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

254 Pages·2011·0.85 MB·English

by  Frederick Stecker

The Podium, the Pulpit,
and the Republicans

THE PODIUM, THE
PULPIT, AND THE
REPUBLICANS
How Presidential Candidates Use
Religious Language in American
Political Debate
Frederick Stecker
Foreword by Charles C. Lemert
Copyright 2011 by Frederick Stecker
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,
or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission
in writing from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stecker, Frederick.
Th e podium, the pulpit, and the Republicans : how presidential candidates use religious
language in American political debate / Frederick Stecker ; foreword by Charles C. Lemert.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-313-38250-5 (hbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-313-38251-2 (ebk.)
1. Communication in politics—United States. 2. Presidential candidates—
United States—Language. 3. Vice-presidential candidates—United States—
Language. 4. English language—Religious aspects—Christianity. 5. English
language—United States—Rhetoric. 6. Rhetoric—Religious aspects—
Christianity. 7. Republican Party (U.S. : 1854– ) 8. United States—Politics
and government—2001–2009. I. Title.
JA85.2.U6S74 2011
324.973'0931—dc22 2011011307
ISBN: 978-0-313-38250-5
EISBN: 978-0-313-38251-2
15 14 13 12 11 1 2 3 4 5
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Th is book is printed on acid-free paper
Manufactured in the United States of America
In Memory of Phyllis W. Meadow, PhD, Founder of the Center for Modern
Psychoanalytic Studies, New York, NY, and former president of the Boston
Graduate School of Psychoanalysis, Brookline, MA

and

Th e Rev. John Snow, MA , Professor of Pastoral Th eology Episcopal Divinity School,
Cambridge, MA

Contents
Foreword by Charles C. Lemert ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction xiii
1 Parenting Models and Religious Beliefs 1
2 Tracing the Origins of the New Right 12
3 Th e Religious Right 26
4 Assessing the Impact 37
5 Politics 2000 and Beyond 52
6 America and the Presidency in a Post-9/11 World 69
7 Issues of Security: Th e 2004 Presidential and
Vice Presidential Debates 84
8 Religion and Induced Fear: Th e Stealth Manipulation
of the American Public 102
9 Th e Residual Eff ects of the 2004 Presidential Contest 116
10 Th e Race to 2008: Th e Republicans, the Democrats,
and Th eir Nominees 130
11 2008: Th e Democratic and Republican National Conventions
and the Prelude to the Presidential Debates 143
12 Th e 2008 Presidential Debates and the Presidential Election 160
viii CONTENTS
Afterword 177
Notes 181
Selected Bibliography 217
Index 221
Foreword
For a good several centuries, since Marx in the 1840s, social critics operated on
the assumption that the days of religion’s reign over the public sphere were num-
bered. Today, in the 2010s, a good 15-plus decades later, the question remains.
Why is religion still so powerful a force in late modern social life such a long time
after Marx declared it the opiate of the people?
Even if it were somehow demonstrated that religion is little more than a drug
debilitating the rational mind, the fact is that it is a powerful infl uence today.
From the rise of evangelical Christianity in the 1990s to the perplexing promi-
nence of Islamic fundamentalism in the 2000s, few corners of global politics have
not been assaulted by very often ill-informed commentary on the role of religion
in society. Public discourse on the subject is notable only for the degree to which
its intellectual poverty so often compares to the impoverishment of the evangeli-
cal and fundamentalist religions it aims to explain.
Th is is why we need a book like Frederick Stecker’s Th e Podium, the Pulpit,
and the Republicans. S tecker is uncommonly well prepared for his topic. He is an
ordained minister of the Episcopal Church as well as a student of psychoanalysis.
As such, his study and experience have trained him to focus on the ways public
speech relies on and distorts ordinary language. Th e preaching minister must
deploy words to explain the inexplicable as the analyst must listen to them to
understand a patient’s deeper feelings. Th ese are the two sides of political lan-
guage in that the politician is widely accused of using language to explain what
he does not believe in order to persuade voters who do not know what they feel.
Stecker does a superb job of pulling these disparate vectors of today’s political
culture together.
Th e Podium, the Pulpit, and the Republicans is also daring in that it focuses
on the crisis of American politics as represented by the strains and tensions (as
well as successes) of the Republican Party. Yet, the reader never feels she is being