It is difficult to write about religion in politics these days. Chances are, you either muck it up and offend someone or worse, you get it right and offend someone. The point being, there are many who will read into what you write whatever they please, eager to rhetorically bash your head in because you are making a point with which they violently disagree.
Simply put, the intrusion of religion into politics has gone beyond what it should in a healthy democracy and somebody, somewhere has to say so.
Thank you Charles Krauthammer:
This campaign is knee-deep in religion, and it’s only going to get worse. I’d thought that the limits of professed public piety had already been achieved during the Republican CNN-YouTube debate when some squirrelly looking guy held up a Bible and asked, “Do you believe every word of this book?”—and not one candidate dared reply: None of your damn business.Instead, Giuliani, Romney and Huckabee bent a knee and tried appeasement with various interpretations of scriptural literalism. The right answer, the only answer, is that the very question is offensive. The Constitution prohibits any religious test for office. And while that proscribes only government action, the law is also meant to be a teacher. In the same way that civil rights laws established not just the legal but also the moral norm that one simply does not discriminate on the basis of race—changing the practice of one generation and the consciousness of the next—so the constitutional injunction against religious tests is meant to make citizens understand that such tests are profoundly un-American.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with having a spirited debate on the place of religion in politics. But the candidates are confusing two arguments. The first, which conservatives are winning, is defending the legitimacy of religion in the public square. The second, which conservatives are bound to lose, is proclaiming the privileged status of religion in political life.
I’m not talking about criticizing the idea that faith animates a candidate’s position on the issues. Nor am I calling for a moratorium on talking about religion in a political context. Neither is Krauthammer. What Krauthammer is saying – and what I am agreeing with – is that a line has been crossed, most notably on the Republican side, that seeks to give religion a privileged position in policy debates – absolute moral authority with a vengeance based not on the efficacy of one’s position on the issues but rather on the strength or nature of their religious beliefs:
Imposing religion means the mandating of religious practice. It does not mean the mandating of social policy that some people may have come to support for religious reasons.But a certain kind of conservative is not content to argue that a religious underpinning for a policy is not disqualifying. He insists that it is uniquely qualifying, indeed, that it confers some special status.
Krauthammer easily demolishes the leftist idea that posits the notion that faith based opposition to abortion or gay marriage is somehow indicative of a desire to “impose” one form of religion or another on the American populace. For the Christian right, these are moral issues they are fighting for – the same kind of moral fight carried out by the left to achieve civil rights for blacks, women, and others. No one complained when the Christian preacher Martin Luther King framed the civil rights debate in biblical terms of loving your neighbor and “doing God’s will” in holding a mirror up so that America could see the ugliness of racial bigotry. King even patterned his political campaign to change America on the Christian notion of “turning the other cheek” when confronted with the violent reaction by southern authorities.
But there is a huge difference between being inspired or animated in your politics by religion and thrusting your religious beliefs forward as “proof” of your superiority as a candidate. Or that your faith gives you a privileged position in a debate over public policy issues.
And that, boys and girls, is the problem with this GOP field. The Democrats have their own agenda when it comes to trying to appeal to Christians. Witness Barack Obama’s efforts in South Carolina where he staged a “Gospel-fest” featuring some of the country’s finest Gospel singers. But Obama seems to wear his faith like an old coat – comfortable and roomy. Candidates Romney and Huckabee wear their faith like a straitjacket, the tenets of which limit their worldview while binding them to positions on social issues that brook no opposition because they are based on holy writ.
Romney made this clear in his “Faith in America” speech. An excellent speech for the most part in which Romney made the case for religious liberty quite eloquently, it nevertheless featured some troubling omissions as well as a statement that is patently false:
Romney has been faulted for not throwing at least one bone of acknowledgment to nonbelievers in his big religion speech last week. But he couldn’t, because the theme of the speech was that there is something special about having your values drawn from religious faith. Indeed, faith is politically indispensable. “Freedom requires religion,” Romney declared, “just as religion requires freedom.”But this is nonsense—as Romney then proceeded to demonstrate in that very same speech. He spoke of the empty cathedrals in Europe. He’s right about that: Postwar Europe has experienced the most precipitous decline in religious belief in the history of the West. Yet Europe is one of the freest precincts on the planet. It is an open, vibrant, tolerant community of more than two dozen disparate nations living in a pan-continental harmony and freedom unseen in all previous European history.
I totally reject the idea that freedom and religion are interchangeable or that one “requires” the other. Not only for the reasons Krauthammer lists but because while freedom is the natural state of man, that we were born free, religion is, for all practical purposes, a man made institution. It must be taught and so is not part of the “natural law” that makes all men free. Exercising the freedom to believe anything you wish is a natural right but not the belief itself.
I realize I’m treading on dangerous ground since most “natural rights” adherents believe that freedom is God’s gift to humans at birth. As an atheist, I reject that notion based simply on the fact that God is not necessary in this equation. Being born free is our patrimony as human beings and does not require any kind of supreme being to validate it.
Just as government is designed by man to regulate the affairs of citizens – who in an ideal situation grant the government the powers necessary to do so – religion is designed by man to regulate behavior. While some recent research shows that we have genes that give us a conscience and perhaps even a gene that grants us a propensity to believe in a higher power, the fact is cultural and moral strictures must be taught and are therefore excluded in any debate over the necessity for faith and freedom to co-exist in a democracy.
Romney was right in saying his faith shouldn’t exclude him from consideration for the presidency. But he was dead wrong in positing the notion that faith promotes freedom and vice versa:
In some times and places, religion promotes freedom. In other times and places, it does precisely the opposite, as is demonstrated in huge swaths of the Muslim world, where religion has been used to impose the worst kind of unfreedom.In this country, there is no special political standing that one derives from being a Christian leader like Mike Huckabee or a fervent believer like Mitt Romney. Just as there should be no disability or disqualification for political views that derive from religious sensibilities, whether the subject is civil rights or stem cells.
In the past, the issue of the religious beliefs of a candidate was something discussed only in those long, Sunday edition newspaper articles that profiled a candidate’s background and upbringing. But with the possible exception of Jimmy Carter and his admission to being “born again” as a Christian, I can’t recall a campaign season where religiosity has been so visible, sprinkling the discussion of issues with biblical quotes and other outward manifestations of faith. Candidates raise it casually in the course of their stump speech or, like Mike Huckabee, when explaining his sudden rise in the polls and attributing it to a higher power.
No one ever pointed out the discrepancy in say, Nixon’s Quakerism and his fighting the Viet Nam war. Today, charges of “hypocrisy” would abound from his political opponents. And that’s the difference between a political culture that respects and appreciates faith, putting it carefully in a place where it informs a candidate’s position on issues and candidates that push faith front and center in order to gain a political advantage.
Religion as a supplement that unites us or as a wedge that divides us. Isn’t that what the debate is really about?
UPDATE
Allow me to take cover behind Ed Morrissey:
The Republican primary risks falling into a theological beauty contest. Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney have actual policy positions and track records as governors, something that pundits and the media seem to have forgotten. Neither man is running for Pope—neither man qualifies, of course—and the nature of their doctrines matter little in comparison to the nature of those policies they espouse.
All of us have value systems from which we operate, and America has a splendid diversity of them. The shared values we have in the political realm are informed by those in the religious or personal realm, but in the end we judge people on what they do, not which congregation they join. Americans of many faiths and of no faith at all have joined together to extend self-government on the basis of rational decisions about policy for over 200 years, and the President serves all equally.
Let’s call off the revival, please, and get back to policy.
9:15 am
You know, it’s kind of irritating when I wake up, read Krauthammer, and think “I really want to blog on this later,” and then bop over here to find that you’ve already done it. And with more care (and fewer F-bombs) than I would have spent on the topic.
The result is I’ve lost my excuse for procrastinating on my work. Thanks. Thanks a lot.
9:24 am
Heh.
Check back in a couple of hours. I don’t think this is going to make too many people happy.
Consider yourself lucky that you won’t have to face the righteous wrath of some of my friends.
10:00 am
“he was dead wrong in positing the notion that faith promotes freedom”
You’ll have to pick that same bone with America’s founders since it seemed manifestly evident to them:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”
Of course, I suppose they could have be dead wrong. But I wouldn’t bet on it.
10:17 am
As Krauthammer points out, there are plenty of places on this planet where people are free to worship but where political freedoms are stymied.
I would say that gives the lie to Romney’s statement.
11:09 am
“there are plenty of places on this planet where people are free to worship but where political freedoms are stymied”
In reading Krauthammer, the only mention he makes that could be associated with “plenty of places” is “huge swaths of the Muslim world”. That’s a disingenuous attempr to blow in a foer-foggy haze of moral relativism. Islam has always been a political-power movement with a veneer of “religion”, it’s very design and intent has always been to make people literally “submit”, not to free them.
On the flip side he did try to present the EU as the Brave New World’s Great Emerald City of “tolerance”. (that term alone should make anyone’s eye’s spin faster than a spinach-eating dradle.)
If a person is enamored of total micro-management of and massive intrusion in citizen’s lives and thus chooses to label such things as “being set free”, Krauthammer’s argumnent indeed does work. Otherwise the EU is in fact a dying civilization and not something I would offer as an example of much as anything. (other than as a dying civilization)
I do think way too much has been made of religion in this campaign. Especially about things of no or little import and about candidates like Huckabee who makes it his big selling point. Romney’s not bad in that respect since he’s responding to attacks and really not wearing his religion on his sleeve.
11:53 am
Karen:
Europe is a dying civilization? New York is packed with Europeans buying dollar-discounted luxury goods and running up the cost of good hotel rooms. The EU is now a larger market than the US. Their single biggest economic woe at the moment is that they’ve been dragged down by American mismanagement of the mortgage market.
I keep hearing prophecies of Europe’s demise. Been hearing them for, oh, about 30 years now. And yet, when I visit Europe they seem to be pretty much alive. Go to London and tell me they’re dying. Go to Amsterdam or Madrid or Moscow or Copenhagen. If they’re at death’s door, how is it I’m driving a German car and flying on French/Brit jets and wearing Italian clothing and taking Swiss pharmaceuticals and —until recently—using a Finnish phone? Germany alone has a larger GDP (nominal) than all of China. At PPP the EU with just under 500 million people is still 40% larger than China with almost 3 times the population.
Don’t take Mark Steyn too seriously. Europe is far from dead.
1:06 pm
The Founders were also from very different religious backgrounds and had harsh disagreements with each other on what, exactly, others thought and if it was right. They, instead, looked at what the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 had garnered, read on Blackstone, Vattel and Grotius and decided to uphold Westphalia to keep its peace. That peace had been expanded to cover more than just christianity, from where it started, and it would take Ben Franklin to remove all sorts of passages Jefferson had put into the Declaration, trying to justify rights via religion and put in the concept: if it is self-evident that we have these rights, then say so. By removing specific interpretations Franklin got the general rule out there – that we have to deal with these things because we have them.
I was particularly worried that the Editors at NRO went on jag about non-Protestants and had absolutely forgotten not only American history but the history of the Republican party that had supported a non-Protestant and, indeed, non-Orthodox for the office of President and he won. I thought that conservatives actually cared about and understood these things…
2:43 pm
It really irritated my Leftie sensibilities that Krauthammer said something rational and intelligent. I’ve gotten so used to hating his work that I had to read the collum three times to make sure I didn’t miss something. It makes being radically partisan much more difficult when there’s intellignet discuorse on both sides. That damn man is going make me think!
@ Karen:
respectfully, I think you are seriously misreading the quote. The freedoms are self-evident (as ajacksonian mentioned)—they don’t come from faith. Faith allows a person to ascribe a source to the freedoms, but the freedoms exist regardless of their source.
It’s like the Universe. The origin of it can be attributed to different sources (God, the “Big Bang”, whatever) but nobody questions that regardless of the source, the universe does exist. Same with the fundamental freedoms.
The Founding Fathers were (for the most part) religious and men of faith—true. But they didn’t set up a government that runs on faith, or requires faith. Faith is personal—government is not.
2:44 pm
[...] Rick Moran also weighs in : “Simply put, the intrusion of religion into politics has gone beyond what it should in a healthy democracy and somebody, somewhere has to say so.” And:  What Krauthammer is saying – and what I am agreeing with – is that a line has been crossed, most notably on the Republican side, that seeks to give religion a privileged position in policy debates – absolute moral authority with a vengeance based not on the efficacy of one’s position on the issues but rather on the strength or nature of their religious beliefs… [...]
2:46 pm
Great article Rick.
4:33 pm
It’s a good point that religion has been used in civil rights and other social movements. But Krauthammer and Moran make a glaring omission – when it came to civil rights and civil rights, abolitionists and activists used religious rhetoric to EXPAND the circle of freedom, to be more inclusive, to grant the same liberties to a greater scope of people.
In the case of gay marriage, for example, current believer are doing just the opposite – they are using belief to constrict and exclude, to restrict the ability to marry to an arbitrarily defined group.
Furthermore, they use wordplay to hide the fact they are doing just this – the number of gays intending to marry are dwarfed by the number of heteros who are and intend to be married – if one intends to protect marriage, why not make it harder to get married, harder to get divorced, and easier to have single income families, etc- because, of course, the language of all this is meant to exclude a group that is increasingly being more accepted by the rest of society.
So in this case, the rest of us can feel the believer being left behind morally; their bigotry is moving them against the tide of society’s tolerance and inclusivity, and it is glaring and embarrasing.
This is why Kraut’s citing of King’s use of religious rhetoric does not achieve the heavy lifting you want it to with respect to validating the use of religious language in public debate. It still is valid, but when it moves against the moral zeitgeist, when it has to argue against the cumulative findings of genetics, or unbiased reason, then religion starts to look bad, and should be called onto the floor to account for itself.
Religion is far easier to accept as a standard when it is in the direction of tolerance and good will, and not towards exclusion and condemnation, especially when it is based upon fiat, upon mere assertion based upon a group’s acceptance of the authority of some collection of texts that cannot be shown as a rational authority on their own merits…
It’s not as simple as Kraut would have us believe…
richard
5:56 pm
What Krauthammer is saying – and what I am agreeing with – is that a line has been crossed, most notably on the Republican side, that seeks to give religion a privileged position in policy debates – absolute moral authority with a vengeance based not on the efficacy of one’s position on the issues but rather on the strength or nature of their religious beliefs:
We became our enemy a long time ago. Being “Religiously Correct” is part of being “Conservatively Correct” which is now as important to Conservatives as being “Politically Correct” is to liberals.
I remember how in the 80s we used to mock and disparage the Politically Correct notion that the “oppressed” had a privileged viewpoint which was inherently more valid than that of others. We pointed out that while the “oppressed” had a legitimate viewpoint that they were no less subject to human weakness and error than anyone else – that being oppressed did NOT necessarily make ones moral or political vision any clearer and, in fact, sometimes warped and obscured it.
Sometime during the 90s we stopped fighting PC and instead adopted the notion for our own. Conservatives, and especially Christian Conservatives copied the language, arguments, and positions of the PC police and their only change was that they put themselves in the role of the oppressed.
We were amazed when PC feminists screamed “sexual harassment” because there Botticelli’s “Venus” hung on the wall. Now Conservatives scream “War on Christmas” because of signs saying “Happy Holidays” and we nod along.
Where we used to see liberal students who protested having to read the works of “dead white men” as a bad sign of growing ignorance, we now applaud when Conservative and Christian students protest having to simply read (not agree with, just read) Marx, Darwin, or any other author that doesn’t actively reaffirm their prior beliefs.
We used to condemn it when hordes of leftist students intimidated school officials and others into doing their bidding while maintaining that “The personal is political”. Now Conservatives styling themselves “citizen journalists” post the personal information of people on their websites specifically so their readers can harass and intimidate them for saying something unpalatable.
10:06 pm
if the founders had meant that we “are endowed by the god of abraham and jesus christ with certain unalienable rights” then they would have said exactly that.
10:40 pm
There are those who say that faith and freedom are not compatible – Baloney! A Christian woman sparked the abolitionist movement. Dr Martin Luther King, leader of the Southern Christian Leadership, a minister himself led a successful civil rights movement. There are those who say that Bible-based Christians are all right wingers who want to turn the middle east into glass. I heard Pat Robertson publicly say that the war in Iraq was a bad idea.
>Jesus|Freak
1:50 pm
Rick:
Right on.
Would be interested in hearing your thoughts on what this video shows:
http://tinyurl.com/yxewot
when compared to this statement from your post:
“...religion is, for all practical purposes, a man made institution. It must be taught…”
I read you a lot and hope posting that link doesn’t offend your rules here. And it’s certainly not my intent to push religion on you or anyone. It’s a freedom.
4:04 pm
disunreconnected:
Interesting video, but I’m not sure how that’s relating to the discussion.
If your question is how could the girl develop concepts of Heaven and Christian Divinity without it being “taught” to her, the video only said that her mom was an atheist, and that God was not discussed at home. Unless the girl was locked in a room her whole life, she had contact with the world—certainly there are enough sources for her to learn from in society. Not hearing about God at home does not eliminate the subject from the environment—only from the home environment discussions.
10:16 am
Rick,
You’ve twisted the logic in your critique of Romney. Saying that there are places with freedom of worship but no democracy doesn’t disprove Romney’s premise, because he’s not said that the equation works that way. What he said was that democracy and freedom require religious freedom, not that religious freedom guarantees the existence of other freedoms. The one (religion) acts as a vital support for the other.
You disagree with that, obviously, but you’d have to show examples of atheistic/nonreligious cultures which are able to maintain democratic, free societies. Europe may be heading there now, but they still don’t provide an example of the natural rights being derived from an atheistic worldview (in other words, they still benefitted from the Christian worldview that prevailed at the inception of their governments). It also remains to be seen whether or not their cultures will ultimate survive their increased secularization. Unfortunately it seems that socialism replaces Christianity as a social force for moral treatment of the weaker members of society, and I for one don’t believe that such a system is sustainable.
10:18 am
On a separate note, I’m growing tired of (and concerned over) the tendency for paleoconservatives to scapegoat the Christian right for the problems of their own movement. If none of the candidates in the field represent a compelling force for paleoconservatives, how exactly is that the fault of the social conservatives? Fiscal cons have been asleep at the wheel for a political generation, and now they’ve awoken in a panic and are looking for someone to blame.
11:30 am
No punches from me – at least not in your contention that religion is too important in the current political campaign: for the Democrats and Republicans.
I am a “born again” Evangelical Christian with a blog called “Brain Cramps for God” and I agree.
I am going to give you some definitional advice: religion and faith are two very different words. Religion is a human institution that can certainly be designed to regulate behavior – and never has. It’s primary function is to give people with similiar objects of faith ways to commonly worship.
Faith is the other word: “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for, being convinced of what we do not see.” All human beings who are not suicidal or terminally pessimistic share that – but faith is meaningless without an object. The question isn’t whether folks have faith – the question is in what.
Religion is not a question for a politcal compaign. What a candidate places his faith and hope for the future of the country in is entirely a question
8:38 pm
Huck is going to win I think, and I don’t even like him. He’ll win because America is sick and tired of the political correctness being shoved down our mouths, of the pandering to Muslims while liberal screaming at every mention of Christianity. Liberals have made Christianity a target to supress in schools, courts, everywhere. The pendulum is about to swing back, and the liberals will bury themselves by publicly disavowing the faithful as “evangelicals”, the liberal term for “overly religious people”. What would “overly liberal people” be called? We all know, it’s “socialists”.
All the good people. rich or poor, of any color, who call themselves Christians have had enough, look for a Huck landslide. Liberals will scream bloody murder that “Faith has taken over America”, and Christians will scream back “You’re damed right”.
3:46 pm
@stevebradle:
pandering to the muslims? care to elaborate?