Religion is making a rare appearance on the campaign trail this week in a presidential election that has paid less attention to candidates’ personal faith than ever before.
Vice President Kamala Harris plans to attend services and speak at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church outside Atlanta on Sunday, while her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, will visit Victorious Believers Ministries in Saginaw, Michigan.
Meanwhile, former President Donald Trump criticized Harris on Thursday for skipping the Al Smith Dinner in New York City, a high-profile fundraiser for Catholic charities. He said her absence was “very disrespectful to our great Catholic community.” Harris sent a video instead.
While candidates from both parties have traditionally tried to emphasize their piety to appeal to religious voters and signal their personal integrity, Harris, Trump and their running mates have not made their faith a central focus this year.
That’s a stark contrast to President Joe Biden, a lifelong Catholic who regularly attends church services, quotes hymns and figures like St. Augustine, and wears ashes on his forehead on Ash Wednesday.
Barack Obama’s religion was a major factor in his 2008 campaign, both for its influence on his oratory and for criticism of his relationship with his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, a controversial figure who Obama eventually rebuked.
Obama cut his teeth in Chicago as a community organizer for a coalition of Catholic churches. And his comfort in religious settings was evident throughout his presidency, from the five times he invoked God in his first inauguration speech to his impromptu singing of “Amazing Grace” at Mother Emanuel AME Church after a white supremacist killed nine at the historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina.
But the United States has become even more secular in the eight years since Obama left office, with a record 28 percent of American adults now identifying as religiously unaffiliated, according to Pew, surpassing evangelical Protestants and Catholics to become the largest religious group in the country.
As recently as 2007, when Obama was preparing for his first presidential campaign, the religiously unaffiliated — which includes people who identify as atheists, agnostics and “nothing in particular” — made up just 16 percent of the country in Pew’s data.
And presidential historian Michael Beschloss said Americans have become more cynical about their politicians and what their religious affiliation might say about their character.
“We’ve learned a lot about a lot of politicians who seemed to be very religious but didn’t necessarily follow the tenets of their faith in any way,” Beschloss said, noting that religion has become as much about policy as it has about personality. “For many people, religion may not say much about someone’s personal character anymore.”
There’s less reason now for candidates to emphasize their religiosity — and even a potential danger to nonreligious voters, especially on the left — said Massimo Faggioli, a theology professor at Villanova University who wrote a spiritual biography of Biden.
And Harris and Trump, along with their running mates, have complicated religious backgrounds that are harder to “sell” politically than Biden’s familiar Catholicism, he said.
“There’s secularism on one side and a more complicated religious mix on the other,” Faggioli said. “And for Harris, there’s a risk when religion is associated with some kind of oppression in the eyes of some voters.”
Trump’s coalition is largely driven by evangelical Christians, but their support for him is based more on a shared political agenda than a spiritual connection. Only 8% of people who had a positive view of Trump earlier this year thought he was “very” religious, according to Pew.
Trump was raised Presbyterian, but in 2020 he said he considered himself a nondenominational Christian, though he’s not known for regularly attending church.
“It’s not a true love story anymore. It’s a marriage of convenience,” Faggioli said. “It’s become much more transactional.”
At the Al Smith dinner, Trump made that clear: “Catholics, you have to vote for me. You have to remember: I’m here and they’re not.”
Harris, by contrast, is a rare political figure who has downplayed her spiritual life in public, given the anti-religious sentiment in her native California Bay Area and a complicated personal religious journey.
Harris is a Baptist who was raised by a black Anglican father and an Indian Hindu mother and is now married to a Reform Jewish husband.
She is a longtime member of San Francisco’s historic Third Baptist Church and is close to its pastor, the Rev. Amos Brown. As vice president, she has attended services at Baptist churches in the Washington, D.C., area and will speak at the 2022 National Baptist Convention.
Brown was one of the first people Harris called after Biden decided not to run for re-election, and she managed his campaign for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1999.
“She’s a strong, spiritual person who comes from a strong, spiritual family that we’ve known for a long time,” Brown said in an interview with a newspaper in his native Mississippi earlier this year.
Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, said in his speech at the Democratic National Convention that “Kamala has connected me more deeply to my faith” and that they attend both synagogue and church on holy days.
In her 2019 memoir, Harris wrote about her mother’s exposure to both Hindu and African-American Christian religious traditions, adding that she and her sister, Maya, sang in the choir at the 23rd Avenue Church of God in Oakland.
“I believe in living our faith and demonstrating our faith in action,” she wrote.
But aside from asking Brown to deliver the closing prayer at this summer’s convention and occasionally referencing her church, especially when speaking to black audiences, Harris rarely speaks about God and her oratorical style is more denunciatory than preachy.
“I grew up in the black church,” Harris told radio host Charlamagne tha God last week when a pastor asked about working with faith communities. “Our God is a loving God. Our faith drives us to act in a way that is about kindness and justice, mercy.”
She contrasted that with what she called Trump’s belief that strength is “who you knock down,” which she called “absolutely antithetical to the church that I know.”
Walz, meanwhile, was raised Catholic but became Lutheran after marrying his wife, Gwen. Lutheranism is a major Protestant denomination, but in the U.S. it is almost entirely concentrated in the Upper Midwest, with little traction in the rest of the country, where it makes up a small percentage of the population.
Walz rarely talks about his religion and sometimes jokes that his Midwestern sensibilities make it difficult to be outspoken.
“Because we’re good Minnesota Lutherans, we have a rule: If you do something good and you talk about it, it doesn’t count,” Walz joked during a speech to unions this year.
Meanwhile, Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, has written about his own personal journey. He was raised evangelical but rarely attended church, and became an atheist as a young adult before converting to conservative Catholicism as an adult.
Vance’s wife, Usha, was raised Hindu in a “religious family,” and she and Vance were married in an interfaith ceremony that included both Bible readings and a Hindu pandit.
Those stories of conversion, intermarriage and background religiosity reflect the spiritual lives of Americans today, but may not make for neat stories for the stump.
“If you’re not comfortable talking about religion, it’s obvious, so it makes sense not to,” Faggioli said.