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Good and Bad Ways to Think about Religion and Politics

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Chapter One

Why in the world would one want to write another book on religion and politics? Any brief glance at the catalogue of a library or any quick search through an online search engine will bring forth a huge number of entries. Is there anything about the subject that hasn't been said?

It is certainly true that much has been said, but a good deal of what has been said is genuinely bad. There is nothing greater than indignation to stimulate a writer to write, and my outrage has been stirred mightily by reading so many wrongheaded "takes" on how religion and politics ought to be related. In this book I will describe and analyze the bad ways and then offer what I consider to be a better way.

I am so bold as to think that the Christian tradition from which I write — the Lutheran tradition — offers such a better way. It has an approach to faith and politics that has scarcely been heard in the larger public debate about the relation of religion and politics. Indeed, that way of looking at religion and politics is generally neglected even by the church that supposedly bears it. Moreover, though I prize that tradition and will be writing from it, the tradition itself needs some revision in order to grapple creatively with the new challenges we face. I hope to offer that revision for the ongoing conversation.

My contribution will have to do mainly with how religious persons, institutions, and the religious claims they make ought to interact with the political process. I will argue with those who have very different versions of how religion and politics ought to be related, or in many cases, unrelated.

This normative task needs to be distinguished from the descriptive task of showing how religion in fact makes an impact on the political process. Both tasks are currently very important to both scholars and the general public in the contemporary world. The Pew Trust, for example, with its massive study of American religion, includes extensive information about how religious factors influence political behavior. And of course we have many examples of religious organizations and individuals trying to influence political decisions, some praiseworthy and others more dubious.

Oddly enough, neither the normative nor the descriptive tasks were considered to be very important fifty years ago. There would have been far fewer books on the subject then, and of course there were no computer search engines to look up the subject because there were few computers available to ordinary people. Even the computers would not have found much, except for the controversy in 1960 over John F. Kennedy's successful effort in becoming the first Catholic President. In the run-up to that election Kennedy assured alarmed Baptist pastors that not only would his church have no influence over his actions as President, but that his own religion — such as it was — would have no influence on his political decisions.

After that flurry the relative uninterest in the relation of religion and politics returned, though there were many examples of organized religion's effect on American political life. The major example of such effects came during the civil rights movement of the late 50s and the 60s. The black churches, aided by a number of white denominations, and led by a black Baptist preacher, Martin Luther King Jr., exerted great political pressure to get rid of racist laws and practices and to bestow long-denied civil rights to minority blacks. There was also religious involvement in the anti-war movement during the Vietnam War, as well as incursions into the newly born ecological, feminist, and gay rights movements. The Catholic and mainline Protestant denominations exerted political clout amid the political controversies of the day.

This religious involvement in politics was pretty much ignored in academia, as well as in the book-publishing world. In those elite worlds religion was no longer supposed to have political potency. Even the strong religious elements in the King-led civil rights movement were often ignored in the academic accounts of that phenomenon. Academics were long schooled in modernization theories that assumed that people would become less religious as living standards and the level of education rose. If religion was becoming weaker as America modernized, why bother studying something that was about to disappear?

Since most of the historians, sociologists, political scientists, and even scholars of religion of the time believed in and participated themselves in this "modernization" process, they were very unlikely to take the religious factor in political life seriously. Moreover, modernization theory was abetted by a related powerful intellectual perspective of the time, the Enlightenment paradigm, which held that only reason and science could arrive at reliable knowledge. The Enlightenment, partly in response to the wars of religion, viewed religion as arbitrary, unreliable, irrational, and therefore potentially oppressive if it were asserted in the public sphere. Therefore religion, if adhered to at all, ought to remain private and politically unimportant.

Intellectuals, then, were blinkered by two convictions — that religion was waning in the modernizing world and that whatever was left of it ought to remain private. In their eyes, religion did not and ought not have any discernible effect on politics. So they ignored it. This posture endured, with a few notable exceptions such as Peter Berger, until the recent past in academia. However, events made such obliviousness impossible.

First came the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976. Conservative evangelicals — scarcely known and much defiled — seemed to come out of the woodwork to elect a fellow evangelical. Little did those evangelicals know what they were getting at the time. Soon after the Carter election came the crisis in Iran, which signaled the rise of radical Islam. That resurgence became impossible to ignore, as it deeply affected the Muslim countries of the Middle East. Radical Islam was quintessentially political — it aimed at capturing the political centers of power and imposing Islamic law on the newly "pure" nations. It also aimed at dramatically extending the reach of Islam. Religion was becoming intensely political. The academic world belatedly began to take account of it.

What really got the wheels turning, however, was the rise of organized conservative religion in America. The Supreme Court decision of 1973 that found a constitutional right to abortion was an early stimulus to the rise of conservative Protestantism. The Court seemed to usurp the will of the people and to trample on religious values. Soon thereafter ensued an increasing number of court decisions that seemed to drive religious themes and practices out of public life. Meanwhile, the counterculture of the 60s worked its way into the fabric of American life in the 70s and 80s.

These developments galvanized conservative Protestantism into a political force through organizations such as the Moral Majority and later the Christian Coalition. These organizations gave increasing visibility to the awakening giant of American evangelicalism, which now constitutes the largest segment of American religious groups at about 26 percent, according to a recent Pew study of American religion. The emergence of such a large group has stimulated the fears of many secular intellectuals, some of whom I will discuss later, who still cling to various versions of the modernization thesis or the Enlightenment paradigm. A few of them furrow their brows in fear of putative theocracy in America, something that is as likely as a snowball in hell.

Indeed, it is increasingly clear that American evangelicalism is neither religiously nor politically monolithic even though it is politically very active. A significant portion will vote Democratic while most ally themselves with the Republicans. But even conservative evangelicals have more nuanced perspectives on politics than they are given credit for. Conversely, the headquarters of the mainline Protestant denominations — Episcopal, Presbyterian, Methodist, United Church of Christ, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America — continue their political activism by listing further to the left than their lay membership. They remain very active politically but with few followers among their own laity.

American Catholicism, while holding its "market share" among the religions of America because of Latino immigration, attempts with more effect to influence American political life. It draws upon the Pope's moral authority and an ample store of social teachings to make its arguments. But it has been badly damaged by the fallout from sexual abuse by its priests. Its moral clout has been diminished. African American churches, in contrast to the examples of Jeremiah Wright and Al Sharpton, tend to be less active politically as institutions even as their members remain staunchly Democratic in political orientation. Reform Judaism has become more and more identified with the political causes of liberal Protestantism (except for the latter's stance on Israel), while Orthodox and Conservative organizations are more diffident about politics.

So, it seems that religion is relevant to politics in an empirical sense. And many persons — pundits and academics among them — now reflect and write profusely upon this lively connection. The question is not so much whether American religion will have political effects. It most definitely will. The more serious questions are: Should it? How should it? Certainly some modes of religious involvement are harmful to both the religious organizations and society. But perhaps the worst damage is done to religion itself. It is used as an instrument for purposes other than its own main reason for being. It sacrifices its transcendent claims for a mess of earthly pottage.

Chapters Two and Three of this book will feature an analysis of the two main bad ways of relating religion and politics — one in which religion and politics are separated and the other in which they are fused. Both bad ways break down into subcategories. The fourth chapter will deal with the theory of how religion and politics ought to be related, what I call "critical engagement." How do the core claims of religion properly relate to something as specific as voting for a candidate or for a specific public policy? The fifth chapter will deal with the practical ways that religion does and ought to relate to political life. I will develop a typology of involvement that runs from noncontroversial and subtle ways to controversial and robustly assertive, and will make evaluative comments as I survey the types.

Chapter Two

A. "To Keep Politics Free of Dangerous Religion"

The first bad way to think about religion and politics is sharply to separate them, claiming that they should have nothing to do with each other, either theoretically or practically. This separationism comes from both militant secularists and ardent religious people, and in both crude and sophisticated forms. But it also pops up in a camp that could be termed "selective separationists," who believe that only certain kinds of religion should be banned from politics. Thus, they are not true separationists. We shall reflect about them toward the end of this first section.

During a recent political discussion on our campus, one of our physics professors, a devoted reader of The Nation, angrily denounced those Christian groups who are active in pressing for policies that restrain abortion. Finding ridiculous the belief that a clump of cells is viewed as the beginning of life by these activists, he makes the following statement:

We live in a free society so it's fine for people to believe this very simplistic philosophical principle (that life begins at conception), to incorporate it into dogma for their religious practice, and to freely meet with others of the same belief. But it is dead wrong to expect others to drink from such thin philosophical soup and to attempt to legislate public policy into this mode.

And from the right, the redoubtable George Will condemns those local groups of Christian social conservatives who try to make some room for Intelligent Design in high school science curricula. Will quotes the famous saying of Thomas Jefferson that "It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." However, if such religious opinions become public, Mr. Jefferson made quite a different judgment. George Will has the same negative opinion of such religion becoming public: "It is injurious, and unneighborly, when zealots try to compel public education to infuse theism into scientific education."

Many other persons and groups make similar assessments of the public exercise of religion through churches, voluntary associations, or even individual persons. Often, in their distaste for religion becoming public, they confuse the "separation of church and state" with "the interaction of religion and politics," which is quite a different matter. The former prohibits the state from establishing or privileging particular religious organizations and the persons belonging to them, a thoroughly institutional matter. The latter is guaranteed by the First Amendment, which protects the "free exercise of religion" by persons and organizations. Free exercise certainly isn't limited to the private sphere. But for those worried about the threats posed by dangerous religion, perhaps such a distinction doesn't matter. They seem to be willing to refuse freedom of expression to people and organizations if they operate from religious ideas and values, a somewhat shocking proposal.

Militant atheists such as Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) do not shrink from such a proposal. Dawkins is so negative toward religion — it seems to him to be the source of all the world's woes — that he suggests that teaching religion to young children is a form of child abuse. Joined by other popular atheist authors — Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett — Dawkins no doubt believes that irrational and dangerous religion ought to remain safely sequestered from politics. To them the "separation of church and state" would also include the separation of religion from politics.

A more sophisticated version of this separationism is offered by Mark Lilla in his influential book, The Stillborn God, in which he argues that religion that appears in public inevitably becomes "political theology," a very bad thing indeed. Political theology, if it actually becomes influential, will lead toward theocracy. Lilla fears that the vigor of conservative religion in the United States is in danger of undermining a fragile, liberal democracy. Thus, he much prefers that religion remain separate from politics in America. He is joined by authors such as Damon Linker, whose Theocons: Secular America Under Siege, worries that a cabal of conservative Catholic intellectuals is plotting to take over American political life.

While Lilla and Linker are not as hostile to religion per se as the Dawkins crowd, they do believe that intense religion is dangerous. If people hold their religion lightly and with sufficient skepticism, it does not become dangerous because it will not have enough energy to carry it into the public sphere. Many academics hold this point of view.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Good and Bad Ways to Think about Religion and Politics by ROBERT BENNE Copyright © 2010 by Robert Benne. Excerpted by permission of William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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