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!)?
