“I know how the world works. I know the good and the evil in it.” — John McCain
When talk turns to the intersection of religion and politics, religionists are a bore to have around; what you want is titter and amusement. But scholars of religious studies don’t offer much by way of demonstrative surprise at the obscenities of public faith. Like the manager of the strip club, they’ve seen it all before. Whisper to a religionist that the Christian candidate has a grandchild produced out of wedlock and you’ll get a game of one-upmanship. “Well, if you think that’s crazy, let me tell you about the nun in Dubuque who…the Hindu cleric who…the Catholic soccer mom who…the born-again President who…” Or, just as likely, you might get a little shrug, a roll of the eyes, and a tiny harrumph. “Religious people are just like nonreligious people,” one colleague remarked to me recently, “except religious people have whole cosmologies to explain their failures.”
What may seem like a flippant position is actually an elaborate argumentative vantage point that scholars of religion have been refining for over one hundred years. Religionists are, by their training, by their dispositional nature, less interested in the debunking of the religious subject (“I knew you were lying!”) than we are in the study of the religious subject (“Such a complicated way to understand the world!”). What religionists have learned through all this analysis is that there are no consistent or pure religious subjects. There have been men and women throughout history—of towering, articulated faith and of impressive, practiced piety—who have found ways to sin, prevaricate, and seemingly contradict the ideal postulate of their orthodoxies. It is no surprise that a man of Christian consensus might have an Afrocentric preacher, or an evangelical may have an impregnated teen, or a Catholic may have a weakness for plagiarism, or an Episcopalian may have a hankering for Charles Keating’s cash. These aren’t exceptions in the study of religion, they are the rules. Men and women believe even as they struggle, relentlessly, to behave.
So when I say that John McCain may not believe in God, I do so with serious thought, and with no small indifference. It matters very little to me (as a voter, as a thinker, and as a believer) that John McCain doesn’t articulate a deity familiar to any available denomination of Christianity (or Judaism or Hinduism or Islam). John McCain is, indisputably, a man of courage and intelligence. To suggest that he is not recognizably Baptist (nor ostensibly Episcopalian) is merely to demonstrate that our enterprise of discerning religion from political candidates misses, precisely, the realities of religion. In some contrast to the pursuits of journalism, the religionist does not anticipate the craven, presuming that all words of faith are pandering rhetoric meant to appease men with guns and girls with God(s). Rather, our job is to collect the available artifacts of religion (words and acts supplied in archive or public record) and render an analysis of the subject. For students of religion, this analysis is not an inherently apolitical exercise, but it is, at its best, one disentangled from theological prescription. Somehow, without a God (but not, as we will see, without a powerful creed) John McCain has forged for himself a moral mode, a discourse, a rhetoric of righteousness. What, then, ought it matter whether he is or is not, technically speaking, Christian?
It apparently matters to him, and to his opponent, and maybe it matters to you. McCain has noted several times that the “number one issue... that people should [use to] make a selection of the president of the United States [is] will this person carry on in the Judeo-Christian principle that has made this nation the greatest experiment in the history of mankind?” A person’s faith is, according to McCain, an “important part of our qualifications to lead.” Bracketing his dubious grasp of constitutional history, McCain’s words direct our assessment. How ought we estimate the existence of such Judeo-Christian principle? And is such a principle properly religious? As I proceed here with a study of McCain’s religious words and religious acts, it is worth noting that there is no test, no catechism, and no shibboleth (as much as the voting public may, for whatever reason, desire one) that will prove religious identity or personal commitment to a specific God. People say and do a lot of things they don’t actually mean. Trying to know what people actually do believe, or what they actually do mean, requires psychic skill far beyond the purview of most refereed journals, most tenured academics, and certainly beyond the polygraph limits of the American media. Remember (yes, you, Senator McCain; you, Senator Obama; and you, voting Americans): words of faith are precisely that: Words. To know a man’s religion as an observer (a voter, a journalist, a scholar, an outside believer) is to know, only and entirely, his language game. This is John McCain’s.
Acts of Faith
From the start, it should be clear that we don’t have a lot to study. The most consistent aspect of McCain’s performance of religion is his droopiness toward expressive devotion. When it comes to communal ritual and institutional affiliation—the social expressions of religious belief—McCain offers little more than a confusing hopscotch of churches and a sense of presumptive Protestantism. His strongest acts of faith have been political maneuvers, like his 2008 attempt to create alliances with evangelical leaders in an effort to convince the party’s base that he is a bible believer. This despite the fact that he denounced the Religious Right in 2000 as “agents of intolerance” and despite the definitional truth that he was not, by any useful meaning of that category, an evangelical. This is one of the many reasons the selection of Governor Sarah Palin was such a brilliant choice as a co-conspirator in 2008. Central casting could not have supplied a better religious beard.
Even in his 2008 convention speech McCain would not admire publicly Palin’s religious belief, choosing rather to note that “she knows where she comes from and she knows who she works for. She stands up for what’s right, and she doesn’t let anyone tell her to sit down.” McCain’s rhetoric is littered with invocations of chutzpah and independence even as his has been a (theological and professional) career bent on a studied moderation. “Ultimately,” writes McCain biographer John Karaagac, “we may say that McCain’s life offers a study in appropriateness.” Yes, McCain has done what was expected of him: he, great-grandson of an Episcopalian priest, attended an Episcopal High School, matriculated to the Naval Academy, then devoted himself to military service before transferring his duty to elected office. In high school, he attended mandatory chapel every morning and mandatory church twice on Sundays. He learned every line of the Nicene Creed and the Apostles’ Creed, acts of memorization which would later earn him the role of ad hoc prison chaplain in the Hanoi Hilton. When he married a woman more regularly religious, he followed her to church when they had time to go. He would listen, and nod, and think that there was something good about all this fellowship, all this love.
Such a rendition of McCain’s appropriate religious life fails to offer the fleshy, flashy McCain, the McCain of infamy and admiration. McCain’s life story (articulated in memoirs and stump speeches) is suffused with talk (and pride) for insubordination, fearlessness, and nonconformity. He fancies himself a “maverick.” Perhaps this is why he has such a hard time tying with a denomination, and why he doesn’t like talking about anything as singularly conceding as religious devotion. For some observers, the fact that McCain doesn’t talk much about his faith, about his Christianity, is a denominational inevitability. “McCain, actually, is being very authentic by keeping it inside,” writes voter Eric Gorski in a letter to the New York Times,” He doesn’t wear religion on his sleeve because he comes from a generation and upbringing—Episcopalian—that tends not to.”
Such a socially determinist explanation might apply if McCain had not made an abrupt move to a different church in the early 1990s. Although his campaign lists his affiliation as “Episcopalian,” McCain corrected a reporter in 2007, commenting, “By the way, I’m no Episcopalian. I’m Baptist.” That year—preceding his current national candidacy, just seven years after he was outfoxed by Bush in South Carolina—saw many oddly confessional claims from McCain on subjects religious. “It wasn’t so much a rejection of the Episcopal Church,” McCain said in October 2007 of his move to the North Phoenix Baptist Church. “I came into that church, I sat down, I got the message of redemption and love and forgiveness, and it resonated with me. I found going to that church was beneficial to me in my life.” He “got” the “message of redemption.” He’s been “going” to church. These are claims of some acceptance and presence, but not the conversion or holy abjection frequently described by individuals whose worlds have been transfigured by a particular reading of the gospel, a particular preacher’s poignancy, or a particular ritual process. Becoming Baptist was, by McCain's reckoning, a Sunday respite. Conveniently for him, this churchly idyll was found by quitting one of the smallest mainline denominations in order to attend the single largest Protestant sect, by leaving the land of Gene Robinson for the world of Billy Graham, Rick Warren, and Mike Huckabee.
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