Politics and piety

...Some 94 percent of Americans say they believe in God...

...Religion was a crucial force in molding our cold war mentality and in convincing America in the 1950s and 1960s to rid itself finally of Jim Crow...

...There is a long history in America of religious influence on public life and policy...

...Religious politics works best in this country when it manages to clear itself of partisan politics...

...20 percent of the English say they do...

...That said, however, it remains extremely difficult to figure out how we can use religious resources in public life in nonpartisan ways...

...in Britain and Germany the figure is 10 percent...

...What else could a politician do when he learned that 40 percent of Americans thought that the Republican Party "shared America's fundamental faith in God," whereas only 18 percent said the Democrats did...

...One influential group of critics was furious about the omission of God from the Constitution...

...Searching for formulas to overcome DISSENT / Spring 2001 n 7 PLAN B selfish group interests, they envisioned a republican citizenry united in common moral practice based on general religious principles...

...THE AMERICAN CONSTITUTION is a godless document...

...Yet any truly constitutional program for government assistance to church social services will do precisely that...

...Lieberman suggested even more strongly than his counterpart, Dick Cheney, that only a religious people can be a moral people...

...The proposals for government endorsement of religious work will surely multiply, but we will here confine ourselves to a brief consideration of President Bush's opening of a White House office to promote faith-based charities and social services...

...If we remain strictly true to the American Constitution, we ought to insist that government policy should never be determined by a religious claim...

...Timothy Dwight, an early chaplain at Yale, attributed the successful British bombardment of Washington during the War of 1812 to American irreligion in general and to God's absence from the Constitution in particular...

...The second has to do with encouraging churches to compete for public funding, a potentially unspiritual competition that will inevitably produce more government money for some religious institutions than for others...

...None of the founders who left a record of their religious convictions resemble the evangelical preachers who in the antebellum period divided the United States into a labyrinth of competing faiths and brought the majority of Americans into formal affiliation with a religious denomination...

...George W. Bush consistently performed on the stump as someone who had proclaimed over the years that "my faith tells me that the acceptance of Jesus Christ as my savior is my salvation and I believe that...

...Still, he boasted of reading the Bible daily...

...Like universities and other secular eleemosynary institutions, churches perform public services before or beyond converting people to particular religious beliefs...

...Led by the great preacher Horace Bushnell from Connecticut, hundreds of Protestant ministers convened two national conventions in 1863 that blamed the bloodshed of the Civil War on God's vindictive punishment, not for slavery but for the Constitution's godlessness...

...However, almost as soon as Americans took the revolutionary step of separating the purposes of government from the will of God, they began to look for ways to fudge their resolve...

...It can solve the problem of education...

...The fact that religion does not figure much in accounts of their lives argues for secularism...

...The linkage of American calamity with its godless Constitution energized a national crusade in the midst of the Civil War to pass what became known as the Christian Amendment...

...We may be certain of one thing about the 2000 presidential election: God had no hand in the outcome...

...In its 1988 Bowen v. Kendrick decision, the Supreme Court laid down appropriate guidelines for assessing the constitutionality of federal grants to religious organizations providing social services...

...The issue was pragmatism...

...12 n DISSENT / Spring 2001...

...Any measure to promote social justice deserves attention, although there is surely reason to be cautious in this case—in fact, three reasons...

...The religious appeals of abolitionists during the 1840s and 1850s and the religious rhetoric of Martin Luther King, Jr., during the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s are different from efforts made by the Christian Coalition to take over the Republican Party...

...Lieberman used his political opportunity to call upon Americans "as a people" to "reaffirm our faith and renew the dedication of our nation and ourselves to God 6 n DISSENT / Spring 2001 PLAN B and God's purpose...

...It will fade because the majority of American voters don't like it and are increasingly willing to punish presidential candidates who try to run with God...

...As that concept bore on their personal religious affairs, it made them less doctrinaire than the ministers of the various faiths to which they adhered...

...But he never claimed that his administration was in any particular policy trying to carry out God's platform...

...Neither man holds the extreme views associated with the religious right...

...So pervasive is public piety in our politics that Newt Gingrich, before his conversion to statesmanship, introduced a proposal for a school prayer amendment by arguing that it would produce "an America in which a belief in the Creator is once again at the center of being an American...

...Approximately 40 percent of Americans claim to attend a religious service weekly...

...As the candidates lined up to testify to their religious faith, they appeared not to know that the Constitution in Article 6, Clause 3, expressly provided that "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office...

...The question that should have been put to all the candidates in the year 2000 was whether they believed atheists should be attacked for their anti-religious views if one of them dared to run for president...

...I ET'S ASSUME that experience will quickly lead to the scaling back of rhetoric and I expectations...

...AS IT turned out, the irenic balance that Washington and others imagined—between, on the one hand, a constitutional order that distinguished the City of God from the City of Man and, on the other, a proper respect for God in the political arena—was impossible to maintain...

...Stephen Carter, the Yale Law School professor, articulates this lament: "In our sensible zeal to keep religion from dominating our politics, we have created a political and legal culture that presses the religiously faithful to be other than themselves, to act publicly, and sometime privately as well, as though their faith does not matter to them...

...Politics is an affair of mortals, as the writers of the American Constitution wisely suggested...

...What indeed would Jesus have done to get rid of the memory of Monica Lewinsky...

...The largest church charities in the United States, organized by Catholics, Methodists, and Jews, continued to run their operations without claiming that they could take on a major role in solving America's social problems...

...Nonetheless, the totally untested assumption of Charitable Choice was that faith-based institutions were better able to get people off drugs, out of prison, and into regular jobs than secular agencies...

...All of which, liberals should insist, is not what the founders intended...

...We know from every cross-national opinion poll that Americans are the most religious people in the industrialized world...

...Polls consistently show that people at the low end of the economic scale—whites, African-Americans, and Hispanics—view churches as valuable resources in community struggles against crime, drugs, and illiteracy...

...The Constitution, however, remains godless, and with it the reminder to all politicians that a political campaign is not a good place to discuss one's religion, if religion really deserves special respect...

...Pollsters told him that he was in electoral trouble with religious America and so forced him to say something about Jesus...

...And once again as they kept their Constitution godless, some Americans, nervous at the affront, chose to place God in a less fundamental part of American public life, this time in the Pledge of Allegiance, where America became "one nation under God...

...Public piety may be the only thing that connects liberal African-American Democrats with conservative white Republicans...

...Among the favorite words of the founders was Harmony...

...Even the founders who came closest to approving Jefferson's famous gloss on the religious clauses of the First Amendment, that it established a wall of separation between church and state, regularly incorporated into their public addresses phrases about the need to seek God's protection and guidance...

...No one excluded religious discourse from the debate over slavery...

...His call mirrored George W. Bush's statement that "our nation is chosen by God and commissioned by history to be a model to the world...

...It can solve the problem of poverty...

...Washington, a man of rational temperament who believed that moral conduct pleased God and brought the blessings of Providence upon the community, imagined a political order free of both political parties and religious quarrels...

...Is there a presidential address from the Oval Office that doesn't conclude by invoking God...

...Whether that makes up for the unseemly prospect of the Church of Scientology also benefiting substantially is another matter...

...We already have some experience with the Charitable Choice provision of the Personal Responsibility and Work Reconciliation Act of 1996, the intention of which was to encourage charitable giving and to make it easier for 10 n DISSENT / Spring 2001 PLAN B the government to enter into contracts with churches to provide social services more extensive than the usual charity of religious groups...

...Did the program work and were the rules for determining success applied equally to religious and secular agencies...

...Six more times, four in the twentieth century, efforts were made to amend the Constitution by adding reference to God to its preamble, and six more times God was kept out...

...Evoking God's name in partisan gatherings usually amounts either to political pandering or to unpardonable arrogance...

...American liberals must react with something more than cries of horror, remembering that it was they who were angry in 1986 when conservatives tried to keep religious conviction out of the public square, and William Simon, Ronald Reagan's secretary of the treasury, worked feverishly and unsuccessfully to stop the National Conference of Catholic Bishops from issuing its encyclical letter on economic justice...

...This conventional wisdom is flat-out wrong...

...Why should the government do anything to discourage churches from trying to help people by converting them...

...John Ashcroft's sponsorship of the legislation made liberals nervous, but it passed with bipartisan support...

...He no longer said, as he had in 1993, that people who did not accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior could not go to heaven...

...Less predictable than the litigation has been the reluctance of many churches to climb on board the program...

...If so, one wonders why less religious Europeans take better care of their poor, their children, and their elderly, and devote a higher percentage of their budgets to repairing the social fabric than Americans do...

...DISSENT / Spring 2001 n 9 PLAN B We will venture a prediction...

...that the services provided cannot be religious in character...

...They were not in our contemporary sense celebrants of religious pluralism...

...Since the nation's founding, that nervousness has manifested itself in periodic redrawing of the boundary between church and state and in practices that compromise the "wall of separation...

...So ordinary and normal is the connection of Americanism and belief (usually just Christian belief) that there was little public notice, let alone outcry, when in the 1996 presidential campaign five Republican candidates spoke at a rally in Memphis that began with this flag salute: "I pledge allegiance to the Christian flag, and to the savior, for whose kingdom it stands, one savior, crucified, risen, and coming again, with life and liberty for all who believe...

...Congress and the Supreme Court are poised to rethink the lines that have been drawn between church and state...

...The third is the most important reason and goes back to the concerns of the founders: to enlist God in the cause of making human government work better may finish both by demeaning God, subjecting churches to the charge of inadequacy and failure, and bringing out the worst behavior from religious men and women...

...As William Safire put it in the best one-liner of the campaign, it took a Jewish Hail Mary pass to keep the Democrats in the game...

...Al Gore's spiritual professions could not carry his home state of Tennessee...

...In its religious clauses and in all its other features, the American Constitution was an effort to overcome the predictable effects of discord...

...And is there a baseball, football, or basketball team left in America that doesn't before or after its game bow heads and join hands...

...that there should be no substantial risk that the aid results in religious indoctrination...

...In the first few years after the passage of Charitable Choice, churches did not pick up the available public money...

...We will have destroyed any pretense of the secularism of the American state and put it in the business of promoting religion, of interfering with religion, and, ultimately, of favoring by its financial largesse one group of churches over another...

...He proclaimed a national Day of Thanksgiving to seek God's blessing for the American nation and mentioned God prominently in his two inaugural addresses...

...Al Gore let everyone know, more than once, that he was a born-again Christian and said that whenever he faced a tough decision he asked himself, "What would Jesus do...

...A cynical view of the Bush program, which expands corporate deductions for charitable giving and eases the regulations that restrict religious activity in government-funded, faithbased charities would hold that it seeks to shrink government, with tax benefits for the rich, by making patsies of the nation's churches...

...No one excluded religion from influencing temperance legislation, or from shaping the social conscience of the Progressive movement, or from justifying each and every instance of American imperialism...

...It can solve the problem of crime...

...God was also alive and well in the Democratic Party...

...The founders, however, aware of the splintered religious allegiances of Americans, sought to protect religion by making theological disagreement politically irrelevant...

...They knew about the ancient grievances that set Protestants against Catholics and about the discrimination imposed upon people who did not choose to make the Christian cross the symbol of salvation...

...It is absolutely wrong for government to use its money to entice churches to change their social mission into enterprises for which they lack expertise...

...A lot depends on what the Bush administration means by easing regulations...

...in France, 15 percent...

...During the most controversial period of the civil rights struggle, after all, King's speeches bolstered the liberal wing of the Democratic Party more than any other political interest...

...By far most charitable activity sponsored by religious groups has to do with feeding the poor and handing out used clothing...

...Is there any reason not to give John Dilulio and Stephen Goldsmith, who are spearheading the president's initiative, the chance to show what faith-based institutions may more moderately provide, within parameters that do not destroy the establishment clause of the First Amendment...

...America's largest religious charities have for years carried out their mission in ways that satisfy these requirements...

...Bush's plan might yield some important benefits to black communities, simply by making more money available to institutions with a long history of providing a range of services beyond spiritual counseling...

...Lincoln, whose speeches referred to God almost as often as Senator Lieberman's, refused to endorse the Christian Amendment...

...FI LATER Joseph Lieberman...

...Whether or not this professed devotion to religion translates into deep spiritual feeling, it certainly explains religion's continued presence in public life, especially in American politics...

...Yet the idea of a secular public realm remained a divisive concept, open to many interpretations...

...The trouble is that this nervousness too often results in awarding God a kind of booby prize...

...Yet Washington, also in 1792, tried to assure American Catholics that in this republic religious disputes would never be carried to such a pitch as to endanger their consciences or the peace of society...

...About the spiritual practices of some of them we know many things, but most left little evidence of their devotional habits beyond an uncertainly ascribed denominational affiliation...

...Office seekers play upon our nervousness...

...The founders are best collectively described as humanists rather than partisan Christians, but they rested humanism on the premise that men and women were created by a Supreme Being who built a clear moral purpose into the order of things...

...They noted that unless it was deleted, "papists, pagans and Jews might be at the helm" of the national government...

...Lieberman backed the original legislation as firmly as he has endorsed the more recent Bush plan...

...The religious persuasion of the men who wrote the Constitution and who launched the American Republic remains a subject of debate...

...The Constitution, America's fundamental law, would remain secular, but in that same year, 1863, perhaps to appease the nervous Protestant ministers, the words "In God We Trust," were put on our money, then certainly much less venerated than the Constitution...

...That God is named in these two places and also invoked in the prayers that begin congressional and Supreme Court sessions is a compromise that might or might not have passed muster with Washington, Jefferson, and Madison...

...Written by the Court's bare conservative majority, these guidelines held that funded agencies cannot limit their services to people affiliated with any particular denomination...

...There were of course rules governing these contractual relations between church and state...

...They urged an amendment to the Constitution, changing its preamble to We, the people of the United States, humbly acknowledging Almighty God as the source of all authority and power in civil government, the Lord Jesus Christ as the Governor among the 8 n DISSENT / Spring 2001 PLAN B Nations, and His revealed will as of supreme authority, in order to constitute a Christian government, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America...

...Texas, for example, gave $8,000 to the Jobs Partnership of Washington County that required participants to study Scripture and taught them "to find employment through a relationship with Jesus Christ...

...From the beginning, we have had a peculiar national history of divine give and take that has encouraged both a language of extreme secularism and recurring efforts to write God into the Constitution...

...Their intention in writing the Constitution was to give equal credibility to all religions and, at the same time, to disarm the violence that religious grievances had historically wreaked upon civil society...

...The more of these services they provide, the more religion contributes to the general public welfare...

...In the South, many public schools still begin with prayer...

...However, the American Constitution also protects free speech and ensures that religious voices may make whatever arguments they want in political contests or in the halls of Congress...

...They create institutions for the infirm and elderly...

...Our secular nation has always granted churches tax exemption, a financial contribution to religion that has never been held to violate the non-establishment clause of the First Amendment...

...And although George W. Bush undoubtedly got some help from the Christian Coalition, history will record that he lost the election...

...We do not allow a local government to give one dollar to support a minister's salary, but we give churches the much greater boon of tax-free property...

...In his Farewell Address, Washington explicitly linked public and private morality to religious belief...

...Seventy percent of Americans say they pray daily...

...Nonetheless, these booby prizes for God signal an uncertainty about secularism that turns religion from time to time into a partisan matter...

...Gore had little choice last year...

...That moral purpose was open to discovery by human reason and provided a guideline for all areas of human behavior...

...The public square reverberated with talk about him, as if only believers can be good presidents, as if presidents are chosen to be defenders of the faith, not defenders of the Constitution...

...In the recent presidential race, God did very well...

...You have to appear to be religious to succeed in politics...

...Instead, that faith shaped his attacks on Sodom and Gomorrah—Hollywood and New York...

...From one perspective tax exemption is a notorious exception...

...They loathed religious controversy even when political circumstances placed them in the middle of it...

...We may hear fewer claims in the future that America is a Christian nation, which it most assuredly is not, but we will hear a great deal more about government partnerships with faith-based charities and schools...

...This was a shame...

...It separated church and state with the intention of beginning an era when a person's religious convictions or lack thereof would have no bearing on his fitness to assume public office...

...On the other hand, any surmise we make about the religious beliefs of eighteenth-century Americans must begin with the fact that to all of them, some idea of God was important...

...But in Gore's choice of Lieberman, the key factor was not his Jewishness, but his unassailable, unembarrassed religiosity...

...And it wasn't all that different from Senator John Ashcroft's absurd claim at Bob Jones University that the slogan of some religious revolutionaries, "We have no King but Jesus,' found its way into the fundamental documents of this country...

...In its failure to mention God, or to evoke God's protection, or to pledge the federal government to God's will, it broke with all past models for written political documents, including the Declaration of Independence, the constitutions of the various state governments, and the Articles of Confederation...

...In contemporary America, religion is marginalized and prevented from playing its beneficent role by a misguided, overly zealous commitment to separation...

...This was a record...

...If that happens, then we have reaped the worst of what this season of partisan religious politics has always threatened...

...When asked if they find their religious beliefs important to their personal lives, 86 percent of Americans say yes compared to 49 percent in Britain...

...God's Creation may be messy, but we have to descend very far down the great chain of being before we come to the butterfly ballots, chads, and split judicial decisions that suggest even advanced democracies have trouble recording the will of the people...

...Liberals, after all, are more conditioned to expect great things from government, though in this case they ought to think carefully about the implications of failure...

...There is nothing wrong with religious faith shaping one's political views, although it might have been more credible had Lieberman's deep religious faith moved him to champion the Old Testament's prophetic call for repairing the world, for working to improve the lot of the poor, or for turning swords into plowshares...

...0 UR NATIONAL history nonetheless suggests that some office seekers will reflect (or exploit) the national nervousness about the bold secularism of our political system...

...Today, however, the conventional wisdom about religion in public life goes like this: because of an absolutist division between pulpit and public square, pew and polling place, religion is everywhere on the defensive...

...They provide people with beliefs that don't solve their material problems but may give dignity and meaning to their lives...

...In his debut appearance on August 8 with Gore in Nashville, Lieberman mentioned God thirteen times in ninety seconds...

...The sort of nonproductive religious boasting that has been so much a part of the American political scene since the Reverend Jerry Falwell first proposed a Moral Majority will fade away, at least for a time...

...Even those who opposed the amendment did not challenge that statement...

...More convincingly than the religious right ever had, Lieberman managed to quiet American nervousness about the place of religion in our politics...

...In running a drug program, a church did not have to move out of its building, or strip the walls of religious symbolism, or never mention God...

...and that any arguable effect of adDISSENT / Spring 2001 n I I PLAN B vancing religion must be "incidental or remote...

...We want to find ways to assure ourselves that having a secular political system is not the same thing as having a society that has abandoned God...

...He did not hesitate to remind Americans of the importance of God (referred to in the most generalized terms) in human affairs...

...Thomas Jefferson, the infamous Deist, would fare poorly at the polls today...

...One hopes the Guinness people were nearby...

...This complaint never entirely disappeared...

...They feed the poor...

...God is not running for public office, and God doesn't care who wins...

...Unless, of course, you fudge the rules and hope that the Supreme Court will change its 1988 resolve...

...From another perspective, however, the exception makes perfect sense as public policy...

...So we quickly run up against a dilemma...

...And recently, in a question prompted by the arrival of the new millennium, one out of every four American adults polled said they believed Jesus would return to earth before they died...

...HOWEVER, one legacy of the last twenty years of political God talk will continue to weigh on public policy decisions and, not incidentally, to divide Americans along religious lines...

...Interestingly, research by Mark Chaves of the University of Arizona suggests that American churches with conservative theological and political profiles are less likely to reach for government money or to invest much in charity than liberal churches...

...He did not, of course, live to witness the sorry ways in which partisan politics, at the state and national level, scapegoated American Catholics from the 1840s until the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960...

...The infamous and utterly secular five-to-four decision handed down by the Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore at least had the virtue of reminding us of how distant we are from the doctrine of rule by divine right...

...Religiosity is linked to citizenship, to the very concept of Americanism...

...Most religious groups are acutely aware of how little they gain from placing God on the political hustings...

...ISAAC KRAMNICK is a professor of government and R. LAURENCE MOORE a professor of history at Cornell University...

...Far from being excluded from the public square, religion is ubiquitous in American life...

...Attending multimillion dollar soft-money galas in Hollywood apparently did not count as a tough decision...

...Although a very large number of all Americans, 65 percent, say they belong to some religious group, a whopping 95 percent of the members of Congress claim religious affiliation...

...However, it was enjoined not to proselytize and to make sure that any religious participation was entirely voluntary and not a requirement for the services it provided...

...Smaller church agencies were apt to take the attitude of a local group in Ithaca, New York: we can provide a free lunch for the poor but we cannot do much about the circumstances that bring these people to our door...

...Baptists, Catholics, Jews, Seventh Day Adventists, and Unitarians opposed it as well, and it never made its way through Congress...

...They build hospitals...

...A God who is too exalted to be named in our Constitution does not really belong on our currency or in our flag salute...

...God is in our wallets but not in our founding text...

...But in no eventuality will the churches save the cities...

...And then, the line between a sincere profession of faith and political pandering blurs, and the notion that religion should not be a test of office flies out the window...

...The first has to do with the wisdom of separating religious institutions from their specifically religious missions, a separation that the First Amendment requires in any government-financed, church-managed program...

...Most city councils across the country begin deliberations with an invocation, as does the U. S. Senate...

...Americans today, compared to Europeans, are pious in public and proud of it...

...When asked what thinker had most influenced his life, he said, "Jesus...

...The no-religious-test clause in Article 6 of the Constitution upset many delegates in state ratifying conventions, especially since eleven of the original thirteen states had clauses in their own constitutions restricting officeholding to Protestants...

...The partisan attacks on both men for their lack of religious fervor strengthened their own conviction, shared apparently by most voters of their time, that religious bickering was a private matter, that it belonged outside the realm of state affairs...

...The men who took prominent political roles in the early republic— Washington, Adams, Hamilton, Jay, Jefferson, Madison among them—all ascribed to religion a good, in fact vital, role in perpetuating a democratic society...

...Religious politics in fact began with the men who proclaimed American secularism in the strongest terms, and any hope we have to reform present practices must acknowledge the compromises they were willing to make...

...He inserted into his oath of office the phrase "so help me God," a phrase not in the Constitution, and swore his oath upon a Bible, a practice not mentioned in the Constitution...

...Implementation in some parts of the country was predictably lax, and a number of cases hit the courts...

...it permeates our politics now as it has in the past...

...They are the authors of The Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness...

...that religious institutions must not be the sole or primary beneficiaries of the legislation...

...It is tolerated, even lauded, as a personal or private matter, appropriate for the home, the church, the synagogue, or mosque, but (regrettably) considered inappropriate for the public spaces of civic life...

...in Britain the figure is 68 percent...

...Influential sections of both political parties seem to have accepted the notion that religion can solve some of America's biggest social problems...

...The most recent failed attempt occurred in the 1950s, in the early years of the cold war, even as Americans were defining themselves as the godly champion of freedom against "godless atheistic communism...

...Jefferson, like Washington, could not escape his religious critics...

...Without question, however, there is a problem in umpiring a broader range of social services when an important reason why many churches claim success in working with drug addicts and criminals is that they convert people...

...And if we pay attention to what the first generation of American politicians actually did and to the patterns of American history since, we learn that secularist zealotry is counterproductive and that the elimination of religion from public life is not an option...

...Most of these practices have been followed by most of our presidents, including Jefferson and Madison...

...Imagine, if you will, a candidate for Congress, the Senate, or the presidency acknowledging publicly that he DISSENT / Spring 2001 5 PLAN B or she was an atheist—and then being elected...

...from the first day of the new government, they blamed every woe that beset the American nation on that slight to Christianity...