September 18, at 7:30 p.m., Wade Clark Roof, one of the country’s foremost scholars on religious pluralism in America gave a well attended lecture titled “America’s Gods and Politics.”

“He’s a particularly prominent figure, doing important research on pluralism and the connection between religion and politics,” said Melissa Wilcox, professor of religion and the director of the gender studies program at Whitman.

Wilcox was a graduate student under Professor Roof and the faculty sponsor for this lecture.   With the presidential election a mere two months away, Professor Roof traced the relationship between religious groups and political contests from 1960 to the 2008 election and examines how different conceptions of God influence political values.

Professor Roof examined how various customs governing the relationship between how religion and politics have changed in the last 50 years.   In 1960, when John F. Kennedy ran for president, he diffused the controversy over his Catholicism by swearing by the absolute separation of church and state at that time.

“Clergy did not tell Americans by and large how to vote.   There were no religious tests for candidates running for office,” said Roof.

However, 20 years later, customs governing religion and politics began to change.   “In 1981, 20 years after Kennedy, Ronald Reagan speaking to the National Association of evangelicals, said, ‘I know that you cannot endorse me but I endorse you.’ This short sentence marked a major break in customs and the beginnings of a more visible and explicit recognized mixing of religion and politics.   We have clergy distributing moral scorecards on politicians’ views on moral subjects.   And politicians court religious communities with religious rhetoric and promises to fund faith-based religious issues,” said Roof.

Roof also emphasized that religion and politics are inevitably intertwined because religion shapes the moral views of many individuals and those moral views are translated into support for particular candidates and policies.

Professor Roof then presented data on how differing views about the nature of God and God’s relationship toward the world correlates with political values.   He divided Christian believers into four different categories: those who believed in an authoritarian God, a benevolent God, a critical God, and a distant God.     Authoritarian and benevolent God believers view God as deeply engaged in the world, with the former believing in an angry punitive God and the latter believing in a loving nurturing one.   Critical and distant God believers view God as less engaged in the world.   He noted a strong positive correlation with religious participation, measured in the frequency of church attendance and prayer and with one’s conception of God.   Authoritarian God believers attend church more often and have more favorable views on President Bush, the war in Iraq and the belief that God is on the side of the United States.

Critically, Roof noted that the notion of as an authoritarian father figure God has been used to legitimate American nationalism, military conflict and essentially, an empire ideology.   However, Roof pointed out that the evangelical movement, the group most closely associated with a conception of an authoritarian God, is broadening its concern to not just abortion and gay marriage but also poverty and climate change.

“The critical question is, can benevolent believers with critical and distant God believers overwhelm the authoritarian God constituency?” Roof said.

At the end of the lecture, Roof proceeded to take several questions from the audience.

“Overall, I thought his talk made things really understandable and interesting,” said Max Adcox, an audience member.   Professor Wilcox was right; Roof’s lecture timely illuminated for many the diversity of God imagery within Christianity