[NYTr] America's politics of religion

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by Ed Pearl

International Herald Tribune - Dec 17, 2007
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/12/17/opinion/edcarroll.php


America's politics of religion

By James Carroll

Published: December 17, 2007

What in the name of God is going on in American politics? Mitt Romney's
"Faith in America" speech, riddled with mistaken assertions about
religion, was itself a warning. But other presidential candidates,
debate moderators, pundits and religious leaders all share a dangerous
confusion about questions of faith and citizenship. Here are only a few:

Is America's goodness grounded in God? When Romney and others assert
that American virtues, generally summed up in the idea of "freedom,"
are based on faith, a cruel fact of history is being ignored. The
politics of human rights, like the idea of individual freedom, were
born not in religion but in the Enlightenment struggle against it. When
Thomas Jefferson located "inalienable rights" in an endowment from the
creator, he was decidedly speaking from outside the mainstream of any
denominational faith. Jefferson's point was not to affirm God, but to
deny King George.

It is not an accident that "God" does not appear in the Constitution.
Following the American lead, religions, too, learned from the
nonreligious improvements of modernity, but it is dishonest to claim
after the fact that religions somehow sponsored them.

Were "the Founders" religious? It is a convention of political
speechmaking to ascribe faith to the Founders, but what kind of faith,
and what Founders? The Pilgrims, for whom "freedom" and "rights" meant
nothing, wanted a theocracy. One hundred fifty years later, the Deist
revolutionaries assumed a distant God whose interest in creation, much
less the young nation, was minimal. By Lincoln's time, traumas of war
drove piety, and it was only then that present notions of public
devotedness were born. (It was Lincoln who established the motto "In
God We Trust.") In truth, the power of faith in American politics has
waxed and waned. There is no consistent tradition to be upheld or to be
betrayed.

Is "secularism" dehumanizing? When Mitt Romney praised vital American
religion in contrast to Europe where churches are "so grand, so
inspired, so empty," one could wonder what the collapse of
institutional faith in Europe actually means. Romney condemned the
"religion of secularism." Today in Opinion Turkey's empty gesture
Blazing Arizona The Algerian terror lesson Click here to find out more!

Yet such American smugness seems to miss the largest point of difference
between the Old World and the New. In the very years that majorities of
Europeans were walking away from organized religion, they were
resolutely turning away from government-sanctioned killing, whether
through war or through the death penalty; they were leaving behind
narrow notions of nationalism, mitigating state sovereignty, and, above
all, replacing ancient hatreds with partnerships. All of this stands in
stark contrast to the United States, where the most overtly religious
people in the country support the death penalty, the government's
hair-trigger readiness for war, and the gospel of national sovereignty
that has made the United States an impediment to the United Nations.

Does God send people to hell if they vote wrong? You would think so if
you listened to the American Catholic bishops, who said in November that
forbidden political choices "have an impact on the individual's
salvation." The five Catholics running for president all hold positions
that, in the bishops' view, might earn their supporters eternal
damnation. Whenever preachers appeal to hellfire as a way of
reinforcing injunctions, you can bet they have failed to make a
persuasive moral argument.

What is discouraging here is that the bishops, aiming to reinforce their
squandered moral authority, are resuscitating an image of a threatening,
violent God that religious people generally, and Catholics in
particular, have struggled to leave behind. Religion aims not to "save"
from an unmerciful God, but to reveal that God's mercy is complete.

Is Mormonism a religion of myth? The answer, of course, is that every
religion is a religion of myth. The symbols, rituals, and sacred texts
of every faith grow out of contingent historical circumstances that
seem at odds with the transcendent claims that religions make. Joseph
Smith's origins in upstate New York might seem disqualifyingly banal,
yet so did Jerusalem to those who lived in Rome, as did Galilee to
those who lived in Jerusalem. Religions claim to be above such history,
and that myths are revelations - but the glory of God is that God
reveals through human invention. What Mormons believe is outlandish -
which is the point.

Politics and religion, like art and music, aim to accomplish the same
thing, which is to overcome absurdity with meaning. Religion does this
by seeing God's hand in history. Politics does it by affirming that, if
history is all there is, it is enough.

[James Carroll's column appears regularly in The Boston Globe.]