More on Faith & Politics

On the eve of "Justice Sunday," a few further thoughts and links from the RINO on the intersection of religion and politics.

First, I must point out this article from Friday's New York Times. Apparently some "people of faith" don't feel as though war has been declared upon them, and this report highlights some concerns that many mainstream religious groups are expressing with Senator Frist's participation in tomorrow's telecast. Rev. Clifton Kirkpatrick, a top Presbyterian clergyman, said Thursday "One of the hallmarks of our denomination is that we are an ecumenical church," adding that he thought "Frist's participation in the the telecast undermined 'the historical commitment in our nation and our church to an understanding of the First Amendment that elected officials should not be portraying public policies as being for or against people of faith.'" Frist is an active member of the Presbyterian church.

C. Welton Gaddy, president of the Interfaith Alliance, said in a conference call with reporters on Friday that Frist's "presence is giving credibility to people who have made a stark political issue a litmus test for judging religion." Gaddy went on to note that he worries about "the transition from religion as a source of values and wisdom, to religion as a strategy for passing legislation or winning an election." Kirkpatrick, who also participated in the conference call, urged Frist to skip the event, saying "We believe that this is a time when religious people need to come together and not create a climate of divisiveness. And it's certainly not a time when we turn religious disagreements into religious conflicts." Bob Edgar, general secretary of the National Council of Churches, quipped that "Justice Sunday" would have been more appropriately named "Just Us Sunday," since it "makes one political point of view a litmus test for Christian faith and in so doing attempts to disenfranchise if not excommunicate the millions of American Christians who hold a different view."

Colbert I. King's column in the Washington Post today speaks directly to Edgar's point. While I cannot agree with all of King's conclusions (in my view his correlation between the organizers of "Justice Sunday" and the leaders of the KKK is something of a stretch), his operative paragraphs are right on:

"Americans of faith - and those lacking one - ought to vigorously resist attempts by power-hungry zealots to impose their religious views on the nation. That means standing up to them at every turn.

It means challenging them when they say of Americans who support a woman's right to choose; the right of two adults to enter into a loving, committed, state-sanctioned, monogamous relationship; the right to pursue science in support of life; the right of the aggrieved to launch aggressive assaults against racism, sexism and homophobia, that they are not legitimate members of the flock. Where do those on the religious right get off thinking they have the right to decide who is in and who is out? Who appointed them sole promoters and defenders of the faith? What makes them think they are more holy and righteous than the rest of us?

They are not now and never will be the final arbiters of Christian beliefs and values. ...

The Bergen Record in Hackensack, N.J., editorialized that the attempt by the Christian right to dominate all three branches of government 'has to frighten anyone who is not a Christian conservative. It should frighten us all.' Baloney. It should make us mad. Fighting mad."

Also in the Washington Post today, Paul Gaston, professor emeritus of Southern and civil rights history at the University of Virginia, notes that while those religious fundamentalists backing "Justice Sunday" portray themselves as opposed to a "secular humanist" worldview, "Right-wing and fundamentalist Christians are really at war with left-wing and mainstream Christians. It is a battle over both the meaning and practice of Christianity as well as over the definition and destiny of the republic."

Gaston includes in his column comments from judge George Greer, who presided over most of the litigation concerning Terri Schiavo. Greer, described as "a lifelong Southern Baptist, a regular in church and a conservative Republican," has since the Schiavo debacle received death threats and hate mail informing him that he was bound for Hell because of his decisions in the case. " Gaston quotes Greer as saying that he finds such messages "exasperating". "[M]y faith is based on forgiveness because that's what God did. ... When I see people in my faith being extremely judgmental, it's very disconcerting," Greer says.

Gaston: "Right-wing religious zealots, working in partnership with the secularists who have advised President Bush, are a threat to the most fundamental of American principles. The founders of our nation welcomed and planned for spirited debate over public policies, including the role of the judiciary. But as sons of the Enlightenment, they looked to found a republic in which the outcome of those debates would turn on reason and evidence, not on disputed religious dogma. They planned wisely for principles that are now under wide assault."

As someone who has spent quite a fair bit of time studying and attempting to understand the motivations and goals of the Framers of our republic, I think Gaston has hit the nail on the head here. John Adams declared in an 1816 letter to Thomas Jefferson his "moral or religious Creed, which has for 50 or 60 Years been contained in four short Words, 'Be just and good.'" Jefferson responded on January 11, 1817, saying "The result of your 50. or 60. years of religious reading in the four words 'be just and good' is that in which all our enquiries must end ... What all agree in is probably right; what no two agree on is most probably wrong." (quotations from The Adams-Jefferson Letters, edited by Lester Cappon, 1959; internal emphases preserved; this article from The Nation includes these and others from the Framers on their vision of religion and government).

What all agree in is probably right; what no two agree on is most probably wrong. Can there be a better or more succinct argument for compromise and comity in a republic?

Tearing myself reluctantly back to the present, I would point out that Judge Greer's exasperation jives nicely with another recent article, Andrew Sullivan's "Crisis of Faith" in The New Republic [tip to The Moderate Republican for the link]. This lengthy discussion of conservatism's war with itself is well-argued, and even though it's long, I would highly recommend a complete perusal of it. Sullivan suggests that a recent strain of religious fundamentalist thought has come to dominate the conservative movement, noting that "Fundamentalism, by its very nature, eschews compromise. It is not an inferential philosophy, drawing on experience or history to come to a conclusion about the appropriate way to act or legislate on any given issue. It derives its purpose from fixed texts." Sullivan continues:

"Because the tenets of fundamentalism are inviolable and its standards are mandatory, fundamentalists are inevitably uneasy in the modern West. The culture affronts them in every way - and the affront demands a response. Women in combat? Against God's will. Same-sex marriage? An oxymoron. Abortion? Always and everywhere to be forbidden by law. Stem-cell research on embryos? Doctor Mengele reborn.

The idea that there can be prudential compromises on issues like the right to die, or same-sex marriage, or stem-cell research is a difficult one for fundamentalists. Since there is no higher authority than God, and, since there can be no higher priority than obeying him, the entire notion of separating politics and religion is inherently troublesome to the fundamentalist mind. Whereas for older types of faith-conservatives, religion informed their view of the world and shaped the way they entered civil discourse, the new conservatives of faith bring their religious tenets, unmediated, into the public square."

Sullivan argues that the more traditional-type conservatives, his "conservatives of doubt," [his definition of which would even include the RINO, who is rarely called a conservative by anyone] are less aggressive and less often heard than the more vocal and radical "conservatives of faith." This is not, Sullivan says, a good thing. "An ideologically polarized country, in which one party uses big government for its own moral purposes and the other wields it for its own, is not one that can long maintain a civil discourse," he argues, adding "unless the religious presence within Republicanism becomes less dogmatic and fundamentalist, the conservative coalition as we have known it cannot long endure."

"Advocates for government restraint cannot, in good conscience, keep supporting a party that believes in its own God-given mission to change people's souls. Believers in fiscal discipline cannot keep backing an administration that boasts of its huge spending increases and has no intention of changing. Those inclined to prudence cannot join forces with fanatics (at least not in times when national security doesn't hang in the balance). ... The only pragmatic option is to persuade those who run the Republican Party that religious zeal is a highly unstable base for conservative politics: It is divisive, inflammatory, and intolerant of the very mechanisms that keep freedom alive.

This doesn't mean purging Christians from the GOP. It means filtering religious faith through the skeptical and moderate strands of conservative thought. It means replacing zeal with religious humility; it means accepting that trading compromise of religious principles for political compromise is an ineluctable and vital democratic task. It means a lower temperature within conservative circles on issues like abortion, stem-cell research, and gay rights. And it means a renewed commitment to restraining government from its democratic instinct to act too often, too quickly, and too expensively."

Over at DailyKos yesterday the readers were slobbering over a quote from Barry Goldwater:

"However, on religious issues there can be little or no compromise. There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of God's name on one's behalf should be used sparingly. The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both. I'm frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in 'A,' 'B,' 'C,' and 'D.' Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of 'conservatism.'"

Apparently from a Senate floor speech on September 16, 1981, this quote from Goldwater [who would today probably be considered quite as much much a traitor to the modern GOP as the RINO is] provides a fine example of Sullivan's "conservatism of doubt." While I think Barry Goldwater was largely responsible for taking the GOP is a very wrong direction in the 1960s, I'm pleased to think that he might today be standing with the moderates and those on the reasonable side of today's debates.

On his blog yesterday, Sullivan highlighted another quote, from someone widely seen as the polar opposite of Barry Goldwater: John F. Kennedy:

"I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute - where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote - where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference ... I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish - where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source - where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials." [From a speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, September 12, 1960].

What was that Jefferson said about things on which people can agree? Oh yeah ... they're probably right. For this RINO, there's no longer any 'probably' about it.