Stirring Up Religion on the Trail

My column this week, "Santorum Stirs Up Religion," looks at the prudence not only of trying to philosophize or theologize in public, but of doing so in the wrong setting and at the wrong time. (I've this point in a recent column as well.) Rick Santorum took a double digit lead in Michigan and turned it into a single digit loss because he let himself get off message and took up the religion-in-politics topic.

That's a good topic, of course. He made some good points, though ineptly. (It wasn't his fault. It was a bad venue, or the contraints of time did not permit him to elaborate sufficiently. But he should have known that. So it was his own fault.)

He complained in an interview with George Stephanopoulos that JFK's 1960 speech on the separation of church and state--or perhaps personal religion and policy making--makes him want to "throw up." People of faith, he said, should be able to bring their faith into the public square, borrowing John Richard Neuhaus's phrase. (The religion question comes at the 13 minute mark.)



Well, sure. Good point. Christ is Lord of his people in their entire lives. You cannot dichotomize your soul. But his timing is off. When people hear this, they take him to be unfocused and undiscipline...like Newt Gingrich, but not as smart.

And the tone is all wrong. It's angry and carping. That seems to be a habit of his. He struck the same tone when he rebuked the President for wanting people to go to college. "What a snob!" A sour note to say the least.

This assertion of a Christian right and necessity of taking his faith into politics is fair and good, but it is a delicate matter and not one to handled justly in a highly political atmosphere. Actually, the political reach of the Christian religion is deeper still. This Christ, this King Jesus, is not content to be a mere tribal deity. Christians cannot say, “Oh, don’t worry. It’s a Christian thing. It has nothing to do with you.” Christ’s redeeming eye is toward not only “whosoever will,” but the whole of creation. Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper put it this way: “No single piece of our mental world is to be sealed off from the rest and there is not a square inch in the whole domain of human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’” Jesus claims whole nations (Ps. 2, I Cor. 15, Rev. 19).

It further complicates the political picture if you think your church leadership speaks authoritatively for this Lord Jesus. Notice that in his comments Rick Santorum passed from speaking of “church” involvement in “the state” to “people” of faith entering “the public square” as though they were the same thing. But this is a distinction with enormous political consequences. But the interviewer, George Stephanopoulos, did not press the matter and Santorum did not offer an elaboration.

Modern Marriage and the Antithesis

Most Americans profess to be Christians (76% in 2008). So where is all this support coming from for same-sex marriage? While we're at it, where does the support come from for Family Guy, South Park, many other television shows and movies, advertising, no-fault divorce laws, internet pornography, aggressively secular public schools, and so on?

The answer is that many of those professing Christians are merely nominal in their affiliation (Protestant and Catholic), and they are fairly indistinguishable from their godless neighbors in how they think and live. But even most of the church-attending, religiously serious Christians are culturally compromised. Of course, we are all compromised to some extent or another. Deepening our adoption of the culture of Christ is called the process of sanctification, and it is lifelong. But too many Christians in America are scandalously and unconsciously conformed to the ways of the world that considers itself wise apart from and contrary to the wisdom of God.

The legalization of (or legislative invention of) same-sex marriage in New York State prompted me to call for the church to take it's counter-cultural calling more seriously, i.e., to understand and apply what Reformed theologians call "the antithesis" more widely, more conscientiously, and more rigorously ("A Call to Christian Counter-culture," Worldmag.com, July 6, 2011).

The legal establishment of same-sex marriage in New York state—not by a rogue court, mind you, but by legislative act—raises pressing questions for the Church. Will we stand for Christian principles in the face of this blindly egalitarian normalization of homosexuality, and the polygamy and incest that will logically follow? Will we stand firm when people call us bigots and compare us with unreconstructed racists? Will we continue to follow uncritically the principles of the world around us? Evangelicals have a history of cultural accommodation, after all. Will we join with our clearly anti-Christian society in this moral collapse, or will we present an alternative by clearly identifying, thoroughly rejecting, and firmly replacing those socially self-destructive principles? ...


If the Church continues to address individual issues as isolated challenges—abortion, divorce, teen rebellion, same-sex marriage—she will continue to plug holes in the dike while the rising waters come up through the ground to her knees, to her elbows, and then to her neck. The problem is not this-and-that hole where the water is leaking in, but where you are standing relative to the sea. Christians need a more thorough understanding of the culture and seek the high ground in the mind of Christ.


In the age of same-sex marriage, how radical a Reformation do we need if the Church is to remain distinct from the world? Remaining distinct is not about hemlines, how much you drink, nose studs, what entertains you, etc., though being distinct has consequences for these things. It means being transformed by the renewing of your mind (Romans 12:2). It means understanding the world in distinctly Christian categories of thought.

I then point readers to Abraham Kuyper's Lectures on Calvinism (1898) where he distinguishes between the Christian worldview and the modern one. Part of the modern has grown out of the Christian, but fundamental aspects merely mimic the Christian view but are fundamentally opposed to it. That is, they are idolatrous and corrosive of the Christian way of thinking.
We need a renewed understanding of the spiritual warfare involved in all of life, not just personal but corporate between the church and the world. We need a renewed appreciation of the distinction between what Augustine called the city of God and the city of man, an awareness of the antithesis at work in all of life, the kingdoms that are in conflict in every thought, word, and deed, and throughout the culture. We are what Stanley Hauerwas called "resident aliens."

Christians are at war. Christ is our king and champion. He is spreading his kingdom, reclaiming his world, and putting every enemy under his feet. We are glad captives and combatants in that war. The dramatic slide of our culture into moral vertigo is an opportunity for us ready our minds for battle and live faithfully and redemptively in this clash of cultures.

God Is Back In New York

This spring, two editors from The Economist published God is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World (Penguin 2009). John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge distinguish themselves among their associates in the scribbling class with their appreciation for those who are restrained and directed by religious faith, especially the Christian faith.

Of particular interest to me and many readers of this blog is the special mention they give to The King's College in the conclusion.

The Empire State Building...is an embodiment of technological prowess and an icon of modern pop culture, the building where King Kong met his tragic end. Yet this icon of modernity is also home to one of America's leading seats of Evangelcial learning. King's College, which moved into the building in 1999, now occupies two floors of the skyscraper.

They quote the college President, Stan Oakes, saying,

For all the sophistication and prestige of the secular colleges, almost all of their professors traffic in spent ideas that do not work--bad ideas that have had a myriad of disasterous consequences in our generation. They are wrong about God, human nature, wealth, power, marriage, poverty, family, sex, America, liberty, peace and many other decisive issues.

They point out that The King's College is not just about great ideas, but also about the great city that the college inhabits.

Many Christians deliberately retreat from the temptations ofd the big city, attending Bible schools and Christian universities in small towns....King's College deliberately brings young Christians to the heart of the beast. ... [W]here better to train people to exercise influence on the world than the capital of the media and financial world, not to mention the home of the United Nations?

Here are reviews from The New York Times, FoxNews, The New Statesman, and the Washington Post.

The Return of Christian America Again

Marvin Olasky's* cover article in the recent World, "The Sixth Wind," responds to recent (gleeful) speculation at Newsweek that Christianity in America may be coming to the close of its 400 year history (Jon Meacham, "The End of Christian America," April 4, 2009).

Olasky sees Christianity not as dying but as catching its second wind. More precisely its sixth wind. The first was the pilgrim faith that met our shores in the earliest colonies. The second and third were the First and Second Great Awakenings (1730-55; 1790-1840). The fourth was the revivals emerging from the Civil War and transforming the cities in the late nineteenth century. The fifth he says came when "Billy Graham and others came to the fore amid threats of nuclear war." This is what I would call the Evangelical Awakening. Since the modernist controversy and the Scopes trial in the 1920s, Bible believing Christians had withdrawn. Under the leadership of Carl F.H. Henry (Christianity Today), Harold Ockenga (Fuller Seminary), and Billy Graham, Evangelicals re-emerged, re-engaged, and re-produced (both naturally and evangelistically). I am unaware that it had anything to do with nuclear weapons. Nonetheless, Olasky claims that American Christianity is now getting its "sixth wind."

Meacham cites a decline in religious identification among Americans, but this is simply a function of nominal Christians who were raised in the Eisenhower generation's "comfortable pew" of the old mainline churches finally conceding that, truth be told, they are actually atheists and agnostics. Those who were religious before and now more committedly religious. What Meacham has uncovered is actually a greater religious polarization in society.

The good news is that Christians will stand out more strikingly in Christlikeness. This is what Jon A. Shields found. He is assistant professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and the author of The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right (Princeton University Press, 2009). He confesses, "although my liberal Protestant upbringing initially made me feel out of place hanging out with conservative Christians, I found them disarming, gracious, and more misunderstood than I ever imagined."

John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief at The Economist, and Adrian Wooldridge, the British news magazine's Washington bureau chief, have is co-authored God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World (Penguin Press, 2009). Undistracted by the personal animosity that blinds some to the obvious, they recognize the social utility of Christian faith and the Christian churches. Christianity "helps suburbanites to form communities in the atomized world of the Sunbelt . . . ordinary people all over America to deal with the problems of alcoholism and divorce, wayward children and hopelessness . . . the hard-pressed inhabitants of the inner cities to deal with the chaos that surrounds them."

On a more personal and passionate level, however, Wooldridge objects to atheist dismissal of Christian faith, even though the does not profess the faith personally. "Christians are the people looking after the homeless, the drug-addicted. Where is the atheist homeless shelter? Atheists are only interested in themselves."

Wooldridge is not surprised that "God is back" and that accordingly, atheists like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins are in a publishing panic. In a World interview with the two Economist authors, he says, "The extraordinary thing about American religion is its capacity to reinvent itself and reassert itself."

Terry Eagleton is a distinguished English professor at the University of Lancaster in the UK. He has recently published Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (Yale University Press, 2009) and is scheduled to give the Gifford Lecture in March 2010 entitled "The God Debate."

"Why are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about God?" Eagleton's answer: Nothing else—not science, not reason, not liberalism, not economics—works. He concludes, "If ever there was a pious myth and a piece of credulous superstition, it is the liberal-rationalist belief that, a few hiccups apart, we are all steadily en route to a finer world."

Olasky also cites the return of literary critic A.N. Wilson to humble trusting in Christ.

Like most educated people in Britain and Northern Europe (I was born in 1950), I have grown up in a culture that is overwhelmingly secular and anti-religious. The universities, broadcasters and media generally are not merely non-religious, they are positively anti. To my shame, I believe it was this that made me lose faith and heart in my youth. It felt so uncool to be religious. With the mentality of a child in the playground, I felt at some visceral level that being religious was unsexy.

Olasky then concludes eloquently and encouragingly.

Christianity's ride through 2,000 years, and in America for 400, has always been a roller coaster: up and down, slow and fast, sometimes sideways, always planned by God but unpredictable for man. The first time around a roller coaster is terrifying for children. They do not know that a power beyond them is in control. ...

The apostle Paul was not unduly impressed by temporary ascents and descents. His confidence did not depend on which emperor was in power or who the next emperor might be. He knew that a benevolent reign would allow more to hear the gospel, but a hard reign would create inspiring testimonies that would show how the gospel sustained believers amid pressure—so Christ's cause would win either way.

Paul from prison told the Philippians that "what has happened to me has really served to advance the gospel." Paul told the Corinthians that "in all our affliction, I am overflowing with joy." What afflictions has the church in America faced that we should be grumpy pessimists?

*Full disclosure: Marvin Olasky is my boss (Provost) at The King's College in New York City. But, really, I could call his article fit only for composting and he wouldn't care.

With Friends of Religion Like This...

These words are good to hear coming from a Democratic President. At the National Prayer breakfast today, President Obama said,

No matter how much money we invest or how sensibly we design our policies, the change that Americans are looking for will not come from government alone. There is a force for good greater than government ("Obama Expands Faith-based Programs," New York Times, Feb. 5, 2009).

Before you start thinking that you had the guy all wrong, however, consider these questions.

Will religious groups be forced to hire homosexuals? “No matter what we choose to believe, let us remember that there is no religion whose central tenet is hate,” he said. In Democratese, those words have a very limited range of meaning.

Will Christian groups be forced to hire people from outside their faith? Will this disciple of Jeremiah Wright corral Evangelical groups into the social gospel step by step with the allure of "free money for good work?" Likely both. Last July, during the campaign, he spoke from what seemed to be firmly held principles, saying,

“If you get a federal grant, you can’t use that grant money to proselytize to the people you help and you can’t discriminate against them – or against the people you hire – on the basis of their religion.”

Here is an interesting footnote, however. He also said, “There is no God who condones taking the life of an innocent human being. This much we know.” Nonetheless, his religious conscience is clear in his support for partial birth abortion.

Public Reverence East and West

I am re-posting this from a couple of weeks back because I suspect that it got lost in the excitement leading up to the election.

A South African drive-time disc jockey in Dubai has been fired for imitating God as part of his morning banter. (AP story here.)

He was not fired for violating Sharia Law. Dubai, one of the principal cities and one of several semi-autonomous states in the United Arab Emirates, is a diverse international community. He was fired because his irreverence, that is, his careless treatment of this divine subject matter, offended the religious sensibilities of the people who live in Dubai. He was responding to someone's failed attempt to sue God in a U.S. court. (See my post on that: "The Audacity of Suing God.") "He intended to be funny, not to offend anybody," said Arabian Radio Network Chief Operating Officer Steve Smith. "However, what he did was highly offensive to the Muslim and Christian community in the UAE."

No doubt this shocks many American readers who see it as an example of religious fundamentalism in the benighted Arab world.

But this was our world not so long ago, and I think that in that respect it was a better world. People were more self-controlled and respectful of one another when we inhabited that world.



In 1966, John Lennon had to apologize publicly, or at least to give an account of himself, for saying that the Beatles were "more popular than Jesus." The remark made no impression on the British when it was first published in London's Evening Standard. But when DATEbook published the Maureen Cleave interview in America it was a huge scandal.

Lennon's full statement from the interview was this:

'Christianity will go,' he said. 'It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue about that; I'm right and I will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first-rock 'n' roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me.'

Here Lennon does not apologize, but explains how he was misunderstood.





Here is another press conference video, though not the same one, and again no one actually apologizes.

In some ways, of course, we are a better society now than we were. We're more accepting of racial differences among us, for example. But that improvement has not grown out of our rejection of God. Indeed, the civil rights movement was, in significant measure, motivated by Christian faith.

When people turn away from God and focus on themselves, they actually dehumanize themselves and each other.


Consider this post from November 7, 2007: "An Atheist Ally of Religion? Sounds Reasonable."

Dalrymple, noting the rarity of religiously motivated cruelty, draws attention to the decency that the eternal perspective engenders in by far most people who genuinely embrace it. After quoting from a meditation by Bishop Joseph Hall (1574-1656) on contentment and self-control, Dalrymple concludes that, “moderation comes more naturally to the man who believes in something not merely higher than himself, but higher than mankind. After all, the greatest enjoyment of the usages of this world, even to excess, might seem rational when the usages of this world are all that there is.” It is at least arguable that unsentimental, atheistic rationalism leads logically to debauchery and ultimately to tyranny.

He drives home this connection between piety and moderation by comparing the genuine fruit of Christian faith with what these grumpy anti-theists have to offer:

“Let us compare Hall’s meditation “Upon the Sight of a Harlot Carted” with Harris’s statement that some people ought perhaps to be killed for their beliefs:

With what noise, and tumult, and zeal of solemn justice, is this sin punished! The streets are not more full of beholders, than clamours. Every one strives to express his detestation of the fact, by some token of revenge: one casts mire, another water, another rotten eggs, upon the miserable offender. Neither, indeed, is she worthy of less: but, in the mean time, no man looks home to himself. It is no uncharity to say, that too many insult in this just punishment, who have deserved more. . . . Public sins have more shame; private may have more guilt. If the world cannot charge me of those, it is enough, that I can charge my soul of worse. Let others rejoice, in these public executions: let me pity the sins of others, and be humbled under the sense of my own.

“Who sounds more charitable, more generous, more just, more profound, more honest, more humane: Sam Harris or Joseph Hall, D.D., late lord bishop of Exeter and of Norwich?”

Harold adds:

This sensitivity issue raises a question in my mind. Odd, is it not, that the most hyper-sensitive "culture'"to come along--the post-modern "politically correct" species that got itself planted on college campuses and then spread relentlessly outward, sits cheek-by-jowl with this rough, uncivil assault on Christians, white southerners, conservatives, males, Walmart shoppers, etc. No protection for these groups from the Sensitivity Police. "Sensitivity", like "tolerance", is one of those personality characteristics which, good in themselves, make lousy principles in their own right. There will always be a more basic principle which must govern whose feelings and whose beliefs will be tolerated or deemed worthy of sensitive treatment. For Christians and a few other religions, respect for people as individuals equal before God is that principle which instructs tolerance and respect. For atheism, no such equality exists, since there is no god. Derision of those beneath them then is no vice ,and may be a virtue. Theists are grounded on the will of God; atheists are grounded in their own will, and as Nietzsche understood perfectly, that will is only and always the Will to Power.

Moral-Political Lessons From Dubai

A South African drive-time disc jockey in Dubai has been fired for imitating God as part of his morning banter. (AP story here.)

He was not fired for violating Sharia Law. Dubai, one of the principal cities and one of several semi-autonomous states in the United Arab Emirates, is a diverse international community. He was fired because his irreverence, that is, his careless treatment of this divine subject matter, offended the religious sensibilities of the people who live in Dubai. He was responding to someone's failed attempt to sue God in a U.S. court. (See my post on that: "The Audacity of Suing God.") "He intended to be funny, not to offend anybody," said Arabian Radio Network Chief Operating Officer Steve Smith. "However, what he did was highly offensive to the Muslim and Christian community in the UAE."

No doubt this shocks many American readers who see it as an example of religious fundamentalism in the benighted Arab world.

But this was our world not so long ago, and I think that in that respect it was a better world. People were more self-controlled and respectful of one another when we inhabited that world.

In 1966, John Lennon had to apologize publicly for saying that the Beatles were "more popular than Jesus." The remark made no impression on the British when it was first published in London's Evening Standard. But when DATEbook published the Maureen Cleave interview in America it was a huge scandal.

Lennon's full statement from the interview was this:

'Christianity will go,' he said. 'It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue about that; I'm right and I will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first-rock 'n' roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me.'

In some ways, of course, we are a better society now than we were. We're more accepting of racial differences among us, for example. But that improvement has not grown out of our rejection of God. Indeed, the civil rights movement was, in significant measure, motivated by Christian faith.

When people turn away from God and focus on themselves, they actually dehumanize themselves and each other.


Consider this post from November 7, 2007: "An Atheist Ally of Religion? Sounds Reasonable."

Dalrymple, noting the rarity of religiously motivated cruelty, draws attention to the decency that the eternal perspective engenders in by far most people who genuinely embrace it. After quoting from a meditation by Bishop Joseph Hall (1574-1656) on contentment and self-control, Dalrymple concludes that, “moderation comes more naturally to the man who believes in something not merely higher than himself, but higher than mankind. After all, the greatest enjoyment of the usages of this world, even to excess, might seem rational when the usages of this world are all that there is.” It is at least arguable that unsentimental, atheistic rationalism leads logically to debauchery and ultimately to tyranny.

He drives home this connection between piety and moderation by comparing the genuine fruit of Christian faith with what these grumpy anti-theists have to offer:

“Let us compare Hall’s meditation “Upon the Sight of a Harlot Carted” with Harris’s statement that some people ought perhaps to be killed for their beliefs:

With what noise, and tumult, and zeal of solemn justice, is this sin punished! The streets are not more full of beholders, than clamours. Every one strives to express his detestation of the fact, by some token of revenge: one casts mire, another water, another rotten eggs, upon the miserable offender. Neither, indeed, is she worthy of less: but, in the mean time, no man looks home to himself. It is no uncharity to say, that too many insult in this just punishment, who have deserved more. . . . Public sins have more shame; private may have more guilt. If the world cannot charge me of those, it is enough, that I can charge my soul of worse. Let others rejoice, in these public executions: let me pity the sins of others, and be humbled under the sense of my own.

“Who sounds more charitable, more generous, more just, more profound, more honest, more humane: Sam Harris or Joseph Hall, D.D., late lord bishop of Exeter and of Norwich?”

Obama on the the Bible and Civil Law

Is Barack Obama ridiculing the Bible in this video?



Of course, he is. He is not an evangelical Christian. Divine revelation does not inform his understanding of the words "Jesus," "Christian," and "gospel." He has some imaginary notion of what a Christian is. We see here that, like any theological liberal, he thinks the Bible is replete with barbarism, absurdity, mythology, and the traditions of men passing themselves off as the commandments of God. So of course he mocks the civil and ceremonial laws of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, but more surprisingly he mocks the Sermon on the Mount. I take it that as president he would not abolish the department of defense in obedience to what he takes the Lord's Sermon to be teaching.

Beyond that, what he says about the way we bring the moral injunctions of Scripture to the legislative process in a nation that has lost its Christian consensus is perfectly legitimate. He says that Christians cannot simply cite Scripture as a basis for legislation. They have to translate it into rationally defensible terms that people of any or no religion can accept.

But that is what we do anyway. If not from moral conviction, certainly from political necessity. Communities, when they make laws, make reference to principles and sources of authority they hold in common. So exactly what is he trying to correct?

What is remarkable in connection with Barack Obama personally, however, is that the reasoned argumentation that he advocates appears to have no effect on his own legislative agenda. What could be easier to defend on the basis of natural reason (dare I say natural law or general revelation?) than preserving the life of a baby intended to be killed by abortion but accidentally born alive? Obama voted against this protection deliberately and repeatedly when he was an Illinois state senator. So much for the appeal to reason.

Here is nurse Jill Stanek, who testified before the House of Representatives before it passed the Born Alive Infant Protection Act, describing her experience with live babies tossed in the trash, a practice that State Senator Obama defended, or at least refused steadfastly to outlaw.



Perhaps an appeal to Scripture, a call to repent, and a vivid description of sufferings in hell would have been more effective with Mr. Obama.

Saddleback Aftermath

Kathleen Parker, reflecting on Rick Warren's much-ballyhoo'd Civil Forum, has decided, at the risk of heresy, that it is not good for America that a minister of a church should shoulder his way onto the national political stage. Though I disagree with her in general, she does draw attention to one of the central conceptual tensions running through the American Founding.

Two major streams of influence feed into the mighty river that America has become, and the currents from these two streams rarely flow in the same direction or at the same velocity, which makes for some of the whirlpools, eddys, and white water rapids that periodically characterize our political culture. The Judeo-Christian patrimony of the Reformation is one stream; the rationalist Enlightenment enthronement of Reason is the other. We can never forget--though many folks are now working to obliterate the memory--that America was a haven for Christians considered religious troublemakers by the Anglican establishment in England. The Pilgrims themselves intended to set up a shining city on a hill, and finally get the balance right between church and state. They didn't get it right; but they, and the waves of English settlers coming after, knew instinctively and experimentally that natural law, whether informed more by St Paul's epistle to the Romans, or by John Locke's rationalist paean to "reason, our only star and compass", is the only sure basis for a free government of morally equal individuals. We don't create ourselves, but we do create our government. The first fact informs and limits the second. Throw out the first, and the second consumes human dignity and liberty. This much I think was understood by earlier generations without having to be stated.


This assumption, that natural right flowing from natural law is the ground of political liberty, is now hotly debated, and the default position among the Illuminati and cognoscenti is that religion, if it must exist at all, is entirely and properly a personal matter. In a secular culture--and how can a modern nation have anything other than a secular culture?--faith must not be allowed into the public square. Too metaphysical. Not scientific. And so eighteenth century. Besides, the political technologists over at the English department of your local university, having applied "deconstruction", the ultimate ideological solvent, have deconstructed everything from human nature, natural law, and even the human person, to race, class, and gender and have found that old Thomas Hobbes had it substantially right--that "the general inclination of all mankind, is [a] perpetual and restless desire for power after power, that ceaseth only in death." Every action, every thought, every intended purpose is but a stratagem for hegemony and domination in the minds of our postmodern guides.


Religion is then just another mask for the Hobbesian desire for power. Faith then, in the political arena, is much to be feared. Any metaphysics or religion is, ipso facto, fraudulent--only a mask for power seeking oppressors

Ms Parker does not, in the piece linked above, plumb the philosophical roots of her unease with religion in American politics. But she does consider the spectacle of a Protestant minister holding a political forum to be a dangerous incursion on the establishment clause of the constitution. And what, she wonders, is the real value of knowing the candidates' personal religious views? From her article:


Both Obama and McCain gave "good" answers, but that's not the point. They shouldn't have been asked. Is the American electorate now better prepared to cast votes knowing that Obama believes that "Jesus Christ died for my sins and I am redeemed through him," or that McCain feels that he is "saved and forgiven"?
What does that mean, anyway? What does it prove? Nothing except that these men are willing to say whatever they must -- and what most Americans personally feel is no one's business -- to win the highest office.


One can appreciate the cynicism--and wisdom through experience--shown in those sentences. But what cultural expression or political stance has not been used cynically by ambitious politicians? And what era exactly would it be where politicians were not seeking power after power, assuming along the way whatever mask necessary? Parker cites Thomas Jefferson, the leading spokesman among the Founding generation for Enlightenment rationalism, on the proper attitude toward religious belief:


"It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."


But Jefferson assumed that his Rationalist Deism would not only hold, but develop into an even stronger ground for a free and virtuous society, a position we now know to be untenable. In quoting Jefferson here, Parker subtly points to the charge that religious nuts are bent on establishing a theocracy in America by destroying the sacred separation of church and state, and are therefore the ones who threaten the Founding Father's understanding of America.

Parker is agitated by all this because she knows nothing of Redemption through faith, denies that a politician making a claim of faith can be genuine, or that information concerning a candidate's faith can add anything to the national conversation; denies that religion, in short, has a place at all in our political life. But as the Pilgrims' attempt at achieving the right balance between church and state failed, and as the 18th century Enlightenment project of sweeping away religion failed, so too will resurgent atheism's antipathy toward Christianity fail to remove faith from the political consciousness of the American people.

Besides--Rick Warren would probably never have stepped up to put on this affair if the Fourth Estate had not ceded its august--and constitutionally protected--responsibilities. It was into a giant journalistic and media vacuum that Warren stepped. The political culture is surely better because of it, Kathleen Parker to the contrary notwithstanding.

The Obama Puzzle

Today, David Brooks describes "Two Obamas" that he sees in the Democratic presumptive nominee: Dr. Barack, "the high-minded, Niebuhr-quoting speechifier who spent this past winter thrilling the Scarlett Johansson set and feeling the fierce urgency of now," and Fast Eddie Obama, "the promise-breaking, tough-minded Chicago pol who’d throw you under the truck for votes." He sees hope in the tough Chicago pol side both for moderating the liberal political principles and for dealing with foreign bad guys.

I have recently found these two quotes from Obama challenging.

Obama on religion (even Christian religion!) in politics:

Secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King – indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history – were not only motivated by faith but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. To say that men and women should not inject their 'personal morality' into public policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition

Obama on the war against Islamofascism:

The terrorists are at war with us. The threat is from violent extremists who are a small minority of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims, but the threat is real. They distort Islam. They kill man, woman, and child; Christian and Hindu, Jew and Muslim. They seek to create a repressive caliphate. To defeat this enemy, we must understand who we are fighting against, and what we are fighting for.

John Kerry would never have said these things.

The Unity of All Religions

America is a notoriously religious country. It is also a religiously diverse country. One would think, therefore, that it would be a country of either pervasive religious strife or pervasive religious nominalism. But while there is much nominal religion in America, there is also a lot of religion that takes its own particular claims, traditions and practices very seriously. The role of religious liberty in maintaining both religious health and social peace simultaneously is a topic for another time. There are many who suggest, however, that syncretism or focusing on what is common to all religions is the remedy for human conflict that is traceable to religion. But that is no religion at all. It solves the tension between religion and peace by eliminating religion while only seeming to preserve it.

The Bahá'í Temple near Frankfurt, Germany
illustrates the unity of religions in symbolic symmetry
with its nine sides representing the nine major world religions.
source: www.bci.org

I saw an example of this in Albania when I was visiting that country this spring. On account of the country’s Ottoman history, it is largely Muslim. But on account of its Byzantine history before that, it has a significant Eastern Orthodox population, and also many Roman Catholics. Albania’s communist dictator for forty years, Enver Hoxha (pronounced hoja), not only smashed Islam in Albania, but also reduced all of Illyria’s religions to cowering co-religionists. As a result, Albanian religion is all quite nominal. In a New Life Institute seminar on the value of religion for democracy at which I spoke, a “Muslim” and a “Christian” in the audience gave separate accounts of the essential unity of all religions, at least the monotheistic ones, and held—as though it were a truism—that this is the basis on which we can all finally get along peacefully and have our religion too.

But what if what is most important in religion is not what they share in common, but what distinguishes them? What if what is most profoundly significant is what is unique in each one? That, after all, is how the religious themselves view their own religions, at least when they have religion chiefly in view. People who view it otherwise are those more concerned about peace among men than about peace with God.

Isn’t it always what is unique and distinguishing that is of greatest human importance? Whatever is common merely directs us to it. If we were to recognize only what is common to all human beings, friendship would be impossible. And it is only in friendship—that attachment of one’s own particular soul to another particular soul in all its particularity—that humanity is most profoundly understood and cherished. A tyrant, for example, has no concern for humanity. A tyrant has no friends.

A critic of my position would perhaps cite medicine as an important human practice and source of well being that is premised on an understanding of what is common to all human beings—the circulation of blood, the structure of the cell, the arrangement of organs. Yet if doctors did not recognize and take seriously the distinguishing characteristics of particular bodies, diagnosis and cure would be impossible. There would be no remedy for our very particular sufferings.

Returning to religion and the source of our greatest well being, consider that God became man to remedy sin. But in so doing, he became a particular man at a particular time to redeem particular men, women, and children. Abstraction has an essential role in understanding religion, as it does in understanding anything. But you can’t understand Christianity without appreciating its uniquely gracious character and the defining role of the necessarily particular savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.