Biden elected second Catholic U.S. president in history: What does it mean for a divided nation?
(ANALYSIS) Following nearly four days of uncertainty, Democrat Joe Biden was declared the winner Saturday of the U.S. presidential race. In doing so, he become only the second Roman Catholic in American history to occupy the White House.
While President Trump has said he will challenge the result, Biden now has the job of leading a deeply polarized nation for the next four years.
It was in 1960 that John F. Kennedy, a Democrat, became the first Catholic president in U.S. history. At the time, Kennedy had to convince the nation that a Catholic could govern a Protestant-majority country without interference or influence from the Vatican.
Sixty years later, Biden — now the most politically powerful Catholic in American politics — takes the job under different circumstances but is similar to JFK in many ways. Biden’s Catholicism often helped shape his politics as did a family tragedy earlier in his life. Biden promises unity post-Trump, but how he governs could ultimately result in an even bigger political split in the U.S. over the next four years.
Biden, who was raised in an Irish Catholic household, used faith as a campaign theme through the past year in an effort to cut into Trump’s appeal with evangelicals and traditional Catholics. Biden effectively framed the race as “a battle for the soul of a nation.” Biden highlighted his empathy, especially as the pandemic worsened, while Trump came across as someone who had mismanaged the virus.
In a note on his campaign website on Saturday, Biden wrote the following to the American people:
In the face of unprecedented obstacles, a record number of Americans voted. Proving once again, that democracy beats deep in the heart of America. With the campaign over, it’s time to put the anger and the harsh rhetoric behind us and come together as a nation. It’s time for America to unite. And to heal.
Over the past few decades, Catholics have become a key voting bloc — especially in the Midwest — with many abandoning the Democrat party in 2016 to vote for Trump and a new populist GOP. In the end, it was Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes that put Biden over the top this time.
In this election cycle, exit polling was mixed on whether Catholics were a key group to deliver Biden the presidency. The fissures in our political system are likely to highlight the ones that have plagued Catholicism itself since the 1960s. The church has had an internal battle — between “cultural Catholics” and “traditional” ones — on issues such as abortion. Doctrine and politics don’t neatly line up — as both major parties have learned — but that hasn’t stopped Christians from picking sides and making compromises with their faith traditions and teachings. As a result, Biden’s election and his call for unity won’t likely heal any of the divisions. Indeed, within Catholicism, they may be even further exacerbated.
It was last year, in the middle of a heated primary, that Biden changed his position on the Hyde Amendment, which banned federal money to fund abortions. It worked for Biden, who went on to defeat more progressive candidates like Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Over the last few months, Trump even portrayed Biden as being “against God” and a man whose policies would hurt religious people.
What will all this mean for Americans over the next four years? How will the Catholic church’s hierarchy respond? How will Biden’s politics affect issues such as abortion, immigration and religious freedom? Many traditional Catholics, ones who regularly attend Mass each Sunday, vote based on those issues. Biden, while championing Catholic social teaching, has moved to the left on some of them in order to appeal to a larger segment of Democratic voters who are increasingly agnostic.
“I’m as much a cultural Catholic as I am a theological Catholic,” Biden wrote in his 2007 book Promises to Keep: On Life in Politics. “My idea of self, of family, of community, of the wider world comes straight from my religion. It’s not so much the Bible, the beatitudes, the Ten Commandments, the sacraments, or the prayers I learned. It’s the culture.”
A feature posted on Religion News Service highlighted Biden’s cultural Catholicism and how it impacted his years as a lawmaker. The piece opens with a 1980 meeting between then-Sen. Biden and Pope John Paul II. Here is the key passage:
But despite the thrill of meeting John Paul, there was one thing Biden refused to do: kiss the pope’s ring, a customary greeting when meeting an esteemed cleric. It was later revealed that it was Biden’s mother who insisted he refrain, telling her son, “Don’t you kiss his ring.”
His refusal is a glimpse of how the president-elect, who has spent decades in the U.S. Senate and the White House, might approach his own power as he finally takes hold of an office he has sought since 1988. The moment in Rome is also a hallmark of how the president-elect’s manages his faith: a throwback brand of political Catholicism that eschews obsessive obedience to the Holy See on matters of policy.
It’s a telling detail. In turn, Catholic News Agency, in their news story on Biden’s election, pointed out the following:
“Biden pledged during his campaign to roll back bans on foreign aid to groups promoting or performing abortions, and to rescind religious liberty protections enjoyed by groups who object to the federal contraceptive insurance mandate— both things that can be done by executive order. But the Biden campaign also pledged to enshrine abortion protections into federal law and to pass far-reaching gender identity protections into law — those measures will be unlikely to be enacted while Republicans control the Senate.”
In an email to subscribers hours after Biden won the presidency, the National Catholic Register highlighted a post — written by publisher Michael Warsaw — under the headline “Fighting the Good Fight.” In the post, he wrote:
Biden is poised to become the second Catholic president in American history. He frequently campaigned on his Catholicity and promised he would “restore the soul of this nation.”
Yet it is difficult to understand how a politician and a party who promote and protect at all costs the killing of the youngest lives in our country and who threaten to force nuns to violate their deeply held beliefs will be able to bring about healing, reconciliation and unity. Here is where our constant and clear witness to Catholic teaching and moral truth is needed.
It should also be noted that Biden, who carries a rosary in his pocket, ran as a moderate. Voters rejected not just Trump, but socialism as well. Nonetheless, he seems open to becoming a progressive on issues that matter to many Catholics and social conservatives of other Christian denominations. That will further divide religious people along political lines in this country. It’s up to Biden to try and bring this nation together. That’s a tough task given our political polarization.
Clemente Lisi is a senior editor and regular contributor to Religion Unplugged. He is the former deputy head of news at the New York Daily News and teaches journalism at The King’s College in New York City. Follow him on Twitter @ClementeLisi.