American presidential candidates are often a good lens for looking at the state of American religion. For instance, the fact that 2012 was the first election in American history where no candidate was a mainline Protestant, after that branch’s virtual monopoly on the White House, reflected the mainline’s precipitous decline in numbers and influence over the 20th century.
While the two vice-presidential candidates were boringly Catholic, Barack Obama ran as a nondenominational, basically unchurched Christian, and Mitt Romney as a Mormon, reflecting the surge of these two very different styles of Christianity in America.
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