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the tyee
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Oct
22
“On religious issues there can be little or no compromise. There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of God’s name on one’s behalf should be used sparingly. The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both.
I’m frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in ‘A,’ ‘B,’ ‘C,’ and ‘D.’ Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of ‘conservatism.’” barry goldwater via andrew sullivan
My socon friends believe that there is room for God in politics. There isn’t. There is plenty of room for the religious but not for religion. A politician may well have a particular relationship with God; but his obligation is to do what is right for his country without reference to the particular creed he happens to espouse.
It is a difficult distinction but a crucial one.
Comments
2 Comments so far
Does that go for David Suzuki and the nature-worshiping crowd, or do they get a pass because they don’t explicitly name their gods?
“There is plenty of room for the religious but not for religion. A politician may well have a particular relationship with God; but his obligation is to do what is right for his country without reference to the particular creed he happens to espouse.”
Jay, the two sentences above are incompatible with one another. If a politician must “do what is right for his country without reference to the particular creed he happens to espouse,” then there is not in fact any room for religious people in politics, at least not for adherents of orthodox varieties of the major monotheistic religions. (I am assuming here that by “particular creed” you are referring not merely to very minor doctrinal details that might distinguish between citizens who otherwise share the same religion, but rather to religious tenets both great and small, which distinguish religious citizens from citizens espousing no religion or different religions.)
At least theoretically, a devoutly religious person’s religious beliefs underlie, modulate, colour, and ultimately integrate everything he believes and assumes about the world and existence itself. To tell a religious politician to determine what what is in the public interest “without reference to” his religious beliefs is akin to telling any other politician to come up with policy recommendations, but to make sure that none of his assumptions about human nature, about the means to human happiness, about how society functions, about how economies work, and so forth enter into his thinking as he comes up with said policies. In other words, he must put forward some policies but must not allow his own brain to enter into the process of selecting them.
Apart from being impossible to implement and rather nonsensical as well, such a proposal is at odds with our notion of how democratic politics works. Democratic politics allows us to achieve agreement on policies even if we have very different ultimate visions of the good, and thus to maintain peaceful politics despite cultural pluralism. We largely don’t care why voter X or politican A wants lower or higher taxes; we are happy to work with him if we share his policy stance, even if our reasons for liking it are completely different from his. Of course, if politician A wants to lower taxes because he thinks the Bible tells him to, at least non-Christian citizens might well be leery of electing him, since he might be apt to turn to the Bible later concerning other policy questions that haven’t come up at election time. The voting booth is a fine mechanism for rejecting such a politican; disenfranchising him is not necessary. Likewise with religious citizens; an effective way for a politician to avoid giving them control is simply to refuse to implement what they’re lobbying for. Disenfranchisement would probably create more problems than it’s worth.
Obviously it’s silly for a religious citizen or politician to expect those of a different or no religious persuasion to accept his policies *on the basis of* the religious reasons underlying his own support for those policies. And for a politician to smuggle in religiously fueled plans after election when the voters didn’t know about those objectives is at least ethically dubious. As a representative, a pol has to work for policies that his constituents can recognize as being for the public good. But to claim that his own *reasons* for supporting policies in the public interest must be based on philosophic assumptions accepted by the mainstream takes us into the realm of the impossible and unnecessary.
Or maybe it is necessary — that would be an argument worth having. But the idea that religious people can just turn off their religious convictions while in politics (or any other part of life) is what drives us batty. It’s a complete misunderstanding of what religious belief is and what it entails. If you want to argue that we shouldn’t be allowed to participate in politics because our ultimate vision of the good doesn’t make sense to the broader public, that is a perfectly valid argument — we can and should have that discussion freely and frankly. My ancestors did in fact think that their religious faith made politics out of bounds for them. But drop the bs about people being able to compartmentalize their lives so that religion doesn’t touch important parts. The human mind doesn’t work that way, nor would you want it to, if you reflect on it.