For me, the most intriguing argument during Sunday’s Compassion Forum at Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania, was advanced by Barack Obama during his closing remarks. “What I believe is that all of us come to the public square with our own values and our ideals and our ethics, what we believe,” he said. “And people of religious faith have the same right to come to that public square with values and ideals that are rooted in their faith.”
Then Obama went on to describe the real challenge facing the United States as a pluralistic society. “On the other hand, what those of us of religious faith have to do when we’re in the public square is to translate our language into a universal language that can appeal to everybody.”
One explanation for the popularity of the religious right in recent decades is that their leaders have sought to impose Christianity as America’s “universal language.” (Sometimes these oracles use the term “Judeo-Christian tradition,” a phrase of exclusion coined in the 1890s and popularized in the 1930s.)
It’s not difficult to understand the appeal of this argument. America is in a freefall of moral decline, the leaders of the religious right have argued, citing everything from crime statistics and violence in the schools to teenage pregnancy and rising divorce rates. Very often, they add the logical fallacy of equating correlation with causation: increasing violence in society correlates to the teaching of evolution, they insist, or teenage pregnancies rose when prayer was removed from public schools.
The answer, according to the religious right, is to “return” America to its Christian foundations; or to “Judeo-Christian” values.
This argument held enormous appeal for many Americans, as the patterns of voting behavior over the last several decades attest. Ronald Reagan used this language to win election in 1980, and George W. Bush exploited these sentiments brilliantly in his two campaigns for the presidency, calling for the teaching of creationism in public schools and talking about his own evangelical conversions (yes, there were two: one in Midland, Texas, and another in Kennebunkport, Maine).
The main problem with this argument for a “return” to Christian morality in the public sphere, as Obama acknowledged in the Compassion Forum, is that the United States is (and arguably always has been) a religiously pluralistic nation. This, of course, was especially true after Lyndon Johnson signed the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965, which removed immigration quotas. Since then, the religious landscape of America has changed, quite literally, with Hindu temples and Sikh gurdwaras and Muslim mosques cropping up all across the nation. The religious right seized on the resentment engendered by the arrival of these new immigrants by arguing for a more fulsome and explicit embrace of the “Judeo-Christian tradition.”
The challenge facing us as a society—as Obama recognizes, and as too few politicians are willing to acknowledge—is that we can no longer employ the language of any one religious tradition when we talk about our public life. We need to reach for a new moral vocabulary for our common life, one that might draw from various religious traditions but does not stoop to exclusion. It’s essential that such a “universal language,” to use Obama’s term, will in no way disadvantage those in any particular religious tradition or those who claim no religious sensibilities whatsoever.
This, I believe, is what Obama was pointing to when he spoke about “what those of us of religious faith have to do when we’re in the public square is to translate our language into a universal language that can appeal to everybody.”
And the perils of trying to impose any particular religious perspective on a pluralistic nation? Obama suggested that the danger in the political realm is a kind of religious absolutism, and the danger to the faith is self-righteousness. “And it is important for us not to try to kill the debate by saying, ‘Well, God tells me I’m right, and so I’m not going to listen to you.’ Rather, we’ve got to translate whatever it is that we believe into a language that allows for argument, allows for debate, and also allows that we may be wrong.”
How many ways can you say Amen?
