c. 2005 Religion News Service
(UNDATED) That the American character is drawn to a religious view of itself is hardly new.
Almost all the Founding Fathers had something to say about the United States as a Christian nation. John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, in 1798 that “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Alexis de Tocqueville, on his road trip across the United States, noted that “the religious aspect of the country was the first thing” to strike his attention. A bit more than a century later, British philosopher Isaiah Berlin, doing a stint at the British Embassy in Washington during World War II, described Henry Wallace’s “Free World Victory” speech of 1942 as “an apocalyptic version of America as `the chosen of the Lord’ in whom the culture of Palestine, Rome and Britain are to be brought to a final fruition. America has accepted a divine mission to save the world … (with) the New Deal as the New Islam.”
So President Bush, along with other faith-based Republicans, are part of a long tradition of religious idealism in politics. The problem is that, unlike the framers of the Constitution, some forget the principle of separating church and state, so that one person’s ideals do not become another person’s shackle and one form of religious values cannot lord it over others. This religious conservatism sees the White House as a pulpit and man’s laws as a reflection of God’s. Many Americans understandably balk at this, which is probably why the president in his press conference last week distanced himself from extremists, saying “faith is a personal issue.”
It’s not easy, trying to separate morality from religion. It’s not easy working toward a society that is both just and free. But respecting pluralism need not mean that anything goes. It simply means that people of goodwill can agree to disagree about the means to certain ends. If my religion instructs me that stem cell research is acceptable, and yours does not, it neither means that my religion is bankrupt nor that yours is draconian. It does, however, suggest that you cannot make the view of your religion law. It means that while religious law may embrace certainty, civil law must embrace doubt.
In that context, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger raised some goose bumps delivering his homily to the world’s cardinals just before they were sequestered to choose their next leader. He cautioned against the “dictatorship of relativism,” reminding listeners that the world has jumped from Marxism to liberalism, from collectivism to radical individualism. “Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the church, is often labeled today as fundamentalism.”
Sounding this kind of alarm is appropriate to religion, where a call to the faithful to adhere to religious traditions and values is its purview. It’s especially understandable coming from a man who, as a child in Nazi Germany, saw firsthand the evils of an amoral relativism. For Catholics in countries where church and state are each firmly ensconced in their own realms, the speech raised questions about how austere a Catholicism they would be asked to practice, but none about how that might affect their lives as citizens.
Here in the United States the words echoed differently, causing ripples of dismay among people skeptical of absolutism enshrined as law and canny enough to know the religious right might try to make political hay from the cardinal’s warning.
This is no fault of the man who is now Pope Benedict XVI. He was speaking religiously, not politically. Here, though, his words sounded against a backdrop of a growing culture war in which the voices of moderation and individual liberty are mocked as idealistically bankrupt by the public moralists.
To a certain kind of fundamentalist, there were no legitimate questions over whether to remove Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube. For the extreme faithful, Sen. Bill Frist’s decision to appear on a religious telecast suggesting that Democrats who want to use the filibuster to oppose several of President Bush’s judicial nominees are “against people of faith” was a righteous and courageous act. For them, on issues such as these, there is no difference of opinion. There is only the right way, or heresy.
Admirable though the search for an all-embracing truth might be, history has amply demonstrated the dangers of believing one has found it. The Enlightenment morphed into the scientific certainties of Marxism, Nazism, fascism; if man was a creature of reason, he should be able to find the correct way for all mankind to live and, of course, insist that everyone join the party. Romanticism fostered the excesses of individualism and nationalism.
Society seems to careen between these extremes. Each provides a corrective to the other. That’s probably as it should be. Right now, it’s the excesses of conservative faith that need to be moderated. Surely cautious Democrats and Republicans alike can bring an idealistic fervor to a campaign for the virtuous, but difficult, middle ground between the dictatorship of relativism and the dictatorship of absolutes. The state has its job; religion has its own. That’s of particular issue today, as the United States and other nations try to promote the virtues of liberalism and democracy in response to the threat of Islamist fundamentalism.
MO/PH/JL END JEROME-COHEN
(Deborah Jerome-Cohen is deputy editorial page editor for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J.)
