Two Leaders Of The New US House Could Put Baptist Diversity In The News Spotlight
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Kevin McCarthy speaks with supporters of President of the United States Donald Trump at a "Make America Great Again" campaign rally at Phoenix Goodyear Airport in Goodyear, Arizona in 2020. Creative Commons photo by Gage Skidmore.
(OPINION) There could hardly be a greater contrast than New Yorker Hakeem Jeffries’ glide into leadership of the U.S. House Democratic minority and that of California Republican Kevin McCarthy’s agonizing 15-ballot crawl to barely become House Speaker in the worst such Capitol Hill fuss since the Civil War.
Jeffries, of course, wins news renown as Congress’ first African American party leader. But here’s a factoid that has gotten little media notice. Yes, this is a religion angle.
By coincidence, both party leaders are now Baptists, a faith that outside the South has generally been underrepresented among the political elite. Catholics — think Nancy Pelosi, John Boehner, Paul Ryan — monopolized the speaker and minority leader posts for much of the 21st century.
There would be good feature potential in comparing the two Baptists’ congregations.
Though Jeffries has an Arabic first name (meaning “wise”), he’s a lifelong worshipper at Cornerstone Baptist Church, a prominent African American congregation in Brooklyn. Senior Pastor Lawrence Aker III and his wife, Cynthia, have the distinction of holding diverse divinity degrees from both evangelical Dallas Theological Seminary and mainline Yale.
McCarthy’s congregation is the equally well-known Valley Baptist Church in his hometown of Bakersfield. Senior Pastor Roger Spradlin, who trained at Criswell College, has served Valley since 1983 and now leads a team of eight clergy. This is a typical White evangelical fellowship and affiliated with the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, which Spradlin has served as chairman of the national executive committee.
Speaking of religion on Capitol Hill, reporters will want to keep on file the official religious affiliations of all 534 members of the incoming House and Senate — with one vacancy due to death. The handy list is compiled every two years by the Pew Research Center from information the legislators themselves file with CQ Roll Call.
Labels may say little. For instance, what kind of “Catholic” do we have — tmatt American Catholic typology here — when this research identifies a politico as a Catholic?
A devout abortion rights supporter like President Joe Biden or former Speaker Pelosi, or the five (or six?) Catholic Republican appointees to the Supreme Court? Pew’s list is significant not necessarily on how a faith label affects an individual’s politics but as a rough index of the social status of U.S. religious communities.
Here are a few highlights from the analysis, with these bites of information summarized from the work of researcher and former beat colleague Jeff Diamant:
* The big noise in 21st century American religion is the increase of “nones” who list no religious affiliation or identity for themselves in polls, now 29% of U.S. adults by Pew’s count but barely visible in Congress, where 88% of members identify as Christian in some sense versus only 63% of Americans overall.
* Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, Democrat newly turned Independent, is in fact the only member of Congress who candidly lists herself as religiously unaffiliated. Many others call themselves unspecified Christian or Protestant, which could mean anything from a vague inclination to active membership in a nondenominational church.
* Twenty members declined to identify a religion, including prominent Democrats like senators Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, Michael Bennet of Colorado, Tammy Duckworth of Illinois and John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, and Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington, the influential chair of the 105-member Congressional Progressive Caucus. A Republican, New York’s famously fabulist freshman George Santos, was switched last-minute from Jewish to unknown.
* Looking at one trend over time, when John F. Kennedy took office as the first Catholic president, the Capitol had 398 Protestants and only 100 Catholics. The Catholic total reached 168 by 2017 but is now down to 148 — of which 45% are Republicans, showing an historic shift. The Protestant number has hovered around 300 the past 14 years; currently 303.
* Pew’s comparisons between the overall U.S. population and the makeup of the 118th Congress show Pentecostalists are underrepresented on the Hill, making up 4% of Americans but with only two members there. Heavily overrepresented groups include Jews, with 2% of the population but 33 members, Episcopalians with 1% compared with 22 members and Presbyterians with 2% compared with 25 members.
Apart from Judaism, the other major non-Christian religions have member totals roughly comparable with their populations: three Muslims, two Buddhists and two Hindus; all are Democrats.
The Democrats also have one self-identified humanist and three Unitarian Universalists. Republican ranks include one pietist and one messianic Jew.
Richard Ostling is a former religion reporter for The Associated Press and former correspondent for TIME Magazine. He’s done work in broadcast TV and radio journalism covering religion and receive a lifetime achievement award from Religion News Association. This piece first appeared at Get Religion.