The Podium, The Pulpit, and the Republicans:
How Presidential Candidates Use Religious Language in American Political Debate

by Frederick R. Stecker

229 pp., Praeger, $44.99

An old friend has written an astute book about political language. He is Frederick R. Stecker, an Episcopal Priest, retired from the parish ministry and now an adjunct professor at Colby Sawyer College in New London, New Hampshire. Fr. Stecker also holds a doctorate from the Institute for the Study of Violence of the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. For his dissertation, as he explains in his introduction, he “studied the heavily rehearsed language of the presidential debates of 2000 and 2004,” from a perspective informed by George Lakoff’s work on political language in Moral Politics (1996) and by other work in the literature relating to ways we humans process fear and rage, form world views, develop identity and group identification, etc.¹ The present book appears to have expanded and enlarged the work of the dissertation to include, among other things, an analysis of the language of the 2008 presidential campaign.

Fr. Stecker’s book is both incisive and informed. It avoids the clichés of contemporary media discourse while speaking directly to the categories that enframe those clichés. Here’s an example from chapter five:

[George W.] Bush first rocked the political world when he was asked in a debate, prior to the 1999 Iowa caucus, about his favorite philosopher. Bush responded, “Jesus, because he changed my heart.” The Des Moines Register reported that Governor Bush had misunderstood the question to be “Who’s had the most influence on your life?” However it was heard, Governor Bush changed the direction of the political discourse from that moment on. Orrin Hatch, who followed Bush, noted Abraham Lincoln as his favorite philosopher, but then added, “I bear witness to Christ, too.” Then Gary Bauer chimed in and echoed Bush’s testimony. John McCain was the only one of the six candidates who did not reference God that night; there were, in all, 20 such references by the other five. What started out as a misunderstood question resonated with the citizens of Iowa that polled 40 percent of caucus participants to be evangelical or “born again.” It set the tone for all that followed.

Particularly cogent in displaying how certain religious tropes resonate with various groups of voters, Fr. Stecker’s documentation is impressive, presented informally in the text. Like Lakoff, Fr. Stecker could be charged with speaking as a liberal, but that doesn’t trouble me; and I think the quantitative evidence in this qualitative study is forceful.

That’s not what I want to talk about, however. Fr. Stecker traces the rise of the religious right in post-1960s American politics in his second and third chapters and links that history both with the economic interests it serves and with its growth as a counter-culture. Central to his primary argument in the chapters that follow is an analysis of how George W. Bush and Richard Cheney (perhaps under the tutelage of Karl Rove) combined use of religious language identifying themselves with the supposed certainties of “faith” and skillful manipulation of the fear of terrorism to foster and maintain a siege mentality in the public mind during the years following 9/11 until support for the Iraq war began to erode.

A chief finding of Fr. Stecker’s research is that these rhetorical gestures and the gestures they provoked from Democratic candidates were successful for Republicans in 2000 and 2004 and validate Lakoff’s “nation as family” metaphors; but a further finding is that Barack Obama was able to turn the Republicans’ rhetoric against them and reclaim both the language of faith and the language of patriotism for his own campaign and best “the Republicans at their own game” in 2008. It is this latter finding for which I am particularly grateful.

Back in 2008 my beloved and I met a young couple from Oklahoma and their small children as we were all standing in line at the Edward Jones Dome to be admitted to an Obama rally. Even on a cold winter evening the crowd was huge, but we gained admission easily and had a pleasant time talking as we waited. I wrote about that conversation here. As the years have gone by and I have watched the Obama presidency develop, It has come more and more to seem to me that the president should be judged not on foreign policy, though I have much to say about that, and not on his performance with respect to the economic meltdown he inherited, but rather in relation to the hopes and dreams of young people like the couple we met at that long ago rally. They had driven all the way from southwestern Oklahoma to hear candidate Obama speak. They are part of that generation of Americans who do not expect the social safety net to be there for them but who remain hopeful that their children will inherit the American dream.

I have been severely critical of President Obama. I have been and am still a conscientious objector to his apparent willingness to keep the prison at Guantanamo Bay open, to his apparent willingness to sanction suspension of the right of habeas corpus, and to his apparent validation of Bush era policies that subjected enemy combatants (so called) to torture in spite of his claims to the contrary. But I have also been distressed that President Obama has apparently been unable, or unwilling, until very recently to pursue economic policies that fostered the hopes of Americans like me who believe that government policy has for thirty years favored the interests of a wealthy minority to the detriment of the great majority of Americans. My distress reached its apogee (or nadir) last summer with the President’s capitulation to a vicious Republican minority in the matter of the debt ceiling.

We live in a time of political ambiguity brought about by decades of irreconcilable disputes, as Fr. Stecker notes. Republicans have successfully demanded attention to these disputes as the price of attention to all other matters. In addition, Republicans have preempted the public sphere with absolutist religious and moral claims. The idea that morality is dependent upon religion is an absurdity. Even more absurd is the spectacle of political alliances between religious groups who do not expect to meet one another in heaven. Still, there’s a hard truth in all of this. These groups share a commitment to what Isaiah Berlin termed metaphysical politics.

Berlin begins his famous 1958 essay on two kinds of liberty with the observation that “Where ends are agreed, the only questions left are those of means, and these are not political but technical, that is to say, capable of being settled by experts or machines, like arguments between engineers or doctors.” Berlin characterizes this outlook as Utopian, but it might just as readily be called ideological.² Berlin’s ideas were formed in the shadow of the Nazi terror that he and his family had escaped. It seemed self-evident that “fanatically held social and political doctrines” were as dangerous as the technologies of death they engendered in Germany and Eastern Europe during much of the twentieth century.

But what Berlin calls the metaphysical view of politics seems protean in human affairs. It has renewed itself in American politics since 1980 and seems to be renewing itself in European politics as well.³ Indeed, future historians may characterize our time as a time of resurgent fundamentalism worldwide—though we need a better term; contemporary French sumptuary laws forbidding the wearing of the veil by Islamic women, for instance, reflect a reified secularism that is metaphysical in Berlin’s sense but not precisely fundamentalist even in the broad sense in which we presently use the term.

I was a strong supporter of President Obama in 2008. I did not think him a superhero, but I saw his candidacy and election to office as ratification of the pluralist society we have built in this country since the time of my childhood. Like Berlin I believe “that human goals are many, not all of them commensurable, and in perpetual rivalry with one another.” I believe that we humans “choose between ultimate values; . . . because [our] life and thought are determined by fundamental moral categories and concepts that are . . . over large stretches of time and space, and whatever their ultimate origins, a part of [our] being and thought and sense of [our] own identity; part of what makes [us] human.” I believe that pluralism in politics and the willingness to proceed ad hoc are positive goods because over time these values seem to generate more liberty for more of us humans than does devotion to some dream of future perfection or past excellence or adherence to some system of practice believed to be rooted in the natural order or authorized by divine command.

I don’t mean to imply that I think Fr. Stecker shares these views. His purpose in writing seems to have been modest. At the outset of his last chapter, he makes this claim:

Since 9/11, it has become imperative to monitor our own responses to political pronouncements. We must be able to pause and reflect on our reactions as well as to examine the information we’ve been given. I use the pew to sort out issues. It provides a transitional space for me to help grasp what’s important-authority, not power.

Then after a recapitulation of his book’s major themes he says further:

As I write this, America now focuses on vitriol in politics. The attempt to assassinate Representative Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) brings the focus on linguistics to new heights; it is time that we stop finding unity solely in sorrow. By mid-2011, we will begin to see candidates testing the waters (and our credibility) once more. Keep an ear to the use of religious language and to the nuanced use of fear. I’ll be willing to bet that both will continue to resurface; it is a lightning rod that touches our emotions; it works every time, unless we become aware.

After some reflection I remain at least provisionally convinced that President Obama’s tenure in office affirms the ideals of human flourishing⁴ that I believe represent my country at its best. But that best is always open to critique, subject to correction, contingent, and historical. I am being persuaded by writers like Andrew Sullivan, James Falows, and now Frederick Stecker, that I should reevaluate my reaction to the president’s first term. I’m grateful to these persuasive writers; and though I agree with Fallows that the president will likely be regarded a failure if he does not win reelection, I begin to be hopeful about that eventuality. Frederick Stecker’s book lends credence to the view, more and more expressed these days, that President Obama is capable of deflecting the rhetorical weapons that will be used against him and turning them to his advantage as a candidate, that he takes a long view of the times and the tasks he has set for himself as president, and that he has always intended to serve two full terms.

Notes

¹Fr. Stecker’s book is cross-disciplinary, citing work in psychology, pychiatry, history, rhetorical criticism, and other disciplines.
²I am thinking of Mannheim here, especially.
³See Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land (2010) and here.
⁴I have the term from Martha Nussbaum.