American Colloquium

Spirituality and Religion in American Culture, Olomouc 2000

RELIGION AND POLITICS IN THE U.S. (abstract)

David Goldfield, PhD., University of North Carolina in Charlotte

David Goldfield is the Robert Lee Bailey Professor of History at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte. He is the author or editor of twelve books on these subjects, including two works that have received the Mayflower Award for Non-Fiction, COTTON FIELDS AND SKYSCRAPERS: SOUTHERN CITY AND REGION (1982), and BLACK, WHITE, AND SOUTHERN: RACE RELATIONS AND SOUTHERN CULTURE (1990). He also serves as a consultant to the U.S. Department of Justice, history museums, and television documentary projects, and is currently working on a book, "Still Fighting the Civil War: The American South and Southern History." He is presently holding Fulbright Chair in American Studies, Uppsala University, Sweden.

It is important to keep in mind that, according to a recent New York Times poll, 95 percent of Americans profess belief in God; 76 percent imagine God as a heavenly father who pays attention to their prayers; 44 percent believe in the Biblical account of creation; and 36 percent describe themselves as ”born-again” Christians. Yet, we have a lengthy tradition of the separation of church and state, a tradition embedded in the U.S. Constitution and in the writings of founding fathers such as James Madison and Thomas Jefferson who argued that religious belief would be more likely to flourish if removed from State jurisdiction. As noted American theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr commented, ”The U.S. is at once the most secular and the most religious of Western nations.”

In a work of reflection he titled, ”Detached Memoranda,” written in 1817, James Madison averred that as long as the principle of separation of church and state is maintained, both will be safe. ”Every provision for them short of this principle will be found to leave crevices through which bigotry may introduce persecution; a monster, that feeding and thriving on its own venom, gradually swells to a size and strength overwhelming all laws divine and human.”

Yet, through much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, religion and politics have mixed, often with unhappy results for both. The great reform movements of the early nineteenth century owed their impetus to the rise of evangelical Protestantism. Causes such as the temperance movement and the abolition movement surged through churches and the electoral process. While these causes, especially abolitionism, were laudable, they tended to narrow political discourse by dividing opponents and proponents into the saved and the damned, the sinner and the righteous. The flexible system of Democratic government, built on the art of compromise, could not withstand the rigidity of a political process infused with religious enthusiasm. In the early twentieth century, the movements for Prohibition and against the teaching of evolution in the public schools provided examples of the difficulties of mixing religion and politics.

By the late 1970s, a group of evangelical Protestants had coalesced into a political lobby, the Moral Majority. Though not by any means representing a majority of the voters, nor even a majority of Protestants, they were highly energized and highly organized to have a significant impact at the local and state levels of politics. Though the immediate impetus for the Moral Majority was the threat posed by the Internal Revenue Service review of the tax-exempt status of religious schools that may have been violating racial equality statutes, U.S. Supreme Court decisions striking down school prayer and legalizing abortion also had a role in the rise of the Moral Majority. A key book in stimulating this process was The Myth of Separation by Texas fundamentalist, David Barton, who argued that the U.S. was a ”Christian nation” until the Supreme Court’s rejection of school prayer, which led, according to Barton, to the rise in divorce, sexually transmitted diseases, violent crime, out-of-wedlock pregnancies, and the decline in standardized test scores.

Many of the adherents of the Moral Majority were recent arrivals from rural areas and small towns to the anonymous suburbs of rapidly-growing metropolitan areas, the places where the new freedoms and shifting values were most pronounced. The religious right emerged partly in response to this freedom, and its agenda has focused on using the government to restrict and regulate personal life: to prohibit abortion; allow employers to hire and fire based on a person’s sexual practices; maintain criminal statutes against homosexuality and some kinds of heterosexual practices; and force television networks not to show programs that it deems immoral.

But a majority of Americans rejected the Moral Majority’s intrusion into politics, even if they sympathized with some of its agenda. By 1989, a new conservative religious political action group had emerged, the Christian Coalition, with more sophisticated lobbying techniques, closer ties to the Republican party, and political strategies predicated either on a stealth strategy, which has focused on low-turnout school board, city council, and party organization races where a motivated minority could carry the day, or on a popular front strategy which requires Coalition members to work with other Republicans even if they disagree on Coalition objectives. At the same time, the Coalition has worked to broaden its agenda to include the major issues of the day, such as health care, trade, and foreign policy.

Most Americans today view the Christian Coalition as a burden rather than as a positive influence on the political process. Comments such as religious right leader Randall Terry’s statement in 1992 that ”to vote for Bill Clinton is to sin against God,” have turned voters away from the Coalition’s social agenda. What bothers many people about the religious right is that it is a threat to their privacy. They would agree with essayist Mary McCarthy’s dictum that ”Religion is only good for good people.” The Coalition also challenges the traditions of religious diversity and its fringe elements have anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic backgrounds.

Equally damaging, the Coalition has given religion a bad name, precisely the effect that James Madison sought to avoid when he crafted the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution securing religious freedom and separating church and state. Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in Moral Man and Immoral Society that ”Christianity at its best has leavened the natural egotism of groups and nations. . . . Christianity does not provide a political agenda but rather an underlying social conscience with which to approach politics. Religion plays its most constructive role precisely when church and state are separate. When the two are fused, however, . . . then religion becomes subordinate to politics. It becomes infected with the darker egoism of group and nation; it no longer softens and counters our ungenerous impulses but clothes them in holy righteousness.”

The certainty of the religious right belies their fear that the world they knew and understood is a world that exists no longer. As Niebuhr noted, ”Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are not sure that we are doubly sure. Fundamentalism is, therefore, inevitable in an age which has destroyed so many certainties by which faith once expressed itself and upon which it relied.” The religious right is a reflection more of religion’s weakness than its strength. A faith that requires the support of a government is an infirm faith. There is no law in the U.S. that inhibits conservative Christians from finding their God in their houses of worship or in their homes. They will flourish or not flourish according to the spiritual quality of their exertions. And politics is too small to intrude into the most exalted meanings of religious faith.

It is important to keep in mind that, according to a recent New York Times poll, 95 percent of Americans profess belief in God; 76 percent imagine God as a heavenly father who pays attention to their prayers; 44 percent believe in the Biblical account of creation; and 36 percent describe themselves as "born-again" Christians. Yet, we have a lengthy tradition of the separation of church and state, a tradition embedded in the U.S. Constitution and in the writings of founding fathers such as James Madison and Thomas Jefferson who argued that religious belief would be more likely to flourish if removed from State jurisdiction. As noted American theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr commented, "The U.S. is at once the most secular and the most religious of Western nations."

In a work of reflection he titled, "Detached Memoranda," written in 1817, James Madison averred that as long as the principle of separation of church and state is maintained, both will be safe. "Every provision for them short of this principle will be found to leave crevices through which bigotry may introduce persecution; a monster, that feeding and thriving on its own venom, gradually swells to a size and strength overwhelming all laws divine and human."

By the late 1970s, a group of evangelical Protestants had coalesced into a political lobby, the Moral Majority. Though not by any means representing a majority of the voters, nor even a majority of Protestants, they were highly energized and highly organized to have a significant impact at the local and state levels of politics. Though the immediate impetus for the Moral Majority was the threat posed by the Internal Revenue Service review of the tax-exempt status of religious schools that may have been violating racial equality statutes, U.S. Supreme Court decisions striking down school prayer and legalizing abortion also had a role in the rise of the Moral Majority. A key book in stimulating this process was The Myth of Separation by Texas fundamentalist, David Barton, who argued that the U.S. was a "Christian nation" until the Supreme Court’s rejection of school prayer, which led, according to Barton, to the rise in divorce, sexually transmitted diseases, violent crime, out-of-wedlock pregnancies, and the decline in standardized test scores.

Most Americans today view the Christian Coalition as a burden rather than as a positive influence on the political process. Comments such as religious right leader Randall Terry’s statement in 1992 that "to vote for Bill Clinton is to sin against God," have turned voters away from the Coalition’s social agenda. What bothers many people about the religious right is that it is a threat to their privacy. They would agree with essayist Mary McCarthy’s dictum that "Religion is only good for good people." The Coalition also challenges the traditions of religious diversity and its fringe elements have anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic backgrounds.

Equally damaging, the Coalition has given religion a bad name, precisely the effect that James Madison sought to avoid when he crafted the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution securing religious freedom and separating church and state. Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in Moral Man and Immoral Society that "Christianity at its best has leavened the natural egotism of groups and nations. . . . Christianity does not provide a political agenda but rather an underlying social conscience with which to approach politics. Religion plays its most constructive role precisely when church and state are separate. When the two are fused, however, . . . then religion becomes subordinate to politics. It becomes infected with the darker egoism of group and nation; it no longer softens and counters our ungenerous impulses but clothes them in holy righteousness."

The certainty of the religious right belies their fear that the world they knew and understood is a world that exists no longer. As Niebuhr noted, "Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are not sure that we are doubly sure. Fundamentalism is, therefore, inevitable in an age which has destroyed so many certainties by which faith once expressed itself and upon which it relied." The religious right is a reflection more of religion’s weakness than its strength. A faith that requires the support of a government is an infirm faith. There is no law in the U.S. that inhibits conservative Christians from finding their God in their houses of worship or in their homes. They will flourish or not flourish according to the spiritual quality of their exertions. And politics is too small to intrude into the most exalted meanings of religious faith.

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