In 1960, John F. Kennedy faced an extraordinary challenge to his hopes for winning the presidency: in a nation that was overwhelmingly Protestant, the Catholic senator from Massachusetts knew that his faith might cost him the race. The majority had been schooled since colonial times in the dangers of “rum, Romanism, and rebellion,” and the one previous Catholic nominee for president, New York Governor Al Smith, had lost badly in 1928.

On June 12, Kennedy went before the Houston Ministerial Association to confront that challenge. In his speech he gave eloquent endorsement to the idea of separation of church and state, reminded his listeners of the costs of religious bigotry, and challenged voters to rise above divisions of faith in their choice of the nation’s leaders. “I believe in an America,” he said, “where the separation of church and state is absolute — where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote — where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference — and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him. I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant, nor Jewish — where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches, or any other ecclesiastical source — where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials — and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.”

Kennedy won election five months later — and many afterwards counted that moment in Houston as the inauguration of a new era in American life. Religion, it was said, would no longer be a test for public office.

But roll forward 40 years, and that First Amendment-enshrined ideal can seem as quaintly outdated as the pillbox hats Jacqueline Kennedy once wore. President Bush invokes God at every turn, as his guide and the nation’s in choices about everything from war to welfare reform. Echoing Ronald Reagan (and John Winthrop), he describes Americans as a chosen people, America as a promised land, and its role in the world as divinely inspired. Asked as a candidate in 2000 who his favorite philosopher was, famously, Bush unhesitatingly replied, “Jesus Christ.”

The Republicans aren’t alone, of course, in invoking the deity nowadays as a guide to public life. Despite the precedent Kennedy set in Houston, 13 years after his assassination, Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter proudly entered the White House as a born-again Christian, and most of the party’s nominees have struggled ever since to make sure voters understood that they, too, embraced the divine, Joe Lieberman’s proud invocation of his Orthodox Judaism in 2000, the most vivid example. In the wake of September 11, no politician concludes a major speech without enjoining, “And may God bless America.”

For those who thought John F. Kennedy’s election marked a new era in church-state separation, in short, the question is, what happened — or perhaps more important, what does this all mean? Is America as religiously intolerant as millions outside its borders seem to think, a jihadist superpower as dangerous to world peace and security as the extremist Muslim forces it’s facing? And domestically, is all this talk of faith signs of a new bigotry toward the nonreligious or minority religions that threatens all too familiar consequences? And most important for many, the immediate issue: how will God vote in the race between born-again President George W. Bush and Senator John F. Kerry, another Catholic Democrat from Massachusetts?

Answering those questions isn’t easy, but its starting point is this: the history of American politics is, for better or worse, also a history of American religion. Kennedy, for example, after his eloquent defense of church and state division won election only because Catholics that November voted for him in unprecedented numbers. Eighty-two percent of them, according to exit polls, chose the Democrat; white Protestants, far greater in number, voted for Richard Nixon by nearly two to one.

Twenty years later, of course, the once-burning “Catholic issue” was forgotten, replaced by the “Christian Right” question. After voting for Jimmy Carter in 1976, the nation’s white evangelicals overwhelmingly opted for Ronald Reagan in 1980, the opening salvo in what turned out to be the single most important partisan realignment in modern U.S. history. Urged on by fundamentalist preachers like Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority and then by Pat Robertson and his Christian Coalition, those voters dropped the Democratic Party by the millions for wholehearted embrace of the GOP. By 2000, their conversion wascomplete: they supported George Bush over Al Gore by a four to one margin.

That realignment, needless to say, has remade American politics, helping usher in a 30-year-long conservative era that ended the New Deal and Keynesian legacy born in the Great Depression. With the “New Right” in control of the GOP, “New Democrats” abandoned their party’s long-established support for New Deals, New Frontiers, and Great Societies in favor of “limited government” and “market-based solutions” to the nation’s (and the world’s) ills.

That realignment also helped launch the “culture wars that have riven the country ever since, over abortion, feminism, the family, gay rights, evolution, prayer in public schools, and a host of other issues. In those wars, conservatives have always claimed that they stand on one side of a great divide, the proud defenders of “traditional values,” standards, religious faith, and common sense battling against liberal opponents advocating mindless multiculturalism, moral relativism, secularism, and a woolly utopianism little changed since the turbulent 1960s. They’ve used the charge to great effect in the media and hundreds of
key political races across the country, repeatedly forcing Democrats onto the defensive in ways that have in turn further divided the party.

Reading exit polls, pundits, in fact, have taken to claiming that religion has become the strongest single predictor of voting behavior today, more important than race, income, or gender. “Religious Americans,” they say, “vote Republican; secular Americans vote Democratic.” And since religious voters vastly outnumber the secular, they offer a simple conclusion: the candidates and values of a secular and liberal America stand little chance of recapturing control of politics any time soon. The conservative era, after three decades, still has in this view an unchallengeable future ahead of it, other things being equal.

With the Iraq War and its ongoing aftermath, and a still limping economy, of course, “other things” aren’t equal. Even so, if there are hints of truth here, they’re only hints that mislead more than they inform, because in reality the ways in which the religious beliefs of most Americans affect their voting behavior and political beliefs not only about the culture wars, but the war against terrorism and the economy as well, turns out to be far more complex than these pundits understand. For example, it’s true that 90 percent of George Bush’s voters in 2000 did identify themselves as “religious” — but so did 80 percent of Al Gore’s voters. In other words, presidential politics aren’t a fight between “the religious” and “the secular,” as conservatives like to claim, but a division that’s far more interesting — and far older in our history — between two competing communities of religious Americans with very different visions about the place of religion in public life, and the political and moral values of each tradition.

A little background here: Americans, as Tocqueville and others long ago pointed out, are a remarkably religious people, quite unlike Europeans. More than 90 percent, for example, since World War II have consistently told Gallup pollsters, who ask the question annually, that they believe in the existence of God — a rate more than double, and in many cases three or four times, that found in any other advanced industrial society. On another level, too, Americans also seem quite unified; more than 80 percent identify themselves as Christian, and of those, three-quarters specifically say they’re Protestant Christians. Put another way, the United States is more Christian than Israel is Jewish or India is Hindu.

But there the nation’s seeming religious homogeneity ends, as anyone with passing familiarity with it knows, not only because there are more than 1,200 Protestant denominations in the country, but also because nearly 40 percent of Americans aren’t Protestant.

The best way to grasp the confusing religious landscape, however, isn’t to think about homogeneity at all, but to think in terms of religious or denominational “blocs.” Today a quarter of the nation is Catholic, a quarter evangelical or fundamentalist white Protestant (Baptists foremost, plus conservative Lutherans, Pentecostals, and Reformed churches), and a quarter so-called “mainline” Protestant (Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Congregationalists the best known). Beyond that 10 percent are African-American Protestant, 2 percent Jewish, 2 percent Mormon, 1 percent Muslim, 1 percent Orthodox Christian, and roughly 10 percent secular.

The “bloc” concept is useful because it tells far more than the “religious versus secular” idea does about the relationship of religious affiliation to political beliefs and voting behavior. In the 2004 race, it’s safe to predict that white evangelicals and Mormons will vote Republican, that African-American Protestants and Jews will just as solidly vote Democrat — and that the outcome of the presidential contest will rest on the decisions made by Catholics and the mainline Protestants. Catholics since 1960 have never voted as they did, dividing more on 55-45 lines, swinging back and forth between the two parties; the mainline Protestants meanwhile, scattered across the North and South, have split largely along the same regional lines that divide the Democrats themselves.

That’s what makes both “the Catholic issue” of 1960 and the “Christian Right question” of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s so relevant today, but in new — and for many of us, unexpected — ways. Sometimes overlooked, Falwell’s Moral Majority went bankrupt in the late 1980s, and Robertson’s Christian Coalition did likewise a decade later, leaving their supporters Republican, but without big nonparty organizations around which to rally. As 40 percent of the GOP base, they’re vitally important to Bush’s chances for re-election, but alone not enough — and that’s made them a complicated problem for White House strategists. There are very few white evangelicals still left outside the party to be recruited, and as the 40 percent figure indicates, Bush will need plenty of other conservative and swing voters if he’s going to win this November.

But the Christian Right’s divisive legacy, their stridency, and their agenda sit uneasily with a lot of those voters, otherwise inclined to vote Republican. Conservative Catholics, for example — even when they voted with conservative evangelicals for Reagan — always expressed uneasiness about the “televangelists” and never joined either the Moral Majority or Christian Coalition in even insignificant numbers, holding themselves apart. And moderate suburban and business Republicans, many of them “mainline” Protestants, have been no happier with the Christian Right’s perceived intolerance about abortion, intolerance for homosexuals, and views toward school prayer and evolution. In 2000, Bush’s presentation of himself as a “compassionate conservative” was meant to hold this uneasy alliance together — which it did, but without producing the majority needed to win the popular-vote race.

Even the Christian Right isn’t as solidly and passionately Republican as it once was. Former leaders such as Cal Thomas have even openly questioned the evangelicals’ passionate embrace of politics in the 1980s and 1990s, arguing not only that in office Republicans failed to deliver on the conservative Christian agenda, but that by descending too deeply into politics, evangelicals had forgotten the New Testament’s distinction between serving God and serving Rome. The Bush campaign’s chief strategist Karl Rove has more than once since worried aloud about how the party will get the millions of evangelicals who “missed” voting for Bush in 2000 out to the polls in 2004.

That’s ultimately what makes “the Catholic question” so compellingly interesting this year. Can a fairly liberal Catholic senator from Massachusetts (with a Southern Protestant senator as his running mate) repeat the victory of JFK and LBJ 44 years later, by persuading Catholics to vote in large numbers for the Democrats? No one believes that Kerry can get 82 percent of them as Kennedy did (too much about America and American Catholicism has changed since then). But too often forgotten is the fact that in both presidential elections before 1960 Catholics had gone solidly Republican. Having chosen Clinton and Gore by modest majorities in the last three races, will those numbers swell — say, to 55 or even 60 percent — for Kerry? If they do, because the nation’s Catholics are significant factors in most of the key swing states this year, religion may turn out to have powerful effects once again. (Here, interestingly, the criticism of Kerry by Catholic bishops — including the threat to deny him Communion — may actually work in his favor; in the wake of the church’s pedophilia scandals, disillusionment with the hierarchy among congregants is at an all-time high.)

Nearly a century ago, the English writer G. K. Chesterton famously observed, in an echo of Tocqueville, that America was “a nation with the soul of a church.” This November, with both sides convinced that in some sense this election is an unprecedented battle over that soul, it’s safe to say that Americans’ faiths will once again play a major role in determining the outcome.

Richard Parker is a senior fellow at the Shorenstein Center and a lecturer in public policy who teaches on religion, politics, and public policy.