Longtime friends of Joe Biden attested to the former vice president’s personal faith at the final night of the Democratic National Convention amid criticism from the Trump campaign that he is an insincere Catholic.
Delaware Sen. Chris Coons, an ordained minister and Biden ally, delivered a speech defending Biden’s faith against critics, saying that, for him, “faith isn’t a prop or a political tool.” Coons’s remark contrasted Biden with President Trump, who held up a Bible in late May in an effort to quell riots then breaking out in many cities.
“Joe is a man of faith and conscience, and he’ll be a president for men of all faiths, as well as for people of non-particular faith,” Coons said. “Joe’s faith is really about our future, about a world with less suffering and more justice.”
When Coons finished speaking, the night’s host, comedian Julia Louis-Dreyfus, repackaged Coons’s point as a joke about how Biden’s Catholicism is more sincere than Trump’s gestures to religion.
“Just remember, Joe Biden goes to church so regularly that he doesn’t even need tear gas and a bunch of federalized troops to help him get him there,” she said, referencing to the instance in which police cleared the area behind the White House, allowing Trump to cross the street and hold up the Bible in front of St. Johns, a historic Episcopal church in Washington, D.C.
Later in the evening, Michael Beals, a Delaware rabbi who got to know Biden while he was a senator, said that he was always touched by Biden’s respect for faiths that are not his own. Beals has participated in the Biden campaign’s outreach calls to Jewish people.
Biden’s faith has been a subject of controversy throughout his campaign, especially as the Trump campaign has attempted to cast the former vice president as a bad Catholic, particularly because of his positions on abortion and religious liberty. The Trump campaign has hammered hard on Biden’s opposition to the Hyde Amendment, which bars federal funding for most abortions. It has also criticized Biden for his promise to reinstate a contraception mandate on the Little Sisters of the Poor, a Catholic religious order.
Trump inflamed the controversy when early in the month he said that Biden would “hurt God” and “hurt the Bible” if elected.
Biden responded that Trump’s words were “shameful.”
