RELIGION AND POLITICS
by Forrest Church
October 24, 2004
On the eve of this year's presidential election, we find ourselves bitterly divided as a nation. It almost seems that our sturdy national motto, e pluribus unum (out of many, one), may soon need updating to e pluribus duo (out of many, two).
Political division in America, especially at election time, is hardly a novelty, of course. In addition to a deep breath, those of you who are muttering about leaving the country should your candidate lose, might take a longer view. In 1800, Thomas Jefferson challenged President John Adams in our first vigorously contested election. Here is what the Connecticut Courant warned its readers to expect should Jefferson prevail. "Murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest will all be openly taught and practice. The air will be rent with the cries of distress, the soil will be soaked with blood, and the nation black with crimes." For shear viciousness, the Federalist and Republican broadsides of 1800 make today's political ads seem more like floral gift bouquets.
This year's presidential election does highlight one division in our nation that has been growing in recent years, however: the chasm between those who view America through religious and secular lenses. The former group—composed primarily of Fundamentalists, conservative Catholics, and Protestant Evangelicals—seeks moral restoration through the establishment (some would say reestablishment) of a Christian, or, at the very least, a religiously instructed, government. The latter—made up in large measure of mainline Protestants, liberal Catholics, and the growing population of citizens who openly describe themselves as secular or non-affiliated—cringes at the infusion of religion into politics and seeks to enhance and protect American pluralism by keeping our government (some would say nation) resolutely secular.
One recent poll (a University of Akron survey on religion and politics) suggests the growing magnitude of this religion gap. On average, those Americans who attend church three times a month or more are almost twice as likely to support Bush over Kerry; those who attend church two times a month or less, support Kerry by approximately the same margin, with the gulf widest at both ends of the church-going spectrum.
The number of people who worship isn't growing. The religious constituency is changing. The Mainline Protestant denominations are in sharp decline; fundamentalist and evangelical churches, along with the Mormons, continue to grow apace. Overlooked by most commentators is another statistic. People who call themselves non-religious are increasing almost as rapidly as those who define themselves as Born-again. By one measure, over the last decade self-described "secularists" have grown from 10% to 17% of the population.
Here's what scares me. Should this trend continue, we may end up one day with a religious and a secular party in America. Insensitive to protections that ensure church-state separation, the religious party would turn an increasingly blind eye to the first clause of the First Amendment (that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion"). The secular party would likely prove as insensitive to the rights protected in the second clause of the very same amendment (which precludes Congress from making any law on religion "prohibiting the free exercise thereof")
Both sides overlook an essential part of our national heritage. First, however much the devout secularists may wish it otherwise, ours is a religious nation, in the broadest sense of that word. The nation's moral and spiritual grounding is one of America's essential (though often perverted) strengths. Our highest ideals are drawn from the God-given principles of liberty and equality that Jefferson spells out so eloquently in the Declaration of Independence. Grounded in the creation itself by nature and nature's God, the founders' ideals held both themselves and hold succeeding generations under the judgement of a higher law. They also constitute the "unum" in "e pluribus unum."
By the same token, however much the most ideologically avid Christian may wish it otherwise, ours is a devoutly secular government. Freedom of conscience is rightly the first American liberty. Encompassing religious belief and disbelief, this liberty requires and has throughout our history been protected by a healthy measure of church-state separation. In conjunction with our other sacred liberties (of press, speech, and assembly), freedom of and freedom from belief undergird the "pluribus" in "e pluribus unum."
The last thing this nation needs is an "unum" party and a "pluribus" party. Neither alone fulfills the founders' vision. In either instance, the ultimate triumph of one over the other would lead to the rending of a fabric designed to serve us all.
Religion will always have a place in politics. Religious values are, or should be, moral values. They will instruct both our activism and our votes. In fact, the three most Biblically charged presidential campaigns in the nation's history were waged by progressive candidates: the populist Fundamentalist and social gospel advocate, William Jennings Bryan; Theodore Roosevelt on the Bull Moose ticket in 1912—who proclaimed, "We stand at Armageddon and battle for the Lord;" and—this may surprise you—George McGovern, whose rhetoric was infused with the prophetic proclamations of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel.
Yet the churches themselves (and other religious institutions) must beware hitching their moral star to anyone's political wagon. From the outset of our experiment in governance and by the conscious design of the founders, religion has thrived in America in large measure because the Government was excluded from corrupting its franchise. Church-state separation is better described as freedom for religion, not freedom from religion, because, historically, whenever the church and the state get in bed together, it is the church whose virtue is compromised. "Will you respect me in the morning," she may well ask. The answer is almost always, "No."
Just look at Europe. Look at England, where the Anglican church has fed at the government's trough for centuries; or Sweden, where the Lutheran Church was disestablished only four years ago. Almost nobody goes to church! The United States of America is the most religious western industrialized nation precisely because the church has maintained her moral independence and therefore her moral authority.
For this very reason, church-state separation has long been championed by religious leaders in this nation, especially by evangelical Protestants. Less than half a century ago, when John F. Kennedy, a Roman Catholic, ran for president, many Protestant leaders were terrified. Why? Because of their mistaken apprehension that the Vatican would gain back-door access to the White House. Norman Vincent Peale and other (more evangelical) Protestant ministers sounded alarms that Kennedy, should he be true to his faith, would be forced to be answerable to the Pope and not the people.
Their panic was such that it didn't even escape the easily distracted attention of a 12-year-old boy. I recall the shock of receiving in change a quarter that someone had defaced with red nail polish by painting a cardinal's cap on George Washington's head. Eleanor Roosevelt—in the final volume of her Autobiography, written shortly before her death—lamented the faithlessness powering such bigotry. "What seemed to me most deplorable was not the fact that so many people feared the strength of the Roman Catholic Church," she said. "It was that they had no faith in the strength of their own way of life and their own Constitution." Even if Kennedy had turned out to be an undercover Vatican operative, Eleanor Roosevelt was confident our sturdy national tradition of church-state separation would protect the state from being Shanghaied by the church.
Many conservative Protestant leaders were less sanguine about the resiliency of church-state separation. Yet, about one thing, almost everyone back then seemed to agree: in the United State of America, church-state separation is inviolable. How distant the day seems and yet how recent it was that Right-wing Christians rushed more quickly to condemn the admixture of religion and politics than did left-wing secularists. As late as 1965, a young, pre-politicized Jerry Falwell anethmatized the ministers who marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma, Alabama. "Preachers are not called to be politicians but to be soul winners," he said.
Especially in America's Protestant heartland, concerns about the Catholic church compromising Kennedy's political independence and jeopardizing the separation of church and state were so widespread that he had to tackle the problem head on. He memorably proclaimed, "I am not the Catholic candidate for President. I am the Democratic Party's candidate for President who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters--and the church does not speak for me."
Kennedy reinforced this promise with sentiments almost every one of his predecessors, from George Washington onward, could easily have ratified. "I would not look with favor upon a President working to subvert the first amendment's guarantees of religious liberty," John Kennedy said. "Nor would our system of checks and balances permit him to do so.. . . . I believe in a President whose religious views are his own private affair, neither imposed by him upon the nation or imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office."
How dramatically the political climate has shifted from that election to this! Back then, evangelical Protestants defamed John F. Kennedy for being a Catholic; this year, Catholic leaders join many evangelical Protestants to condemn this year's Roman Catholic presidential candidate, John Kerry, for not being Catholic enough. According to the Religious Right, then and now: Kennedy's election would imperil the nation by bringing the Vatican into the White House; Kerry's would do the same by not bringing the Vatican into the White House. No longer deemed a bulwark essential to the protection of our liberties, church-state separation is viewed by many religious and political advocates as almost unAmerican. Theodore Sorenson (who assisted Kennedy in the penning of his Houston address) is quick to point out the irony. The denominational heirs to those who then expressed concern that Kennedy's religious views would influence his political decisions "now openly and expressly urge that their religious doctrines be favored over others, that their members in office set public policies according to those religious doctrines, and that their political views be binding on their congregations."
Today's Catholic hierarchy would be wise to hold suspect any advice I might have to offer them, but I will say this. When a Bishop chooses one tenet of his faith, regarding abortion say, and says that any Catholic who supports a pro-choice candidate is committing a sin, entirely apart from transgressing prudent laws that prohibit preachers mounting their pulpits to instruct their parishioners for whom to vote, it is clear that he is subordinating his religious to his political faith. Why is this clear? Because, if he were not, he would go on to say that any Catholic who supports a candidate who is in favor of the death penalty or who supported what the Pope condemned as an unjust war in Iraq is also committing a sin. If Bishop Michael Sheridan of Colorado, or any of the other bishops who would deny both communion and the promise of salvation to a pro-choice Catholic, were charged to design a strategy to empty his church's pews as quickly as possible, this would surely be it.
One final word about the danger of theologizing politics. All by itself, religion is perhaps the most divisive force in the world today. True believers are forever incited first to damn and sometimes then to blow their infidel neighbors to the nether side of kingdom come. Most wars have been, to one extent or another, Holy Wars. When augmented by the rhetoric of Armageddon, political gulfs, difficult to bridge to begin with, can quickly become political chasms. Whoever wins next weeks election, the people of this nation are going to have a lot of work to do if we are to work together and not against one another to meet the challenges of our time, both foreign and domestic. There is more than merely a rhetorical distinction between disagreeing with one's neighbors and demonizing them.
Admitting how combustive the admixture of religion and politics can be, let me nonetheless leave you with precisely the opposite thought—that there may be too little religion in our politics, not too much. Too little of the religion prescribed by the prophet Micah: "to do justice and love mercy and walk humbly with your God." Too little of the religion taught by Rabbi Jesus, who summed up all the law and the prophets in two great commandments: "to love God with all your heart and mind and soul and your neighbor as yourself." Too little of the religion as defined by Thomas Jefferson, who said, "It is in our lives and not in our words that our religion must be read."