What would a Mike Pence presidency look like?
(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
On 7 October 2016, the Washington Post printed the story of Presidential candidate Donald Trump, who was recorded boasting to a TV host about his lewd behaviour with women. The leading lights of the Republican Party went into damage limitation discussions that included the possible dumping of Mr. Trump. According to super-star journalist Bob Woodward, Vice-Presidential candidate Mike Pence let the Republican National Committee know that he would be willing to take Trump’s place. He was up for it. But Trump brazened it out. Four years later, America’s Evangelical Christian Vice-President must be wondering if God is having another try at making him President.
Would it be so bad if Pence became the Republican candidate? It depends where you stand in the US’s culture wars — but there will certainly have been many viewers who will have watched his performance against Kamala Harris last night, and who would have liked what they saw. Pence is in many ways a personification of Middle America. One of six children in an Irish-American Democrat-voting family, Mike was a good Catholic lad, an altar boy at St. Columbus Catholic Church in Columbus, Indiana where he went to school. They weren’t poor, but by Washington standards not rich either.
In 1978 aged nineteen, following a not uncommon religious trajectory, Pence was called at a Kentucky evangelical music festival to “give his life to Jesus”. He answered that call. During the 1990s he described himself as an evangelical Catholic but began attending the Indianapolis Grace Evangelical Church, one of the mega-churches, with his wife. There is nothing affected about his faith — his support for the full raft of social conservative positions on sexuality is sincere. He does not attend events serving alcohol without his wife and will not travel alone with another woman.
He began his political career as a Republican in 1988, when he lost a race for a Congressional seat. In 1992 Pence began trying to reach a wide audience in Indiana by anchoring a local radio Conservative talk-show. Like Trump, a media profile did the trick. In 2001 he was elected to the Congress to represent the 2nd congressional district (in eastern Indiana) and moved on to become Governor of Indiana in 2013.
After 2009 when the Tea Party emerged, his earlier religious conversion became a more important political asset. He happily hitched his wagon to the Tea Party movement and described himself as “a Christian, conservative and Republican in that order”. During 2015-2016 he backed the presidential candidature of Texas Senator Ted Cruz, a Southern Baptist with a similar evangelical background and views. He then talked Trump into selecting him as his running mate, quite an achievement.
During Obama’s two terms as President the evangelical caucus within the Republican Party felt themselves discriminated against by “anti-religious” Democrats and the Washington elite. When Pence tried to enact legislation in Indiana enabling businesses to refuse services to gay customers, pressure from several quarters forced him to amend it. Pence’s argument that this was a matter of religious freedom did him no harm among conservative evangelical and catholic voters. His support for school prayers, his attempts to curtail sex education and his advocacy of censorship of pornography also helped his cause. In the words of Richard Land, President of the Southern Evangelical Seminary, Pence was “the 24-carat-gold model of what we want in an evangelical politician”.
What could be expected from a 24-carat gold evangelical politician? The grim expression on his face as Trump has mouthed-off on the campaign trail indicates that he has not found the role of loyal Trump defender pleasant. But in public he espouses the full litany of Trump positions, from Climate Change denial and support for the gun lobby to opposing immigration and “Obama-care”. He has voted accordingly. Far from dealing with his personal faith in the manner of John F. Kennedy, dissociating public position and policy from private religious belief, the evangelicals around Trump see the White House as the engine room of the United States’s salvation, in a conflict between light and dark.
The religious contribution to the Trump team’s ideological armoury is not negligible. In 1996, Pastor Ralph Drollinger and his wife Danielle founded Capitol Ministries “to create disciples of Jesus Christ in the political arena throughout the world” at the same time insisting: “we stay away from politics and concentrate on the hearts of leaders”. The pastor leads a weekly Bible study in the White House for the President’s entourage. This is the religious world Pence inhabits. Dollinger believes that the US is in dire straits and doesn’t think it can be turned around “if we don’t have almost a benevolent dictator”. Who can he be thinking of?
Another facet of the evangelical influence in the White House is how much Pence — and Pompeo as Secretary of State — conflate their faith assumptions with foreign policy. Israel features both in the Bible and within the critical geo-political problems besetting the Middle East. Christian Zionism brings the two together with Israel at its heart. But taking biblical verses on Israel such as “those who bless her bless us” as the rationale of US policy, does not inspire confidence, and neither does the evangelical view that Iran must be opposed at all costs.
It is surprising that, during the radical papacy of Pope Francis, Pence may now be signalling a return to the Catholic fold. He had a long, one hour, and apparently warm meeting with the Pope in January this year. Joe Biden is ahead in the polls by a substantial margin — but then the polls got it wrong last time. If a combination of the ballot box and the “Chinese virus” were to bring him to the Presidency, let’s hope that, if nuclear war between Israel and Iran threatens, he doesn’t believe that he will be beamed up to heaven in The Rapture at the end of the world.
And let’s hope that he goes back to the boring old Catholicism he learnt at St. Columbus Church School where faith and reason go together.
