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The debate has only just begun. Mondale, seeing the extraordinary reaction his Dallas remarks aroused, decided that the issue should be pursued carefully. "There are few things in American life that are more personal, more emotion-laden," he explained at a press conference Wednesday. "It should only be addressed with great care, and with great clarity." Mondale plans to do just that this Thursday in Washington, elaborating on his vision of American religious pluralism to a convention of B'nai B'rith, the Jewish service organization, and to the National Baptist Convention. Indeed, he and his staff believe that the broad issue might become one of the most important in the election. "This has been building for some time," says Campaign Manager Robert Beckel. "The Republican Convention and Reagan's statements about religion kind of crystallized a lot of thinking. I think it is coming to the surface very quickly."
The relationship between church and state has always been a big issue, of course. The American colonists were often refugees from religious intolerance, come to establish their own homogeneous religious communities. The distinction between civil and ecclesiastical rule was blurry. Yet by 1791, the Enlightenment had taken hold and the American theocratic impulse had cooled: the Constitution's First Amendment mandated that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." What Thomas Jefferson called the "wall of separation between church and state," however, has been understood by most Americans to be broader than the simple, constitutional hands-off requirement. By informal consensus, the separation has been regarded as more of a two-way affair, with undue incursions of organized religion into politics also limited.
During the 1884 presidential campaign, for instance, a Protestant minister's anti-Catholic slur on Democrats ("the party whose antecedents have been rum, Romanism and rebellion") caused a backlash that almost surely gave Democrat Grover Cleveland the election. In 1960 religious bias was still strong. To become the first Roman Catholic President, John Kennedy had to persuade many voters that he was not a pawn of the Vatican.
Reagan's 1980 candidacy in some measure benefited from a spiritual surge, a reaction against the secularization of society and the supposed breakdown of morality that was thought to be its consequence. An important element of Reagan's coalition has been the Religious Right, made up of conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists who joined with New Right political activists on such issues as abortion and school prayer. In recent years, politics has assumed a more religious cast and religion a political tint, partly because of Reagan's masterly use of the presidency's bully pulpit.