![]() “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute,” he proclaimed. In 1960, when Democratic candidate John Kennedy needed to address concerns about his Catholic faith - something no president had shared - he spoke to Protestant pastors in Houston. One of them is bound to use this campaign slogan: “Jesus loves you, but I’m his favorite.” It’s hard to believe that white Southern evangelicals once took a very different view of politics. It hinders him with younger voters, who are the least likely to be born-again Christians.ěut in the short run, or the Republican primaries, his born-again appeals may help him compete against candidates like Mike Huckabee, an ordained Southern Baptist minister, Rick Santorum, a religious culture warrior, and Scott Walker, son of a Baptist minister. It puts him in a geographic box, as well as a sectarian one, since white evangelicals disproportionately live in the South. Cruz’s message will alienate at least as many people as it will attract. Today, they are onlyđ8 percent of the population - just slightly more than the percentage with no religious affiliation. Politically, this sounds like a losing long-term strategy, since white evangelicals (the chief target of his appeal) make up a small, shrinking group. He was informing a narrow slice of Protestants, “I’m one of you.” Most religious expressions by politicians are inclusionary. He was not paying the normal tribute to general and widely held Christian beliefs. Even President Barack Obama, whom many people continue to believe is a Muslim rather than a Christian, ends his speeches, “God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.”ěut Cruz takes this custom to a novel extreme. He said America’s urgently needed reclamation would come from “people of faith.” He testified that when his father was contemplating divorce, “God transformed his heart.” He informed his audience that “were it not for the transformative love of Jesus Christ,” he “would have been raised by a single mom without my father in the household.” Invocations of the Almighty have long been a normal and harmless part of American political rhetoric. He noted that his wife’s parents were missionaries in Africa. ![]() Part of the message was the setting - a stage at Liberty University, founded by televangelist Jerry Falwell, which Cruz saluted as “the largest Christian university in the world.” He holds degrees from Princeton and Harvard, but he was right at home there. The Texas senator sounded less like he was running for president of the United States than for president of the Southern Baptist Convention. “Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious belief,” he once declared, “and I don’t care what it is.” He might have been taken aback at the spectacle presented by fellow Republican Ted Cruz on Monday in Lynchburg, Va. President Dwight Eisenhower signed the bill making “In God We Trust” the nation’s official motto, but his approach to religion was not excessive in its rigor.
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