Can the Religious gap in our culture wars be bridged?

Narrowing the Religion Gap?

By GARY ROSEN

Try a quick political thought experiment. First, form a mental picture of the Democratic front-runners for president — Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Now do the same for the leading Republican contenders — John McCain and Rudy Giuliani. Next (and this is the key step), imagine each of them in church, sitting in a pew, head bowed, or better still, at the pulpit, delivering a homily or leading the congregation in worship.

Strange, no? It’s not hard to envision Clinton and Obama among the faithful. She is a lifelong Methodist and self-described “praying person,” and he belongs to a church where some years ago he found himself (in his own words) “kneeling beneath that cross” in submission “to His will.” Both slip easily into the earnest, humble-of-the-earth mode of liberal God talk.

But McCain and Giuliani? You somehow imagine them fidgeting during the hymns and checking their watches. The senator is an Episcopalian, the former mayor a Catholic, but neither man, you have to think, would be caught dead in a Bible-study group or could possibly declare, à la George W. Bush, that his favorite philosopher is “Christ, because he changed my heart.” In the piety primary, the Democrats win hands down.

None of this is likely to reverse the “religion gap” in our politics — that is, the fact that regular churchgoers identify by a wide margin with the G.O.P. Come election time, the personal religiosity of the Democratic candidates won’t matter nearly as much as the positions they take in all the drearily familiar theaters of the culture war. What a matchup between churchgoing Democrats and secular-minded Republicans may supply, though, is welcome moderation in our debates over issues like abortion, gay marriage and stem-cell research. God knows, both sides of the ideological divide have fundamentalists in need of taming.

On the right, the culprits are familiar, having become stock characters in our politics. In his unsuccessful run for the Republican nomination in 2000, McCain called them “the agents of intolerance,” singling out Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. For a taste of their views, you can visit the Web site of Concerned Women for America (C.W.A.), which bills itself as the “nation’s largest public-policy women’s organization.” Its mission is “to protect and promote biblical values among all citizens,” the Bible being “the inerrant Word of God and the final authority on faith and practice.” As for dissenters from C.W.A.’s stand on issues like the “sanctity of human life,” a handy link to Bible passages explains “why you are a sinner and deserve punishment in Hell.”

A number of observers on the right, including Jeffrey Hart of National Review, Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute and the blogger Andrew Sullivan, have performed a service lately by denouncing the G.O.P.’s pact with such authoritarian bullies. But the problem can be exaggerated. Whatever their private views, most of today’s big-time social conservatives speak in public as faith-based policy wonks, not as preachers of fire and brimstone. Consider James C. Dobson, the controversial founder of Focus on the Family. In a recent article titled “Two Mommies Is One Too Many,” he objected to the impending parenthood of Mary Cheney and her partner. The core of his argument? What he trumpets as “more than 30 years of social-science evidence” showing that children do best with a married mother and father.

Is Dobson persuasive about the supposed evils of gay parenthood? Not to me. But the case he makes is based on an asserted set of facts — facts that are open to challenge and dependent on neither revelation nor church writ. Yes, he also avers in passing that traditional marriage is “God’s design for the family and is rooted in biblical truth,” and this is probably what motivates him. But is there anything wrong with so frankly religious a premise? Does it somehow disqualify his arguments?

Here is where the dogmatists of the secular left come in. Looking to fend off Bible-toting conservatives, the philosopher Richard Rorty argued more than a decade ago that in a modern democracy, faith should be a strictly private matter and has no place in public discussion. Traditional religion, he wrote, is a “conversation stopper,” a source of values before which nonbelievers can be only mum. The same rigid divide informs a recent manifesto “in defense of science and secularism” signed by such academic luminaries as Daniel C. Dennett, Steven Pinker, Peter Singer and Edward O. Wilson. They urge the country’s political leaders “not to permit legislation or executive action to be influenced by religious beliefs.”

So categorical a rejection of faith in the public square is impossible to reconcile with our political traditions, of course. It sweeps away not just today’s social conservatives but also abolitionism, women’s suffrage and the civil rights movement. Dr. King without the almighty? Unthinkable. Conceding the extremism of his earlier view, Rorty himself has backtracked. Citizens should feel free to speak as believers, he now suggests, so long as they don’t simply “cite authority, scriptural or otherwise.”

It’s a reasonable standard. After all, very few of us, whether religious or secular, can easily articulate our views about fundamental things. On questions of human dignity and human ends, we tend to sputter and assert, setting out propositions that are difficult to justify to those who don’t share them. Invoking secular values like “autonomy” or “self-realization” can be just as much of a “conversation stopper” as appealing to the Bible. What we owe one another are concrete explanations, grounded in terms we might hope to share.

Can the rising field of presidential hopefuls move beyond the collision of orthodoxies to which we have grown accustomed? Maybe in some small way, if only because of the peculiarities of the personalities involved, but even that would be progress. At our present cultural moment, it is hard to think of a more edifying prospect than a campaign that will feature a running debate between churchgoing Democrats and vaguely impious Republicans.

Gary Rosen is the managing editor of Commentary.

from The Sunday Magazine, NY Times, Feb. 18, 2007