Kamala Harris tries to sell herself to Christian America
The 2024 election season gets religious
Published in
5 min readOct 24, 2024
America has one religion, and it’s politics. When electing a president, the country chooses both a head of state and the head of a church.
I maintain that both political parties are theocratic at heart. Democrats and Republicans alike yearn to see a president as a spiritual ideal. Then a candidate has to go out and sell themselves as a figure I call “Jesus.”
The latest figure to try it: Kamala Harris.
A candidate doesn’t have to be “Jesus.”
Democrats knew that Joe Biden was a low-key administrator—a mirror, that is, of the ordinary Catholic churchgoer he is in real life.
Hillary Clinton was always a kind of Methodist pastor, the role she had spoken of wanting to be. That was respected, but it wasn’t “Jesus.”
In 1960, John F. Kennedy, Jr. had been “Jesus.” In 2008, Barack Obama had been “Jesus” too—and his party was ready for a religious revival.
