Religion on Capitol Hill:
Castelli, Jim
God of the Hill BEUGION ON CAPITOL HILL Peter L. Benson and Dorothy Williams Harper & Row, $11.95, 209 pp. Jim Castelli IIMMY CARTER is a born-again Christian; so is Ronald Reagan. Teddy...
...so is Henry Hyde...
...When Benson and Williams examined the voting records of the members they interviewed according to conservative and liberal lobbies, they found that People-Concerned and Nontraditional Religionists were always the first and second most liberal, Legalistic and Self-Concerned Religionists were always the first and second most conservative...
...And while about 60 percent of the evangelical Christians in Congress are conservative, a surprising 40 percent are liberal...
...JIM castelli is the author of The Bishops and the Bomb: Waging Peace in a Nuclear Age (Doubleday...
...Mark Hatfield is a Baptist...
...they are not the raving liberals...
...Nominal Religionists (22 percent) have maintained formal church ties, but have little enthusiasm for religion...
...ronald radosh, a professor of history at Queens Community College, is the author of Prophets on the Right...
...There is no simple answer...
...Paul Simon is a Lutheran...
...a Nuclear Age (Doubleday...
...In some ways, these results only document what was already obvious...
...Teddy Kennedy is a Roman Catholic...
...But that assumption is unacceptable to anyone with a working knowledge of what religion is all about or an unbiased observation of the political process...
...Benson and Williams suspect they may maintain religious affiliation for social and political expedience...
...It would be fascinating to see research comparing the congressional representing of Legalistic Religionists, and so on, with that in the general population...
...The book is based on in-depth interviews conducted with a representative sample of eighty House and Senate members in the spring of 1980...
...Nontraditional Religionists (9 percent) are very close to people-concerned religionists, but have a much more symbolic, abstract sense of God...
...God, not humankind, is their audience...
...They note a principle of psychology is that people seek "cognitive consistency" among their ideas and ideals...
...It doesn't merely offer empirical evidence to support the claim that religion influences politics...
...The relationship is strong enough in both directions that no one can afford to assume, as most observers do, that when a politician talks about religion, he is merely engaging in a cynical form of campaigning...
...But the heart of Religion on Capitol Hill is its breakdown of six different types of religious belief - independent of denomination - found among members of Congress and, presumably, among the general public...
...at the same time, it is rare that gut-level reactions are so perfectly mirrored in social science research...
...Pairings like that serve to reinforce the conventional wisdom of academia and the secular media that religion has no impact on politics...
...We need to pay far more attention to politicians' religious beliefs and what they tell the Knights of Columbus or the National Association of Evangelicals - those may be the most revealing speeches of all...
...it also explains why members of the same denomination can differ so dramatically in their approach to politics, confirming what many of us have long believed - "liberals and conservatives differ not in amount of religion but in kind...
...perhaps more interesting, "there are very few evangelicals who take a moderate political position...
...Self-Concerned Religionists (29 percent) are similar in belief to the legalists but are "almost entirely concerned with the relationship between the believer and God...
...Religion on Capitol Hill also contains some real gems of new information...
...Integrated Religionists were always the third most liberal, Nominal Religionists always the fourth most liberal...
...Benson and Williams found that despite myths to the contrary, almost all members of Congress believe in God and practice their religion and that "Congress is at least as religious as the public," reflecting the same general beliefs as the population at large...
...For example, those members of Congress who are by most measures the least religious tend to stand politically right of center...
...so is Jesse Helms...
...Several times in the book, Benson and Williams wrestle with the "chicken-and-egg" question - do religious beliefs influence political beliefs, or do political beliefs influence religious beliefs...
...so is Ed Meese...
...RE VIEWERS JOHN C. CORT, co-editor of Religious Socialism, a quarterly newsletter, has worked for labor groups and anti-poverty agencies for most of his life...
...Integrated Religionists (14 percent) show a balance on all value scales studied and have tested their faith - their "religious beliefs work to liberate, to free them to speak and act...
...and that an important focus of that action should be on responding to the needs of the oppressed and the have-nots of the world...
...Based on an analysis of themes which came up in the extensive questioning, they divided members of Congress into these groups: Legalistic Religionists (15 percent) "place very high values on rules, boundaries, limits, guidelines, direction, and purpose...
...Those of us who have been trying for years to get people to see the obvious - that religion and politics are intimately related - have powerful new ammunition in Religion on Capitol Hill, the result of research funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities...
...People-Concerned Religionists (10 percent) "believe intensely that religious belief ought to move out to action...
Vol. 110 • August 1983 • No. 14
