Religion and American Politics

Second Quarter 2004

Old Dialogue, New Book

Early this summer, The Brookings Institution and the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life will release a new book titled One Electorate Under God: A Dialogue on Religion and American Politics. Two of the book's short essays are written by Mark Noll, Professor of History at Wheaton College and the author most recently of America's God, and James Skillen, President of the Center for Public Justice. Edited excerpts from these two essays follow.

Voting Not to Vote

As has been the case for the last few presidential elections, on November 2, 2004, I will almost certainly cast my vote once again for "none of the above." Here's why.

Seven issues seem to me to be paramount at the national level: race, life, taxes, trade, medicine, religious freedom, and the international rule of law. My disillusionment with the major parties and their candidates comes from the fact that I do not see them willing to consider the political coherence of this combination of convictions, much less willing to reason about why their own positions should be accepted, or willing to break away from narrow partisanship in order to try to act for the public good. Sketching the reasons for my political convictions will make my electoral dilemma clear.

Race

From 1619, when the first African indentured servants were offloaded in the American colonies, until the 1960s, American political institutions wavered in deciding whether African Americans could be full and equal citizens of a democratic nation. The United States pays a heavy price, and it pays it daily, for its history of injustice to African American citizens. Full attention to the racially infested plight of impacted urban areas—a Marshall Plan in some shape or form—is certainly the least that could be asked of the major political parties as recompense for America's longest lasting and most debilitating political crime.

Life

I am militantly pro-life because I do not want the United States to commit the social suicide that results when nations allow personal preference to trump human life. Assumptions that are nearly universal in human history testify that, without compelling reasons to the contrary, life should be favored over death. With all necessary qualifications, it is nonetheless imperative for nations that want to promote "liberty and justice for all" to stand securely behind the principle of life and against any effort, however well intentioned, to compromise that fundamental principle.

Taxes

The United States needs sharply progressive income taxes as a policy based on broad views of justice and equity. The ability to create wealth does depend on personal initiative, personal intelligence, personal work, and personal luck. It also depends upon social infrastructures that allow initiative, intelligence, hard work, and luck to result in the creation of wealth.

Trade

The United States should continue to defend principles of free trade and, wherever possible, expand the operations of free trade. Temporary assistance may be needed for segments of the economy hurt by the expansion of free trade. But in broader terms, free trade opens up opportunities for the kind of entrepreneurial activity that creates jobs and expands markets. It shows up dictators and statist regimes when their people witness elsewhere the economic advantages of free economic activity.

Medicine

Basic medical coverage, supplied at minimal cost and minimal bureaucratic frustration, should be offered to all. At the very least this is a policy of prudent self-interest. Those whom illness or disability incapacitate become a drain on the public purse and are kept from functioning as productive workers. Those who live in constant fear of being pauperized by illness or disability do not function productively or contribute to the institutions of political and civil society. A problem of nearly equal magnitude is the skyrocketing expense of medical coverage that results when individual parts of the medical system act only from their own perceived short-term interests. Political leaders must find the courage to propose comprehensive programs, the perseverance to push them along, and the commitment to make things change.

Religious Freedom

People must be allowed to exercise the basic human right of worshiping God, or not worshiping God, as they choose. That religious freedom is almost certainly the most basic human right has been demonstrated by the repeated social constriction and economic regression where it has been abridged.

The International Rule of Law

Since the United States is by far the strongest nation in the world--the new Rome of the early twenty-first century—it should ponder the over-extension, the short-sighted presumption, the failures of imagination, and the unilateral use of force that caused such difficulties in the latter phases of the Roman empire. Warfare remains the most explosive instrument of international policy.

These are political convictions to which I have come as a result of my Christian faith. Of course, I could be mistaken—either in what traditional Christianity should mean politically for an American citizen in the early twenty-first century or in how best to argue for these positions with reasoning not demanding a pre-commitment to traditional Christianity. But as long as I hold these positions, I am a citizen without a political home.
 

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Religions and the American Religion

What is most important for voters to know about the religious convictions of candidates is how those convictions undergird their political point of view.

When former New York Governor, Mario Cuomo, comments [in an essay published at the beginning of the book] that all citizens should be "free to act according to their own religious beliefs, even when those acts conflict with Roman Catholic dogma [on] divorce, birth control, abortion, [and] stem cell research," he is ambiguous and obfuscating. That is because the Catholic Church holds abortion and embryo destruction to be more than personal religious beliefs. They are, from a Catholic point of view, actions that governments should not permit.

Cuomo could have said that on the basis of his Catholic faith he was committed to doing everything possible as an officeholder to try to bring an end to abortion and embryo destruction. And at the same time, he could have said that if abortion and embryo destruction were the law of the land, he would uphold the law, as he would have been obligated to do as governor. That stance would be compatible with his Catholic faith and with Catholic recognition of the legitimacy of democratic government.

Instead, what Cuomo does, in my view, is to use the language of religious freedom as a generalized cover for privatizing certain Catholic public commitments and thereby making room for his own public support of abortion.

Mark Souder [Member of Congress from Pennsylvania], is ambiguous in a similar way [in his essay also published earlier in the book]. He is explicit about his fundamental Christian convictions, but his religious declarations do not have a direct bearing on his political views. His view of government and the Constitution is, in fact, very close to Cuomo's. But whereas for Cuomo public respect for the dignity of each person means allowing women to choose abortion, Souder is convinced that the moral and religious people who make up America should protect the life of the unborn. Souder, no more than Cuomo, however, shows how his religious convictions lead to his particular policy conclusion.

None of this seems particularly helpful as a way of illuminating politics by means of religious talk. The press and the people had best just ignore the chatter and look to policy stances, funding sources, and public opinion to learn what candidates really believe about politics. Yet if this is all that voters and the media do, it will leave many of us wondering why the candidates—who all love America, believe in its Constitution, and support religious freedom and human dignity—seem to come out at such different points on so many policy issues.

My hunch about the conundrum here is that the typical questions about faith and politics are misdirected. Asking about the private faiths of candidates does not yield much. Instead, we should turn in a different direction and look for the source of many important political differences in the growing crisis of the American civil religion, which dominates all other religions in public life. This religion—the glue of the Republic for almost two hundred years—is now in trouble because its nineteenth-century tenets no longer grip a large majority of Americans.

This country's increasingly diverse society, culturally speaking, can live comfortably enough with religious diversity in private. What Americans do not yet accept or know how to establish, however, is religious diversity in public—in politics and in government—because the old-time civil religion demands an America whole and undivided. Consequently, the real political fights and culture wars are not over differences in private faiths but over the principles of political faith that should define the American way of life as a whole. The contest over the right to define those principles is the contest for majority control of Congress, the White House, and the courts—and the winner takes all. Those who disagree with the majority will still have every right to hold their private convictions, but they will not have authority to exert any public control.

What would be most helpful, then, is a probing examination of where candidates stand with respect to the American civil religion, and that requires dealing with the truly relevant questions of political religion.