[R-G] America's politics of religion

[Richard Menec]

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/12/17/opinion/edcarroll.php

International Herald Tribune | Opinion

Carroll: America's politics of religion

By James Carroll

Published: December 17, 2007

What in the name of God is going on in American politics? Mitt Romney's 
"Faith in America" speech, riddled with mistaken assertions about religion, 
was itself a warning. But other presidential candidates, debate moderators, 
pundits and religious leaders all share a dangerous confusion about 
questions of faith and citizenship. Here are only a few:

Is America's goodness grounded in God? When Romney and others assert that 
American virtues, generally summed up in the idea of "freedom," are based on 
faith, a cruel fact of history is being ignored. The politics of human 
rights, like the idea of individual freedom, were born not in religion but 
in the Enlightenment struggle against it. When Thomas Jefferson located 
"inalienable rights" in an endowment from the creator, he was decidedly 
speaking from outside the mainstream of any denominational faith. 
Jefferson's point was not to affirm God, but to deny King George.

It is not an accident that "God" does not appear in the Constitution. 
Following the American lead, religions, too, learned from the nonreligious 
improvements of modernity, but it is dishonest to claim after the fact that 
religions somehow sponsored them.

Were "the Founders" religious? It is a convention of political speechmaking 
to ascribe faith to the Founders, but what kind of faith, and what Founders? 
The Pilgrims, for whom "freedom" and "rights" meant nothing, wanted a 
theocracy. One hundred fifty years later, the Deist revolutionaries assumed 
a distant God whose interest in creation, much less the young nation, was 
minimal. By Lincoln's time, traumas of war drove piety, and it was only then 
that present notions of public devotedness were born. (It was Lincoln who 
established the motto "In God We Trust.") In truth, the power of faith in 
American politics has waxed and waned. There is no consistent tradition to 
be upheld or to be betrayed.

Is "secularism" dehumanizing? When Mitt Romney praised vital American 
religion in contrast to Europe where churches are "so grand, so inspired, so 
empty," one could wonder what the collapse of institutional faith in Europe 
actually means. Romney condemned the "religion of secularism." Today in 
Opinion Turkey's empty gesture Blazing Arizona The Algerian terror lesson 
Click here to find out more!

Yet such American smugness seems to miss the largest point of difference 
between the Old World and the New. In the very years that majorities of 
Europeans were walking away from organized religion, they were resolutely 
turning away from government-sanctioned killing, whether through war or 
through the death penalty; they were leaving behind narrow notions of 
nationalism, mitigating state sovereignty, and, above all, replacing ancient 
hatreds with partnerships. All of this stands in stark contrast to the 
United States, where the most overtly religious people in the country 
support the death penalty, the government's hair-trigger readiness for war, 
and the gospel of national sovereignty that has made the United States an 
impediment to the United Nations.

Does God send people to hell if they vote wrong? You would think so if you 
listened to the American Catholic bishops, who said in November that 
forbidden political choices "have an impact on the individual's salvation." 
The five Catholics running for president all hold positions that, in the 
bishops' view, might earn their supporters eternal damnation. Whenever 
preachers appeal to hellfire as a way of reinforcing injunctions, you can 
bet they have failed to make a persuasive moral argument.

What is discouraging here is that the bishops, aiming to reinforce their 
squandered moral authority, are resuscitating an image of a threatening, 
violent God that religious people generally, and Catholics in particular, 
have struggled to leave behind. Religion aims not to "save" from an 
unmerciful God, but to reveal that God's mercy is complete.

Is Mormonism a religion of myth? The answer, of course, is that every 
religion is a religion of myth. The symbols, rituals, and sacred texts of 
every faith grow out of contingent historical circumstances that seem at 
odds with the transcendent claims that religions make. Joseph Smith's 
origins in upstate New York might seem disqualifyingly banal, yet so did 
Jerusalem to those who lived in Rome, as did Galilee to those who lived in 
Jerusalem. Religions claim to be above such history, and that myths are 
revelations - but the glory of God is that God reveals through human 
invention. What Mormons believe is outlandish - which is the point.

Politics and religion, like art and music, aim to accomplish the same thing, 
which is to overcome absurdity with meaning. Religion does this by seeing 
God's hand in history. Politics does it by affirming that, if history is all 
there is, it is enough.

James Carroll's column appears regularly in The Boston Globe.

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