Too Much Good News - proper role of religion in politics

National Review, June 28, 1999 by WILLIAM McGURN

RELIGION

How not to talk about God.

Mr. McGurn is a member of the Wall Street Journal's editorial board.

Never spake Al Gore like this before. During a recent campaign stop at a Salvation Army office in Atlanta, he called for "a new partnership" between government and "faith-based organizations." The former Vanderbilt divinity student attacked the "false choice" Americans face today: between a Right that wants to impose "a specific set of religious values" and a Left that has "said for too long that religious values should play no role in addressing public needs."

The press is having a field day, sensing correctly that if Gore is serious about what he said in Atlanta we are heading for major spats, not only between Republicans and Democrats but within the Democratic party. Indeed, Gore's remarks and the way they were reported suggest that the chasm is not so much between believing and not believing as between quietly believing and speaking about it-and between ways of speaking about it.

It did not help Gore when one of his senior advisors, Harvard's Elaine Kamarck, told the Boston Globe that his comments on faith were the opening shot in a campaign to "take God back" for the Democrats in Election 2000. Even some of Gore's other people were taken aback by Kamarck's comment. For it suggests a rank opportunism, the kind of suborning of religious beliefs for the sake of a political enterprise that the vice president's allies typically attribute to the evangelical Right.

Gore, of course, is not the only candidate to have stumbled on the G- word. Jimmy Carter was a born-again Baptist, and he was more ridiculed for admitting to having lusted in his heart than Bill Clinton ever was for having skipped the heart and gone straight to the cigar. Ditto for Ken Starr, whose occasional singing of hymns while jogging was treated as a sure sign of kookery. As the campaign for 2000 kicks off, presidential contenders from George W. Bush to Elizabeth Dole to Gary Bauer find themselves in much the same fix: how to confirm their bona fides to the faithful without coming across as a Christian ayatollah to the rest of America.

It is a dilemma of fairly recent vintage. For most of America's history, politicians invoked God and the Bible freely. But the Scopes "monkey trial" changed this forever. Though William Jennings Bryan was certainly not the buffoon of Inherit the Wind, the trial "publicly anathematized," as Richard John Neuhaus puts it, what had been "the original language of American Protestantism." The upshot is that a country that pledges allegiance to "one nation, under God," that stamps "In God We Trust" on its coins, and that attributes to our Creator the inalienable rights upon which it staked its claim to independence, lacks a public language of faith.

This result accounts for a curious disjunction in American politics that shows up every election cycle. While the denominational affiliations of Mrs. Dole, Gore, Bush, and Bauer are well within the American mainstream, their every utterance about faith is treated by the press as exotic, outside the pale. Dole and Bush are seen as pandering to the Christian Right, while Bauer is attacked for being the Christian Right. Candidates become uncomfortable discussing religion, knowing that the words that sound natural in church will be jarring in the public realm, as Gov. Bush found when he was called to task for saying (in 1994) that Jesus was the only path to heaven.

Some of this is sheer bigotry. Mostly, however, it is the outcome of decades of people having drummed into their heads that religion is entirely subjective and morality a matter solely of personal taste and preference-a belief that has been accompanied by the erasure from our schools and public facilities of any and all references deemed Christian.

If our dilemma is new, its roots are not. What makes the problem especially acute is that some of those roots found naturally fertile soil in Protestantism. The great American experiment in ordered liberty would not have been possible without the disestablishment of religion, which itself would not have been possible without the Protestant Reformation. But as early as a century ago, Orestes Brownson, the Transcendentalist-cum-Catholic writer, worried that this experiment would eventually be devoured by Protestantism's lack of ultimate ecclesiastical authority.

In a curious way, even the evangelicals who insist that there indeed exists an objective law, and that it can be discovered, inadvertently contribute to the problem. They do so with a language that suggests morality has its only basis in Scripture. This of course begs the question whether non-Christians, or even Christians who read Scripture differently, can be moral; indeed, whether they can assent to the same America.

It would be easy to say that this is simply a matter of rhetoric. Certainly many Christian activists understand that much religious rhetoric can sound unnervingly self-righteous in the political arena. In his 1996 book Active Faith, former Christian Coalition chief Ralph Reed said as much when he suggested that "calling gays 'perverts' or announcing that AIDS is God's judgment on the gay community is not consistent with the Christian call to mercy." What Reed probably also meant was that it was not consistent with the American electorate, which suspects that professions of a commitment to genuine pluralism on the part of groups like the Christian Coalition are only a tactic to get into power and fly their true colors.