The Next Baptist President of the United States?
Sunday was one of those days that will go down in political history. President Joe Biden announced, via a social media post, that he will no longer seek reelection. A few moments later, he endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to be the nominee against Donald Trump. Soon, accolades for Biden poured in from Democratic politicians, as did endorsements for Harris. People from across the country sent donations to her campaign while Trump and other Republicans complained it wasn’t fair Biden dropped out.
Despite the fact Harris has been VP for three-and-a-half years, she’s not nearly as well known as Trump or Biden. Polling shortly after she took the vice presidential oath of office showed that while 58% of Americans knew Biden is Catholic, only 12% correctly noted Harris is a Protestant. Even fewer would’ve likely gotten her denomination correct. But since I’ve interviewed her longtime pastor multiple times, this issue of A Public Witness introduces the faith of one of the two leading contenders to be the 47th president of the United States.
“She is a woman of enlightenment and intelligence,” Rev. Amos C. Brown, a civil rights icon and pastor of Third Baptist Church in San Francisco, told me in 2020 after the election. “She is an encourager; she encourages all people regardless of their social station in life. She is one of empathy; she cares about people. She’s a connector. She’s personable. And finally, she is excellence in whatever she does. … She is a role model for womanhood, and just human decency and dignity at its best.”
Harris grew up in an interfaith family going to a Church of God congregation and Hindu temples. Her husband Doug is Jewish. But she’s been a member of Third Baptist for decades.
When she moved into the Naval Observatory, Harris became the fifth Baptist to serve as VP. Only one of the previous four — Harry Truman — became president, although Al Gore nearly made it. Another one, Nelson Rockefeller, only served a partial term after being picked by Gerald Ford, who himself became VP because of Spiro Agnew’s resignation and then president because of Richard Nixon’s resignation. When Ford unsuccessfully sought to win a term on his own, he ditched Rockefeller as his running mate (and then lost to a Baptist Sunday School teacher). The first Baptist VP, however, is likely the least known today: Richard Mentor Johnson, a Democrat from Kentucky who served as the nation’s ninth VP during the term of President Martin Van Buren (1837-1841). Harris represented quite a shift from Johnson. While she’s descended from people who were enslaved, he was an enslaver who had an enslaved wife.
If Harris follows Truman in taking the “vice” off her title, she would also become the fifth Baptist president of the United States. The four who have claimed the affiliation are Republican Warren Harding (1921-1923), Democrat Truman (1945-1953), Democrat Jimmy Carter (1977-1981), and Democrat Bill Clinton (1993-2001). But Harris’s denominational affiliation would be partially unique. Carter and Clinton were both Southern Baptists during their presidencies (though Carter later left due to the rightward shift of the Southern Baptist Convention). Harding was a Northern Baptist, the denomination today known as American Baptist Churches USA. And Truman worshiped in both camps.
Third Baptist in San Francisco, the oldest Black church in the city, is dually aligned with American Baptists and the National Baptist Convention USA. The latter is the largest Black Baptist denomination in the U.S., founded shortly after the Civil War by formerly enslaved Baptists. Harris spoke to the NBCUSA’s annual meeting in 2022.
“Faith teaches us that a brighter future is always ahead and we must keep moving forward to realize that future. And to move forward, simply put, I also learned and we all know: Faith requires action,” she said. “The Bible teaches us so much about what we must do to be dutiful, understanding we have a duty to our God and to one another. And people of faith, then with that spirit, have always been part of leading our nation forward out of the darkness and toward the light.”
“For me and President Joe Biden, faith guides our work every day. So I will say to the National Baptist Convention: We know — we know deeply — that when people of faith come together, anything is possible. Everything is possible. That is the power of faith,” she added. “Just think, after slavery was outlawed in our country, the founders of this very convention came together to protect the freedom of worship. As Black people in our nation battled racist laws and ideologies, men and women of the cloth were the leaders of the civil rights movement in America. And they, then, following the teachings of Christ, built coalitions of people of all faiths and races and walks of life, because they understood and knew the importance of the collective. They did not declare, ‘I shall overcome.’ No, they said, ‘We shall overcome.’”
During her remarks, Harris also noted the presence of her pastor, Rev. Brown: “For two decades now, at least, I have turned to you. … And I will say that your wisdom has really guided me and grounded me during some of the most difficult times. And you have been a source of inspiration to me always.” On Sunday, after Biden made his announcement, Harris started making calls to Democratic leaders to get her campaign moving. But she also called Brown so he and his wife Jane could pray for her.
When I talked with Brown shortly after Harris’s election as VP, he reflected on what it meant for the country — and what more still needed to be done to overcome racism.
“I think it’s to the credit of the person who has emerged in office. It’s not so much to the credit of this country because this country still has a lot more to do. It is to the credit of Mr. Biden that he chose Ms. Harris,” he explained. “I just hope and pray that we will keep going and keep the faith. But we’ve had some progress before, and yet there was retrogression.”
“We’re still dealing with that evil, that sin. And Donald Trump has been the embodiment of that with his racialized politics,” Brown added while highlighting Trump’s support from White evangelicals. “Our spirituality in America is corrupt.”
Brown has seen the progress and the retrogression firsthand. Born in Mississippi, he was the same age as Emmett Till, who was lynched in 1955 in Mississippi. That year brought other racial injustices, Brown noted, like the death of Baptist preacher George Lee for registering to vote. Brown’s father followed Lee as pastor of a rural Mississippi Baptist church. Amos responded to the murder of Till by working with Medgar Evers to organize a youth council of the NAACP. Soon, he met Martin Luther King Jr. and other prominent civil rights leaders.
In 1963, Evers was assassinated. That same year, Brown joined other Black students in Atlanta as they sought to integrate First Baptist Church. While ushers blocked students from worshiping, Brown managed to slip in and stay for the whole service, thus integrating a church founded more than a century earlier by enslavers. He also told me in 2022 he met his wife of more than 50 years “there on those steps of First Baptist Church” during weeks of protests. While the church eventually ended its segregationist policy, its pastor today preaches conspiratorial Trumpian politics (including during a recent Christian Nationalistic service for the Fourth of July).
Brown has also seen the progress and retrogression in reactions to Harris. Shortly after being with her on inauguration day in 2021, he wrote a guest column for Word&Way responding to comments by White Southern Baptist pastors who called Harris a “Jezebel,” a derogatory term historically used to attack Black women. Brown also criticized other White evangelical leaders for not publicly denouncing the “ugly, racist” slur. With Harris now elevated to the top of the ticket, such attacks are likely to return.
“Such vile tropes have no place in our society or political discourse,” Brown wrote. “If we are to stamp out this stain on our history, then all of us — and especially White evangelical leaders — must stand up and denounce racism in word and deed. It is the first step towards the reconciliation and unity that we must have for our nation to prosper for all of its citizens.”
As a public witness,
Brian Kaylor
You can listen to my full December 2020 interview with Rev. Brown in episode 147 of Baptist Without An Adjective: