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THREE
centuries and a decade have changed America’s image of
itself, it seems. In 1797, under George Washington, John
Adams signed a treaty with Tripoli with the following
disclaimer:
As the
Government of the United States of America is not, in
any sense, founded on the Christian religion, as it has
in itself no character of enmity against the laws,
religion, or tranquillity, of Musselmen; and as the said
States never have entered into any war or act of
hostility against any Mohamitan nation, it is declared
by the parties concerned that no pretext arising from
religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of
the harmony between the two countries.
The
words of the treaty have some relevance not only to the
US invasion and occupation of Iraq but also to the
campaign of three Democratic presidential candidates:
Hillary Rodham Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama.
They recently spoke about their beliefs before the
Sojourners/Call to Renewal evangelical organization
founded by Jim Wallis, called “liberal” by Associated
Press.
How
would Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams
have felt if they were in the audience—if they would
have attended at all? The reason for the question is not
only that these founding fathers of the American nation
were all deists, who professed belief in Nature’s God,
as stated in the American Declaration of Independence:
it’s that among their crowning contribution to democracy
is the principle of the separation of church and state.
But in
fairness, Clinton, Edwards and Obama did not exactly
turn their backs on the principle. They simply spoke of
their personal beliefs.
Hillary
Clinton related to the evangelicals how her “grounding
in faith” gave her the courage and the strength to do
what was right regardless of what the world thought.
This was obviously an allusion to her husband’s
nonpenetrating sex with Monica Lewinsky, at “which
moments,” she said “personal faith and the prayers of
others” sustained her. There was no mention if anyone in
the congregation wondered whether it was also political
prudence, but you don’t argue about faith—especially if
you’re evangelical.
But
Clinton also said that talking about her religious
beliefs did not come naturally to her—as did Jefferson,
who acknowledged privately to his friends that at
bottom, he was a Christian. “I take my faith seriously
and very personally, and I come from a tradition that is
perhaps a little too suspicious of people who wear their
faith on their sleeves.” Well spoken, but she did
nevertheless.
John
Edwards, after saying that he sinned “every single
day—we are all sinners and we fall short,” was asked by
the moderator to name the biggest sin he had ever
committed; he was loudly applauded when he answered he
would have a hard time naming one thing. Was it telling
lies, committing adultery, stealing, playing with
himself, lusting (as Jimmy Carter said in a famous
Playboy interview)? Certainly not murder or
embezzlement. But if it were (just) lying, should one
trust a president who lies every single day?
What
Edwards said about all of us being all sinners isn’t the
point; the point is whether he would lie to the American
people if he were president. In fairness to him,
however, he is one with Washington in saying that the
United States shouldn’t be called a Christian nation
even if he himself has a deep and abiding love for my
Lord, Jesus Christ.
The
closest to the spirit of the founding fathers was Barack
Obama, who focused more on policy than the personal
(just like John F. Kennedy when he was questioned on the
influence of his Catholic background on his presidency).
Asked whether he agreed with President Bush’s portrayal
of the current global struggles in terms of good versus
evil, Obama replied, “The danger of using good versus
evil in the context of war is that [it] may lead us to
be not as critical as we should about our own actions.”
He believed that 9/11 was the result of evil but he also
believed that US treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib
and Guantanamo Bay is unjust. He left it to the audience
to distinguish between “evil” and “unjust.”
The E
word is a favorite of Republican presidents. Reagan
characterized the Soviet Union as the “evil empire,”
although he may just have been thinking of Star Wars;
and Bush, of course, demonized Saddam Hussein as much as
he was demonized by Saddam. (It was a struggle between
Satan and Satan.) The Democratic president JFK, in the
bitterest confrontation with the Soviet Union, used the
term “adversary.” He spoke not of godless communism but
of the USSR’s drive for domination.
Pistic
politics
The
pistic commitment—relating or exhibiting one’s faith—is
something new in American presidential politics. It
began when President Bush, who was “born again,” won
with the evangelist votes. That was the time too when
liberal became the “L” word, meaning permissiveness and
a bleeding heart for the underprivileged. It was morning
in America for the “silent majority” and dusk for the
noisy minority.
The
conservative “revolution” was coached in pietistic
terms, as liberals became advocates for gay rights and
legal abortion, and invoked freedom of speech and
expression for pornography. To be for these things had
undertones of irreligiousness and smacked of immorality,
while cutting down on welfare and social security were
signs of “godliness.”
Books
like This I Believe became best-seller precursors
of ascendant religiosity. There was a time when
Americans were skeptical of people who wore their faith
on their sleeves, but now it’s the fashion. Pisticism
has become a political force.
The
irony is that not so long ago, Barry Goldwater, the
archconservative, was cited in the Congressional Record
(16 Sept. 1981) for his secularist defense:
There is
no position on which people are so immovable as their
religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one
can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or
Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. But
like any powerful weapon, the use of God’s name on one’s
behalf should be used sparingly. The religious factions
that are growing throughout the land are not using their
religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force
government leaders into following their position 100
percent. If you disagree with these religious groups on
a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten
you with loss of money or votes or both. I’m frankly
sick and tired of political preachers across this
country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a
moral person, I must believe in A, B, C, and D. Just who
do they think they are? And from where do they presume
to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me?
And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure
the threats of every religious group who thinks it has
some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll
call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will
fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate
their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of
conservatism.
Goldwater lost to Lyndon Baines Johnson. He probably
lost because he was too conservative, or that it wasn’t
the Republicans’ turn at the White House, but
undoubtedly he understood that the secular “religion” of
America is democracy, the democracy which the Democrat
(liberal) Franklin Delano Roosevelt succinctly summed up
as Four Freedoms: of speech and expression, of worship
(or not to worship), from fear and from want.
“Just
who do they think they are?” asked Goldwater. Simply:
they are voters and have organized themselves—in the
erstwhile New World no less, as distinct from the Old
World of religious persecutions of Medieval Europe. Now,
however, neither in Spain (whose king was defender of
the faith), France (of the divine right of kings),
Germany, Italy (site of the Vatican), there’s no
evangelism as vigorous (to put it politely) as in the
US, although it was the American Sinclair Lewis who
wrote a blistering satire of a fictional, though
familiar, preacher by the name of Elmer Gantry.
Babylon
by the Hudson
For
years, many Americans, not just evangelists, have been
castigating their country—mainly Washington, New York
and California—as the new Babylon, “the whore of the
world and the abomination on earth.” What they regard as
“permissiveness” got them religion; they changed
churches when these did not satisfy their values, they
despaired, like us, of their governments, but unlike us,
they resolved to do something about it. Surely, moral
beliefs have to do with one’s politics, but in this new
era of evangelism, these beliefs are couched in
religious terms. Because of the political force of
evangelicals, Democratic and Republican leaders stand
row to row in honoring Billy Graham and they face every
sectarian group in their terms. It’s as much out of
sincere piety as a sincere desire for votes.
The
American divide today is not between
Republican-conservative-“selfishness” and
Democrat-liberal-“permissiveness” since the pejorative
descriptions are moveable—but between secularists and
sectarians, where the former places moral and religious
values in the political sphere (per Aristotle) and the
latter places politics in the sphere of piety. Whatever
their moral and intellectual qualities, the 991,000
agnostics composing 0.5 percent of the US population, if
exposed, voluntarily or involuntarily have less chances
than gays of being elected to public office. They
comprise 0. 5 percent of the US population, not counting
the thousands of atheists among scientists and
intellectuals.
Sectarians practically deny the rights of a citizen
because they cannot be trusted either for being
uncertain that God exists or holding that He does not,
although they are more moral than any number of
Democrats and Republicans in office who proclaim their
faith. As surveys showed, 61 percent of Republicans and
32 percent of Democrats are “unlikely to vote” for
anyone who isn’t Christian in a nation which stressed on
its founding that it wasn’t a Christian nation.
In his
Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson wrote:
“It does no injury to my neighbor to say that there are
twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor
breaks my leg.” Let him say that now and he’ll see how
his pocket will be unpicked and how long his legs will
be unbroken. He was lucky that in his time he was
elected president notwithstanding the Federalists’ claim
that he was an atheist. Deists, agnostics and atheists
are often lumped together by “religionists.”
All is
not lost
The
wonderful thing about America is that like the universe,
it is ever changing. It swings from left to right, right
to left, until it finds the center. The experiment with
Puritanism in the form of Prohibition spawned Al Capone
and Elliot Ness. FDR saved American capitalism with the
New Deal and Ronald Reagan, a beneficiary of the New
Deal, reversed by dismantling the so-called “welfare
state.” It was the Thatcherite swing in Britain and even
the Scandinavian countries—Sweden, Myrdal’s
welfare-state model—that followed suit, and finally, the
Philippines, whose recent presidents have complained
that people depended too much on government, as if
government was ever dependable. (It is, though, if you
ask the right people.)
The
present divide between secularists and sectarians in
America, if ever recurring, is not permanent.
But why
are we concerned? It’s because America is in our
hearts. |
