Ministries in Saginaw, Michigan.
Meanwhile, former President Donald Trump on Thursday criticized Harris for skipping the Al Smith dinner in New York City, a high-profile fundraiser for Catholic charities, saying her absence was “very disrespectful to our great Catholic community.” Harris instead sent a video.
While candidates in both parties have traditionally sought to play up their piety to appeal to religious voters and signal their personal integrity, Harris, Trump and their running mates have not centered their faith this year.
That’s a marked 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 ash on his forehead.
Barack Obama’s religion was a major factor in his 2008 campaign, both for its influence on his oratory and the criticism of his relationship with his former pastor Jeremiah Wright, a controversial figure whom Obama ended up rebuking.
Obama cut his teeth in Chicago as a community organizer working for a coalition of Catholic churches. And his comfort in religious settings was apparent 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 killed nine at the historic Black church in Charleston, South Carolina.
But the United States has grown even more secular in the eight years since Obama left office, with a record 28% of U.S. adults now identifying as religiously unaffiliated, according to Pew, surpassing evangelical Protestants and Catholics to now be the largest religious group in the country.
As recently as 2007, when Obama was preparing his first presidential run, the religiously unaffiliated — who include people who identify as atheists, agnostics and “nothing in particular” — made up just 16% of the country in Pew’s data.
And presidential historian Michael Beschloss said Americans have grown more cynical about their politicians and what their religious affiliation might say about their character.
“We’ve learned a lot about a lot of politicians who seemed to be very religious but did not necessarily follow the tenets of their faith in one way or another,” said Beschloss, noting religion has become as much about policy as personality. “So for many people, religion may no longer say much about someone’s personal character.”
There’s now less incentive for candidates to play up their religiosity — and even potential peril with irreligious voters, especially on the left — said Massimo Faggioli, a Villanova University theology professor who wrote a spiritual biography of Biden.
And Harris and Trump, along with their running mates, have complicated religious backgrounds that are harder to “sell” politically than Biden’s familiar Catholicism, he said.
“There’s secularism on one side and a more complicated religious mix on the other side,” said Faggioli. “And for Harris, there’s a risk where religion is associated in the eyes of some voters as a form of oppression.”
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. Just 8% of people who had a positive view of Trump earlier this year thought he was “very” religious, according to Pew.
Trump was raised Presbyterian but in 2020 said he considers himself a nondenominational Christian, though he is not known to attend services regularly.
“There’s no pretense anymore that this is a true love story. It’s a marriage of convenience,” said Faggioli. “The relationship has become much more transactional.”
Indeed, at the Al Smith dinner, Trump made that plain: “Catholics, you’ve got to vote for me. You better remember: I’m here and she’s not.”
Harris, on the other hand, is a rare political figure who may have downplayed her spiritual life in public, given anti-religious sentiments in her native California Bay Area and a complicated personal religious journey.
Harris is a Baptist who was raised by a Black Anglican father and an Indian Hindu mother and is now married to a Reform Jewish husband.
She’s a longtime member of San Francisco’s historic Third Baptist Church and has a deep relationship with its pastor, the Rev. Amos Brown. As vice president, she has attended services at Baptist churches in the Washington, D.C., area and in 2022 spoke at the National Baptist Convention.
Brown was one of the first people Harris called after Biden decided not to run for re-election, and she managed his campaign for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1999.
“She’s a strong, spiritual person who comes from a strong, spiritual family that we’ve known for a very long time now,” Brown said in an interview with a newspaper in his native Mississippi earlier this year.
Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, said in his Democratic National Convention speech that “Kamala has connected me more deeply to my faith” and that they attend both synagogue and church on holy days.
In her 2019 memoir, Harris wrote about her mother making 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 our faith and show faith in action,” she wrote.
But aside from asking Brown to give the closing prayer at the convention this summer and some occasional references to her church, especially when speaking with Black audiences, Harris rarely speaks of God, and her oratorical style is more prosecutor than preacher.
“I grew up in the Black church,” Harris told radio host Charlamagne tha God last week when a pastor asked about partnering with faith communities. “Our God is a loving God. Our faith propels us to act in a way that is about kindness and justice, mercy.”
She contrasted that with what she said was Trump’s belief that strength is “who you beat down,” which she called “absolutely contrary to the church I know.”
Walz, meanwhile, was raised Catholic but became Lutheran after marrying his wife, Gwen. Lutheranism is a major Protestant denomination, but in the U.S. it is almost entirely concentrated in the Upper Midwest, with little salience in the rest of the country, where it comprises just a small percentage of the population.
Walz rarely speaks about his religion, joking at times 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 no longer counts,” Walz joked at a speech to trade unions this year.
Meanwhile, Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, has written about his own personal journey. Raised evangelical but rarely attending services, he became 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 both Bible readings and a Hindu pandit.
Those stories of conversion, intermarriage and back-seat religiosity reflect the spiritual life of Americans today, but may not make for tidy stories on the stump.
“If you are not comfortable talking about religion, it really shows, so it makes sense not to,” said Faggioli.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
VP Harris hosts campaign event at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in DeKalb County
WSBTV.com News Staff
Sun, October 20, 2024
On Saturday evening, Vice President Kamala Harris held a campaign rally in Atlanta to encourage voters and drum up support in the final weeks of the 2024 election season.
Harris continued her campaign stop in the metro Atlanta area with a planned visit to the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Stonecrest.
The event is part of what the campaign has called their Souls to the Polls event. After the church service at New Birth, Harris is expected to attend a second Souls to the Polls event at Divine Faith Ministries International in Jonesboro, where she will give brief remarks after the service.
While former President Donald Trump held his own events in Pennsylvania on Saturday, with a rally in Latrobe, Penn. that evening.
As far as events for the Trump-Vance campaign on Sunday, the former president remains in Pennsylvania, where he’ll be speaking at a 5 p.m. town hall in Lancaster.
In Georgia, Stevie Wonder is also expected to be in attendance at Divine Faith Ministries and will give a performance before the Vice President’s arrival, according to the Harris-Walz campaign.
Also on Sunday night, supporters of former president Trump’s reelection bid will host a “Women for Trump” town hall in Kennesaw with Congresswomen Ashley Hinson and Erin Houchin, as well as former Sen. Kelly Loeffler.
The Kennesaw event covers topics similar to Harris’ own, with a focus on issues impacting women and mothers in Georgia.
While Harris’ event focused on threats to reproductive rights and freedoms, and the associated health concerns in the state and across the U.S., the Women for Trump event is expected to focus on the prosperity and economic opportunity that the former president’s supporters say happened while he was in office.
Harris visits Black church in Georgia in ‘souls to the polls’ early voting push
Eric Bradner and Ebony Davis, CNN
Sun, October 20, 2024
Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at a church service at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Stonecrest, Georgia, on October 20, 2024.
Vice President Kamala Harris visited a church in the Atlanta suburbs on Sunday, urging congregants to cast early ballots as part of her campaign’s “souls to the polls” push to turn out Black voters.
The early voting push comes as Harris attempts to motivate Black voters, who are a critical part of the Democratic base. Her Republican rival, former President Donald Trump, has targeted those voters — hoping to chip into Harris’ margins, especially with Black men.
“Our country is at a crossroads, and where we go from here is up to us as Americans and as people of faith,” Harris said at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Stonecrest, Georgia.
“We face this question: What kind of country do we want to live in?” she said. “A country of chaos, fear and hate, or a country of freedom, compassion and justice?”
Black churches have played a critical role in mobilizing Black voters since the Civil Rights Movement — and Democratic campaigns have long sought to reach those voters, particularly in early voting states like Georgia, where polls were open Sunday afternoon.
Despite holding an advantage over Trump among Black voters, Harris has fallen short in most polling of President Joe Biden’s numbers with the demographic when he won in 2020. In recent weeks, her campaign has made targeted media appearances and unveiled proposals aimed at Black men in a bid to strengthen her coalition. The vice president’s campaign’s “souls to the polls” effort, launched earlier this month with a board consisting of Black faith leaders from around the United States, also saw Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, attend service at Victorious Believers Ministries in Saginaw, Michigan.
On Sunday, the congregation in Georgia sang “Happy Birthday” to Harris, who turned 60 that day. The service was also attended by Opal Lee, known as the “Grandmother of Juneteenth” for the 98-year-old’s decades-long campaign to make the day commemorating the ending of slavery a federal holiday.
The vice president wore a black suit with a pink blouse in honor of the church’s “pink day,” aimed at raising awareness of breast cancer, and she highlighted her mother’s work as a breast cancer researcher.
Harris said that growing up, she often attended Sunday school and sang in the choir. She learned of a “loving God who asks us to speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, and to defend the rights of the poor and the needy,” she said.
“For me, like for so many of us, church is then a place of growth and belonging and community; a place where we are reminded of the incredible power of faith and fellowship. And in moments of difficulty and uncertainty when the way is not clear, it is our faith that then guides us forward,” Harris said.
Trump on Sunday morning appeared on Fox News, where he said his closing message in the final stretch to Election Day on November 5 is focused on border security, inflation and transgender athletes.
“We’re a failing nation right now,” Trump said. “We’re failing at the borders. We’re failing with inflation and the economy. We’re failing with all of this woke stuff, like men playing in women’s sports and transgender operations and all of these things that are just terrible for our country and we just can’t let it happen.”
At a rally the night before, however, his closing pitch devolved into profane attacks and a lewd story about the late golfer Arnold Palmer.
His running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, visited Kroll’s West sports bar in Green Bay, Wisconsin, on Sunday ahead of a Packers game.
“Go Pack, go Trump,” Vance said after taking a swig of beer.
CNN’s Aaron Pellish, Veronica Stracqualursi and Kit Maher contributed to this report.
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