Swept along by a tide of fervor for the born-again President Bush and Catholic disenchantment with the dissident views of John Kerry, America experienced a rare religious revival in 2004.
That, at least, was the story line. In public affairs, unlike in church, you really shouldn’t take anything on faith. Faith and values — the code words for religion in 2004 — were not the avatars of the campaign. They were the tools.
For example, the presumption — accepted as Gospel — that George W. Bush has ever been “born again” is not necessarily true. It’s murky. And while it’s true that Kerry disagrees with his church on several important issues, his views fall squarely in the mainstream of American Catholic thought. Indeed, he’s no more a “dissident” in the Catholic church than Bush is within his own United Methodist denomination.
But the perceptions were useful. Bush without a doubt is a religious man, whose exact bearings remain intentionally unclear; if conservative evangelical voters chose to embrace him as one of their own, the campaign was never interested in clarifying whether they were right or wrong. And if Kerry — by all accounts a deeply devout Catholic in his private worship — appealed to some non-Catholics because he didn’t seem to take direction from his church, well, his campaign was more than happy to remain silent.
The disconnects point to a paradox of American society: Americans in every survey claim to be strongly religious people, but in study after study, they reveal striking unfamiliarity with religion — not only there own, but especially anyone else’s — and they don’t usually act in ways consistent with what their individual denominations teach.
That’s just another way of saying that America isn’t exactly a nation that embraces freedom of religion — it’s a nation that embraces freedom from religious discipline.