TRUST ME
In this week’s edition of the JOURNAL, Bill Moyers asked Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Melissa Rogers about Presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s high-profile speech regarding religion and politics. In the program they reprised portions of the famous JFK speech in the 1960 campaign before the Southern Baptist convention in Houston, Texas that year.
The Kennedy and Romney approaches are quite different in tone and substance. Kennedy emphasized the separation of church and state arguing that his Catholicism would have no relevance to his decisions as president. Romney (a Mormon) by contrast suggests as does Mike Huckabee that as a "Christian leader" their religious values will shape how they govern or look at major issues like abortion or gay rights.
Romney claims that in "recent years, the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning. They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God. Religion in seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America, the religion of secularism. They are wrong."
Huckebee, who was formerly a Baptist minister, takes another approach in a campaign commercial being aired in Iowa suggesting that he doesn't have to question where he stands he knows presumably because of his Christian faith. In this sense Huckabee is referencing his religiosity much like President Bush did in the 2000 and 2004 campaigns. And like Bush, even more so to RAD, Huckabee comes off as being very authentic - much more so than Romney.
Now the question which Moyers et al did not address is what should the role of religion be in a presidential campaign? The problem is that such discussions often fail to make a clear distinction between the Founders' belief in the absolute separation of church and state, one of the hallmarks of American government and politics. The Founders forbade the establishment of a state religion, but they did not prohibit freedom "of" religious expression from the pulpit or in the public square.
This is a crucial distinction. Had they not made such a decision it's quite likely that the 13 colonies would have split up into warring factions based on the dominant religious preferences in each colony and the United States would have never been able to form "a more perfect union" as a constitutional republic. But the establishment clause has nothing to do with freedom of speech, including religious speech within a church, synagogue or mosque or in the public square.
The critical question each voter must ask of all the candidates is what is the foundation of your ethics or moral belief system? For George Bush, Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee the answer is fairly straight forward - their claims of a belief in God and the divinity of Jesus Christ are their moral center. For Rudy Giuliany (a Catholic), Fred Thompson (a Baptist) and Hillary Clinton (a Methodist) the issue is more complex since the correlation of their private and public lives is more opaque.
For Barack Obama, a member of the United Church of Christ, the question of religiosity as a ground of one's ethical core is less conflicted or so it appears to this commentator perhaps because we share the same faith journey. How religious preferences inform the world view of John McCain (an Episcopalian) Joe Biden (a Catholic), Chris Dodd (a Catholic), John Edwards (a Methodist) Bill Richardson (a Catholic) and Dennis Kucinich (a Catholic) are less clear.
The issue is NOT the question of the separation of church and state. Any candidate in the field who does not understand this is NOT qualified to be president and those who claim to be running as "Christian" leaders come very close to disqualifying themselves as candidates. Huckabee and Romney come close to this perilous line. While their stance will not bite them within the GOP battle for the nomination, it will if either becomes the GOP nominee.
Romney's inclination to bring "God" into the public square begs the question - "whose God" is he referencing? Is he talking of a Christian, Jewish or Islamic God? And where do the "Godless" citizenry fit into Romney's vision as a would-be president? To ground one's decisions on one's private generic or particular religious faith is one thing, but to invoke the word "God" in issues of governance is to violate the separation of church and state.
When one takes the oath of office (forget about the symbolism of placing a hand on the Bible) - a would-be president is declaring to be the president of ALL the people with or without a religious faith belief system. As the GOP has morphed into "the" party of fundamentalist or evangelical Christians its platform and candidate rhetoric raises all kinds of red flags on this issue. How can a "Christian" leader be a president of ALL the people?
However, if the question is what is the core of a candidate's moral beliefs - one's personal faith is a legitimate political issue because it may inform his or her decisions as president and the public deserves to know that up front what that system of belief is. For those on the political "left" this is often a dicey issue either because Dems come from a broader sweep of the population in terms of faith or lack thereof than GOP candidates.
But just because Democratic candidates often choke on this subject does not make it irrelevant. For example, Bill Clinton and Al Gore invoked their own Baptist roots on the campaign trail. So this is not a simple GOP or Dem dividing line. Now whether President Clinton in particular deported himself consistently as a Christian is in considerable doubt to say the least. But his Baptist roots clearly had traction throughout his presidency.
And if we go deeper into the intertwining of religion and politics in American history the evidence of cross fertilization is clear. The Abolitionist movement was rooted in both a religious and secular based aversion to slavery which was also reflected in the modern Civil Rights movement and within even the Black Power movement - where traditional African-American roots in the Christian tradition were challenged by the Nation of Islam.
For candidates of other faiths or who profess to be agnostics or atheists the challenge is similar - what provides you a moral core upon which to make tough political decisions? Those of the Jewish faith would have no problem answering this question; neither would Muslims, Buddhists nor Hindus. As far as RAD knows all religions of the world have some basic principle which mirrors the Ten Commandments.
For the secular humanists among us who would be president - whether or not they might be agnostic or atheist - what philosophical well do you go to in keeping your moral-ethical compass alive and well? That is not an unfair question. Do you reach out to an Eric Fromm, a Martin Buber, a Paul Tillich or a Ludwig Feuerbach (RAD's own choices when so inclined).
My own faith journey as a youth involved being baptised by his Baptist maternal grandfather (before my age of consent, 1942), being raised in a Congregational Church in Seattle (1948-50), then attending Stanford's non-denominational campus Cathedral church in Palo Alto for a year (1951) and then a Presbyterian Church in Roseburg, Oregon (1952-60).
In college at Whitman and the University of Minnesota (1960-69) RAD wavered between agnosticism, atheism and Unitarianism having been dismayed in my early life in the "church" by the moral and religious hypocrisy among the adults and my peers. It wasn't a belief in God or Jesus that I found wanting among the "faithful" but their inability to walk the talk of the Sermon on the Mount.
Nevertheless my own moral compass focused on a personal morality and a passion for social and economic justice. So religion rubbed off on me despite my leaving the "churched" community. Growing up as a hyphenated American who identified subliminally with his Italian roots more than the German side of the family tree added "honor" and "loyalty" as moral/ethical benchmarks.
As the Civil Rights movement matured and the Vietnam Peace Movement came on - connecting with Martin Luther King Jr. and/or A.J. Muste made sense to me in the mid 1960s as a I struggled with my own political identity. One didn't have to be a person of "faith" per se to oppose racism or an imperialist war. But Martin Luther King's transition from Civil Rights to anti-war leader and the role of the Clergy & Laity Against the War helped me understand that people of faith, along with we "secularists" could do the right thing!
Being married in an Episcopal Church and then being a parent would re-connect me with a "church" experience from the mid 1970s on. Today I fluctuate from "active" to "lapsed" church attendee. But my secular and faith based moral compass is clear as I lobby for affordable housing as a member of the Washington County Interfaith Committee on Homelessness.
The point is that whatever the great issues of the day might be - making up one's mind on whether to go to war against Iraq or to declare Iran a "rogue" nation should not be simply a question of "political triangulation" or a knee jerk response to a simplistic faith that asserts the immanence of the "end of time" - Armageddon. Such decisions should be based on sophisticated and carefully crafted thinking processes, not knee jerk litmus test inclinations!
In that sense, one's personal moral code in whatever form - faith-based and/or secular - is important and the more we know about the moral calculus used by candidates - the better. But to appropriate the term "God" for partisan purposes crosses the line. Otherwise campaigns will default into vacuous rhetoric where candidates use coded "God talk" as a thinly veiled appeal to voters to just "trust me."
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