Election '84: The Shaping of the Presidency 1984

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very roots of life, when medicine prolonged life until age often became a curse, have spawned questions that torment conscience. Seeking answers, many Americans found them in a rebirth of pieties, a renaissance of religious search that offered man more than bread alone. And in offering answers to riddles that computers could not solve, or fashion satisfy, clerics raised their voices to offer moralities to politics, passionately arousing those who held opposing values.

Abortion lay at the heart of the final debate on manners and morals. On the one side were ranged hierarchical Roman Catholics and Fundamentalist Protestants; on the other, all those who believed that no church and no dogma might impose their will on the privacy of personal lives. Yet the decline of family life brings unwanted babies and throws the burden of their care on the public purse. Among blacks, 55% of all babies are born to unwed mothers, chiefly to the most impoverished and most ignorant of young women. To deny them relief from unwanted births or to deny relief to any woman whose pregnancy is unwanted seems absolutely immoral to many; others feel it equally immoral to give them relief.

On half a dozen other issues in the religious revival, clerics roused audiences. The Bible, whether in the King James or any other version, is as fine a classic of good narrative as any school can teach; to deny its glories to children is as ridiculous as to deny them Shakespeare. But to clerics of differing faiths, the classroom recital of a single required standard prayer (even one taken from the Bible) is an imposition on the freedom of children to grow up in the faith of their parents. The wonders of modern medicine increase the span of life beyond joy or usefulness; euthanasia, or mercy death for those who suffer, is to some the essence of love and compassion, to others outright murder. To many, homosexuality is forbidden by the command of Moses: "Thou shall not lie with mankind as with womankind; it is abomination." To others that injunction is as savage as "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."

What has been going on in the past decade, and came to a blistering point this year, is a revolution of social tolerances—and the demand that Government decide where laws must step in to restrain tolerance, whether it be drunken driving, pollution of streams and air, gun control or abortion. Neither candidate could avoid confrontation with forces urging new values into Government. And never before has the U.S. witnessed in public debate two claimants for the presidency forced to define their religious faith and their stand on matters as intimate as family life and abortion.

For the past twelve years, America has seen a succession of presidential candidates trained in divinity schools, children of divines, self-proclaimed born-again Christians, or men who claimed God as their copilot. Preachers and divines have always tried to infuse politics with moralities. The "Boston preachers" (as some Southerners still bitterly call them) urged abolition of slavery on the nation as a moral issue; so soldiers marched off singing The Battle Hymn of the Republic ("As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free"). Clerics dominated politics when they persuaded the nation that alcoholic drink was not only sinful but a public danger, and imposed Prohibition.