Religious rights

Pontius Pilate’s cryptic question “What is truth?” is a phrase that launched a thousand sermons, maybe millions, over the intervening centuries. It also haunts any attempt to discuss the volatile questions asked about Christians and other religiously motivated citizens when they take their faith into politics.

For the followers of Jesus, he is the “Truth,” which converts an abstract answer into a profoundly personal one. If you accept that, it is partly with reason, mostly by faith.

Questions about the truth of religion when it enters politics, however, are both simpler–yielding to fact and more complex the stuff of wildly differing interpretations.

What is really meant by the “religious right?” Is it “dangerous?” “Extreme?”

Is biblical teaching relevant to such hot issues as taxes, abortion or the welfare state?

The difficulties start, as so often in politics, with definitions. In these cases, even the scholars differ; indeed, scholars within the same biblical or political camps differ. It probably is impossible for any writer, therefore, to speak to anything like a consensus view. The common legacy of the Bible, and the vast Western literature based loosely on it, are themselves in contention these days.

Well, to employ an example from Alexander Pope, “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” So, here goes.

What is the religious right?

The terms religious right and Christian right seem to be used interchangeably now, partly because politically conservative Christians are eager to find allies in other faiths, and partly because there now is a politically compatible movement within Judaism, ranging from Commentary magazine and “Neo-conservatives” such as Norman Podhoretz and Gertrude Himmelfarb, to Rabbi Daniel Lapin of Toward Tradition.

The learned and outspoken Rabbi Lapin, headquartered in Seattle, came to national attention for his briefs on the biblical basis for free market economics and cultural conservatism. The “Commentary crowd” are mostly former liberal intellectuals who in the 70s defected to the rights over the Cold War and Israel, issues where they believed the left had lost its compass. They noted that whereas the liberal National Council of Churches, for instance, campaigned for disarmament and tended to support the Palestinian cause, the Christian right backed stern moral and strategic defense against communism and the right of the Jews to the land of Israel.

This is still a distinction. A recent Gallup survey commissioned by the American Jewish Committee shows that voters on the Christian rights are more sympathetic to Israel (61 percent) than are other Americans (52 percent). Most also lack any bias against Jews in this country, 80 percent saying they would vote for a Jewish candidate for president.

Not only does the Christian right tend to back Israel, but politically conservative Jews have been leaders in defending persecuted Christians around the world. Michael J. Horowitz of the Hudson Institute calls himself “rootedly Jewish,” but he has become a hero to evangelical Christians by documenting the murder of Christian believers in countries like Iran and Ethiopia, and the widespread enslavement of Christian children in militantly Islamic Sudan.

Horowitz’s advocacy of religious freedom contrasts withe the indifference and even the opposition of some on the Christian left. Albert M. Pennybacker of the National Council of Churches, for example, told a House hearing in Washington last February that what seemed like “persecution” in such countries might be better explained as “the wish to preserve authentic religious and cultural traditions.”

Many Jews not on the right are made nervous by the missionary zeal and apparent dogmatism of some Christians. Conservative Christians often are religious proselytizers, after all (which is one reason their numbers have been growing). But depreciating such fears, David C. Stolinsky, a Jewish medical educator quoted by Thomas C. Reeves in his book, “The Empty Church,” put the matter into the perspective of everyday life.

“The reason we fear to go out after dark,” Stolinksy said, “is not that we may be set upon by bands of evangelicals and forced to read the New Testament, but that we may be set upon by gangs of feral young people who have been taught that nothing is superior to their own needs or feelings.”

However, while it is correct to speak of the religious right as including Jews, it is also correct to note that the overwhelming majority of its supporters are Christians–including large segments of the burgeoning fundamentalist and evangelical churches, conservatives within mainline Protestant denominations, and culturally conservative Catholics.

Total numbers are hard to ascertain, however, another sign of definitional problems. Media estimates have varied from 5 percent to 40 percent of the population. Asked “Do you consider yourself a supporter of the Religious Right political movement?” some 22 percent answered affirmatively, with another 12 percent saying they were uncertain. When asked the same question with various “tests” applied–including the question of whether the Bible is “the actual word of God and…is to be taken literally, word for word”–the affirmative answer dropped to 14 percent.

This latter number is probably too low, since it goes to a theological rather than a political definition. Many Protestants and Catholics, for example, would not agree with a “literal”–as opposed to an “inspired” interpretation of scripture and yet would agree with much of the religious right’s views on political issues.

If the Gallup estimate is probably low, it is also the case that some religious conservatives wrongly imagine that overwhelming majorities of their fellow citizens agree with them. Polls do show that nine of 10 Americans profess belief in “old-fashioned values about family and marriage,” the same percentage as believe in God.

They also might take comfort in a 1988 Gallup survey that reported that 80 percent of Americans believe in Judgment Day, 70 percent in life after death and 80 percent in miracles. Eighty-four percent believe that Jesus was the son of God and 66 percent say they have made a personal commitment to Christ.

The trouble is, these declarations made to pollsters do not correspond with actual church attendance and other religious activity, even though Americans, by any account, still rank with the Irish as among the most church-going people in the world. Nor do professions of faith necessarily equate with a political agenda.

The Religious Left

This brings us to another complaint raised against the religious right. In the fortunately rare cases where a candidate claims that God personally urged him to run, many other Christians find the remark blasphemous, and citizens in general correctly view it as an improper attempt to trump legitimate political debate. (The counterpart on the left is the attempt to trump any moral argument by claiming that all “values” are relative and non has more weight than another.) Here, one wishes that religious enthusiasts would bear in mind Abraham Lincoln’s gentle admonition, “My concern is not whether God is on our side; my great concern is to be on God’s side.”

Some critics of the religious right also contend that while it is fine to profess support for “old-fashioned family values” when it’s your own family you’re talking about, it’s another thing entirely to try to enact laws reflecting those religiously based views. Indeed, many people probably wish that religion and politics could be separated altogether. Anyone who has ever been harangued from the pulpit by a politically minded pastor or priest with whom he disagreed knows the feeling.

But serious believers of almost all persuasions would agree that faith without works is weak. And Christians, in particular, are aware of what failure to connect faith to public life has meant in the past. The silence of most German churches in the face of Nazism–along with communism, one of the great 20th century secular religions–is sufficient reminder of that.

Against the materialist superstition that man can build a perfect society, religion’s claim that striving for obedience to God in this world will yield perfection in the next seems modest, and far more humane.

It is arguably wrong to assert a strictly Christian (or, for that matter, Jewish) political position on, say, school vouchers. But, there surely is everything right with a voter using his religious study to inform his views on such issues. The American Founders, contrary to what some (not all) on the religious right contend, did not set up a Christian nation as such, but they certainly intended that religious faith would undergird public life. They were anything but secularists.

As George Washington said, “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.” Indeed, the Founders thought that religion was necessary, though sometimes potentially annoying and even dangerous, because it injected badly needed idealism into public life.

Christians early int he American Republic campaigned (unsuccessfully, at first) against Sunday delivery of the mail and (also unsuccessfully) against the expulsion of the Cherokee Indians from their ancestral home in Georgia. The anti-slavery movement was profoundly religious in inspiration, as was the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Religious leaders were part of the anti-war movement before World War II and again during the Vietnam War.

The religious left, in fact, was surely far better organized than the religious right from World War II until the late 1970s. From the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to the Rev. Jesse Jackson, many black churches long have been centers of political action. The National Council of Churches, though virtually silent for years about persecution of Christians in the Soviet bloc, was an outspoken opponent of apartheid in South Africa and denounced the commemoration of Columbus’ landing in the New World as a “discovery” that mainly brought “invasion, genocide, slavery ‘ecocide’ and the exploitation of the wealth of the land.” The Council opposed the Gulf War and applauded the election of Bill Clinton as president in 1992 as a reversal of the marginalization of various groups “during the past 12 years.”

Recently, to further counter groups like the conservative Christian Coalition, an Interfaith Alliance has been organized. Its stated purpose is “to celebrate religious diversity in our society and (to) challenge intolerance.”

However, the diversity that is celebrated does not seem to include people who disagree with the alliance’s platform, which, for example, includes opposition to school prayer, school vouchers or charter schools. This platform provides just as much a liberal agenda as the Interfaith Alliance’s target is a conservative agenda.

In a generally sympathetic account in the Seattle Weekly recently, Kathryn Robinson observed, “If the Religious Right is at war with worldliness, the Religious Left it frequently appears, is simply at war with the Religious Right.”

In general, it really seems to perturb people on the religious left, as on the religious right, that the others are there.

Toward Religious and Political Ecumenism

The greatest scandal of the church, it is said, is that it is divided.

The remark is usually made on behalf of the economical movement that has struggled for four decades to find ways to close the theological gaps and liturgical differences among Christian denominations. Oddly, the political activities of people from either the Christian right or the Christian left does cross that divide.

While there are more politically active fundamentalists and evangelicals working for conservative candidates and causes, and perhaps more active mainline Protestant church leaders (if not lay people) active on the liberal side, the greatest political affinity does not run along theological lines. You can get a nearly complete cross-section of Christian denominations out to a rally for justice and peace, as described from a liberal perspective, and a similarly broad representation out to rally for family values on the right.

It may be a good thing. Imagine how frightening it would be if religious division and political division neatly corresponded, as they did in the religious wars of Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries.

The American Founders had just that concern in mind. As John G. West Jr. of Discovery Institute and Seattle Pacific University says in his new book, “The Politics of Revelation and Reason,” the Founders believed that the just civil order that a christian might establish by faith also could be reached through reason, which God gives everyone, not just the religious.

Rejecting talk of a “religious war,” West argues for more dialogue, but starting from a common grounding in the Bible and faith rather than from political ideology. It’s harder to demonize people with whom you have prayed. Fro Christinas, he suggests, “Public policy ought to be based on public principles, and modern Christians can make this clear by appealing to the same ‘laws of nature and nature’s God’ that their forebears evoked in the public arena…”

People of faith have just as much right to participate in politics as anyone else. Christians surely have the right to differ among themselves, and to do so vigorously. But they also have the obligation, one would think, to try to do so in a spirit of love.