God’s Politics

In his brief but generally judicious Religion in American Politics, Purdue historian Frank Lambert demonstrates that this is nothing new: Proponents of both visions have been arguing back and forth since the time of the founding. Since his is a “short history,” Lambert doesn’t exhaustively document every intersection of religion and politics. Rather, he picks his moments, showing how they reveal particular versions of our hardy perennial debate.

Thus he tells us about the founding era, the debate over Sunday mail delivery in the early Republic, the inevitable conflicts over slavery, different late-19th-century religious responses to industrialization, the early-20th-century battle between modernists and fundamentalists over the authority of science, the rise of religious and political liberalism in the middle of the 20th century, the civil rights movement, the rise of the religious right, and the apparent resurgence of the religious left in the aftermath of George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004.

Of course, it’s hard to examine the history without drawing some lessons. Lambert’s two principal arguments are that religious groups on both the right and the left have sought to impose upon the country “a national religious establishment, or, more specifically, a Christian civil religion,” and that every religious claim has been and will be contested, by other religious groups, by secularists, or by both. These considerations, he says, point to the wisdom of the Founders, who sought “to keep religion out of national politics.”

Stated thus baldly, this slight book would seem to yield slight-and not particularly interesting-results. Of course, religious claims are contestable. But so is any claim anyone makes in political life. Lambert would have to argue, in addition, that religious claims are somehow different-more absolute, less open to negotiation, and hence more likely to lead to irreconcilable conflict. The spectre of the English Civil War looms on the horizon, with blood spilling everywhere as mainline Cavaliers line up against evangelical Roundheads.

But Lambert’s own history seems to suggest another possibility. Yes, religiously inspired claims in the public square are contested, but bloodshed isn’t inevitably the result. Sometimes the religionists take a lickin’ and keep on tickin’-as the old Timex ad would have it. Sometimes they withdraw to the sidelines for a time and establish a “counterculture,” as conservative Protestants did after winning the battle of Dayton, Tennessee, and losing the larger war over science in which it was but a skirmish.

Our culture wars, in other words, have most frequently been wars solely in the metaphorical sense. In America, vigorous debate, even vigorous religious debate, isn’t always, or even often, accompanied or followed by violence.

There’s another lesson here, one that I wish Lambert had drawn more explicitly. It is that however incontestable or nonnegotiable the fundamental religious precepts are, the political claims that derive from them are much more matters of fallible human prudence. God may tell us not to murder, but we’re still left to decide which sorts of killing amount to murder. The religious men and women who intervene in debates over the justice of a war, of capital punishment, or of abortion should know or must learn that there’s some distance to be traversed between even a clear and categorical “thus sayeth the Lord” and any law or public policy based upon it.

To recognize this distance is to become a little less categorical and a little more humble in one’s pronouncements, to engage with one’s adversaries in such a way as not to foreclose the possibility that, in the future, they may be allies. But because he’s so wed to his attempt to encourage religion to stay out of politics, Lambert all too frequently forgoes this teachable moment. That’s too bad, because his entire narrative leads one to conclude-correctly-that religious people can’t and won’t stay away from the public square.

Lambert’s wishful thinking about separating religion from politics also leads him to oversimplify his other lesson. For one thing, there’s a gap between a “national religious establishment” and a “Christian civil religion.” Clearly forbidden by the First Amendment, the former involves exclusive formal legal preferences for a particular religion or denomination.

By contrast, the latter is promoted and propagated by informal means, and embodied in the way people think and talk about moral and political questions. If we talk about America as a city on a hill, or refer to ourselves as our brother’s keepers, we’re using the language of the Book and calling upon a Judeo-Christian civil religion of a sort. To forgo this is to impoverish our political discourse, to wish to forget the language that men like Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Ronald Reagan, and, yes, even George W. Bush used to good effect.

Lambert would prefer to reserve the language of civil religion for what he calls “America’s scriptures-the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights” whose provenance owes more (he rightly argues) to the Enlightenment and classical republican traditions than directly to Christianity.

He concedes, however, that the institutions inspired by these documents require a decent citizenry and that, for a long time, many people expected Christianity to provide that. One might say that our institutions presupposed a “merely Christian” moral framework, one that emphasized the moral precepts that most great traditions have in common. While Lambert occasionally seems to argue that religion simply serves to “threaten liberty” or “restrict choice,” a more nuanced argument would at least sketch the ways in which self-government depends upon government of the self, not to mention the ways in which the latter is fostered by religious faith.

It would be misleading to say that Lambert is simply hostile to the role religion plays or has played in the public square. He treats the civil rights movement quite favorably, for example. But he does like to emphasize the divisive character of religious arguments, not to mention the anti-intellectualism of some forms of traditional religion.

His own political sympathies (or rather aversions) come most obviously to the surface in his treatment of the contemporary religious right and the president-George W. Bush-most closely identified with it. Indeed, Lambert’s portrait of Bush’s faith-based initiative borders on caricature. Asserting that the expression “faith-based” is intended to exclude, he omits to mention that the Bush administration officially and routinely refers to it as the faith-based and community initiative.

Despite intense and assiduous efforts at outreach-often to urban churches that aren’t exactly populated by ardent supporters of the president-Lambert suggests that the Bush administration largely intended the funds associated with the initiative to reward its supporters.

Finally, he repeats without challenge or qualification the separationist canard that the administration’s support for religious hiring rights amounts simply to support of federally funded discrimination. In so doing, he fails to note that the first piece of legislation affirming that government contractors could enjoy these rights was signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996.

This recitation of Lambert’s exaggerations might seem to give the lie to my opening observation that his account is generally judicious. It is. He usually tries to tell both (or rather all) the sides of a story and, within the limits imposed by his brevity, to let the protagonists speak for themselves. And despite the conclusion he would like his readers to draw, he provides ample evidence for those who would disagree with him.

In other words, as a brief introduction to the interventions of religious figures and movements in American politics, this volume is useful. It provides a summary narrative and lots of references for further examination. Those who, for example, believe that the religious right poses (or posed) an unprecedented threat to our liberties couldn’t read this book without coming to the conclusion that, at the very least, morally and theologically conservative leaders and movements have been hardy perennials on the American scene. They would also be forced to confront an argument that religious conservatives aren’t the only ones who have sought to influence our public debate. Today’s (somewhat) resurgent religious left also has prominent historical antecedents.

As I noted earlier, Lambert wants his to be a cautionary tale. But the lesson he ultimately teaches isn’t the one he intends. Yes, religious movements have always been around. Yes, there has been some conflict associated with them-just as there has been with secular movements. But the republic has survived, and religion has continued to thrive.

Rather than embark with Lambert upon the nigh-unto-impossible task of persuading religious folk to keep their views out of the public square, let’s have a more productive conversation about the responsibilities attending prophetic witness and the roles of prudence and good information in assuring that the religious voice gets a respectful hearing. Against his explicit intentions, this is a conversation in which Frank Lambert’s contribution would be most welcome.

Joseph Knippenberg is professor of politics and director of the Rich Foundation Urban Leadership Program at Oglethorpe University.