The little man, JFK and Amy Coney Barrett
Rodger Nishioka sometimes illustrates his speeches with a paradigm-shifting moment in Little Five Points, a hip, eclectic neighborhood in Atlanta, Ga.
Arriving early for a meeting that day, about 10 years ago, he decided to hang out and observe the goings-on. Not long after he entered a randomly chosen store, another customer approached a jewelry case and told the clerk, “I’m looking for a cross.”
“Hearing the word ‘cross,’ I was immediately intrigued,” said the Rev. Nishioka, then a professor at nearby Columbia Theological Seminary, “so I kept listening.”
His story resurfaced in my mind as the nation endures a rabid election season and observes the grilling of Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett. Religion is a river that runs through both. It also ran through a pivotal presidential election 60 years ago — for similar reasons, but with a markedly different population watching.
Back to that Atlanta store: The clerk was a young Goth — black clothing and makeup, many piercings, and a “very sweet, laidback” vibe — “and she said to the customer, ‘Do you want a plain cross or one with a little man on it?’”
“I was shocked. I didn’t even hear what the customer’s reply was, but a moment later I said, ‘I’m sorry to interrupt, I don’t mean to be rude, but did you just say, ‘one with a little man on it’?”
She nodded, confused, so he said, “Actually, that little man is Jesus Christ.”
“She said, ‘OK, whatever,’” he told me the other day, still marveling. “That was it. No recognition.
“It reminded me that I’m in this little Christian bubble.” People with no religious affiliation, he noted, are the fastest-growing segment of the American population.
I find his take on the encounter very humble and kind. Obviously the sweet Goth clerk lives in her own bubble. It’s mind-boggling that anyone in a modern society with a free, massive flow of information could not have heard of Jesus Christ, crucified 2,000 years ago by the Roman Empire and namesake of the world’s largest religion (currently 2.4 billion, or 31% of all human beings).
Christians constitute 71% of the U.S. population, but Rev. Nishioka, now a Presbyterian pastor in Kansas, is correct that the number of people who don’t identify with any religion is rapidly increasing. (Researchers call them “nones,” a confusing and ironic homophone for “nuns.”) The “nones” are also growing more secular — less likely to believe in a god, or pray, or go to any house of worship, ever.
This growing skepticism toward religion impacts our politics. It is easy for an unscrupulous politician to foment religious hostility. The most infamous quote in Judge Barrett’s journey toward the Supreme Court actually came in Senate hearings on her 2017 U.S. Court of Appeals nomination, when Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., assessed the Catholic Barrett with, “The dogma lives loudly within you.” It was a condescending and easily refuted remark soon overshadowed by the hellish Kavanaugh saga.
Such open hostility also makes it easy for a politician to pander to religious folks who are tired of being disdained and mocked, à la Donald Trump’s shockingly successful wooing of evangelical Protestants.
It’s no accident the first example above is a Democrat and the second a Republican. The distance between the parties in terms of voters’ religious inclinations unfortunately continues to grow.
In 1960 John F. Kennedy faced opposition as a Roman Catholic vying for the presidency, some of it, sadly, from Protestants wary of Rome’s influence. But the Supreme Court’s aggressive Roe v. Wade decision launched the pro-life movement and, correspondingly, a new era of Protestant-Catholic cooperation. It drove otherwise liberal Catholics toward the Republican Party. The increasingly religious profile of the GOP in turn drives some “nones” to the left.
Senate Democrats interrogating Judge Barrett last week dropped religious hostility in favor of fearmongering the (very unlikely) reversal of Obamacare, an astute effort not to alienate religious voters who might still be on the fence.
The cultural landscape has changed a lot in 60 years. Which parts could we call progress?