Joseph R. Biden made the nation’s soul central to his 2020 presidential campaign. This approach served as a counterpunch to Donald J. Trump, who won the Republican Party’s nomination in 2016 through a targeted appeal to Christian conservatives, including Catholics. In the general election that year, Trump won the Catholic vote and gained Christian voters more broadly by even greater margins. Four years later, the Catholic Biden endeavored to neutralize Trump’s hold on religious voters. In Biden’s favor, he regularly attended Mass and expressed devotion to praying the rosary. Yet Biden appealed to voters not by emphasizing Catholic theology or dogma to justify his public policy. Instead, Biden’s language echoed the inaugural address of the nation’s first Catholic president, John F. Kennedy. Sociologist Robert Bellah identified this rhetoric as American Civil Religion (ACR).