Both Republicans and Democrats have done it, swimming in a current that stretches far back in history.
"Faith, and particularly Catholicism, played a prominent role in Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, which culminated in an election victory speech in which Biden quoted from Ecclesiastes and the saccharine 1970s Catholic hymn “On Eagle’s Wings.” The August Democratic National Convention that selected Biden as its presidential candidate in turn featured a panoply of paeans to Biden’s Catholic faith. Former Ohio governor John Kasich, former first lady Michelle Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and former president Barack Obama all characterized Biden’s religious beliefs as a motivation and guide for his political career. One suspects they are not talking about his submission to the Nicene Creed.
"Rather, as both the Democratic Party and liberal legacy media have constantly reminded us, Biden is a “decent” man who will provide “comfort and solace” to an American nation suffering through a pandemic, economic crisis, and heightened racial tensions. His Catholic faith, we are told, influences his opinions on core Democratic Party policies such as sustainable energy, welcoming immigrants, improving racial equity, and curbing gun violence. However, they also assure us, that same Catholic faith does not influence his position on abortion, sexuality, or religious liberty. In other words, Catholicism has been exploited as a tool of statecraft: essential to Biden’s politics when politically advantageous and discarded when it is not." . . .
The secularization process in biblical scholarship sought to retain a shell of religiosity in its belief that piety was still useful for inculcating civic virtue. Yet the concurrent effort to “demythologize” the Bible and interpret it solely as a work of historical fiction fostered a further privatization of religious commitments, neutralizing the influence of beliefs deemed problematic to the state’s domination of the public square. What remained of “faith” were only generic exhortations to be good, such as Kant’s categorical imperative. And in that, we can see its fruits in the diluted “nice guy” Catholicism of Joe Biden that is acceptable, even exploitable, by the Democratic Party.
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