Thrice in the past few weeks, Scott Walker, the Wisconsin governor and presumptive candidate for president, has delivered a non-answer to a prodding question: First on whether he believes in evolution, second on whether he would disassociate himself from Rudy Giuliani’s (since half-retracted) impugning of President Obama’s patriotism, and then finally on whether he believes the president is a Christian.
All of these questions can reasonably be criticized. I recommend reading Jamelle Bouie on why the evolution question isn’t a good one, Dave Weigel on why conservatives were (reasonably) annoyed at the media’s flood-the-zone obsession with getting Republican politicians to comment on the Giuliani affair, and this David Harsanyi list of questions that reporters might lob at Democrats if they were more consistent in their quest to discomfit and provoke.
At the same time, the questions Walker ducked are still questions that a Republican politician — especially a politician who wants to be president of the United States — would do well to answer rather than deflect, for the reasons that John Dickerson elaborates on here and more. In the case of the evolution question, for instance, unless Walker is really a dedicated young-earth creationist it shouldn’t be hard for him to follow the example of recent G.O.P. presidential nominees and simultaneously affirm his own religious faith while also nodding to the existing scientific consensus on the age of the earth, common descent, etc. — and then poof, the question is gone, never to return, with (so far as I can tell) next to no political cost. In the case of the Giuliani question, a long list of Republican politicians, starting with Marco Rubio (who had his own troubles with an age-of-the-earth question a few years ago), have provided a clinic in how to address the issue smoothly, defusing any unwanted controversy without giving the press an inch.
And in the case of the Obama-and-Christianity question … well, there a number of conservative writers have defended Walker’s “I don’t know,” and with a very interesting argument: Namely, that in principle it’s inappropriate for politicians to answer a question about another politician’s faith. John Hinderaker, for instance, offered this “what Walker should have said” suggestion:
… that is a very stupid question. And not just stupid, but inappropriate. I have never met Barack Obama. How could I possibly comment on his religious views? It would be totally inappropriate for me to do so. Why would you ask me a question like that? If President Obama’s religion is of concern to you for some reason, I suggest you ask him about it. It is not of concern to me. Now, does someone else have a more relevant question?
And National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke, with whom I squabbled over this a bit on Twitter, offered the following defense of not answering the question:
None among us is able to manufacture windows into other men’s souls, and we should certainly not be asked to try — either on the record or off. Easy as it may be for Walker’s critics to pretend that his demurral revealed a tolerance for fever-swamp conspiracy theorizing, one can only imagine that the man would have been equally stumped had he been asked to weigh in on the faith of, say, Mitt Romney. As Soren Kierkegaard rather brutally observed, the question of what we mean by a “Christian” is extremely complicated, especially in a country in which most people claim to be devout. Presumably, Walker has a particular set of definitions and parameters; and, presumably, his Evangelical worldview requires that they be substantiated only by earnest investigation. If this is how we conduct our public discussions now, one wonders why the Post didn’t ask him to tweet out the meaning of life.
One can certainly make this kind of argument, but it’s worth stepping back and thinking its implications through.
Yes, the actual state of a person’s belief, and beyond that the condition of the soul, is an extremely complicated question whose answers are either known only to the person themselves, or perhaps to God alone. But the Kierkegaardian issue notwithstanding, we live in a society where many people make public professions of faith, identify publicly (to friends, co-workers, survey-takers, you name it) with particular religions and confessions, and where politicians — Democrats as well as Republicans, Hillary Clinton as much as Mike Huckabee — make that identification regularly and reliably, working their faith convictions into their public arguments and claiming religious motivation in some form for all manner of policies and perspectives. (For instance, Walker himself has stated that his own decision to run for president will be shaped by whether he feels a call from God.)
And those claims are then regularly analyzed and argued over in public — which is an entirely reasonable thing to do, if religion is something that matters as a worldview-shaper and not just a quirky private hobby with no implications after noon on Sunday. If we take religion seriously, we should be interested in what faith (if any) politicians hold, what creed (if any) they profess, for the same reason that we should be interested in all the other forces and influences that shape their ideas about the world. And we should expect a leading politician, and particularly a would-be president, to know what faith the president of the United States professes — especially if that politician, in this case Walker, is himself publicly religious. Asking him to identify the president’s faith isn’t necessarily a constructive use of time, and perhaps reflects a quest for a particular narrative, a particular conflict, a particular sort of headline. But there’s nothing inherently inappropriate about it, and no principle that should have prevented Walker from just saying, “yes, next question” and moving on.
What’s more, the alternative perspective here — that a politician’s religious commitments are so personal and private that no one else can reasonably be asked to comment on them, or even to identify them at all — usually belongs to a particular slice of the secular left: The slice that doesn’t think that religion should have any public role in politics, the slice that was so anxious about “theocracy” in the Bush era, the slice that finds Walker’s own public expressions of faith eminently mockable today. That’s where you’ll find a principled argument for regarding Obama’s religious profession as irrelevant to our political conversations. But that argument points toward a full privatization of religion, toward a system much more like French laïcité than the American tradition of religiously-informed politics — and as such it’s a very strange argument for American conservatives to embrace.
Now there are a couple more possible rejoinders to the argument that Walker should have just said “yes.” One is that even within a context where we assume politicians’ professions of faith matter, we don’t have to be super-pious about their piety, because it’s perfectly reasonable to also suspect that some of those professions are insincere or heavily politicized. In the case of President Obama, there’s a fever-swamp version of that suspicion (the secret-Muslim camp, etc.) but also a more reasonable and bipartisan version (I know a number of liberals who harbor it), to the effect that the president is probably an agnostic faking piety because, well, it’s necessary to political life in our still-religious nation.
I don’t share that suspicion; I’m pretty confident that the president is what he says he is, a representative sort of liberal Protestant. But we do know for a fact that Obama has deliberately dissembled about his theological convictions on at least one rather important issue in the past. So it’s possible to imagine a reasonable challenge to the president’s sincerity on some fronts, or at least to the political applications of his faith. And if that’s what Walker had done — if he said, “the president professes to be a Christian, but I think his liberal politics are more important to him than his Christian faith” — there probably would have been some media freakout, but the substance of Walker’s comments wouldn’t have been that different from the various attacks on Republican politicians for being un-Christian or un-Catholic, or from President Obama’s own past attacks on religious conservatives for “hijacking” Christianity for right-wing ends. The Wisconsin governor would have been being deliberately provocative, but not without some warrant, and not unreasonably so.
But Walker didn’t provoke or critique. He just professed (feigned?) ignorance about the president’s beliefs and said it wasn’t an issue anyone should really care about. Neither of which, again, seems compatible with a view of religion as an important force in public life.
The second rejoinder is one that Cooke raises: Namely, that what’s at issue here isn’t Obama’s religious profession, but Walker’s own theological beliefs, because as an evangelical Christian the governor may think that Obama’s liberal Protestantism isn’t really Christian any more, and that the essential issue for identifying whether someone is or is not Christian isn’t their denominational affiliation or public profession but whether they’re actually born again. So given that perspective he may have felt that he couldn’t honestly say whether Obama is a Christian as he, Scott Walker, understands the term, and for the sake of his own religious integrity he needed some way of ducking the question. (And a judicious use of the word “heretic” probably wouldn’t have played particularly well.)
I think this is the strongest defense of his evasion. But if it’s what Walker was thinking (and again, there’s nothing in his response to suggest as much, especially given that his spokeswoman followed up by saying that “of course” the governor thinks Obama is a Christian), then he probably needs to think a little bit differently. Many, many millions of Americans identify with Christianity in a way that might not meet some evangelical standards for true Christian faith (or Catholic standards for orthodoxy, for that matter), and a man who wants to be president of this country needs a way to talk to them and about them that doesn’t constantly imply that they aren’t what they say they are.
The simplest approach is just a big-tent approach to whom the term “Christian” covers, but if for some reason of deep theological principle you don’t want to use the word itself then you need another way to finesse things. Maybe something like: “President Obama and I would have some big theological differences, but we share a faith in Jesus.” Or something else, artfully constructed, that acknowledges the president’s professed faith rather than acting as though that faith doesn’t matter much and what the nation’s chief executive professes is mostly irrelevant. Because that’s what Walker’s non-response pretty explicitly suggested, and that’s not an argument that anyone who takes religion’s role in American life, past and and present, can consistently or reasonably defend.