Walter Mondale came to Dallas for that most prosaic of political events, a campaign fund-raising dinner, and he had intended to talk about a drab, unemotional subject—the problems facing small businesses. But he tossed away his prepared speech. As he rambled on last Monday night, he found himself turning his campaign talk into a rather passionate tutorial on religion and liberty. "The founding fathers spelled it out in great detail," he said, when it came to writing the First Amendment. "What they spelled out is the separation of church and state." Suddenly the 800 well-to-do Texans erupted with applause, then, still clapping, stood up. The candidate knew he had struck a resounding chord.
"Now why did the framers do that?" continued Mondale. "Because they saw in Europe that every time you let the politicians interfere with religious faith, it was poison and it destroyed its integrity and independence, and that politicians were always posturing and interfering . . ."
Thus the founders of the Republic decided that "religion would be here and was between ourselves and our God, and the politicians would be over there—and we'd never get the two mixed up . . . In America, faith is personal and honest and uncorrupted by political interference." As the crowd leaped up to applaud once again, Mondale added a kind of secular amen: "May it always be that way."
The Democrat's extemporaneous exegesis was unusual, but it did not come out of the blue. Just four days earlier in Dallas at a prayer breakfast, President Reagan had declared that politics and religion were inseparable. He charged that opponents of organized prayer in public schools "are intolerant of religion," that "morality's foundation is religion" and that "without God, democracy will not and cannot long endure." The President got a response at least as enthusiastic as Mondale's. The emotion on both sides reveals a fundamental disagreement in U.S. society over the role that religious beliefs should play in public life.
Religion has become a principal theme of the presidential campaign. Indeed, the prominence and the complexity of religious issues may now be greater than in any previous election. At stake on one level are a set of tough, specific public policy matters with a clear religious dimension: abortion, public school prayer, tax credits for parents of private school students. The debate has also raised more abstract questions: Just how should faith inform public policymaking? Should clergy involve themselves and their congregations directly in politics? To what extent should religious beliefs be thrust into the campaign?