God and the Government

...Many opponents of abortion are not motivated by religion at all...

...In one of his more acute pronouncements, Ralph Reed wrote in 1994 that "Some people view people of faith as latter-day Babbitts who troop to churches in polyester suits, handle snakes, and pray in tongues for the return of Jim Crow and patriarchy...

...the separation of church and state would be unaffected...

...And just as with civil rights, enacting a constitutional amendment to forbid it would involve no official recognition of religion...

...As a result, contemporary advocates of strict separation such as the American Civil Liberties Union, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and People for the American Way have "original intention" on their side, while conservatives who support prayer on public occasions are reduced to citing the Declaration of Independence or the speeches of Abraham Lincoln...

...Ah, but you spotted a crucial difference...

...It may mean at least two different things...

...Oddly enough, many members of the press feel hurt and baffled when evangelicals accuse them of systematic prejudice against Christians...

...No reporter would dare say such a thing about the millions of black church members whose ministers urge them every November to go out and vote Democratic...

...The paper later apologized...

...In the second, an arm of the government—public education—is being asked to endorse, even carry out, an explicitly religious activity...

...Gregory, who demonstrated the medieval Church's authority over the state by receiving the Emperor Henry TV's submission at Canossa...

...Why should historical commemorations restrict themselves to a measly month...

...But nobody should be outraged or frightened when Christianity or any other religion spills over the dam that divides church from state...

...After showing up for communion anyway, according to Omer Englebert's Lives of the Saints, the King "with a blow from his sword cleaved open Stanislaus' head, so that his brains spattered the walls...

...Here again, judging by polls, many people apparently agree with my demand without necessarily sharing my religious views...

...Suppose I joined a black evangelical church in Alabama around 1960 and became persuaded that because all people are equal in Christ, my religious duty was to go demonstrate for civil rights...

...Suppose, 30 years later, still in Alabama, I joined an evangelical church (white, black or integrated) and became persuaded that because Christ commanded his followers to bear witness to their faith, organized prayer in the public schools was essential to bringing up children properly...

...The determination to abolish slavery began among English evangelicals at the end of the 18th century...

...I disagree with most of what they stand for...

...A third case—abortion—makes the whole business even more messy and contentious...

...Brooding on the connection between politics and religion reduces many on the Left to something not far removed from insanity...

...More recent liberal causes, from pacifism to feminism to support for illegal immigrants to gay liberation, have found enthusiastic support in the so-called mainstream Protestant churches, particularly the Episcopal Church...

...Between those dates usually come Passover and Easter, the two major Judeo-Christian holidays memorializing victories of faith and the supernatural over secular power...

...In the first instance, nobody is asking the government to take any position on matters of theology...

...In that case, I would be asking government at every level to change existing laws because they violated the teachings of my religion...

...But as subsequent history indicates, establishment is not the only way for religion to flourish, let alone the best...

...This year Maureen Dowd of the New York Times celebrated Easter by mocking Independent Counsel Kenneth W Starr as "prissy" and a "holy roller" because he "attended Bible College and still reads the Bible and sings hymns when he jogs...

...In its period of greatest effectiveness in sweeping away segregation, it began as an obscure religious movement, passed through a stage of martyrdom, acquired a moral prestige that made it unstoppable, yet came to be remembered not as a spectacular modem example of Christian witness against an unjust world, but as a self-evident vindication of secular equality whose roots in religion were minimized by white liberals...

...Consider: On April 4,1968, Martin Luther King Jr...

...The great liberal causes in British and American history historically owed much of their muscle to religious fervor...

...The almost universal assumption that separation between religion and government is a liberal doctrine, however, is far from self-evident...

...Why then is the role of religion in politics so commonly mistrusted today by liberals—so frequently attacked as an attempt by ayatollahs of the far Right to enforce antique prohibitions on everyone else...

...On May 30, 1431, Joan of Arc was burned at the stake in Rouen after leading armies that raised the siege of Orléans in April-May 1429 and began liberating France from the English...

...As aficionados know, the Bimonth also includes May 25, the day of St...

...Would it be fair to suggest that several of our national dialogues would profit from an end to such attitudes...

...The Constitution never mentions God and refers to religion only twice, both times to indicate its separateness from government...

...The so far not very effective Coalition, Justin Watson concludes in his informative new book...

...The abolition of slavery throughout most of the world during the 19th century was the greatest triumph of Victorian Christianity...

...Or if you prefer a more gruesome tradition, there's Bishop Stanislaus of Cracow (May 7), who excommunicated King Boleslaus II for sexual debauchery...

...Religion has played a prominent role —many different roles—in politics since at least the time of the Old Testament prophets, and still does...

...Of course, many non-Christians supported the same demands for purely secular reasons...

...In the 20th century the Christian Left has had far more impact on politics than the Christian Right, which has yet to accomplish any of its major goals...

...As long as religious people have convictions about the world, their convictions will affect their politics...

...A lot of the anger and confusion arises from failure to distinguish between them...

...What exactly does it mean to say that someone, whether liberal or conservative, is dragging religion into politics...

...The Christian Coalition: Dreams of Restoration, Demands for Recognition, is an idealistic, often nostalgic organization created to uphold the moral views and interests of a traditional kind of evangelical family...

...True, it was 18th-cenrury liberals like Thomas Jefferson who opposed having an Established church such as the Church of England, while some people who would today be called conservatives supported one...

...There are probably two immediate answers to that question: the Pope and the Christian Coalition, the organization liberals most love to hate at present...

...They want to like him, they really do, only he's so backward on sex...

...The insignificance of the Church of England for most of its own history suggests that kind of a relationship to the state weakens rather than strengthens the political impact of religion...

...A sixth of a year gives you twice as much to sink your teeth into, and in spring the fruits of the spirit seem to get more than usually entangled with the vines of state...

...Guaranteeing civil rights to black Americans is an entirely secular policy, consistent with a century of (largely unenforced) law, whatever the motivation of some people who argue for it...

...only with the Civil War did secular politicians come along in large numbers...

...After Gary Bauer, director of the Family Research Council, urged the Clinton Administration to do what it could for Chinese Christians persecuted by their government, the president of the National Council of Churches compared Bauer—not the Chinese dictatorship— with the Nazis...

...Even when they speak temperately on issues where one would expect little controversy, leaders of the Christian Right get few breaks...

...In modern times, the State of Israel was founded on May 14, 1948...

...The surprising thing today is not that priests, ministers, rabbis, popes, and devout lay people make religiously based political demands, but that such demands are so often attacked as an illegitimate imposition of spiritual authority, whether they derive from Jesse Jackson and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference on the Left or Pat Robertson and the Christian Coalition on the Right...

...To accept the totalitarian threat of CC political activism as real without evidence," Watson warns, "is to plunge through the looking glass into the intellectually bankrupt wonderland of conspiracy theories...

...The Christian Coalition gets a much worse press...

...The civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s passed through the same historical trajectory...

...was assassinated in Memphis after leading nonviolent protests that obliterated whatever vestigial moral reputation segregation had when he began...

...Of course, those of us who don't share their faith have a right to judge their proposals from our own secular point of view...

...These churches routinely lobby their members to demand Federal legislation on poverty, homelessness, even paying our United Nations dues...

...The Washington Post described their followers in a 1993 phrase that soon became notorious: '"largely poor, uneducated and easy to command...

...Whether such an amendment would be a good idea is highly dubious, but lambasting or ridiculing the Christian Right too often substitutes for debating it on substance...

...American abolitionism was likewise to a large extent a religious phenomenon...

...But people who oppose abortion usually do so because they regard at least some forms of it as murder, and being against murder is even more common among the nonreligious than being in favor of civil rights...

...Whenever John Paul II visits the United States, the major news media praise him for his criticisms of capitalism, denounce his opposition to abortion and women priests, and tactfully urge him to give up the supernatural nonsense so he can be consistently progressive...

...In this case, I would be asking government to override a series of recent Supreme Court interpretations which, although plausibly supported by the text of the First Amendment, contradict 200 years of widespread practice...

...Abortion-rights supporters typically denounce all opposition to abortion as an attempt to enact bigoted religious doctrines or, in a common phrase, to "force your morality on me...

...Its leaders, particularly founder Robertson and former director Ralph Reed, are consistently portrayed as evil and deceptive...