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Sumbul Ali-Karamali
Bill Berkowitz
Linell Cady
Mary E. Hunt
David Sorkin
Gabe McKee
Nathan Schneider
Lucia Hulsether
Nick Street
Ayesha Mattu
Joseph Gelfer
Sara Friedman
Rev. Kittredge Cherry
Manipulating Religion for Politics
I have never witnessed an election in which religion was so heartbreakingly wielded as a tool of discrimination. On the national level, 20 months of undying accusations of “secret Muslim,” “political Muslim,” or even just (God forbid) “Muslim,” have dogged Barack Obama, slandered him to the point of erroneously associating him with terrorists, and characterized the second-largest religion in the world as a contagious malignancy. To further similar ends, in September, a fear-mongering, Islamophobic propaganda DVD was sent as a paid advertisement to residences in battleground states in order to affect the election. On the state level, too, religion is being used to promote discrimination: Proposition 8 in California seeks to annihilate gay marriage rights, though they have been confirmed by the California Supreme Court, by amending the California Constitution. The Prop. 8 campaign has effectively played on fear and the ingrained religious notions of marriage that most people retain, no matter what religion—or even lack of religion – they profess. (“Honk if you’re for traditional marriage!” I saw blaring from a sign held by a young man in a black suit.)
We Americans pride ourselves on our cultural diversity and our separation of religion and state. But this election has been an illustration of the difficulty most people have accepting the former and separating the latter. On a brighter note, perhaps the distasteful religious xenophobia in this election will help us more clearly define our obstacles and forge a different path for the future. Colin Powell has already begun; we can, too.
Church and Government: Protect Them From Each Other
It has become fashionable to say that the First Amendment separation between church and state did not then and should not now be equated with the separation of religion and politics. The founders did not aim to keep religion quarantined to the private sphere, but to keep separate the institutions of church and government.
While an aggressive secularism that seeks to monopolize the public square isn’t the answer, we should be even more impatient with the manipulation of religion in presidential politics. Is it really okay in such a diverse country that the two major presidential candidates hold a nationally televised forum on faith that is moderated by an evangelical Christian minister? What does it say about our vaunted religious pluralism when false rumors designed as smear tactics that Osama is a Muslim have such traction? Why is there such outrage against a religious leader who speaks prophetically about the nation’s sins and failures?
The First Amendment wasn’t only intended to keep religion out of government; it was also championed as a way to ensure that religion’s prophetic power is not corrupted by politics.
Four More Days...
Studs Terkel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and premier oral historian of the twentieth century died at 96, on Halloween, four days before the election. A risk-taking, uncompromising, black-listed progressive and an agnostic, Terkel didn’t shy away from talking or writing about religion: On his radio program in 1945 he introduced his largely white audience to the legendary African-American gospel singer Mahalia Jackson; and in 2001, he wrote “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” a book about attitudes on religion and death.
Terkel supported Sen. Barack Obama. According to Edward Lifeson, who usually blogs about architecture at Hello Beautiful, Terkel offered this advice to the candidate:
I’d ask Obama, do you plan to follow up on the program of the New Deal of FDR? I’d tell him, ‘don’t fool around on a few issues, such as health care. We’ve got bigger work to do! Read FDR’s second inaugural address!’
The free market has to be regulated. And the New Deal did that and they provided jobs. The government has to. The WPA provided jobs. We have got to get back to that. We need more reg-u-la-tion.
Having watched Alan Greenspan’s recent testimony, Terkel also pointed out that “he’s an idiot, and by the way, so was Ayn Rand!”
Terkel’s death just before the election of America’s first African-American president: God as trickster?
Rescuing Toleration?
The presidential election is turning into a referendum on toleration. Colin Powell pointed this out in his penetrating comment (October 19th) that “all towns have values” and that a seven-year-old Muslim American should be able to dream of being elected president. The issue is not smear tactics or “swift-boating,” deplorable though these are, it’s Americans’ ability to accept diversity and difference of all kinds, whether of religion, race, ethnicity, values or, for that matter, residence. It is a question of whether we value toleration as an ideal and a practice.
One reason toleration has not fared well in recent years is that we assume it is a secular ideal derived from the Enlightenment. Conventional wisdom, drawing on a formidable scholarship, designates secular Enlightenment thinkers such as Bayle, Locke and Voltaire the champions of toleration. They are thought to have invented toleration as part of a larger program of secular culture (in eighteenth-century parlance, “deism”) that was directly opposed to belief and the authority of religion. The result is that toleration has been enmeshed in the culture wars that pit supposedly secular liberal advocates against putatively believing conservative opponents.
Yet the truth about toleration is otherwise: toleration is as much a religious as a secular value. Created in eighteenth-century Europe, as much by believing thinkers and committed theologians—figures I would call “religious enlighteners”—as by secular enlighteners or philosophes. These figures were fervent and loyal Protestants, Jews, and Catholics.
The challenge Europeans faced after the Reformation and the subsequent century of religious wars was how a religiously plural society could live in peace and harmony given that few countries were left with a religiously homogeneous population. We are familiar with the secular enlighteners’ dual answer to this challenge. In the idea of “natural law” (equality before the law, right to property, freedom of conscience) applicable to every individual, regardless of religion, they erected a common legality. In the idea of “natural religion,” the belief in God, Providence and immortality of the soul, which were thought to guarantee morality and be inherent in all religions, they proffered a common morality. Both of these ideas were ostensibly secular since they appeared to subvert, by rendering irrelevant, established religion.
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