Heaven Can Wait: Against Michael Kazin

...Does the quote refer to an American religion that fought slavery over the opposition of many orthodox churches or to a religion that upheld slavery in the South and profiteering from slavery in the North...

...Americans have always been a predominantly Christian people (overwhelmingly so at the time the Constitution was written), but the founders established a secular central government...

...We all cherish our children's future...

...Still worse, many liberals have thrown in the towel and accepted the right-wing premise that there can be no morality, and no exposition of moral issues in the public square, without reference to religion...

...Kazin argues that movements "imbued with a revivalist ethos" have been most effective in forcing the American government to "do the right thing...

...Today, religious conservatives are wreaking havoc with that glorious paradox, and they are aided by liberals intimidated by the vilification of secularists over the past twenty-five years...

...Two distinct, though not entirely novel, approaches to church-state issues have recently been advanced by the evangelical activist Jim Wallis in God's Politics and by legal scholar Noah Feldman in Divided by God: America's Church-State Problem and What We Should Do about It...

...And we are all mortal...

...Indeed, American presidents in the past—and not only the distant past—have had great success in combining reason with moral passion...

...Wallis's solution to the "church-state problem" is even worse than Feldman's...

...In other words, let public school prayer alone but don't spend public money on religious charter schools...

...Hart's argument that religion is "inherently useful in solving social problems because it yields moral guidelines that inevitably generate both a concern for justice and the welfare of all people...

...Are Hart and Kazin referring to a religion that makes room for secular knowledge or a religion that refuses to listen to anything science has to say about the origins of life...

...The question is whether there are any political leaders left with the courage to appeal to voters as reasoning adults, with arguments based not on the promise of heaven but on the moral obligation of human beings to treat one another decently here on earth...

...KAZIN, WHOSE NEW biography of William Jennings Bryan should be a major corrective to the cartoonish stereotype based entirely on Bryan's role in the Scopes "monkey trial," is absolutely right in his contention that "evangelical Protestantism has always been an integral part of American political history...

...Call me crazy, but I have a feeling that a great many Americans, including religious Americans, are sick of hypocritical politicians who pretend that their policies deserve support because they are the work of a Higher Being...

...Both supporters and opponents of ham-handed, faith-based attempts by the U.S...

...The Eighteenth Amendment, which criminalized the sale of alcohol from 1919 until its repeal in 1933, is a cautionary tale of what happened when government, in the name of religious morality, outlawed an activity regarded by much of the public as harmless or beneficent...

...President George W. Bush is an heir of the later evangelicals, who wanted nothing so much as to Christianize the Constitution...

...But those moral terms should be grounded in reason, not in pandering to the supernatural beliefs of Americans...

...And let us not forget the Old Testament God who inflicted unspeakable tortures on the Egyptians— an argument for a free hand for U.S...

...it is good theology" God help us all, for reason will not save us, if religious progressives like Wallis get their wish and manage to turn the next presidential campaign into a duel of theologies...

...Man's reason and spirit often solved the seemingly unsolvable—and we believe they can do it again...

...And man can be as big as he wants...

...He argues (a quote Kazin cites approvingly) that "there is nothing shameful or inherently disadvantageous in being a religious minority, so long as that minority is not subject to coercion or discrimination...

...We all breathe the same air...

...I could not agree more with Kazin that the left needs to present its case in unapologetically moral terms...

...Inherently...

...Feldman, a professor at the New York University School of Law, suggests that more religious activities and expressions of faith should be permitted in public institutions but that no public money should be used to support religious institutions...

...the civil rights leadership provided by black churches is the prime twentieth-century example...

...Perhaps the most outstanding example is John F. Kennedy's June 1963 American University commencement speech, now regarded as the beginning of détente with the Soviet Union...

...Kennedy spoke of peace as "the necessary rational end of rational men" and declared, "Our problems are manmade—therefore they can be solved by man...

...Inevitably...

...But the voices of African American preachers spoke to a broader public morality precisely because they emanated from outside the government and the political establishment...

...But the two groups defined welfare in irreconcilable ways, largely attributable to religious convictions about whether human beings have the right to "play God" with their own lives...

...There is no such thing as generic religion or, for that matter, generic evangelical Protestantism, and most ecclesiastical leaders, whether evangelical or not, are interested in the welfare of all only insofar as welfare is defined in accordance with their particular faith...

...What Feldman fails to recognize is that the Christian right's drive for more publicly enshrined religious expression is inseparable from its demand for public financing of explicitly religious activities: the first is a stalking horse for the second...

...The framers did not write, as they might have, "we the people under God"—a phrase that would have prevented angry debates in state ratifying conventions over the Constitution's unprecedented failure to acknowledge a divinity as the source of governmental power...

...They did not, as a group of ministers would unsuccessfully propose to Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, write a preamble that declared, "Recognizing Almighty God as the source of all authority and power in civil government, and acknowledging the Lord Jesus DISSENT / Spring 2006 n 85 ARGUMENTS Christ as the Governor among nations, His revealed will as the supreme law of the land, in order to constitute a Christian government...

...He might have noted that such movements are equally effective in 86 n DISSENT / Spring 2006 forcing politicians to do the wrong thing...

...There is something bizarrely ahistorical about the eagerness of certain Jewish intellectuals to proclaim their lack of discomfort in the presence of Christian symbols in public institutions...

...Their great-grandparents from Minsk and Pinsk knew better: the hairs on the backs of their necks would have prickled when they were invited to join public school classmates in singing carols about the birth of the little Lord Jesus...

...IN HIS CALL FOR left-wing moral revivalism as a counterweight to the ascendancy of the religious right in American politics ("A Difficult Marriage: American Protestants and American Politics," Winter 2006), Michael Kazin cites the historian D.G...

...No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings...

...Each formula offers a different recipe for civic disaster...

...Are we talking about a minority faith that insisted women should have an equal voice in the house of God and man or a majority of clerics who denounced feminists, well into the twentieth century, as unnatural female infidels...

...In God's Politics, he makes the stunning assertion that Bush is guilty of "bad theology" in his attitudes ARGUMENTS about war and social justice and that "the answer to bad theology is not secularism...

...No one would deny that some religious spokesmen are capable of framing moral issues in transcendent fashion...

...That is the fatal flaw in all proposals, whether from the left or the right, for a stronger religious voice in the public square...

...The limited, and often conflicting, definitions of welfare promulgated by various religions were very much on the minds of the framers of the Constitution when they deliberately omitted any mention of God from the document and instead ceded supreme authority to "We the People...

...It is no coincidence that antiSemitic quotas began to disappear as the Supreme Court began to interpret the establishment clause more strictly after the Second World War...

...But he fails to make a crucial distinction between eighteenth-century evangelicals, who supported the godless Constitution because they regarded any government involvement with religion as an insult to God, and later evangelicals, who, as their numbers grew, did everything they could to write their religious views into law, on matters ranging from Sunday postal service to the outlawing of alcohol...

...Former president Jimmy Carter, who spoke out against attempts to excise evolution from the Georgia state biology curriculum, is a spiritual descendant of the early evangelicals...

...Then Kennedy memorably observed that "our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet...

...Most southern white Protestant churches, by contrast—churches that helped spawn the present generation of Dixiecans who invoke the name of Martin Luther King in order to push the Republican faith-based political agenda—were closely allied with segregationist politics-as-usual and had no interest whatever in the welfare of blacks...

...Could there be a more reasoned yet passionate statement of secular morality than the assertion that we owe our children a peaceful world not because we are immortal but because we are mortal...

...Congress to intervene in the case involving removal of the comatose Terri Schiavo's feeding tube, for example, would have said (and did say) that they were concerned about the welfare of Schiavo and those similarly situated...

...With reverends-manqués on the stump, voters will be offered their choice of the Jesus who said, "Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy" or the Jesus who said, "I came not to send peace but a sword...

...intelligence agencies if ever there was one...

...SUSAN JACOBY is the author of Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism...

...Feldman also espouses the peculiar idea that religious minorities should not be bothered by explicitly Christian activities in tax-supported venues, say, the recitation of a prayer before a football game or the use of school facilities for Bible classes...

...The absence of any common religious definition of welfare becomes evident in every political battle over "values issues...