For the week of January 21 - 27, 2004

Did God make him do it?

Commentary by Adam Tanous

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When Howard Dean tipped his religious card recently he did it with all the aplomb of a rookie poker player trying to bluff a pro—his eyes big as eggs, hypnotized by the pot before him. His bluster about the Book of Job being his favorite part of the New Testament was no great sin—just another politician talking a bit too much. But the fact that he felt compelled to say something at all about his religious beliefs is telling.

No one expects Howard Dean to be a religious scholar. Nor will his gaffe likely matter much when the votes are tallied at the Democratic Convention. Still, beyond all of the "gottcha" snickers, Dean managed to stumble into an important issue. On both the political left and right, religion is playing an increasing and, it seems, misplaced role in politics.

There are, presumably, a lot of votes out there hinging on the politicians’ religious beliefs, or, at least, the voters’ perception of the same.

Assuming Dean was not suddenly moved by God to express his religious convictions, what might be the cause for his confession? Perhaps the relatively privileged, white Northern Democrat sees a sea of Southern votes that he needs. And the thread that weaves many of those votes together is religion. Most of the Democrats in recent history who actually made it to the presidency, or very close to it, had a geographic lock on the South: Clinton, Gore, Carter and Johnson. Kennedy, of course, was from the Northeast, but he had Catholicism on his side (though against him in other parts of the country).

Dean likely figures if he has no geographic connection to the South, he’d better have a religious one. He’s not the only one who has made this calculus.

Still the path to the Bible Belt may be a more complex journey than most politicians think. In a September 2000 survey by the Pew Forum and the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 70 percent of Americans thought it was important for the president to be strongly religious. At the same time, 50 percent said they felt uneasy when presidential candidates and other politicians talked about how religious they are. Two years later, the same organization found that 50 percent of the public favored churches and other religious groups expressing their views on social and political subjects. The same poll, however, found that 70 percent of the public believed churches and other houses of worship should not endorse specific political candidates.

How does one read such mixed signals?

Perhaps what the electorate longs for are signs of character—a sense of morality, trustworthiness and humanity—all of which may be by some voters equated with leaders having religious conviction. I don’t believe that religious conviction is a necessary precondition for a moral life. Nor is the converse necessarily true: that religious conviction determines a moral life. More than a few Catholic priests have proven this over the last 20 years.

Certainly people vote for whom they think would be a good leader, someone who has set himself above the rest in any number of ways. But there is as well a certain degree to which we want elected officials to be people like us. If a leader is perceived as being religious, that may, for some, translate into evidence of character: something akin to what the voters value in themselves. It is a way policy wonks become more human, and, therefore more electable.

President Bush, too, has made political gestures with religious overtones. These include limiting stem cell research, opposing gay marriages and proposing to spend $1.5 billion to promote marriage, especially among the poor.

What is confounding about this intentional blurring of the line between political policy and religious conviction is that it was never meant to be.

John Locke, whose ideas underpin much of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, expressed his thoughts on church and state in "The Second Treatise of Government."

Locke’s first premise is that God created man and that man’s goal on earth is survival. To achieve that end, Locke asserted certain means were necessary, namely life, liberty, health and property. Since God set the ultimate end, Locke argued, man must have a natural right to the means to the end. In other words, life liberty health and property are rights that belong to us in a state of nature—before any form of government is instituted.

The role of civil government then is solely to preserve these rights. This comes mostly in the prosecution and punishment of individuals who violate the rights of others. Civil government provides an impartial and dispassionate means to settle disputes over natural rights. Without such a scheme, or when it is unduly influenced by fundamental religion, men and women settle their scores with the passions of their histories clouding the issues. Such passion coupled with a Biblical entitlement of "an eye for an eye" leads us down a path of misery, where violence becomes cyclical. The Middle East conflict has devolved into exactly what Locke was trying to avoid—a dispute over natural rights that is being settled daily with the blunt tools of revenge and anger.

Religion should and does come into our lives, Locke explained, when it comes to salvation. But salvation occurs one person at a time, through an infinite number of ways. It is a personal not a civil interest. It is not the function of government to provide its citizens salvation, but rather to protect the freedom of an individual to choose any path he or she wants on the way to salvation.

 

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