Eighteen eighty-four’s election was one of the nation’s dirtiest, and clergy were among its central actors. The example is instructive. Religion has often elevated American politics. But direct involvement by the clergy has not always been helpful. Their primary vocation is to speak God’s Word without compromise, a calling that does not easily transfer into the compromises requisite for electioneering. Directly applying faith to politics is more typically a calling for lay people.

For better or worse, clergy have always been involved in U.S. politics. A Secret Life: The Lies and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland by Charles Lachman tells how pastors, rather fecklessly, virtually decided a presidential election.

In 1884 the Rev. George Ball of the Free Will Baptist Church in Buffalo learned with “shocked incredulity” that former Buffalo Mayor Grover Cleveland, now New York governor and Democratic presidential nominee, had fathered an illegitimate child, whom he had taken away from the mother, after briefly confining her to a mental hospital. He shared his discovery at a meeting of the city’s thirty leading clergy, including a Catholic priest. And he wrote in a Congregationalist newspaper:

It may be too late to do you any good, and may not be needed, but I feel moved to warn you against saying much to the credit of Grover Cleveland. He is a libertine. No Christian should condone his crimes so far as to commend his candidacy. About seven years ago he seduced the head of the cloak department of Flint & Kent’s, leading merchants here. He kidnapped the woman after the boy was born, sent her to the Catholic Insane Asylum [sic] and took the child from her. She escaped, got Milo A. Whitney to help her, finally settled and gave up the child for $500. This I know to be true.

He later commented to another newspaper:

It is painful to think of his offenses and shameful, infinitely shameful, to have such a man commended to the suffrages of a Christian nation. It is enough to alarm all decent people, and even cause the vulgar and profane to hesitate and demand a halt.

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