Sunday, November 24, 2019

American religion and politics: Overreaching Realms

Even though they are formally separated in the U.S. under the constitutional rubric that the federal government cannot lawfully establish a religion and infringe on the free exercise of religion, religion has ventured into politics and vice versa. Valued ideals pertain to both even though the highest in religion are transcendent, meaning that they extend beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and sensibility, according to St. Denis (aka Pseudo-Dionysius) in the sixth century. So far is the political variety from such ideals as being in heaven! Yet the political sort has enjoyed a near monopoly in the world, including its public discourse. At least as 2019 was giving way to a new decade, captivation on President Trump’s tweets (i.e., brief statements made on the internet’s social media) and the process of impeaching him in the U.S. House of Representatives was strangely devoid of any religious discussion in the public square. This is all the more extraordinary because of the significant role that religion had played historically in presidential politics.

During the U.S. presidential campaign of 1928, for example, Al Smith was chastised for being a Catholic, and therefore thought to be under the sway of the Pope in Rome. During the campaign of 1960, John F. Kennedy found himself subject to the same charge. The simple assumption of papal dictate turned out to be naïve. For one thing, the American presidency is firmly within the governmental realm, and the Second Amendment bars the use of the office to establish (or give preference to) a religion or sect/denomination thereof. Kennedy ran against Richard M. Nixon, whose Quaker background, which presumably disdained lying, turned out in his own presidency (1968-1974) to be particularly lacking as revealed in the Watergate hearings. In short, the impact of a president’s inner religious sense and identity on his conduct (and mentality) can be massively overstated.

The role of religion in politics has been present, however, in reactions to the assumed, overstated impact of a candidate’s religion on his role should he get to the office. For example, based on the overblown fears held by protestant Americans, some protestant leaders, including Jerry Falwell and Billy Graham, and their allies in the political realm were able to gain popularity and power. Graham secretly met with other protestant pastors in 1960 to coordinate campaigning against Kennedy, essentially capitalizing on the popular fear among Protestants. This movement in turn prompted Kennedy to give a speech on September 12, 1960 to the Houston Ministerial Association. He insisted that his Catholicism would not direct or obstruct his policy-making judgment. Interestingly, the push of religion into the political sphere was made by religious figures ostensibly in the religious realm—overextending into the other realm.

In 1980, however, a presidential candidate by the name of Ronald Reagan realized that politicians like himself could make use of the political lobbying of religious leaders and groups. Implicitly, he showed Americans just how trivial the political divide had really been between Catholics and Protestants in presidential politics. While Reagan was still the governor of California in the 1970’s, Phyllis Schlafly, a Catholic, was reaching out to evangelical women to lobby against the Equal Rights Amendment (for women). Along with evangelical political action committees, she established the Eagle Forum in the next decade, when Ronald Reagan was president of the United States. By the time he was in office, he had already realized that he could publically galvanize evangelicals and conservative Catholics to support his political ambitions.

With the political realm dipping into the religious realm and vice versa, the societal issue of abortion also played an important role at the time in uniting socially conservative Protestants and Catholics. After the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade in 1973, Francis Schaeffer brought in prominent evangelicals including Jerry Falwell to oppose abortion politically. Gay marriage in the early 2000’s would play a similar role in uniting the division that had hitherto hampered Al Smith and John Kennedy. James Dobson’s Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council, which had formed in the 1980s during Reagan’s flourishing years in office, pushed what they publicized as family values against both abortion and gay marriage. Both Focus and the Council were both church-related and lobbyists close to the Republican Party. For example, the groups lobbied for conservative fiscal policies—something near and dear to the Party but less obviously based in Christianity, especially as Jesus espouses giving to the poor and giving up one’s wealth to follow him. The rich man getting into the Kingdom of Heaven is like getting a camel through a needle. Even so, the evangelical lobbying groups became wealthy, using the prosperity gospel from the Old Testament—that God would make Israel prosperous if it keeps the covenant—as a rationale. To be sure, the pro-wealth paradigm had long become dominant over the anti-wealth paradigm, which hitherto had been dominant.[1] Perhaps this shift within Christianity made it easier for evangelical/Catholic political groups to not only pursue wealth themselves, but also appeal to the Republican Party that Reagan had made (i.e., fiscal and social conservatism). 
 
In conclusion, Americans could look back by the end of the twentieth century and see the old religious division as politically artificial, and thus not nearly as important as Americans had believed in 1928 and 1960. But could those same Americans see their contemporary divisions as just as artificial or at least over-drawn? In the Middle Ages amid the Commercial Revolution, the sin of usury (i.e., charging interest on loaned funds) was the moral/religious/political controversy in Europe. By Reagan’s time, the charging of interest even on consumption loans was a dead issue, whereas abortion could be viewed as an extremely important matter. Could this presumed overriding importance of the issue of the day be questioned by looking back at how the salience of the usury debate had run its course in its own time? In other words, in matters of religion and politics, and even their intermeshing, can the human mind put even its most cherished ideals in proper perspective? Can we question our own presumed importance, including that of our ideological ideals, whether religious or political (or both!)?

1. Skip Worden, God’s Gold (1915), available at Amazon.