When Piety Takes Center Stage

"Meet the Press" host Tim Russert routinely uses his merciless journalistic skills to pick apart the policy statements of the Democratic presidential candidates. Last week, after Howard Dean announced he was going to start talking more about religion on the campaign trail, Russert made the former Vermont governor's faith journey a character issue. "If he was baptized a Catholic," Russert intoned, "then became an Episcopalian, left that church because of a feud over a bike path . . . and is now Congregationalist, is he going to be seen as someone who is trying . . . to publicly embrace Christ to be seen as more religious than he really is?"

This line of thinking makes me nervous. Sure, we should scrutinize the candidates' comments on faith. After all, we assess the consistency of their pronouncements on trade policy or Medicare, so why not religion? But as journalists and commentators parse the candidates' religious statements, they're doing so in ways that can only remind those running why they used to keep quiet about such matters.

As editor of a religion Web site, I viewed it as a positive development when the candidates started talking about their spiritual lives. We can learn a lot about them by listening to them discuss their faith: where they draw their strength from, whether they are fatalistic or believe people can control world events, how they make sense of injustice in the world, and what they value most.

But the punditry so far has been ignorant of how Americans develop their style of religious observance, and I fear it could chill honest discussion of religion. The implication of Russert's question, for instance, is that Dean's shifting among religions indicated a lack of conviction, as if only consistency equals piety. A similar point was made about Wesley Clark after he said, in an interview with Beliefnet, "I'm spiritual. I'm religious. I'm a strong Christian and I'm a Catholic but I go to a Presbyterian Church." Deal Hudson, editor of the conservative Catholic magazine Crisis, complained, "Gen. Clark, still hot in pursuit of the Democratic nomination for President, finally clarifies his real religious convictions -- namely, he doesn't seem to have any."

To some extent this reflects a common tic of many political reporters when facing many subjects. Uncomfortable with making value judgments about the wisdom of someone's policy, they gravitate toward the measurable -- signs of inconsistency or hypocrisy. So it's no surprise that the same standard is now being applied to faith. Going from Catholicism to Episcopalianism is, in the lexicon of political reporting, a flip-flop.

But if Dean and Clark are therefore spiritually promiscuous, they have excellent company. Twenty to 30 percent of Americans now practice a faith different from the one in which they were raised, according to Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow. And a much higher percentage have switched houses of worship.

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