A Small Circle of Friends
D'Souza, Dinesh
done by Professor Jastrow. The UCS has privately admitted many of its defects, but does not, of course, abandon its conclusions, since the conclusions are what they begin from. A similar canard...
...though to do so, one runs the risk of seeming to be a clumsy hypocrite, like Geraldine Ferraro...
...There is always Tocqueville, that standing rebuke to journalists everywhere (who will be reading our reports 150 years from now...
...not good reason maybe, but reason...
...The way to the synthesis was now all clear...
...He marched in a Labor Day parade in New York City...
...Mother Teresa of Calcutta sat by the lectern as he spoke...
...O'Connor answered him--not by name, though the sense of slow-motion debate was palpable--in an address to a Catholic medical group on October 18...
...Nothing, maybe, more elevated than this: American politicians call in religion when it supports them...
...Five Presidents and their advisers have sweated blood over this issue, and so far nothing that worked and was politically acceptable has been found better than straight retaliation...
...Another point to remember is that in the SDI study game we have intrinsic advantages over the Soviets...
...My sole responsibility is to p r e s e n t . . , the formal official teaching of the Catholic Church...
...Questioned about the protesters, Ferraro responded by questioning Reagan's religion...
...Zionism was a pre-condition of membership in the Moral Majority...
...Where was the ACLU...
...that the Catholic position on abortion is not monolithic...
...Cuomo professed himself "delighted" with O'Connor's clarification...
...The beginning of last fall was such a lull...
...The line from the Humanist, quoted above, recalled good oldfashioned Protestant No Popery...
...others are later alterations...
...One of their most controversial religious allies over the last years had been Rev...
...What was the right relation between his faith and his career...
...Any Catholic, Cuomo said in an interview published in early August, who believed "literally" what O'Connor was saying, "can only vote for a right-to-lifer...
...He was not going to be caught in any overt political interventions...
...Falwell had never written off whole religions as dirty...
...They pressed the limits, sometimes bent them, and in the process, dabbled in political and moral science...
...But one weak spot...
...He and his fellows, curiously, had built their national audiences through television--the supposed homogenizer, instead defining "We have a message of redeeming grace and distinguishing...
...On the other side, in 1983 the Defensive Technologies Study Team under Dr...
...I 9 - 1 1 1 ~ | i i U i l...
...because of it, "public morality" in America "depend[ ed] on a consensus view of right and wrong...
...He and Reagan both addressed a Washington convention of the B'nai B'rith service group on September 6. Mondale led off with a reply to the Dallas prayer breakfast...
...The American government, and its leaders, traditionally profess a reticent theism, which sees God as taking a special interest in America, and as the source of proper American ethics (whatever those are thought to be...
...I will not tell anybody in the United States you should vote for or against" her "or anybody else...
...But more normal religions pervaded the political discussion of the mainstream...
...But that still begged the question of a Catholic politician's responsibilities on the abortion issue...
...Mondale was a minister's son, and Gary Hart a former divinity student...
...And of course the Soviets themselves believe in it or they wouldn't be pushing ahead themselves--while objecting to our efforts...
...Weyrich first spoke the phrase "moral majority" in passing, and thought it was too offputting to be an effective title...
...Not necessarily...
...But "she has given the world to understand that Catholic teaching is divided on the subject of abortion" when in fact there was "no variance," "no flexibility," and "no leeway...
...They consulted hundreds Of experts...
...Nor is it the entire answer to theft, arson, child abuse, or shooting police officers...
...Falwell's interest in next-to-last things was specifically triggered by Roe v. Wade...
...The Moral Majority, chartered that June, made a generalAll politicians invoke God...
...Secular humanism" had become such a favorite buzz word of Falwell types that most people naturally assumed that they had coined it...
...They find their room to maneuver in the discontinuities of the American system...
...In Archbishop O'Connor, Cuomo had found an opponent worthy of his mettle...
...But He was on the side of their beliefs...
...All the Democratic candidates used religious figures of speech and justifications 18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1985 continually...
...The truth is," he concluded, "politics and morality are inseparable...
...He criticized Ferraro by name for the first time, on doctrinal grounds, for having said "things about abortion relative to Catholic teaching which are not true . . . . I have absolutely nothing against Geraldine Ferraro...
...The pastoral letter on nuclear weapons, in all its incarnations, was long and complicated, and afflicted with the turgidity that darkens all Catholic official prose...
...The President walks around calling himself a good Christian and I don't for one minute believe it because the policies are so terribly unfair and they are discriminatory and they have hurt a lot of people...
...Fundamentalism took its name from The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth, a set of Biblical commentaries published in Los Angeles in the 1910s...
...also as a lawyer and a politician...
...It left to politicians the responsibility for deciding how best to achieve the ends it marked out as moral...
...Reviewing the Court's school prayer decision, Reagan noted that there were those "fighting to make sure voluntary prayer is not returned to the classrooms...
...The fact was, Ferraro had been too out-front, both in her advocacy of abortion and her appeals to piety, simply to fudge the question, and she was not subtle enough to craft a convincing synthesis...
...Cuomo the politician gave his read-out of the consensus: Antiabortion laws were "not a plausible possibility" and "wouldn't work" anyway...
...He addressed a crowd of students at USC...
...The phenomenon of the religious right Went far beyond Falwell, who was not the only preacher who had gotten into politics...
...O'Connor was John Paul II's point man in the drafting of the nuclear arms pastoral letter, and in the American church generally...
...Religion and state, however, have never been divided...
...In 1979, a common acquaintance set up a meeting with Paul Weyrich, Richard Viguerie, and Howard Phillips...
...Richard Brookhiser is senior editor at National Review...
...It's premature to say that we should deploy, which means precipitating heaven knows what Soviet countermeasures...
...You have to uphold the law, the constitution says...
...Nelson Rockefeller's stenotypist developed an acronym, BOMFOG-or "the brotherhood of man, under the fatherhood of God"--because the phrase appeared so often in his speeches...
...Question: Isn't the real truth that they are intolerant of religion...
...Menachem Begin had given him an award as a friend of the country...
...By far the smallest was authentic civil libertarians...
...said when she made her campaign debut with Mondale at his hometown of Elmore, Minnesota...
...They concluded that SDI would work, thanks to the emergence of "powerful new technologies...
...Gauging the state of the consensus was "a matter of prudential political judgment...
...9 1985 Richard Brookhiser...
...Right...
...And as morality's foundation is religion, religion and politics are necessarily related...
...Religion," she added later, "has been injected into a presidential campaign...
...i| ~i$~ -~-- 1 IIq f .~w e.f J iO~'m ,,w ,t~ ,it, after a few interesting twists in October...
...C k.~o the September debate broke off in partisan jockeying...
...The abortion issue required other shifts...
...The new, wouldbe tradition of the humanists--that religious forms and expressions must make no intrusion into the political realm whatsoever--can be called on by a politician who feels the heat of believers upon him...
...But, nonetheless, the talk had been there...
...It was, in fact, a selfdescription, devised by secular humanists...
...He had carefully expunged the Christian-country language from his rhetoric...
...It was a speech scored, in publicity terms, for full orchestra and brass band...
...but it will do for starters...
...Everybody knows that...
...All politicians invoke God...
...It was an attractive statement, far more so than any of Ferraro's...
...Jackson himself was a minister...
...But in practical political terms, any American politician who was not an explicit warmonger--which is to say, any American politician-could find some way of putting himself on the right side of the pastoral letter...
...George McGovern was both...
...IS] Richard Brookhiser THEOCRACY IN AMERICA: CAMPAIGN '84 REVISITED Who did He vote for...
...I cannot resolve that dilemma for them...
...no one came...
...Given present attitudes, it would be Prohibition revisited, legislating what couldn't be enforced and in the process creating a disrespect for law in general...
...As with Cuomo, the appearance deceived...
...in the political realm, they were on His side...
...With malice toward all, I would also like to deprecate a worthy group in Washington called High Frontier (another term for the SDI...
...What had been revealed...
...Then, we have more money...
...Ronald Reagan's leads in the polls were brushing thirty percentage points...
...For weeks, the quotation was routinely attributed to Falwell, a fine example of unconscious editing: He ought to have said it...
...Jones...
...Whatever his pledges to God and Matilda, Cuomo, in his public life, had been "for" abortion, every bit as much as Ferraro...
...fussy in his enunciation, as if he had once overcome a slur...
...some of it, amusingly quaint: American clergymen, he noted, do not hold public office--'unless this term is applied to the functions which many of them fill in the schools...
...and two thousand members later, it had become the ninth largest church in the country...
...She and O'Connor, she said on the llth, had simply "agreed to disagree...
...Two hundred million Americans, ultimately...
...The Soviets spent about $500 billion to counter our B-52 bombers--successfully, until the cruise missile came along...
...Falwell was born in Lynchburg, Virginia, of a mixed family--a violent, alcoholic father, a religious mother.' Falwell became a Christian in his twenties...
...Most supporters of absolutist interpretations of the Bill of Rights have ulterior motives...
...less okay to point out His absence from the other side...
...HEY FERRARO WHAT KIND OF CATHOLIC ARE Four years later, as the postconvention campaign commenced, the new religious right found itself sharing the spotlight with that very old religious right, the Roman Catholic Church...
...Attacking Reagan was all very well...
...he was also not about to let the faith be defined by random faithful...
...Sophisticates didn't like this at all ("mad," "bonkers," "rattle-brained tripe," ran a typical judgment...
...Soon after the Scopes trial, fundamentalists retired from the public realm as well...
...Some of this was boilerplate...
...McGovern invoked the Creator's perspective on the arms race...
...Ronald Reagan, said Mario Cuomo in his keynote address to the San Francisco convention, practiced the ethics of Darwin...
...James Fletcher, former head of NASA, spent 100,000 man-hours examining the prospects for strategic defense...
...But the others liked it...
...Francis of Assisi ("the first Democrat," Cuomo called him...
...He was moreover a firm, not to say fanatical, supporter of Israel...
...Nelson Rockefeller's stenotypist developed an acronym, BOMFOG---for "the brotherhood of man, under the fatherhood of God"--because the phrase appeared so often in his speeches...
...Church and religion both, finally, play a lively role in American politics, limited by the restraints of decorum: It is okay to draft God for your side...
...I leave to those interested in such teachings" to judge how "the public statements of officeholders and candidates" match up...
...Three days later, Mondale took up the attack...
...Mondale, however, did not back off...
...About the last America had heard of fundamentalism was Mencken's account of the Scopes trial, and such feeble re-tellings as Inherit the Wind...
...Not Tocqueville...
...Mondale called nuclear weapons "godawful," and said that social injustice was a "sin...
...For political reasons they can put more soldiers in the field than we can, but they don't have anything like our depth in computer technology and vast national familiarity with computers...
...It was kindred sentiments that Walter Mondale now tried to rouse...
...Now comes an equally big challenge---space defense-that they're not so well fitted for...
...Pro-life picketers had been showing up for nearly every major Democratic event since the first TV debates...
...Cuomo suggested criteria in the form of questions...
...A dozen years 'Dinesh D'Souza's Falwell: Before the Millennium is the only biography that doesn't froth...
...Archbishop Hunthausen of Seattle called the Trident submarine the "Auschwitz of Puget Sound...
...I have not welcomed it [certainly not in a democracy, it was the voice of necessity...
...but there are a handful who sincerely revere it, in the same way that cargo cultists honor the DC-3: They don't know what it is for, or how it got there, but they know it is holy...
...It might be going too far to say that God was on the Democratic party's side...
...There was only "Secular humanism" was in fact a selfdescription, devised by secular humanists...
...Falwell's social behavior was about as much like Farrakhan's as it was like Jim Jones's...
...There were, finally, those concerned about school prayer and religion in politics generally who might be called aggressive theists: believers in one faith, suspicious of the encroachments of others...
...The soulwinning message consisted of mysteries believed by orthodox Christians of all denominations--the Incarnation, the Resurrection, the virgin birthmas well as the arcana of Revelations, including graphic images of last things...
...Consensus was the glue that held his position together...
...Reubin Askew was an elder of the Presbyterian Church...
...That's a lot for us but excruciating for them...
...If we both succeed, fine, since right now they're better defended than we are...
...An intelligent Pope trusted his intelligence, and his orthodoxy...
...since Elmore] and I do not want it to be an issue in this race...
...They represented a genuine, if marginal, American tradition: of Paine and Ingersoll...
...For a more up-to-date look, one could do no better than examine the discussion of church and state which dominated the 1984 presidential campaign, during the month of September...
...The church's position on abortion, she conceded, after O'Connor produced her letter, was "monolithic...
...Church and state have been separate at the national level since the First Amendment...
...My wife and I," Cuomo stressed, "were enjoined never to use abortion to destroy the life we created, and we never have . . . . For me life or fetal life in the womb should be protected, even if five of nine justices of the Supreme Court disagree with me . . . . But not everyone in our society," he went on disarmingly, "agrees with me and Matilda...
...Falwell at that time accepted segregation as Biblically sanctioned, and acknowledged later that it took a considerable mental wrench to overcome the mistake...
...A similar canard was advanced by the Office of Technology Assessment, which declared that if the Soviets doubled their missile force we would have to double our battle stations in space to counter it...
...The implied parallel was scurrilous...
...When there is a lull or (at the other extreme) the irresistible pressure of some great event, politicians may speak out on matters of constitutional or philosophic importance...
...they beat my brains out," said one defeated pol, "with Christian love...
...Jerry Falwell...
...By the seventies, he had found issues of his own that he felt could not simply be left until the millennium...
...and he hadn't even attacked anyone else's since Lake Tahoe...
...Early in September, O'Connor bore in more directly...
...At least, Mondale was willing to try...
...they upheld the ones that did...
...Some codes of human behavior, the Democrats believed and argued, flowed from the order of the universe...
...It may be that they can sit quite deep in space, able to attack ICBMs but hard to attack themselves...
...By 1976, he was declaring that "the idea that religion and politics don't mix was invented by the Devil to keep Christians from running their own country...
...Well, not so fast...
...But his reputation was such that he might profitably be used to cancel out the memory of the Muslim...
...During the preached Falwell in 1965, expressing the 1980 election, Falwell was routinely consensus fundamentalist view...
...O'Connor answered Cuomo's interview the day it was published with a demurral...
...every highway in the world where Christians are caught away from the driver's wheel...
...The reality is that we do legislate behavior every d a y . . . . It is obvious that law is not the entire answer to abortion...
...But I do believe that there are a lot of Catholics who do not share the view of the Catholic Church...
...His Jewish allies--and there were a fair number--tended to be Orthodox, of deep hue...
...t ,'~_lqI II . . . - ====================================== - ' - . - 9 o . ~ l . o m . , o...
...On the wild side, Louis Farrakhan, head of the Nation of Islam, and prote'g~ of Jesse Jackson, enlivened things with a radio broadcast in which he called Judaism a "dirty religion...
...had been relegated to the category of invisible facts--things which perhaps exist, but, since no one thinks or talks about them, have no importance...
...As the tone of the title suggests, the movement was in retreat from the beginning...
...Mondale needed Falwell to undo the effects of his party's association, through Jesse Jackson, with Louis Farrakhan...
...His politics and his judgment of the consensus coincided to a remarkable degree...
...lumped with neo-Nazis and the Klan, "Preachers are not called to be politi- and compared to Khomeini and Jim embraced pacifism explicitly...
...He fingered the weak spot directly...
...Their organs were gray magazines like the Humanist (Walter Mondale's brother Lester was on its editorial board), subsisting on anti-religious propaganda and exposes of ecclesiastical plots...
...While the Catholics curvetted, Protestants and Jews were rul)t still...
...Other theologies had taken over the Protestant churches...
...Pluralism was the key...
...He exited the debate where he had first entered it...
...When, before Notre Dame, had he made a resonant statement of his opinion of abortion...
...He was endorsed by John Anderson...
...in its own terms, pro-life, pro-family, pro-moral, and pro-American...
...Mario Cuomo took it up next, directly...
...Reagan, who had had a similar small-town background, "would have to explain how he came to a different conclusion...
...On September 13, Mario Cuomo was scheduled to deliver a talk to the theology department at Notre Dame...
...Religion had permeated the Democratic primary campaign...
...There was, moreover, an intrinsic asymmetry between the two positions...
...It does not say that you must agree with the law, or that you cannot work to change the law . . . . "There are those who argue that we cannot legislate morality...
...Some of their signs now had a personal angle...
...Once Jackson was out of the picture, Farrakhan was dismissed as a lunatic aberration (though he would exert an indirect influence later on...
...So go to it, SDI, on the research front, and when and if a later President ever wants to deploy let's consider that question at that time...
...Some of these were built in from the first...
...As far as the country was concerned, it might as well have been on the moon...
...But the Catholic Church had also taken a political stand, for the last dozen years, against the legalization of abortion (a third of the Moral Majority's members, interestingly, were Catholics)-a continuity with its old right days, never abandoned...
...others didn't...
...The September doldrums were perking up...
...The existence of the State of Israel was a necessary precondition of his chiliastic scenarios...
...not okay at all to call specific politicians God-less...
...Bailey Smith had said in the midst of the 1980 campaign, "I do not believe that God hears the prayers of Jews...
...So sincere was Nat Hentoff in his devotion that he had begun to question abortion and infanticide on civil libertarian grounds...
...This essay is adapted from his new book on the 1984 elections, The Outside Story, to be published later this year by Doubleday...
...when in doubt, take a poll...
...Much of what he passed on to his French public is still pertinent...
...But this was before a Catholic who explicitly supported abortion had been put on a national ticket...
...Maybe in time they'll agree to wind down this competition...
...On the deepest level, Falwell inadvertently called attention to splits within the Jewish community itself...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1985 21...
...Your opponents' most vulnerable allies are fair game...
...and some of Falwell's fellow clerics were capable of odd statements...
...Almost all education is entrusted to the clergy...
...Voxpopuli was not vox dei...
...Who provided the consensus on abortion...
...The Catholic position, in other words, equaled the position of Catholics...
...But the Democrats' God-talk was not all ritual...
...Mostly these were the socalled "social issues...
...In all due respect," one Rev...
...Of them, it could reasonably be said that they were "intolerant of religion...
...Fundamentalists who collaborate with the Vatican are used by the Holy See to counter the best interests of the United States...
...Ferraro took cover in the ambiguity of the word "Catholic...
...That was a plausible description of American history...
...Is a religious belief "helpful...
...But the Moral Mathrough a crucified and risen Lord," jority was the lightning rod...
...But what about the interval before the trumpet's blast...
...Cuomo presented himself to his audience as "an old-fashioned Catholic who sins, regrets, struggles, worries, gets confused and most of the time feels better after confession...
...Cuomo the politician bowed his head to it...
...O'Connor had indeed said something very like that, in a news conference two months earlier: "I don't see how a Catholic in good conscience can vote for a candidate who explicitly supports abortion...
...But in the middle of his speech, Reagan made a slightly different point...
...As I see it, their disagreement, if they do disagree, is not simply with me" but "with the teaching of the Catholic Church...
...Ferraro denied on the 10th that she had ever misrepresented her church, whereupon the archbishop produced evidence--a two-year-old letter, signed by her," inviting Catholic congressmen to a briefing by Catholics for Choice, a group of pro-abortion Catholics, who would "show...
...They can dodge around, put out decoys, and, unlike ICBMs, be armored and shoot back at their attackers...
...So did many of that election's losers...
...And there's some chance that the anti-ICBM defense can be conducted from the ground: That's part of what research will reveal...
...Reagan ran through mentions of God in American founding documents--the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, Washington's Farewell Address...
...Many bishops, on their own, THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1 9 8 5 1 9 YOU...
...On August 24, the morning after his 20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1985nomination, Ronald Reagan addressed an ecumenical prayer breakfast in Dallas...
...Like Cuomo, he was personally unprepossessing: bespectacled, almost squirrelish in appearance...
...And the frustrating thing for the great majority of Americans who.., understand the special importance of religion in the national l i f e . . , is that those who are attacking religion claim they are doing it in the name of tolerance, freedom and openmindedness...
...The contest seemed headed for a rout (ultimately, it got there, though only , ~ w ~' ' ~ -- - ~ '~ "~ i , , . . , . . . . . . . . . . . . . :: . . . . . . . . . . . 7 IIIlI~ql ~mlI 11 ll~III4I'41+IIII" i...
...she also was (and much was made of the fact) a Catholic: "very religious," said the governor of New Mexico at the San Francisco con, cians but soul-winners...
...an incontrovertible description of the opinions of the politicians involved in the 1984 campaign...
...ized, unsectarian pitch (no talk about Christians running their own country): against abortion, ERA, the gay rights movement, drugs, and pornography, and for a strong defense...
...Indeed, that contest may come to resemble the evolution of World War l's defenseless and vulnerable observation plane into today's formidable fighter...
...If it was not a conscious attempt to alarm Jewish voters by waving fundamentalist hobgoblins, it gave a good impression of one...
...his advisers, solicitous of his September lead, would risk nothing that might disturb it...
...Or does it divide us so fundamentally that it threatens our ability to function as a pluralistic society...
...But wasn't Governor Mario Cuomo a prominent and respected one of them...
...Three days later, Senator Kennedy took up the same theme: the "intolerance which still flourishes at the extremist fringe of American politics . . . infects the very center of our national authority...
...Whatever its final meaning, it was taken, particularly in the early stages, as an ecclesiastical addendum to the freeze movement, with which it coincided...
...The Republicans, meanwhile, had done invoking of their own...
...it reflected an understanding of ethics and public policy...
...O'Connor had succeeded to Cardinal Cooke's place after a career as a Navy chaplain, in which he rose to the rank of rear admiral...
...Presidential elections are the season in which politicians speak their minds...
...Reagan had isolated an anomalous, but real strain in American political life: the aggressive secularist...
...On his fundamentalist flank, vention...
...He denied that he was "intolerant of religion": "Never before" had he "had to defend my religious faith in a political campaign...
...Francis for membership in the Democratic party would set things right...
...shaped by her faith, she had meanwhile, he was condemned for "subtle ecumenicity...
...He did so by taking on Archbishop (not yet Cardinal) John O'Connor of New York...
...Falwelrs Zionism, like Begin's, was derived from Biblical exegesis...
...But Ronald Reagan took the religious right seriously...
...But the bottom line of his speech was the threat of fundamentalists--a "determined band.., reaching for government power to impose their own beliefs on others...
...Falwell's 1965 sermon had been directed against liberal churchmen active in the civil rights movement...
...My faith," he told an interviewer in Lake Tahoe, where he was resting up for the convention, "unmistakably has taught me that social justice is part of a Christian's responsibility...
...Falwell's "subtle ecumenicity" competed with alliances that Jewish liberals had made with entirely different parts of the gentile culture...
...It was in Elmore that Ferraro tried out her first response...
...everyone booed...
...Its right-wing days, many observers hoped (or feared), were long past...
...As an electoral force, they were nearly nil, but to the extent their ethos informed groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, they wielded disproportionate judicial clout...
...FalweU replaced James Watt as the demon of his and Ferraro's rhetoric all the way till November...
...I know that you can't endorse me," he told a rally of evangelicals in Dallas in August 1980, " b u t . . . I want you to know that I endorse you...
...And what kind of friend of Israel was he, anyway...
...The great majority of the prayer decision's supporters--the Walter Mondales, not the Lesters--simply saw it as a matter of pluralistic good housekeeping: The less we all try to believe together, the better we'll each believe by ourselves...
...therefore, he must have...
...The Catholic Church's major political initiative in the Reagan Administration had been the American bishops' pastoral letter on nuclear war...
...I believe," he began, "that faith and religion play a critical role in the political life of our nation and always has [sic...
...Its publications argue for a hell-for-leather abrogation of the ABM treaty and immediate deployment...
...No, what the President's doing, as distinct from saying, is right: Push the research as fast as we can, so that if ever a deployment decision needs to be made we'll have a sound basis for it...
...But help was on the way...
...Geraldine Ferraro testified that she had been shaped by her faith...
...when it does not, they tend to talk about separation of church and state...
...Since their defeat in Dayton, fundamentalists Falwell's formal political debut was arranged by the New Right...
...in fact, it now looks more as though we would only need increase our stations by half if they doubled up...
...He hadn't entangled himself in disputes over the "Catholic position," and he had avoided the inconsistency of deprecating Reagan's Christianity in July, and complaining about religion in politics in September...
...Of course, attacking our space stations would preclude the advantage of surprise...
...But who would suggest that we repeal the laws against such crimes because the law is so often broken...
...He went to a Bible college in Missouri, then returned to Lynchburg in 1956 where he opened a church in an old bottling plant...
...But there were other elements, not recognized by Reagan, in the opposition to school prayer...
...How does one begin an investigation of the relations of religion and politicsmspecifically, of religion in America to American politics...
...Then, some critics say the space stations themselves will be vulnerable...
...Falweli's "subtle ecumenicity" competed with alliances that Jewish liberals had made with entirely different parts of the gentile culture...
...Does it promote harmony...
...of the village atheist and the village crank...
...The position on abortion, by contrast, was plain...
...it might be the opposite...
...Everything Walter Mondale touched, meanwhile, turned to lead...
...The very man who had sponsored St...
...The question arose in a particularly acute form with the selection of Mondale's running-mate` Geraldine Ferraro's congressional record was down the line pro-choice...
...My upbringing taught me a sense of community...
...essential to human dignity...
...Falwell, it must be said, had given Jewish Americans reason to worry about him...
...In this calm, the candidates, and other prominent Americans, engaged as if by prior agreement in a cluster of inter-connected debates concerning religion and politics...
...When the trumpet sounds," said Falwell in another sermon, "stark pandemonium will occur on...
...The Catholic bishops stressed repeatedly that the two positions were both authoritative expressions of Catholic teaching...
...The bishops' letter had a textual history as complicated as Hamlet: three shifting drafts, the third at the behest of the Vatican...
...I have the responsibility of spelling o u t . . , with accuracy and clarity what the Church officially teaches . . . . I recognize the dilemma confronted by some Catholics in political life...
...In his B'nai B'rith appearance, Reagan backed out of the fight he had picked...
...Democrats practiced the ethics of St...
Vol. 18 • July 1985 • No. 7
