EDITORIALS
CARTER, BROWN AMD GOD God, after 16 years in semi-retirement, is reported ready to return to presidential politics. When He last appeared the "religious issues" were freedom of conscience and the...
...Paradoxically, while our Constitution guarantees the separation of church and state and our dominant cultural values are increasingly secular-even pagan-we remain, in some ways, the Western world's most religious people...
...In an interview in Rolling Stone [December, 1974] he says that "real freedom comes from self-discipline and self-awareness," that he is a "contemplative in action...
...God and morality talk does make people uncomfortable...
...Nevertheless, we welcome His reappearance...
...If we have any objection to Carter's public piety it is that it is not disturbing enough.enough...
...Not call us to repentance-that's what George McGovem tried four years ago- just restore us painlessly to grace...
...for, even though religious issues are as open to passion and confusion as busing and gun control, perhaps He is an issue that will give a little more life and depth to an otherwise dispirited campaign...
...It is an Agreement which the nation often forgets, perverts and breaks: we deprive laborers of their wages, increase the power of the Pharisees, elect crooks, neglect the sick and old, beat plowshares into swords, plot murders, squander our talents and mass-produce an infinite variety of golden calves...
...They speak from very different traditions...
...Yet, Carter, true to form, resists a religious category...
...In this election, the discussion has become more subtle and personal, as a new nervousness ripples through the electorate when a candidate talks about his relationship with God...
...His Playboy interviewer, Robert Scheer, perhaps reflecting his magazine's inability to recognize any religious, motivation as authentic, concludes: "He represents the ultimate Americanization of religion: Brown has turned religion's therapeutic qualities toward the most obsessed and pragmatic of secular At least Brown has told his listeners something they didn't want to hear...
...In Playboy he says he still retreats to Trappist and Zen monasteries, and that Playboy itself "tends to create an image of self-indulgence that is becoming increasingly inappropriate and ultimately inconsistent with the survival of this country...
...With this in mind, in spite of the tendency of politics and religion to mix badly, it is probably good that two presidential candidates-Jimmy Carter and Jerry Brown-are stirring up God talk...
...Jerry Brown's context is scholastic, Ignatian, intellectual, influenced by the Catholic concept of social justice, ascetical, eastern mystical, and pragmatic...
...Then, brought down by either emptiness or guilt, we look for leaders who can restore us to grace...
...Carter's religious context is Southern Baptist, evangelical, unsophisticated in its theology, usually individualistic in its piety and ethics rather than inspired by the social gospel movement feat brought liberal Protestantism and Catholicism into social reform...
...he also reads Paul Tillich and Reinhold Nie-buhr, and is shepherded by the liberal editor of Christian Century...
...When He last appeared the "religious issues" were freedom of conscience and the relationship between church and state...
...Deep in many Americans, sometimes only on the level of instinct, is the conviction that this nation has an Agreement with the Creator, that it is struggling to fulfill an eternal destiny...
...It should...
Vol. 103 • April 1976 • No. 8
