A few days ago I attended a press briefing presented by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and the Brookings Institution. Topic A was a presentation of a Pew survey on religion and the 2000 presidential election, followed by a panel discussion by representatives of various Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish groups of their own studies. And, surprise, we found that religion has indeed been a major element in these elections.
Some of the details inherent in the surveys are encouraging; some I find historically dislocating, others even troubling.
Under the subtitle of “the ambivalent majority” the Pew study found clear approval for the role of religion in political life; this has changed markedly within a generation. Curiously, at the same time a majority are uncomfortable with clergy using the pulpit to proclaim political views. The same ambivalence is evident in the faith expressions of politicians. Yes, respondents believe they should be men and women of faith, but there is discomfort about politicians making public pronouncements of their faith.
As the results were shared and discussed and as the representatives from the various faith groups shared their own figures; I saw a rather clear pattern emerge. While the United States proclaims itself as churchgoing and more religious than other Western states, this can be misleading. For although more people than ever call themselves spiritual, this survey, like most, shows the majority to be infrequent attenders of formal worship services. And there is a curious tracking with the degree of attendance and traditional orthodoxy and how willing people are to involve the state in church matters. It tracks in reverse–the more liberal of a faith group are the ones pushing for this. Yet the more observant of all faiths seem to demand greater separation of powers. And the conclusion of the drift toward vouchers, charitable choice, and other mixings is that it is actually driven by increasing secularization and greater nominal church attendance.
I can’t help thinking of the poet Matthew Arnold’s words from “Dover Beach.” “The sea of faith was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now I only hear its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.” I do believe there is a cause and effect between faith and freedom: One begets the other. But in the context of spiritual decline, a hunger for religious power that seeks the state for support will end badly.
William Butler Yeats, in “The Second Coming,” a poem I often quote when describing the present, wrote of a time when “the center cannot hold”; a time when “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Those Muslim fundamentalist states, those Crusades of yore, those pogroms of the Old World, all shared this phenomenon in being enabled by low spirituality but a heightened dependence on religious activism.
The Pew study also noted something that quite surprised me. Tracking consistently across age and income levels was the curious result that nearly eight in 10 Americans have positive impressions of Catholics and Jews, while only six in 10 are positive on Evangelicals. More telling was the “unfavorable” rating of 16 percent for evangelicals versus 9 percent for Roman Catholics. This is a historically significant shift for a nation founded on Protestant principles and at times marred by vicious anti-Catholicism. It tells me that our growing base of noncommittal religionists is ecumenical in the sense that it suspects religious activism. Catholics have increasingly cultivated a middle-America style, while Evangelicals often alienate the nominal Christians by their fervor.
The apostle Paul was an effective communicator, well schooled in the ways of the world of his day. His visit to Athens, the seat of democracy, was a great occasion for him to present true faith in God. Some of the wise men and philosophers of the time noted Paul and took him to the Areopagus to hear him expound his views.
Paul’s approach was clever. Athens, and Greece in general, by that time was hardly religious as we might now count it; in fact the very concept of democracy owes much more to the philosophy of Greece with its dependence on man’s ability than to a Jewish concept of man (the Old Testament clearly indicates that the majority are more likely to choose evil than anything else)! But Paul wanted to appeal to their nominal faith in the icons of antiquity. So he began his address by noting that in observing “the objects of [their] worship,” he came across an altar inscribed “to an unknown God.”
“Men of Athens,” he said, “I perceive that in every way you are very religious” (Acts 17:22, RSV).”* Well, his irony was concealed for reasons of persuasion, but it is implicit. It is possible to be so inclusive to religious aims as to lose sight of the claims that all true faith makes. Paul proclaimed to them that this unknown god is “the God who made the world and everything in it (verse 24, RSV).”*
Those wise men at the Areopagus rejected that God because he was too specific,
too divine—after all, as they reasoned, how could someone rise from the dead? And in a sense they were on the right track, because a religion with such claims could not exist within their democracy without troubling other religions and excluding the nonbelievers.
It’s no different today. If the state moves into religious territory, it risks awakening religious activism that must be antithetical to the many state gods, not least of all the very claims of the state itself. And the state that attempts to establish its own red book of faith denies true religious freedom and in attempting a theocratic foundation will merely elevate another more troubling unknown god.
* Bible texts credited to RSV are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1946, 1952, 1971, by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission.
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