Religion and American Politics: Three Views of the Cathedral

University of Memphis Law Review, The, Summer 2009 by Horwitz, Paul

I. Introduction

In a recent book defending what he sees as a narrow but vital role for the university, Stanley Fish writes that academic enterprises provide "oases of reflection amid the urgencies that press in on us when we are being citizens, parents, politicians, soldiers, entrepreneurs, lawyers, doctors, engineers, etc."1 He argues that "politically explosive issues" must "be made into subjects of intellectual inquiry" through "academicizing" - "detachfing] [a topic] from the context of its real world urgency . . . and insert[ing] it into a context of academic urgency, where there is an account to be offered or an analysis to be performed."2 I sympathize with Fish's account of the typical academic mission and the need to effect at least a partial divorce of the timeless, the true subject of great academic inquiry, from the merely timely, the passing fads and passions of the day. That is all the more true in legal scholarship, which so often sacrifices a deeper search for truth in favor of a relentlessly normative, problem-solving, transient approach.3

Yet, when legal scholars and philosophers presume to examine the subject of this Article - the proper relationship between religion and politics - they often fall prey to a contrary, but equally distorting, pressure. When legal scholars prescribe rules of conduct to govern the role of religion in contemporary politics, they must not only avoid the urge to be too timely, to think in terms of particular issues, candidates, or campaigns, but they must also avoid the urge to be so "timeless," so Olympian and de-haut-enbas, as to render their advice impractical or absurd. Here, they fare less well. Many a reader of the literature on this subject has noted that writers in the field propose rules of dialogue that tend to give off the refined vapors of the seminar room or the faculty lounge, not the pugnacious atmosphere of our daily political dialogue.4

In this Article, I hope to thread a path through both the timely and the timeless, by examining the eternal question of whether and how religion should involve itself in political debate through the words of the central actors: the political candidates themselves. I want to move the discussion from the seminar room to the war room, as it were, by reviewing and critiquing some of what our politicians have had to say about the role of religion in American politics.

Although this discussion has gone on for so long that it may seem timeless, time has not stood still in the development of either American politics or American religion. Indeed, in examining the movement of political rhetoric on the relationship between religion and public leadership, one cannot help but notice that the rhetoric has evolved with the times. Lawrence Lessig once wrote masterfully about "meaning's vulnerability to changes in context."5 "At the core" of the law's response to changing context, he wrote, "is an idea of contestability."6 Ideas can be either contested or uncontested, in the foreground or the background of public attention.7 Some issues may be the subject of public disagreement, but "stay[ ] quite firmly in the background of social and political life."8 Contestable issues, by contrast, are the stuff of our greatest public controversies for as long as they remain contestable.9

So it is with the relationship between religion and American politics. Americans have always been a religious people, as Justice Douglas famously observed.10 But to leave it at that obscures a great many changes in what it has meant to be religious in America - changes that track, perhaps, what it means to be American, or even what it means to be religious, in a society whose pluralism and secularism unsettle the easy assumptions of earlier generations. Religious belief, which was once so widespread and so widely shared as to be a common and uninteresting trait, has become increasingly contestable, one among many competing belief systems and values. In turn, that development has meant that, for those Americans who are deeply religious, religion has also become increasingly salient: it has become an ever more powerful, noteworthy, and publicly debated phenomenon. It is thus no contradiction to say that Americans are a people who have become both more religious, in the sense that religion occupies a greater share of their attention and passion, and less religious, in the sense that an increasing number of Americans either profess no religion or have shunted It1 off to the side.11

Any contemporary consideration of the relationship between religion and American politics must thus assume the perspective of religion in an age of contestability - an age in which, precisely because religion is of fading importance to many people, it is of increasing importance to others, and in which the very question of religion is subject to vigorous debate and firmly located in the foreground of public discussion. Not surprisingly, political strategies for dealing with the relationship between religion and politics in American life have changed to reflect this era of religious contestability. As suggested below, in the past half-century American political culture has witnessed a move from strategies of avoidance,12 in which politicians have attempted to satisfy suspicious voters by relegating religion to the background, to strategies of dialogue, in which politicians have moved religion to the foreground as a way of reaching voters of different faiths and beliefs.