Stephen L. Carter, Basic Boooks, 2000
1
[God’s Name in Vain] argues two interrelated theses: First, that there is nothing wrong, and much right, with the robust participation of the nation’s many religious voices in debates over matters of public moment. Second, that religions, although not democracy, will almost always lose their best, most spiritual selves when they choose to be involved in the partisan, electoral side of American politics.
2
Only by looking at politics through the lens of faith, rather than faith through the lens of politics, will we be able to comprehend the nature and resilience (and the sensible limits) of the involvement of overtly religious organizations and individuals in our public life.
3
. . . why is it more “fanatical” for parents to tell their children that the creation story in Genesis is literally true than for the public schools to tell the same children, required by law to attend, that the religion of their parents is literally false. Or why is it more “fanatical” to criticize the culture for not reflecting a particular religious view on, say, the role of women than to criticize a religion for not reflecting the culture’s views on the same thing. In short, the danger, if there is one, is mutual.
4
A nation that truly values religious freedom, . . . a nation that truly values the constitutional separation of church and state, must welcome the religious voice into its political counsels. To do otherwise is one sure way to accomplish the task of alienating the religious from democracy, for it places official imprimatur on the cultural message that religion is an inferior human activity.
5
Relligion is what we profess and morality is what it moves us to do. Politics needs morality, which means that politics needs religion. In a nation grown increasingly materialistic and increasingly involved in urging satisfaction of desire as the proper subject of both the market and politics, the religious voice, at its best, is perhaps the only remaining force that can call us to something higher and better than thinking constantly about our own selves, our own wants, our own rights. Politics without religion must necessarily be, in today’s America, the politics of me.
16-17
. . . when God-talk mixes with the partisan side of politics: More than likely, for too many people with causes to push and desires to fulfill, the name of God will collapse into a mere rhetorical device. Instead of maintaining the sacred character guaranteed by the Third Commandment, God’s name becomes a tool, a trope, a ticket to get us where we want to go.
18
. . . the erroneous assumption that it you discredit the messenger you discredit the message.
19
If history has taught us anything, it is that religions that fall too deeply in love with the art of politics lose their souls, very fast.
22
Sects that were hierarchical and dogmatic in Europe surrendered most of that character upon reaching these shores. Thus the most successful sermons of the early nineteenth century featured “the Jeffersonian notion that people should shake off all servile prejudice and learn to prove things for themselves.”
When a religious community becomes too regularly involved in politics, the community loses tough with its own best self and risks losing the power, and the on lobligation, to engage in witness from afar, to stand outside the corridors of power and call those within to righteousness. [This is called] the Integrity Objection.
When a religion decides to involve itself in the partisan side of politics, in supporting one candidate or party over another, it not only runs a high risk of error; it also, inevitably, winds up softening its message, compromising doctrine to make it more palatable to a public that might remain unpersuaded by the Word unadulterated.
23
Too many religious groups, however, want to influence electoral politics, a danger not to politics or democracy but to faith.
. . . to be involved in public dialogue without becoming involved in partisan politics will require a delicate balancing act, for it is very easy to stumble.
25
From the traditional Christian point of view, and certainly from the point of view of many other faiths, religion is not merely an aspect of life, to be divided from its other parts. Belief in God is a totality.
To the faithful, there is no part of the day that is outside of God’s view. . . . very few religionists anywhere in the world live lives quite as faithful as they believe they should. But our religious faith helps most of us to see the road we should be traveling, even if our human weakness often makes us travel it poorly.
Human life is characterized by the search for meaning. . . . there is, to each thing, a purpose it must fulfill. . . . most humans still believe that we are somehow connected to something transcendent, something larger and wiser than we are. Thus religions, too, provide meanings to their adherents, meanings of a deep and transcendent sort. What is religion, after all, but a narrative a people tells itself about its relationship with God, usually over an extended period of time? And if the narrative is truly about the meaning God assigns to the world, the follower of the religion, if truly faithful, can hardly select a different meaning simply because the state says so.
28
Humphrey wanted to talk about policy (ending racial discrimination). [Fannie Lou] Hamer wanted to talk about religion (establishment of the Kingdom).
The biblical prophets rarely called upon the nation to choose new leaders. Instead, they called upon the leaders themselves to change their hearts, often predicting doom if they did not.
29-30
Indeed, the very idea that God’s will is both different from and higher than the will of fellow humans, even humans with the power to create binding law, is one of the signal contributions of Judaism to civilization. In the Jewish tradition, the idea of this difference is illustrated by the prophets calling Israel to account for failing to adhere to the will of God. Christianity, founded as a prophetic religion, squandered much of this wisdom during its thousand-year effort to meld the spiritual and temporal powers into one.
30
A religion that makes no difference in the life of the believer is not really worthy of the name. The difference religion makes, the way in which believers deviate from the cultural norm, is the measure of its subversive power. At its best, religion in its subversive mode provides the believer with a transcendent reason to question the power of the state and the messages of the culture. That is the reason that the state will always try to domesticate religion: to avoid being subverted.
30-31
Any state will try to control the forces that might upend it, because a state, as though organic, will do whatever it must to survive. Religion is a potential threat to that survival. The domestication of religion is the process through which the state tries to move3 religion from a position in which it threatens the state to a position in which it supports the state. And that was the purpose of Hubert Humphrey’s negotiation with Fannie Lou Hamer [chair of the Mississippi Freedom Party at the 1964 Democratic National Convention], to move her from a relatively radical position, in which she threatened his political prospects, to a domesticated position, in which she became a supporter. For there is a lesson every politician knows that too many religionists involved in politics forget: Once you take sides in an electoral contest, you are stuck with your candidate, warts and all. If it turnes out that your candidate actually holds positions antithetical to your religion, well, if you want to be serious about your politics, you ignore or explain away or even lie about this inconvenient fact. Hamer, to her credit, refused to become a supporter.
31
. . . this battle between the insiders who run the state (and perhaps the culture) and the prophetic outsiders who are moved by their faith to call the insiders to account? It is a battle about the meaning of our very existence.
31
A democracy hat lacks the moral force of religious understanding is likely to be a democracy without purpose, in which politicians promise to allow citizens simply to satisfy their own wants, whether for money, power, or sex, will little regard for the needs of others; in which the measure of success in war is how small a sacrifice the nation’s citizens are called upon to make, as the enemy’s dead, including civilians, pile up, unmourned, at least by Americans, they are, after all, merely the enemy; in which the worst off are allowed to languish and often die in their segregated urban prisons, while the elite live in safe high-rises and safer suburbs. And if that description sounds much like the America we actually have, either religion is being insufficiently prophetic or a selfish society has decided not to listen, or both.
31-2
Religion, at its best, is subversive. Religion resists. It often resists, in particular, the values of the dominant culture. It resists because religious people sometimes feel called by God to stand for something different that what everybody else believes, nomatter how radical the vision they are pressing might seem to others.
33
If religion at its best is subversive, politics at its best proposes that the nation stands for something. Humphrey was arguing, in effect, that the nation should stand against racial exclusion, and that politics, working for the election of the Democratic ticket, was the best way to achieve that stance.
[But Hamer] sought a somewhat different goal. . . . She wanted more than an end to racial segregation: By calling for the establishment of the Kingdom, she was proposing a radical restructuring of American society, and a radical reordering of its priorities.
The reason Humphrey could not give Hamer what she wanted was not, really, because her vision was religious; it was that her religious vision was too radical to be considered in politics. Which is not the same as saying her vision was wrong.
Politics is the art of the possible; bargaining and compromise are its life’s blood. Of election campaigns this is particularly true. No candidate ever comes before the voters clothed entirely in authenticity. Candidates who want to win are constantly shifting, shading, spinning, softening, omitting, emphasizing, sometimes even reversing field.
34
“When I [John Maynard Keynes] get additional information on a subject, I now and then change my mind/ What do you do?”
35
The civil rights movement, in Mrs. Hamer’s day, the middle years of the 1960’s, was still characterized by a remarkably radical energy, a vision of a nation fired by love and commitment rather than profit and self-seeking, a nation in which the very meaning of life was defined by the Gospel commandment to love one’s neighbor. That vision was explicitly Christian, and it was doomed from the start, doomed in the sense that it could not possibly be realized through politics. The flaw lies in politics, not in religion, which is no knock on politics; but religion, at its best, is a higher path to some of the truths that politics dimly perceives.
37
Our political system does not exactly screen radicalism out; very often, it invites radicalism in, in order to tame it, to take energy that might have been devoted to the restructuring of the culture or the economic system, and twist that energy instead into the gaining of minor triumphs in the political system. Social movements are domesticated, softened, absorbed. Radical challenges to the status quo morph into demands for a moderately larger piece of the pie, and the basic social structure remains unchanged.
. . . co-opting radical energy is only possible, however when radicals are willing to be co-opted. Religious radicals are, or should be, harder to co-opt, because although politics heals with compromise and negotiation, religion, at least in the Western experience, tends to deal in absolutes. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in his never-completed Ethics that compromise is the enemy of the Word. He was writing in the context of the struggle by many German churches to resist the orthodoxy being imposed upon them by the Nazi regime, which wanted to control the content of the Christian message. But his point may be generalized. Religion that is not pure in its fidelity to its vision of truth, religion that is unfaithful, begins to lose its distinctively religious character and becomes much like everything else. When a religion enters politics, it at once finds itself bombarded with demands for compromise. The message must be softened, or hardened, or omitted altogether. . . . the risk is especially great when a religion enters electoral politics. Candidates, as we have seen, will do what they must in order to win. They will likely welcome religious supporters as they would welcome anybody who might be able to raise money, ring doorbells, or generate votes. But that support, as we shall see, always leads to infidelity, infidelity of religious to its own best self.
38
The theologian James Cone has written about the risks of a black theology too wrapped up in Marin Luther King, not because Cone has no respect for King, whom he calls the most important theologian in American history, but because emphasizing King to the exclusion of the more radical thinkers “makes it easy for whites to ask for reconciliation without justice and for middle-class blacks to grant it, as long as they are treated specially,” a reference, presumably, to affirmative action. Cone, like West, wants black leadership, especially the church leadership, to focus on justice understood more broadly than ensuring that the proper number of black students are admitted to the best colleges.
39
Once the decision to become electorally active was made, the power of prophetic ministry was lost. If you are in the business of endorsing candidates and pushing for their election, you can hardly pretend to stand outside the corridors of power to call the nation to righteousness. You are far more likely to soften the message, reinterpret the Gospels, and do what is necessary to retain the status of the insider. Cone complained, correctly, back in 1976 that too many black churches “adopt their value system for the American capitalistic society and not form Jesus Christ.” But the villain may not be capitalism alone. The villain may be politics itself.
174-5
Evolution does not, however, mean the surrender of sacred truths. To say that a faith must change its most precious values because the values of the world have changed, a claim heard, for example, in the mainline Protestant churches from the end of the nineteenth century up to the present day, invites the skeptic to conclude that the moral lessons a church tries to teach emerge not from the mind of God but from the imagination of fallible humans. Unfortunately, a growing number of religious leaders write and speak as though they view religious truth in precisely this way. For example, the theologians who constitute the so-called Jesus Seminar argue that we must begin our understanding of the Gospels by excluding all claims that are supernatural. The retired Episcopal bishop Shelby Spong of my own Episcopal Church, author of a book claiming that Christianity must “change or die.” Has suggested, among other ideas, that Jesus may have been married and that Mary did not become pregnant with the baby as a result of the intervention of the Holy Spirit but was, perhaps, a victim of rape. It may be that Bishop Spong was merely engaging in theological speculation, peculiar speculation though it may be, and that the members of the Jesus Seminar were merely offering helpful hints to non-Christians who might nevertheless gain from a study of Christ’s moral teachings. I certainly hope so. Otherwise, Christianity is already changing, in ways that might ensure its death. When leaders of a faith decree, in effect, that their faith is a human invention, they have lost the right to call their activity religious, for they have surrendered the transcendence that marks religion as distinct among human activities. After that point, there is no longer a reason for anybody to pay attention to them.
175
The space carved out for religious liberty by the separation of church and state as it should b e understood is a space for the religious, working in community, to engage in prayer and discernment about God’s will, and to strengthen each other to stand against the cultural forces trying to breach the wall. [The wall of separation of church and state, “the garden and the wilderness.”]
A religion cannot call the world to account once it has decided that its own traditions are wrong and the world is right.
178
[expansion of public education – the period of the development of Progressive ideology between the Civil War and WWI]
184
. . . the very idea that we can aggregate these costs [of the errors the state will make if it is the central source of meanings will be smaller than the aggregate costs of the errors the parents will make if the family is the central source of meanings], or for hat matter, that we have measured them correctly, rests on the assumption that the dominant paradigm will remain undisturbed, that no subsequent shift, perhaps led, as so often, by a radically subversive religious vision, will undo what we have thought to be settled moral and even scientific knowledge. Once we kill off the ability of the religious to create centers of meaning in serious opposition to the meanings of the state, we are left without the possibility of future prophets calling us to righteousness. Perhaps some would prefer an America without any truly subversive, and truly effective, prophetic voices. But how do we know that the system established today to promote liberal hegemony by wiping out opposing centers of meanings will not be captured tomorrow to promote racist or fascist hegemony? How do we know, in other words, that the good guys will always, or even usually, be on top? Nothing is the history of the state as an entity, or of humanity as a species, justifies so extraordinarily optimistic an assumption.
185-6
. . . even if we create these spaces for the nurturing of religious resistance, they will, in the long run, be useless, unless religions resist. So much of American religion today has become so culturally comfortable that one can scarcely find differences between the vision of the good that is preached from the pulpit and the vision of the good that is believed by the culture. If a religion wants to be just like everything else, it needs no guarantee of religious liberty. After all, both breakfast cereal manufacturers and automobile companies manage to transform themselves constantly into images acceptable to the culture without the benefit of a constitutional right to do it.
If the Constitution or the culture or the two in combination do manage to carve out the spaces in which religionists can freely build communities preaching meanings sharply at odds with those that dominate our era, religion must take advantage of that opportunity. In America today, so many traditions are politically identifiable. In the Protestant churches, the problem is especially acute. Denominations that make common cause with the Right have learned to mute the Gospel message about the dangers of wealth. Denominations that make common cause with the Left have learned to cast aside New Testament teaching about sex. . . . the pull of political involvement, if it is heeded, invariably alters the content of the message. The Integrity Objection holds firm.
American religion needs more time in the garden, less in the wilderness, more time for prayer and discernment, more time for renewal, more time for community, more time to discover what it is that God is calling it to be. Prophetic witness, the distant, transcendent voice that calls on the nation to repent and return to righteousness, is impossible if religion is comfortable. The religious voice is destroyed when religion yields to the temptation to be important, to shape the outcome of elections, to fit snugly into the culture, to make filling the seats on the Sabbath day the highest goal. And without the religious voice, our politics will be nothing, which means, in a democracy, that our nation will be nothing.
And religion: Without renewal, without a retreat from the wilderness and a return to the garden, without more time spent listening to the voice of God and less time spent drafting position papers or fighting over who gets to be in charge of what, without these necessities, religion will be nothing too.
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