There are those who mourn the days of Camelot, of John F. Kennedy’s famous insistence upon the absolute separation of church and state and the irrelevance of personal faith to politics and the presidency. The 2008 presidential primary campaign—with Mike Huckabee’s talk of divine intervention, Romney’s speech on his Mormon faith, and Obama’s standard stump-speech opener: “Giving all praise and honor to God”—seems to reflect a strong turn toward the infusion of religion into presidential politics. It is hardly surprising to find voices rising against this trend, and there is certainly cause for concern, but blanket condemnations of the merging of religion and politics don’t get us very far. They blind us to the range of alternatives, and in so doing leave us with an overly simplistic understanding.
There is more than one way of bringing religion into secular politics. If we picture too sharp and settled a boundary between religion and the secular, we will be tempted to see religiously inflected politics as all of a piece. It isn’t.
Rather than imagine that we have but two simple choices, a secular politics or a religious one, we need to become more attentive to the range of options that jostle and compete in the marketplace of American political life. It just might help us move past the reigning stalemate that blinds us to the more complicated dynamics between religion and the secular in American life, past and present.
It is particularly illuminating to consider how two of the candidates have navigated these currents in this presidential election year: Romney in his unsuccessful bid for the Republican nomination and Obama in his continuing quest for the Democratic nomination. They embody two major streams that need to be distinguished. Romney advances a homogeneous “fusion” model of the relation between religion and secular public life, whereas Obama proposes a more pluralistic interactive model. And each approach can be contrasted with the separationist vision that inspired Kennedy’s winning strategy.
Kennedy: Absolute Separation
A momentous shift has indeed occurred in the place of religion in American public life in the past half century. In the mid-twentieth century Kennedy could appeal to a wall of separation between church and state, a wall that is high and unassailable. As he forthrightly proclaimed “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute.” Although anchored in the imperative to separate ecclesiastical and state authorities, this metaphor did considerably more work for Kennedy in terms of separating religion and politics more broadly; it actually defined a public secular realm for politics over against a private realm that religion properly inhabits. Religion becomes, for Kennedy, a “private affair”. The “real issues,” as he put it, concern such matters as poverty, the spread of communism, and healthcare. Denying that his religious affiliation would determine his views, he would be guided by “what my conscience tells me to be the national interest.” In this manner Kennedy sought to counter the long history of animosity against Catholics in the United States, particularly perceptions of their purportedly divided loyalties to the U.S. and to Rome.
We need to notice how readily Kennedy invoked a fundamental distinction between secular and religious affairs, and how neatly it mapped onto the public/private divide. Only within this horizon can we appreciate his unequivocal assurance that it was not religion, but his individual conscience discerning the national interest that would determine his handling of “birth control, divorce, censorship, gambling or any other subject.” These were the hot-button family value issues of his day, analogous to issues of abortion and gay marriage in our own. He dealt with the “religion question” concerning his own candidacy by essentially denying that religion played any role in secular political affairs—and this position resonated deeply with Americans in the mid-twentieth century.
Although the separation of church and state has been a feature of the United States since its founding, the principle initially applied to the federal level and was more narrowly focused on institutions. By the mid-twentieth century its application had expanded considerably, and it was invoked to legitimate a broadly encompassing separation of religion from a secularized public life. This shift was most directly attributable to a series of Supreme Court rulings, beginning in the 1940s, that advanced a separationist vision. But the secularization of higher education earlier in the century and the increasing diversity of the American population also were significant factors. By the middle of the twentieth century the strands coalesced in the ascendance of secular liberalism as a shared public creed, with religion as a private, individual option. Kennedy successfully tapped into this public vision.
Romney: God-America-Freedom
Invoking a high wall of separation has long been a strategy embraced by minority religions throughout our nation’s history as a way to protect themselves from Protestantism’s cultural and political dominance. That Romney did not choose to pursue this strategy to defend his candidacy underscores how much the religion-political landscape has shifted in the past fifty years. His challenge was considerably greater than was Kennedy’s. Most Americans have never met a Mormon, and know virtually nothing about this religion. Many continue to associate Mormonism with “un-American” practices such as polygamy and theocracy, despite their having been abandoned and officially repudiated over a century ago. Initially reluctant to even address the subject, he finally opted in a highly publicized speech last December to follow in the footsteps of JFK in explaining to the American public why his religious affiliation should not be an obstacle to his candidacy. But quite unlike Kennedy, Romney did not appeal to an absolute wall of separation between religion and secular politics, a position that has lost much of its resonance in broad segments of the American public in the past fifty years, most especially among his conservative Republican base.
Romney drew instead upon another powerful tradition of relating religion and politics in American public life, that which envisions religion as providing the foundation and common moral vision underlying our democratic politics. In this tradition secular politics and religious faith are not antithetical but partners in a common enterprise to advance freedom at home and abroad. The partnership has forged an American identity and mission that blends secular and religious motifs, enabling them to operate on two different registers simultaneously. On one level the United States is a secular nation-state located within the international system of nation-states, and on another level it is a nation with a sacred mission to advance the divine cause of liberty. Originally a Protestant religion-secular synthesis, this tradition has expanded under the pressures of diversity to include Jews and Catholics.
Romney’s strategy was to locate Mormonism within this religious coalition, thereby defending the legitimacy of his Mormon candidacy and sustaining the interface of religion and American identity and public life. Although he strongly affirmed the constitutional separation of church and state, he just as strongly rejected its expansionist rendering in which religion is “merely a private affair with no place in public life.” To Romney this smacks of efforts to establish a “new religion in America—the religion of secularism.” The relationship between religion and the secular, for Romney, is not an opposition or a compartmentalization so much as a continuum that sustains critical links between religion and the national identity and project. Faith, in his telling of our country’s founding, is foundational: “And so together they prayed, and together they fought, and together, by the grace of God, they founded this great nation.” It is a story that allows Romney to claim “freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom.” By making religious faith pivotal in the origins, identity, and mission of the U.S., Romney replaces a settled secularism with a religious-secular synthesis. If the first seeks to exclude religious voices in the public sphere, Romney’s alternative suggests that non-religious Americans are aberrations, even threats to the flourishing of the American democratic experiment.
In a separationist model the defense of religious liberty can be extended to all religions without taking up questions of their substantive differences. As private options, such differences simply don’t matter. But Romney was forced to address questions of substance, given his refusal to embrace this position. His strategy was to underscore the shared moral principles that unite the faiths within the American religious coalition, and deny the relevance of diverse theologies. The religious substance boils down to a thin civil religion that renders religions essentially equivalent, hence Romney’s remark: “every faith I have encountered draws its adherents closer to God.” It invokes memories of President Eisenhower’s well-known comment that “our government makes no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith. And I don’t care what it is.” It is this interpretive stream that still leads many Americans to assume that morality is necessarily embedded in religion.
We need to recognize what a deeply celebratory narrative Romney invoked in aligning religion and American identity and its core values, both at home and abroad. Echoing chords heard in President Bush’s speeches, Romney speaks of the “divine author of liberty” and “freedom’s holy light” with which America has been blessed. In this fashion American identity and its mission are made sacred; it is a divine project that Americans advance, and no people, claims Romney, have sacrificed more for this sacred mission. We must stay the course: “America’s resolve in the defense of liberty has been tested time and again. It has not been found wanting, nor must it ever be. America must never falter in holding high the banner of freedom.” Revealingly, Romney appeals to the religious-secular synthesis that marks national identity and mission to contrast the United States to an atheistic Europe, on the one hand, and Islamist movements that embrace forms of “theocratic tyranny” on the other. In so doing he illuminated the way in which the two registers of religion and the secular operate in this tradition, distinct on one level, though deeply fused on another.
Romney obviously recognized what an uphill battle he faced in locating Mormonism within the mainstream of American religions, and most especially among the more conservative religious voters he was courting. Anticipating the tough sell in his religion speech, he threw in the theoretically and rhetorically jarring (but politically opportune) aside affirming his belief in Jesus Christ. The apparent failure of his attempt to mainstream Mormonism within the American imagination should not blind us to the persistence of the very link between (some) religion and American identity he sought to mine. Indeed it should make us all the more aware of the way in which (some) religion and secular politics work together in a manner that any simple contrast between religion and politics fails to illuminate.
We need to become far more aware of the persistence and power of this approach to linking the religious and the secular, as it has grown increasingly problematic. Most immediately and directly, the growing diversity within American life makes a religiously based national identity deeply exclusionary. More than 13% of Americans now identify as nonreligious or secular, among the fastest growing segments of the American population. A religiously based vision of our national identity marginalizes this growing population.
Less obviously, but equally importantly, grounding American identity and mission in religion works to provide a sacred canopy that too readily legitimates American power and interests on the global stage. As we can see from Romney’s appropriation of this tradition, it lines up God-America-and freedom, effectively contrasting us with other countries that leave out God or freedom. This is a dangerous brew that allows religion to serve fundamentally as legitimation and mobilization for American military exploits abroad. The current Bush administration has been masterful in exploiting this interpretive strand to advance American foreign policy since 2001.
Religious folks should be deeply skeptical of this religio-political tradition as well. The push toward the homogenization of religion, toward accentuating the similarities of religious faiths, runs roughshod over their differences. The productive interaction between religious faith and democratic culture in the American context has increasingly veered toward the conflation of religion and a democratic faith in liberty and equality. In this trajectory God is essentially harnessed to the American national project.
The religion story about Mitt Romney in his unsuccessful bid for the White House now focuses on the continuing suspicions, even hostilities, of many Americans to Mormonism. But in our post-mortem of his campaign we should not lose sight of his larger strategy of trying to graft Mormonism to the religious-secular blend that remains deeply embedded within American life. If we think only in terms of a simple opposition between religion and secular politics, we will miss this powerful current in our public life.
Obama: a fuller, deeper conversation
Barack Obama has had to negotiate a response to both of these approaches. Not surprisingly he rejects the notion of America’s sacred mission—he refuses to tell a story of America in which its origins, identity, and mission are grounded in religion. Such a narrative does not place sufficient weight upon the principle of separation that has defined American democracy from its founding, and grown ever more urgent with the increasing diversity of the American population. “Whatever we once were,” he remarks, “we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.” His powerful rhetorical accent upon diversity, and perhaps most especially the inclusion of nonbelievers, points to the limitations of an American story that grounds national identity and democratic life in a shared religious faith. It is at bottom an exclusionary account that has grown ever more so over time.
But Obama’s accent on pluralism does not stop with attention to the variety of faiths and non-faiths that make up the American landscape. He also pays attention to the disagreements within religious traditions, asking rhetorically, even if all Americans were Christian, “whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? Would we go with James Dobson’s, or Al Sharpton’s?” That the question even needs to be asked points to the power of the conservative monopoly on religion in public discourse in recent years. Obama suggests that progressives share much of the blame for this state of affairs, in their evident willingness “to abandon the field of religious discourse.” By recourse to a high wall of separation, by using pluralism to avoid conversations about fundamental commitments, and by discounting the role of culture and religion in shaping individual and community lives, progressives have been complicit in the conservative takeover of public religion.
Rather than pursue “strategies of avoidance” concerning religion, Obama challenges progressives to better understand its power and place in American life. The majority of Americans, past and present, profess some form of religious faith: far from being a matter of private belief, religion has shaped law, fueled social movements, and transformed politics and policy throughout American history. The effort to quarantine religion to the private realm to safeguard a settled secular public realm is not only fundamentally antidemocratic, but it disregards the potentially prophetic power of religion in effecting social change.
Recognizing the legitimate place of religion in American democratic life is not the same as granting it an exalted place. As Obama rightly notes, religious people have no “monopoly on morality.” Indeed he argues that democratic virtue in a pluralistic society requires translating and explaining one’s beliefs and values in a manner that is intelligible to those standing outside one’s own faith tradition—clearly a secularizing imperative. In this model American identity and democratic politics are not grounded in a common faith, as Romney championed. Far from any static partnership between a shared religious faith and American democracy, Obama imagines a more dynamic, pluralistic interaction of voices, both secular and religious—achieved through a “fuller, deeper conversation” about religion in this country.
We need to break out of the limited options through which we envision the relations between religion and secular politics. Our choices are not between their absolute separation or, as some exaggerate, their collapse. By envisioning a secularism that is insulated from religion we actually blind ourselves to seeing, let alone entertaining, other ways of their relating. It is particularly worrisome that the separation narrative that underscores the opposition of religion and the secular cloaks the ways in which they have partnered, for both good and ill.
Before we can choose more wisely, we need to see more clearly.
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