This is the time of year when religion fills the air. The eight nights of Hanukkah concluded last night, Christmas is less than two weeks away and the presidential primaries are in full swing.
In years past, presidential politics and religion were as separate as… well, as church and state, but those lines get blurrier all the time. Last week, Republican hopeful Mitt Romney gave a speech defending his membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Days Saints, because he thinks certain evangelical Christian sects (who have an outsized influence in GOP primaries) are suspicious of Mormons.
Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, a Baptist minister is surging in the Republican polls, perhaps with the support of those evangelicals who remain unconvinced by Mr. Romney’s speech.
On the Democratic side, nasty rumors and let’s be clear – untrue rumors – have been spreading that Illinois Senator Barack Obama is Muslim. Mr. Obama is a member of the United Church of Christ, although he lived in Indonesia, a Muslim nation, for four years as a child. Let’s also be clear that there’s nothing about the Muslim faith that would disqualify any Muslim from holding our nation’s highest office.
There’s renewed emphasis on religion and politics across America right now, but it’s not new. These things come and go. In some regions, they haven’t gone for a long time. The late A.J. Liebling quoted the late Democratic governor of Louisiana, Earl Long a half century ago:
“‘I consider myself forty percent Catholic and sixty percent Baptist.’ (This is a fairly accurate reflection of the composition of the electorate.) ‘But I’m in favor of every religion, with the possible exception of snake-chunking.’ …The snake-chunkers, a small fanatic cult, do not believe in voting.”
This all makes for great fun and storytelling, but the point is this: if you’re an American, regardless of what your religion is (or like so many of our Founding Fathers, what your religion isn’t), you and I have another religion. It’s democracy, or if you want, republican democracy, so we can work in the lower-case names of both major parties.
Like any religion, some people are born into it and others are converts. We have a scripture, the Constitution. We have our holy people, whether you want call them prophets or saints, like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony. (The latter two did their good works from my hometown, Rochester, New York. Feel free to make a pilgrimage.)
Our civic religion, like many of the other kind, exhorts us to improve ourselves as individuals, contribute to our communities and leave the world a better place than we found it.
If we want to judge politicians on their religiosity, then this religion, democratic republicanism, Constitutionalism, whatever you want to call it, is the only religion we need to consider.
Consider it we should. In the Church of the Constitution, there are far too many backsliders among us. Yea verily, we have allowed heretics and apostates to gain control of our national temples and burn our scriptures.
The only way this could have happened is that we, the members of the congregation, have allowed adherence to our national creed to lapse. We’ve allowed civics classes to fade from our schools, we’ve allowed our political discourse to be sidetracked by petty and superficial issues.
Should we be surprised if significant portions of the electorate are trying to inject their personal religious beliefs into the political arena? Why wouldn’t they? We’ve thrown away the map of our Constitution, in the name of security or expediency or bigger profits and a soaring stock market. Of course people will reach for some other road map. We – all of us – have allowed our best map, our shared, civic beliefs to wither and be pushed to the margins.
As is the case in any religion, the faithful cannot wait for some savior to lead them to a promised land. Nothing will be done for us unless we the people do it for ourselves.
My Other Religion
This is the time of year when religion fills the air. The eight nights of Hanukkah concluded last night, Christmas is less than two weeks away and the presidential primaries are in full swing.
In years past, presidential politics and religion were as separate as… well, as church and state, but those lines get blurrier all the time. Last week, Republican hopeful Mitt Romney gave a speech defending his membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Days Saints, because he thinks certain evangelical Christian sects (who have an outsized influence in GOP primaries) are suspicious of Mormons.
Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, a Baptist minister is surging in the Republican polls, perhaps with the support of those evangelicals who remain unconvinced by Mr. Romney’s speech.
On the Democratic side, nasty rumors and let’s be clear – untrue rumors – have been spreading that Illinois Senator Barack Obama is Muslim. Mr. Obama is a member of the United Church of Christ, although he lived in Indonesia, a Muslim nation, for four years as a child. Let’s also be clear that there’s nothing about the Muslim faith that would disqualify any Muslim from holding our nation’s highest office.
There’s renewed emphasis on religion and politics across America right now, but it’s not new. These things come and go. In some regions, they haven’t gone for a long time. The late A.J. Liebling quoted the late Democratic governor of Louisiana, Earl Long a half century ago:
“‘I consider myself forty percent Catholic and sixty percent Baptist.’ (This is a fairly accurate reflection of the composition of the electorate.) ‘But I’m in favor of every religion, with the possible exception of snake-chunking.’ …The snake-chunkers, a small fanatic cult, do not believe in voting.”
This all makes for great fun and storytelling, but the point is this: if you’re an American, regardless of what your religion is (or like so many of our Founding Fathers, what your religion isn’t), you and I have another religion. It’s democracy, or if you want, republican democracy, so we can work in the lower-case names of both major parties.
Like any religion, some people are born into it and others are converts. We have a scripture, the Constitution. We have our holy people, whether you want call them prophets or saints, like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony. (The latter two did their good works from my hometown, Rochester, New York. Feel free to make a pilgrimage.)
Our civic religion, like many of the other kind, exhorts us to improve ourselves as individuals, contribute to our communities and leave the world a better place than we found it.
If we want to judge politicians on their religiosity, then this religion, democratic republicanism, Constitutionalism, whatever you want to call it, is the only religion we need to consider.
Consider it we should. In the Church of the Constitution, there are far too many backsliders among us. Yea verily, we have allowed heretics and apostates to gain control of our national temples and burn our scriptures.
The only way this could have happened is that we, the members of the congregation, have allowed adherence to our national creed to lapse. We’ve allowed civics classes to fade from our schools, we’ve allowed our political discourse to be sidetracked by petty and superficial issues.
Should we be surprised if significant portions of the electorate are trying to inject their personal religious beliefs into the political arena? Why wouldn’t they? We’ve thrown away the map of our Constitution, in the name of security or expediency or bigger profits and a soaring stock market. Of course people will reach for some other road map. We – all of us – have allowed our best map, our shared, civic beliefs to wither and be pushed to the margins.
As is the case in any religion, the faithful cannot wait for some savior to lead them to a promised land. Nothing will be done for us unless we the people do it for ourselves.
© Mark Floegel 2007