All Rev’d Up hosts Irene Monroe and Emmett Price returned to Boston Public Radio on Monday, where they debated the impact President-elect Joe Biden’s faith might have on his administration's policy.
Price said he expects Biden to lean into the more “egalitarian” aspects of his Catholicism, predicting an “interesting tension” between the former vice president's liberal values and the more conservative aspects of the Catholic Church. He rejected the idea, however, that anyone could be cleanly defend by their religious identity.
"I don’t think that we can always phenotype individuals based on our perceptions of what their faith dictates,” he said. "Myself as a Black Baptist, I don’t think you can fit me into the two-by-four Baptist category, because there’re some nuances."
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Monroe, meanwhile, flat-out rejected the notion that Democrats ought to praise Biden for being a man of faith.
“One of the things we were saying with [Justice] Amy Coney Barrett was that we were hoping that her faith would not lead her to make judicial decisions,” she remembered. "And so we’ve gotta do the same thing [with President-elect Biden.]”
She added, "I feel it’s a slippery slope. I think that if we leave religion out, it doesn’t become a litmus test for electability, [and] we have a much more multicultural democracy."
Irene Monroe is a syndicated religion columnist, the Boston voice for Detour’s African American Heritage Trail, and a visiting researcher in the Religion and Conflict Transformation Program at Boston University School of Theology. Emmett Price is a professor and executive director of the Institute for the Study of the Black Christian Experience at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. Together, they host GBH’s All Rev’d Up podcast.
