Observers of religion say Harris looks like the future of the nation
Kamala Harris filled two criteria that Joe Biden wanted in a running mate: she is a woman, and she is black, two critical Democratic constituencies ahead of the November elections.
But Harris, the 55-year-old junior senator from California, has other advantages in the 2020 presidential race. She embodies the future of American religion: in a time of expanding religious pluralism, the country’s younger generation, many of them children and grandchildren of immigrants, will recognize in Harris a kind of multifaith and spiritual belonging unfamiliar to the mostly white Christian majority of past decades.
Harris, who was born in Oakland, California, to a Jamaican immigrant father, Donald Harris, and an Indian immigrant mother, Shyamala Gopalan, is both black and South Asian. She grew up in a home that accommodated both Christian and Hindu religious practices.
