Is there a place for religion in politics? Peter Wehner and Michael Gerson, two evangelicals who served President George W. Bush in the White House, give us a short book, “City of Man,” that gives us a more-or-less “yes.” The first condition is the understanding that there is a difference between a creed and a value, and between a value and a stand on policy. In his l960 speech to the Protestant ministers, the President John F. Kennedy, a Catholic, promised not to impose his
creed upon others. His values — that rights come from God, that freedom is holy, that man owes certain things to his God and his country — were expressed in the iconic “Ask Not” inaugural, that transcended their creed and his own. Creeds are specific, and divide their practitioners. Values are entwined in creeds, but unite and transcend them.
Creeds have no place in politics, and vice versa. Politics, on the other hand, is all about values, as the effort to impose one’s own on the culture — or rather, to persuade others to adopt one’s own ways of thinking — is exactly what politics
is. The idea that people of all races and creeds should be treated the same is a value. The idea that one should care for one’s neighbor is a value, but the kind of safety net this entails is a policy issue.
The difference between them is the key to the question, as the three things are often confused.
If conflating a creed with a value — and then voting them both off the island — is a misstep on one level, then stretching a value to encompass a policy is a mistake of the opposite kind. Wehner and Gerson claim that the mainstream Protestant sects and the Christian Coalition both blundered badly when they became spokesmen for liberal and conservative policies, conflating God’s will with the musings of mere politicians.
“Whether the top marginal tax rate should be 70 percent, 40 percent or 28 percent is a serious public policy issue, but neither the New Testament nor the Hebrew Bible sheds light on the matter,” they tell us, correctly.
“Scripture simply does not offer detailed guidance on … trade, education, welfare, crime, health care, immigration, foreign aid, legal reform, drilling [in ANWAR], climate change, and much else.”
Instead of reading God’s will into marginal tax rates (the real effect of which on the poor has been hotly debated), they urge the pious to focus on the big picture, or the promotion of four arms of the moral society, which, in their view, tend to be these:
Order (the sine qua non, without which nothing is possible); justice (the persecution of predators, within the bounds of due process); virtue (strengthening families, which socialize the young and inculcate habits of discipline); and prosperity (valuing capitalism, the engine of wealth and well-being, while restraining its excess, and providing a safety net for the victims of the social upheavals it tends now and then to create).
These prescriptions are general, and leave plenty of room for political argument. On its highest level, politics is the process for the transmission of the values enshrined in religion to make their way into everyday life.
Now and then — as in Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural — the religious and secular meet. Seeking the words to define and refute absolute evil, planners of the Holocaust Museum in Washington found them, not in the Old or New Testaments, not in Moses or Jesus, not in the saints or the prophets, but in the Declaration of Independence, written by politicians.
Case closed.
Examiner Columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
