NY Times: “Harris’s Faith, Inside and Outside the Black Church”

I posted this yesterday Good article: "The Chronically Underestimated Kamala Harris"  and coincidentally this article was in yesterday's NY Times. No mention of her fanatical support and promotion for abortion  Harris Rejects Religious Exemptions for Abortion. That's Harris's faith?

The Rev. Dr. Amos Brown was taking his usual Sunday afternoon nap in late July when a longtime congregant, Vice President Kamala Harris, called. “Pastor, I need for you to pray for Doug, for me and for this nation,” Dr. Brown, pastor of the Third Baptist Church of San Francisco, recalled her saying. “I’ve decided to run for president.” President Biden had announced only a few hours before that he was abandoning his re-election campaign, and he endorsed Ms. Harris almost immediately. The prayer Dr. Brown, 83, offered was drawn from a Bible verse that Ms. Harris quotes often herself: “What does the Lord require of you but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?”

Ms. Harris has visited several churches in the final weeks of the election campaign. On Sunday, her 60th birthday, she made appearances at two in Georgia, coinciding with the campaign’s “Souls to the Polls” effort to turn out Black churchgoers.

Most Americans do not see either Ms. Harris or Mr. Trump as particularly religious. In a poll in September by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs, 43 percent of respondents said they thought Ms. Harris was “religious,” and 35 percent said that of Trump.

This perception may not be a problem for a significant share of Ms. Harris’s base. As religious adherence declines broadly among Americans, the drop-off has been much steeper among Democrats. In 1999, about 60 percent of both Democrats and Republicans described themselves as “religious,” according to polling by Gallup. By 2023, the figure among Republicans had barely moved, but only 37 percent of Democrats described themselves that way.

Ms. Harris has said she grew up attending both a church, the Twenty-Third Avenue Church of God in Oakland, and a Hindu temple, which she has not named. In her adulthood, she has maintained ties to the Black church and its tradition of political organizing. But though she peppers her speeches and interviews with references to scripture, she rarely speaks about her faith in the personal terms that are familiar to evangelicals, nor does she go to church as often as does President Biden


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