September 11, 2008
The Democrats launched their convention with their “First-Ever Faith Caucus.” A Republican National Committee spokeswoman told JTA, “Faith-based initiatives and family values are at the heart of our party.”
This is all too much for Abe Foxman, the Anti-Defamation League’s national director. He writes in an op-ed, “Some of what we have been seeing in this campaign is excessive and aggressive. It goes beyond a candidate’s discussing how religion shapes his or her worldview. Rather, it’s saying, ‘Vote for me because I’m a person of faith’ — and that is directly contrary to the constitutional principle that there shall be no religious test for public office.”
Actually, I don’t think that’s what the Constitution means by a “religious test.” Article VI, section 3 declares that a federal employee or elected official can’t be made to adhere to a particular faith or creed as a condition of taking office. If the voters want a Christian, a Buddhist, or a Sikh, that’s okay, just as long as the government doesn’t endorse their motivation by demanding an oath or a background check.
Certainly all the religious pandering violates the spirit of the Constitution, but Foxman and other religious liberals (by which I mean those liberal toward religion) have a problem: When it comes to politics, religion is like the proverbial camel with its nose under the tent — the revival tent.
For most of their history in this country, Jews have been comfortable when a public figure describes how “religion shapes his or her worldview.” It’s a bargain they’ve made: “If we accept your beliefs, you’ll accept ours.”
Even Jews who have very strong doubts about the specificity in which God speaks to believers — or believers speak to God — are willing to accept the way religion shapes their fellow citizens’ worldviews. Such skeptical Jews are happy to treat God-talk as metaphor: One person’s “angel” is another person’s “conscience.” One person thanks God, another thanks Goodness. It’s all good.
Interfaith amity is possible, according to this gambit, because we all have different languages and metaphors for expressing what we hope are the same basic human impulses and the same basic notions of right and wrong. Religious liberals who don’t believe in Jesus can still be stirred by Martin Luther King’s sermons because the powerful metaphors of his faith point to a vision of overriding justice.
Religious liberals are confounded by two things — people who actually believe that their religious language is meant to be taken literally and, as a result, the same people’s adherence to a very different set of convictions and ideologies than the religious liberals’. Many of those who freak out when Sarah Palin suggests that America is “sending [its soldiers] out on a task that is from God” forget how accepting they were when King and other civil rights leaders took their cues and their rhetoric from the Bible.
Even those who agree with Palin about the war can find her religious certainty troublesome. Religious metaphors are inherently pluralist; religious certainty is not. Religious metaphors are open to interpretation; religious certainty often leads to lethal action. Religious liberals hear Sarah Palin in church and see someone who, in the balance between human agency and surrender to the supernatural, has tipped to the latter.
That scares people who remember that our presidents swear (on a Bible no less) to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
Religious literalism also rocks the world of religious liberals, whose own religious enterprise is predicated on the idea that they can speak in a language of faith without taking dictation from a Supernatural Being. “New Atheist” Sam Harris even accuses liberal believers of enabling the fanatics: “The problem is that wherever one stands on this continuum, one inadvertently shelters those who are more fanatical than oneself from criticism.”
Foxman’s op-ed, intentionally or not, expresses this liberal religious quandary: How much religion is too much? Is it okay to invoke God when one speaks to a public consensus, and to censor God-talk when belief leads to a potentially divisive policy?
Committed atheists, like True Believers, face no such dilemma. Atheists are convinced all religion is narishkeit and are offended by all religious talk, whether from the pulpit or the political soapbox. To an atheist, the statement “I support (or don’t support) the war in Iraq” is a reasonable opinion. But a statement saying the war is “God’s plan” — or even “God bless America” — is a sign of mental imbalance.
Atheists, however, are a minority in this country. Americans tolerate religion, in private and public, because most see it as a force for good. Many are troubled by religious fanaticism, which they take as an inability to separate the metaphorical from the literal. But the only thing the majority worries about more is a world without religious belief. If you doubt this, just trying getting elected if you acknowledge being an atheist.
So we’re stuck with religion and politics — or blessed, depending on your worldview. We can only pray the politicians don’t abuse the privilege.
