COMMENTARY: Election Signals Escalating Religion War

c. 2004 Religion News Service (Rabbi Rudin is the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser and Distinguished Visiting Professor at Saint Leo University.) (UNDATED) My Oct. 1 Religion News Service commentary asked: “Will the `Three Gs’ of God, guns, and gays trump jobs, health care and education? We’ll all know on the night of Nov. […]

c. 2004 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin is the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser and Distinguished Visiting Professor at Saint Leo University.)

(UNDATED) My Oct. 1 Religion News Service commentary asked: “Will the `Three Gs’ of God, guns, and gays trump jobs, health care and education? We’ll all know on the night of Nov. 2.”


Because I was certain the answer would be a resounding “Yes,” I was not surprised that “moral values” emerged as the campaign’s top issue. Yet, when my article appeared a month before the election, many readers scoffed at the question, and even now still express shock about the political potency of the “Three Gs.”

But my understanding of the religious and political texture of today’s “red zone” goes back a long time. As a Jewish youngster, I grew up in a small Virginia city dominated by a Southern Baptist/evangelical ethos. Over the years, I have kept in touch with many Christian classmates from high school and watched their political and religious beliefs harden into a defiant commitment to the policies of the current Republican Party.

Today I live and vote in Lee County in southwest Florida, which gave George W. Bush more than 60 perecent of its vote Tuesday, even more than in 2000. Around these parts, the national Democratic Party is frequently described as dominated by “blacks, San Francisco radicals and Northeast liberals.”

Some of the national pundits and pollsters who were wrong about the Kerry-Bush battle should have visited Lee County before the election to discover what was going to happen Nov. 2.

The success of the film “The Passion of the Christ” among evangelical Protestants and theologically conservative Catholics was an accurate cultural predictor of the heavy Bush vote by those two groups.

In this part of Florida, mainstream Protestant institutions, especially the National Council of Churches, are frequently ignored and even ridiculed by evangelicals, who are fueled by a long-simmering sense of revenge. Now, after decades of being scorned by theologically liberal Christians, evangelicals feel vindicated.

And what about the political behavior of the Jews of this region? It was a microcosm of the larger American Jewish community.


Many of my Jewish neighbors in Lee County are the older children and beneficiaries of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Most of them strongly supported John Kerry’s White House bid. That was an obvious fact long before Election Day.

But something else was at work in the Jewish political psyche this year. For months leading up to Nov. 2, whether to vote for Kerry or Bush dominated much of the talk at our local synagogue. A few traditional Democrats, one a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst, defiantly announced they were voting for the president because of a single issue: his support of Israel’s security and survival.

Heated debates constantly broke out on the subject, and as Election Day neared, our mailboxes and computers were filled with pleas from such folks as former New York City mayor Ed Koch (pro Bush) and Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz (pro Kerry).

Had our synagogue been a “focus group,” it would have been clear that the once near-unanimous vote for Democratic presidential nominees was eroding. In fact, almost a quarter of America’s Jews voted for Bush despite serious concerns about domestic issues _ especially the one troubling almost every Jew.

I believe the historic American separation of church and state will be vigorously attacked in the next four years. Almost unnoticed during the campaign was the comment made by Philadelphia’s Cardinal Justin Rigali, who after meeting the president called the separation principle a “misinterpretation of the Constitution.”

We will likely hear some talk in the new Congress and within conservative think tanks about officially designating the United States a “Christian nation.” The Texas Republican party adopted such a resolution at its convention last spring.


Finally, “culture war” is a euphemism for what is really taking place. It is actually a “religious war” that can easily get out of control with terrible results. In the war, “secularists,” “humanists” and “non-churchgoers” are not simply political opponents, but evil enemies of God.

In 17th century Europe, Protestants and Catholics fought one another in the Thirty Years War between 1618 and 1648. This different kind of war promises to last much longer.

Using wartime language, I ask yet another question: Was the 2004 election a Gettysburg, the decisive battle at which evangelicals and Catholic conservatives won the war, or was it the the fall of Fort Sumter, which marked the formal opening of hostilities? Was it the high-water mark of power and influence of the conservative evangelical/Catholic alliance? Or was it the beginning of the end of nearly 220 years of an American republic based on separation of religion and state, on pluralism, personal liberty and freedom of conscience?

LF/JL END RNS

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