What does Kamala Harris believe, and why does she believe it? It’s a harder question to answer than one might think for someone who has been in national-level politics for almost a decade, and state politics for almost fifteen years before that. A survey of Harris’ historic comments on her religious beliefs — and what her supporters say about them — suggests that what matters is less the substance of her faith but its symbolism (and, perhaps more cynically, its alignment with the Democrat Party platform).
What Does Harris Believe?
Harris comes from a religiously diverse family background: her mother, a native of Tamil Nadu in southern India, was a Hindu until she met her future husband, Jamaican American Donald J. Harris, after which she converted to his Christianity. Nevertheless, Religion News Service (RNS) tells us, Harris’ mother “instilled in her two daughters a reverence for Hindu temples.” Moreover, as corporate media never tire of reminding us, the name Kamala means “lotus” in Sanskrit and has special significance in Hinduism, as it is “closely associated with Sri-Lakshmi: the goddess of sovereignty, auspiciousness, fecundity, wealth and good fortune.”
Raised in a Baptist church, Harris once wrote that her “earliest memories of the teachings of the Bible were of a loving God, a God who asked us to ‘speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves’ and to ‘defend the rights of the poor and needy.’” She elsewhere told RNS, “I can trace my belief in the importance of public service back to learning the parable of the good Samaritan and other biblical teachings about looking out for our neighbors.” She added:
Ever since I was a girl, church has not only been a place where I draw strength, it’s been a place for reflection, a place to study the teachings of the Lord and to feel grounded in a complex world. … Church still plays that role for me. And I also draw something else from it as well: a sense of community and belonging where we can build lasting relationships and be there for one another in times of need.
Today Harris is a member of Third Baptist Church of San Francisco, a predominantly black church, whose pastor Rev. Amos C. Brown declared that Harris “came to this church because she knew our ways, she knew our history … This church has always had a balanced spirituality: social justice and personal fulfillment and salvation.”
That religious commitment to social justice is also reportedly what inclines Harris toward Hinduism. RNS reports, “Part of what she has drawn from her Hindu side is her commitment to social justice,” noting that Harris has identified Hinduism with her maternal grandfather’s “dedication to the freedom struggle against the British during the Partition of India in the 1940s.”
Harris’ Faith as Syncretistic and Symbolic
It is that syncretistic union of religious traditions that the left most eagerly celebrates. The title of a July 25 article in the Associated Press says it all: “Kamala Harris: A Baptist with a Jewish husband and a faith that traces back to MLK and Gandhi.” Black clergy, reads the AP article, “marvel at the fusion of traditions and teachings that have molded her religious faith and social justice values.” Indeed, religious leaders and theologians interviewed by the AP explained that her candidacy “has special symbolic significance,” because she is female, black, and South Asian.
Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, president of Interfaith Alliance, picks up this same theme of Kamala the multiculturalist, recently claiming that the vice president’s ties to Hinduism, Judaism, and Christianity make her stand out. “I don’t think we’ve ever before had a candidate who has navigated various religious spaces and celebrated those various spaces in such an intimate way as the vice president,” said Raushenbush. A 2020 piece in The Washington Post went so far as to claim that Harris “embodies the future of American religion,” predicting that younger voters will “recognize in Harris a kind of multifaith and spiritual belonging unfamiliar to the mostly White Christian majority of past decades.”
There, in brief, is the true meaning of Harris’ religious beliefs: a syncretistic pluralism that appeals to the left’s shallow, perversely manipulative obsessions with identitarianism. What do voters need to know about Harris’ actual political record (such as the fact that, far from being “centrist,” she had the second-most liberal voting record during her tenure in the Senate)? Only that her identity as a black, South Asian woman and a child of immigrant parents uniquely positions her to be representative of a multicultural America in need of overcoming what Harris has called its “systemic racism.” What do voters need to know about her religion? That it is an amalgamation of Christianity, Hinduism, and Judaism that enables her to symbolize America’s post-Christian, post-white pluralism.
An Adherent of the Church of Social Justice
In a word, Harris is a totem of the left’s ideologically driven identitarian agenda, often framed by religiously inclined leftists as “social justice.” In stark contrast to the “unenlightened” who believe Christianity makes doctrinal and moral claims that cannot be fully reconciled with other religious traditions, Kamala the multiculturalist is “tolerant” and nuanced enough to draw upon a diversity of religious traditions and (somehow) represent them all. She is the champion of the globalists and borderless, furthering the narrow-minded provincials’ descent into the dustbin of history with a condescending smirk and a laugh that bespeaks her elite credentials.
Of course, it’s a “religiously influenced” political project that’s not entirely tolerant. There was that demonstrable display of opprobrium Harris leveled at the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal society involved in thousands of volunteer projects and responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars in charitable giving. “An all-male society comprised primarily of Catholic men” that takes extreme positions on abortion and gay marriage is what Harris once called the Knights of Columbus — whose positions on those issues just so happen to be those held as doctrine by the Catholic Church.
Harris has also co-sponsored or promoted legislation to restrict the free speech of Christians, end religious exemptions for certain government mandates, and coerce Christian businesses to cover contraception in their health insurance policies.
Conveniently, the religious leaders and organizations to whom Harris has wedded herself do not view such actions as inimical to “social justice,” that mystical phrase that serves as the connective tissue uniting Harris’ (and her allies’) comments on her “ecumenical” religious faith. It is a phrase that evinces a mission transcending any single religious tradition or creed.
It would perhaps be simplistic to observe that this religion of “social justice” seems a manifestation of, rather than an influence on, her politics, given it so conveniently aligns with the Democrat Party’s stance on just about every contested contemporary political issue, from abortion and transgenderism to criminal justice, immigration, and the environment. But would it be wrong?
Casey Chalk is a senior contributor at The Federalist and an editor and columnist at The New Oxford Review. He has a bachelor’s in history and master’s in teaching from the University of Virginia and a master’s in theology from Christendom College. He is the author of The Persecuted: True Stories of Courageous Christians Living Their Faith in Muslim Lands.
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