On the coffee table – ‘God in the White House’

Randall Ballmer, though an editor at large at the evangelical “organ,” Christianity Today, is not your stereotypical “conservative knee-jerk Republican evangelical.” Far from it. He’s also a professor of religious history at both Barnard and Columbia, and a visiting professor at Yale.

In short, he knows his stuff. And, in this book, his “stuff” is exposing the hypocrisy and vacuousness of Presidential church-state mixing. While much of his dirt-turning is focused on the GOP presidential side, he doesn’t let Clinton’s religious claims versus some of his actual practices go unscathed, either.

Anyway, to the highlights of the book. Here it is at Amazon.

Jimmy Carter? Likely the most decent, moral and religiously active president of the last 50 years. Yet, ditched by the Religious Right.

And, not because of abortion. But, because the Religious Right wanted segregated Southern private schools to keep tax exempt status, even as they saw the handwriting on the wall for Bob Jones University.

That’s the biggest debunking of conventional wisdom you’ll find in this slim volume.

Normally, I don’t five-star books this size, but, this one is on the 4/5 star border and deserves the bump.

Randall Ballmer does an excellent, nonpartisan job of looking at how faith and presidential politics have mixed from the 1960 campaign, in which John Kennedy defended the right of a Catholic to run for the White House, up through George Bush’s talking about the immorality of abortion without doing anything about it, while claiming moral stature for torture.

That, then, leads to one of two highlights of this book.

Ballmer lists sample questions the mainstream media should have asked presidential candidates of the past, both liberal and conservative politically or religiously, both Democratic and Republican. Specifically, these are follow-up questions the MSM should have asked presidential candidates of the past after particular faith-based statements.

In these sample questions, Ballmer said the MSM should have asked Bush just how he squared abortion talk with lack of action, or how Clinton squared Baptist piety with Monica Lewinsky. That fact, right there, belies one current three-star rater, and others to come, who claim Ballmer doesn’t know what he is talking about just because his definition of “evangelical” isn’t limited to “conservative, Republican-voting evangelical.”

The second special area is major religion-related speeches of modern presidents, from Kennedy’s legendary talk to the Houston Ministerial Association, to LBJ’s “Great Society” speech, on to Ford’s defense — with his mentioning of the role of prayer and faith — in his pardon of Nixon, through Carter’s “crisis of confidence” (NOT “malaise”) speech, Reagan on the Statue of Liberty centennial, Clinton on presenting Billy Graham the Congressional Medal of Honor, and George W. Bush on 9/11.

That said, while I wish the MSM would do just the follow-up work Ballmer cries for, it doesn’t ask that depth of follow-up questions in fields in which it might theoretically have more knowledge, so I’m not holding my breath here.