In Good Faith: John McCain's “New Republican Majority” Address and the Problem of Religion and Politics

Abstract

This essay explores the process by which John McCain's “New Republican Majority” address negotiated competing demands in U.S. political culture surrounding religion and politics by incorporating personal religious testimony within an address that symbolically preserved the fundamentally nonreligious character of the political process. It argues that McCain constructed an identity for the Republican Party as a secular political movement, and that he dissociated the Christian Right from that secular movement. From that position, he then invited conservative Christians to “join” the movement on the basis of common political rather than religious values. Finally, he offered himself as a model of the Christian in politics, who operated out of deep faith but would not use religion to structure public policy.

Notes

T. C. Miller and R. Brownstein, “McCain Delivers Hard Left to Christian Right,” Los Angeles Times, February 29, 2000, A1.

David Barstow, “McCain Denounces Political Tactics of the Christian Right,” New York Times, February 29, 2000, A1. Other reports estimated the crowd at 2,500. See Miller and Brownstein, A1.

All quotations are from the online text of the speech, retrieved from http://www.StraightTalkAmerica.com/news/DisplayArticle.cfm?PassArtKey=42 (accessed August 25, 2000). CNN's transcript of the speech is available at http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0002/28/se.01.html (accessed March 6, 2009).

Perhaps the most nuanced was Miller and Brownstein's assertion that the speech represented an attempt to exploit “long-simmering tensions between social conservatives and more secular elements in the GOP” as a way of reaching out to “moderate voters—Republicans, but also Democrats and independents—cool toward the religious conservative movement.” See also Linda Feldmann and Abraham McLaughlin, “Behind the Campaign ‘Holy Wars,'” Christian Science Monitor, March 3, 2000, 1.

Steve Marantz, “McCain's Biting Religious Attacks Left a Bad Taste,” Boston Herald, March 8, 2000, 30. For an informative discussion of media framing, see Jim A. Kuypers, Press Bias and Politics (Westport: Praeger, 2002). Particularly insightful is his argument that media accounts of Louis Farrakhan's “Million Man March” address framed the speech by accentuating Farrakhan's reputation for racism and intolerance, in a way that obscured its actual focus on racial reconciliation.

Kevin Sack, “Remarks Rally Christian Right Against McCain,” New York Times, March 3, 2000, A1.

Joe Frolik, “McCain-Bush Feud Captures Attention of Ohio Republicans,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, March 4, 2000, A8.

Robert Novak, “It's Bush and Gore; GOP Christian Conservatives Prove Vital,” Chicago Sun-Times, March 8, 2000, 1.

There is reason to believe that any hope for a McCain nomination rested in the hands of moderate voters. A Gallup Poll revealed that 54% of McCain supporters considered themselves moderates. See Jeffrey M. Jones, “Special Analysis: McCain Voters,” Gallup, March 3, 2000 (retrieved from http://www.gallup.com/poll/3118/Special-Analysis-McCain-Voters.aspx, accessed March 3, 2013). Such voters were essential in order for McCain to win larger states on “Super Tuesday.” According to Ostrom and Puzzanghera, for example, only 25% of Republicans “considered themselves religious conservatives.” Furthermore, “the only category of Republicans” who supported McCain over Bush were moderates, and some observers believed that the speech could “help rally at least some California moderates.” As Political Science Professor Jack Pitney put it, “A lot of Republicans [in California] don't like Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell and Republicans who do are probably going to vote for Bush anyway.” Pitney predicted that “at least in California [the speech] will do McCain more good than harm.” Mary Anne Ostrom and Jim Puzzanghera, “McCain's Insurgent Campaign Continues to Defy Political Convention,” San Jose Mercury News, February 29, 2000 (retrieved from LexisNexis Academic, accessed March 4, 2013).

Stephen L. Carter, The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1993), 9.

Maddux noted that the prominent place of religion in recent political discourse has not only brought strong criticism from cultural opinion leaders but has even prompted intense soul searching within evangelical Christianity itself. Kristy Maddux, The Faithful Citizen: Popular Christian Media and Gendered Civic Identities (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2010), 35–41. One testimony to the pervasiveness of religion in political discourse has been the attention given it by rhetorical scholars. See, for example, Ronald Lee, “The Force of Religion in the Public Square,” Journal of Communication and Religion 25 (2002): 6–20; David C. Bailey, “Enacting Transformation: George W. Bush and the Pauline Conversion Narrative in A Charge to Keep,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 11 (2008): 215–241; Martin J. Medhurst, “Evangelical Christian Faith and Political Action: Mike Huckabee and the 2008 Republican Presidential Nomination,” Journal Of Communication and Religion 32 (2009): 199–239; “Mitt Romney, ‘Faith in America,’ and the Dance of Religion and Politics in American Culture, Rhetoric and Public Affairs 12 (2009): 195–221; Brian Jackson, “The Prophetic Alchemy of Jim Wallis,” Rhetoric Review 29 (2010): 48–68.

For a discussion of this philosophical position, see J. Caleb Clanton, Religion and Democratic Citizenship: Inquiry and Conviction in the American Public Square (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2008).

Richard Rorty, “Religion as a Conversation Stopper,” in The Ethics of Citizenship: Liberal Democracy and Religious Convictions, ed. J. Caleb Clanton (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2009), 138, 136. For a response, see Stuart Rosenbaum, “Must Religion Be A Conversation-Stopper?” Harvard Theological Review 102 (2009): 393–409.

To this Rawls adds the principle of “reciprocity,” which calls on political actors to support their position with arguments that they sincerely believe all other citizens would reasonably accept. John Rawls, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” University of Chicago Law Review 64 (1997): 767, 770–771. For a response, see Jürgen Habermas, “Religion in the Public Sphere,” European Journal of Philosophy 14 (2006): 1–25.

Rawls, 776.

Debra J. Saunders, “Santorum, the Exorcist Candidate,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 14, 2012. http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/saunders/article/Santorum-the-exorcist-candidate-3407408.php (accessed July 19, 2012).

“Devil in the Details: Santorum Hardly Alone in Belief in Satan,” U.S. News on NBCNews.com, February 22, 2012. http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/02/22/10478701-devil-in-the-details-santorum-hardly-alone-in-belief-in-satan?lite (accessed July 17, 2012).

Robert P. Jones and Daniel Cox, “The Mormon Question, Economic Inequality, and the 2012 Presidential Campaign” (Washington, DC: Public Religion Research Institute, 2012), 2, 6. For a discussion of this expectation both historically and in recent political history, see Daniel DiSalvo and Jerome E. Copulsky, “Faith in the Primaries,” Perspectives On Political Science 38 (2009): 99–106.

Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, “More See ‘Too Much’ Religious Talk by Politicians,” March 12, 2012, http://www.pewforum.org/Politics-and-Elections/more-see-too-much-religious-talk-by-politicians.aspx (accessed April 4, 2012).

Edwin Black, “The Second Persona,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 56 (1970): 113.

Michael Calvin McGee, “In Search of ‘The People,'” Quarterly Journal of Speech 61 (1975): 240. The understanding of the audience as a rhetorical construction was given perhaps its most well-known articulation in Maurice Charland's, “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Québécois,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 73 (1987): 133–150.

On the use of specific verbal techniques for establishing communion among auditors, ranging from appeals to common values and traditions to strategic alternations of pronouns, see Richard Graff and Wendy Winn, “Presencing ‘Communion’ in Chaïm Perelman's New Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 39 (2006): 45–71.

As Diggins observes, “In historical memory, the uses and misuses of the Reagan presidency constitute a chapter in American Mythology”; John P. Diggins, Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2007), xx. One journalist, writing just after his death, captured that myth in this way: “To a nation hungry for a hero, a nation battered by Vietnam, damaged by Watergate and humiliated by the taking of hostages in Iran, Ronald Reagan held out the promise of a return to greatness, the promise that America would ‘stand tall’ again”; Marilyn Berger, “Ronald Reagan Dies at 93,” New York Times, June 6, 2004, 1. See also Craig A. Smith, “Mistereagan's Neighborhood: Rhetoric and National Unity,” Southern Speech Communication Journal 52(1987): 219–239.

Peter Beinart, “The War Over Patriotism,” Time, June 26, 2008, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1818195,00.html (accessed July 7, 2012).

Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, trans. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969), 411–412.

Janice W. Fernheimer, “Black Jewish Identity Conflict: A Divided Universal Audience and the Impact of Dissociative Disruption,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 39 (2009): 52. See also Fernheimer, “From Jew to Israelite: Making ‘Uncomfortable Communions’ and the New Rhetoric's Tools for Invention,” Argumentation and Advocacy (2008): 198–212; Andreea Ritivoi, “The Dissociation of Concepts in Context: An Analytical Template for Assessing Its Role in Actual Situations,” Argumentation and Advocacy 44 (2008): 185–197.

Bush's February 2 visit to Bob Jones University dogged his campaign throughout the month, to the point that just one day before McCain's speech, Bush had felt compelled to write to New York Cardinal John O'Connor expressing regret for his failure to distance himself from anti-Catholic sentiments and racial prejudice during his Bob Jones University appearance. See Barstow, A1.

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986); Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (New York: Norton and Company, 2004); Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Hachette Book Group, 2007).

Rawls, 782.

Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950, repr. 1969), 20–23. But see also Mackin, who notes that the success of this kind of rhetorical strategy often comes at the sacrifice of a society's communicative ecology. James A. Mackin, “Schismogenesis and Community: Pericles’ Funeral Oration,” Quarterly Journal Of Speech 77 (1991): 251–262.

Philip Wander, “The Third Persona: An Ideological Turn in Rhetorical Theory,” in Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader, ed. John Louis Lucaites, Celeste Michelle Condit, and Sally Caudill (New York: The Guilford Press, 1999), 370. McCain's strategy also reflects what Klumpp, in his analysis of the 1968 Columbia University student protests, called “polar-rejective identification,” through which radical student leaders gain support by depicting university administration in a way that drove students away from administration and, by implication, toward the radical alternative. James F. Klumpp, “Challenge of Radical Rhetoric: Radicalization at Columbia,” Western Speech 37 (1973): 146–156.

Enactment, Campbell and Jamieson argued, is a compelling form of argument through which a rhetor “incarnates the truth, is the proof of what is said.” Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, “Form and Genre in Rhetorical Action,” in Form and Genre: Shaping Rhetorical Action, ed. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamieson (Falls Church: Speech Communication Association, 1978), 5.

Barstow, A1.

Thomas Oliphant, “For McCain, A Home Run and an Error,” Boston Globe, February 29, 2000, A11.

Novak, 1.

On personal testimony as genre of discourse, see J. Stephen Kroll-Smith, “The Testimony As Performance: The Relationship of an Expressive Event to The Belief System of a Holiness Sect,” Journal For The Scientific Study Of Religion 19 (1980): 16–25; Mark Ward, “‘I Was Saved at an Early Age': An Ethnography of Fundamentalist Speech and Cultural Performance,” Journal of Communication and Religion 33 (2010): 108–144.

For an analysis of that speech as an instance of this paradigm, see DiSalvo and Copulsky, who label it “Faith in Translation” and contrast it to two other options for dealing with religion an politics represented in the 2007–2008 presidential primary, the “Christian Candidacy” of Mike Huckabee and the “Civil Religion” represented by Mitt Romney.

Barack Obama, “Call to Renewal” (Keynote address, Sojourners Call to Renewal Conference, Washington, DC, June 28, 2006), retrieved from http://sojo.net/blogs/2012/02/21/transcript-obamas-2006-sojournerscall-renewal-address-faith-and-politics (accessed March 3, 2013).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gary S. Selby

Gary S. Selby, Communication Division, Pepperdine University.

John M. Jones

John N. Jones, Communication Division, Pepperdine University.