The dubious world of religion and politics
by David V Barrett
[ politics - january 08 ]
So former prime minister Tony Blair, who didn't "do God" according to his spin doctor, has converted to Roman Catholicism. No surprise there. But it points up some of the huge differences between Britain and the USA on politics-and-religion.
Apparently Blair didn't say much about his beliefs while in office in case the Great British Public thought he was a nutter. In Britain we don't trumpet our religious beliefs; it's considered bad form. And politicians, with a few notable exceptions, certainly don't. In what is rapidly becoming a post-Christian Britain, we almost seem to feel more comfortable if someone doesn't have religious beliefs. So when Nick Clegg, the new Liberal Democratic leader, mentioned that he didn't believe in God, there was scarcely a ripple. Clegg has little chance of becoming prime minister of Britain, but Neil Kinnock could easily have been - and he was always open about his atheism.
In Britain it simply doesn't matter. But in the USA it is inconceivable that the president might not be a believer.
It wasn't always so. The great American statesman Benjamin Franklin, a Deist, said, "I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life, I absented myself from Christian Assemblies." President Thomas Jefferson, also a Deist, was even more anti-Christian: "The Christian god is a three headed monster; cruel, vengeful and capricious." President Abraham Lincoln said, "The Bible is not my book nor Christianity my profession. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma."
But they lived in what might be considered more enlightened times: the 18th and 19th centuries.
Today, the Religious Right dominates America, and is crucial to American politics - at least on the Republican side. Most Conservative Evangelicals wouldn't be seen dead voting Democrat anyway, so for the Democrats religion is far less of an issue. For them the real decider will be the politically incorrect and therefore unspoken issue of how many Southern Democrats will be more reluctant to vote for a Black than for a woman, or vice versa. It could go either way - or John Edwards could slip through the middle. But for the Republicans, the race is going to be fought and won (or more likely lost) on religious grounds.
It's still possible that former front-runner Rudy Giuliani will win the nomination, but his star is fading. Yes, he did all the right things during 9/11, but American Christians - especially Catholics - are increasingly uncomfortable about him. Giuliani is Catholic, but is now into his third marriage after well-publicised infidelities. Originally a Democrat, he still has relatively liberal views on the major Catholic moral issues of abortion and stem-cell research.
John McCain is in many ways the darling of the traditional Right; a war hero himself, he still supports the Iraq War. But he too is in favour of stem-cell research, so will lose Catholic support. We'll see below why this is so important. He will also be 72 on election day in November - even older than Ronald Reagan was. This is unlikely to act in his favour.
As for the other Republican frontrunners, it's a choice between a charismatic and very wealthy Mormon and a guy-next-door former Baptist minister. Now that the caucuses and primaries have begun, these two have really begun to slug it out. Mitt Romney has everything in favour of him (especially money) except for his religion. There have been potential presidential candidates before from the Church of Latter-day Saints, including (briefly) Romney's own father in 1968. The best known, however, was the founder of the faith, their prophet Joseph Smith Jr, who declared his candidacy in January 1844; he was never tested in electoral battle, as he was killed in June that year.
(Britain has had a Mormon MP since 1990, Terry Rooney, Labour, in Bradford North, and a member of the Scottish Parliament, Brian Adam, SNP, in Aberdeen North and formerly North East Scotland since 1999. How many of their constituents know - or care?)
Being a Mormon didn't stop Romney becoming governor of Massachusetts, but it might well put the presidency out of his reach. Would Evangelicals be prepared to accept a Mormon president? You'll find Mormonism in most books on new religious movements ("sects and cults"), and in every Christian book on heresies. And heresies, as every good Evangelical knows, are of the devil.
Unless Mike Huckabee drops a clanger along the way, it's almost inevitable that the strongly Evangelical states will go for the former Baptist minister rather than the Mormon.
How did religion affect previous presidential elections? The conventional response stresses the importance of the Conservative Evangelical vote, and this is hugely important. But so are other religions. And the religions that actually won the presidency for George W Bush in 2004 and in 2000 may surprise a lot of people.
But let's look first at those over-influential Evangelicals. Many, even in America, were shocked during the 2004 election to learn that the Republican National Committee had asked Evangelical churches to supply them with their membership lists. Is this an honorable thing for a political party to do? In a Pew poll that year, over two-thirds of voters felt that it was improper; but a quarter thought it was acceptable.
Conservative Evangelicals in particular are natural Republican voters - four in ten Republican voters consider themselves Evangelical Christians - but, in 2000, four million of them didn't bother to vote. Karl Rove, Bush's chief advisor, made it his business to track down exactly who they were through their churches and persuade them individually to vote in 2004.
Religion and politics are supposed to be kept strictly separate in the USA, though the oft-quoted First Amendment to the Constitution ("Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...") doesn't actually say that the Republican Party can't target Conservative Evangelicals - or that Conservative Evangelical churches can't openly lobby for a Republican presidential candidate, and many do exactly that.
Not everyone in the States is happy about this closeness. One Evangelical minister, interviewed on BBC television, said he was seriously concerned that it could damage Evangelical Christianity in the States for decades to come. People could be deterred from conversion, he said, if they thought it meant they would have to become right-wing Republicans!
But most Americans, it seems, do want the president to have strong Christian beliefs. It's a paradox. In a country where Church and State are separated by Constitution, it is utterly inconceivable that an atheist, even an agnostic, could become President of the United States. As we've seen, it wouldn't be a problem at all in Britain, which has an Established Church, or in most European countries; a prime minister's or president's religion, or lack of one, is entirely his own business. But in America, God has to be seen to be welcome in the White House. Indeed, a former senior White House staff member said that working there during George W's first administration was like spending every day in an Evangelical revivalist meeting.
It was even crazier under President Reagan. While First Lady Nancy was consulting her astrologer, Reagan was so entranced by The Late Great Planet Earth, Hal Lindsey's "proof" that we are in the End Times, that he invited Lindsey to address chief planners in the Pentagon, and televangelist Jerry Falwell to speak to a National Security Council meeting on the relevance of the Bible to nuclear war.
According to veteran political analyst Gore Vidal at the time, "Reagan is nothing so mundane as an American president. Rather, he is here to prepare us for the coming war between the Christ and the Antichrist." Reagan himself said several times that he believed "We may be the generation that sees Armageddon." And according to James Mills, president pro tem of the California State Senate in the early 1970s, Reagan's fiscal policies "were in harmony with a literal interpretation of biblical prophecies. There is no reason to get wrought up about the national debt if God is soon going to foreclose on the whole world" - thus giving a whole new slant on Reaganomics!
Of course, there's nothing new in religious leaders and pressure groups aligning themselves with one party or the other. Dr Martin Luther King and the Rev Jesse Jackson, champions of civil rights, were openly on the Democrat side. Going back somewhat further, the Quakers and the Unitarians, both firm believers in liberal social action, were hugely influential in the early days of the United States. But somehow the Religious Right, whether the so-called Moral Majority of a few years ago or today's Conservative Evangelicals, appear more blatant in their attempts to influence American politics.
Recall that it was the Christian Right who promoted and funded prosecutor Kenneth Starr's attempt to unseat a properly elected, successful and popular president for an improper but commonplace moral lapse. The rest of the world looked on in amazement at this shameless interference of religion into politics.
But it was not just the Conservative Evangelicals who influenced the 2004 election. Roman Catholics make up a massive quarter of the American electorate. In some of the crucial battleground states they are even more significant: they are about a third of the electorate in New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Iowa and New Mexico, which Al Gore won by just 366 votes in 2000, and John Kerry lost by 5,988 votes in 2004.
John Kerry presented American Catholics with a problem. Although Roman Catholicism is an inherently conservative religion, American Catholics usually split fairly evenly between the two parties. But Kerry is a practising Catholic, and Catholicism is a very tribal religion. Many Catholics would have loved to have one of their own in the White House for the first time since JFK, whatever his party. Kerry should have been a shoo-in. He wasn't, because of one super-heated issue: abortion.
Kerry himself was not pro-abortion, but he had voted for pro-choice legislation on the grounds that he had no right to impose his own religious beliefs on other people. For devout Catholics, this was anathema. There is no topic on which Catholics feel more strongly and speak more vehemently. For them, abortion is the greatest evil in the world. They can debate the pros and cons of execution, and they can discuss the arguments for and against the Iraq War. But on abortion there is no debate. It's not open to discussion. It's an absolute.
During the 2004 election campaign a number of American bishops instructed the priests in their dioceses that Senator Kerry should not be allowed to receive communion. For non-Catholics this was almost unbelievable; it was almost a return to the mediaeval practice of bishops excommunicating kings for not toeing the line. It smacked of the infamous (and forged) Donation of Constantine, by which the Catholic Church for centuries claimed not just spiritual but temporal supremacy over kings.
There was worse. Archbishop Raymond Burke of St Louis said that any Catholic voting for a pro-choice politician would be committing a grave sin, and must confess it before receiving communion. This was the Church interfering in politics in a massive way. American Catholics were pressured, spiritually intimidated, by their own Church leaders into voting for Bush.
It's fair to say that the Roman Catholic Church won the 2004 election for George W Bush, by causing Kerry to lose.
That was 2004. What about 2000? Leaving aside the question of whether or not Bush stole the election through voting irregularities, the way he won it was quite extraordinary. This is an almost untold story, probably because everyone involved must wish it wasn't true.
George W Bush's infamous Patriot Act, following 9/11, didn't spring quite out of nowhere. In the aftermath of the 1995 Oklahoma bombing by Timothy McVeigh (for which, initially, Muslims were blamed), the 1996 Anti-Terrorism Act put civil rights back by decades. The ancient right of habeas corpus, enshrined in the American Constitution, was suspended; suspects could be charged on the basis of "secret evidence" which neither they nor their lawyers were shown. And most of those who were charged - and convicted - under this system were Muslims. President Clinton may have been fairly liberal, but his Attorney General Janet Reno certainly wasn't. Time and again she displayed what minority religions, from Muslims to the Branch Davidians, could only see as intolerance and arrogance.
In the 2000 election campaign, voters naturally associated Al Gore, as Clinton's vice president, with the policies and actions of the Clinton administration. Gore didn't distance himself sufficiently from Clinton - or, more significantly, from Reno - for many voters. In his election addresses he never once mentioned Muslim voters or their interests. But George W Bush did mention Muslims in one debate, expressing concern about "secret evidence" in trials. Because of this, a coalition of four influential American Muslim groups publicly endorsed Bush.
How significant was this? There are around seven million Muslims in the USA. That's a lot of potential voters. Around a quarter of American Muslims are African-American; another quarter are South Asian, and another quarter are Arab. A fair number of American Muslims are educated, relatively well off, and registered to vote. Previously, American Muslims had never voted as a body. That year they did.
In 2000 most American Muslims who voted, voted for Bush.
In Florida, after all the shenanigans, Bush finally claimed victory - and thus the presidency - by 537 votes. Of the 100,000 Muslims in Florida, at least 60,000 voted in the election, and it's been estimated that 91% of these voted for Bush, and only 1% for Gore.
Do the maths. George W Bush owed his presidency to the Muslim bloc vote.
But after Bush's first four years, with the Patriot Act, the War On Terror, extraordinary rendition, the Axis of Evil, Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanemo Bay, how many American Muslims might just possibly have been put off voting for Bush in 2004? The Republican party must have had a real fear that the very votes that put Bush in the White House four years earlier would now throw him out - another reason why Bush's camp were so desperate to get every vote they could, by whatever means.
And they succeeded. Karl Rove's mission in 2004 was to capture the four million Conservative Evangelicals who didn't vote in 2000 - and Bush's majority in the popular vote was nearly four million. But as we have seen, they weren't all Evangelicals.
What Bush himself actually believed about abortion, stem-cell research and gay marriage was irrelevant. But he mentioned them in speech after speech in the 2004 campaign for one carefully calculated reason: to gain the votes not just of Conservative Evangelicals but of Catholics. Bush even had a Catholic task force specifically targeting three million active Catholics in fourteen swing states with cold telephone calls and mailings, emphasising his agreement with the Pope's beliefs on sex, gay culture, same-sex marriage, abortion and TV violence. Winning the Catholic vote was a deliberate ploy - and it worked.
Religion played a huge part in the elections of 2000 and 2004. What of 2008? Predictions would be foolish. For a long time the assumption was that it would probably be a Clinton/Giuliani fight. As I write, the talk is all about Obama/McCain. But who knows? It could easily be Edwards/Huckabee. A lot can happen between the first caucus and primary in early January (when this was written) and the conventions in late August, and a lot more between then and the actual election on November 4th.
But look out for the influence of religion, whether subtle or blatant. After all, it won two elections for Bush.
To return to Britain, let's be grateful that we manage to keep religion out of politics - most of the time. The Rev Ian Paisley is an obvious exception that proves the rule. And Catholic MPs such as Ann Widdecombe and Lords such as David Alton make their feelings known on moral issues - but strangely, only Catholic politicians stand up in this way. How often do you hear "Anglican MP X" or "Methodist Lord Y"? Almost never.
Regrettably, however, religion has recently raised its head in British politics in a very divisive way, with the advent of the Christian Peoples Alliance, who "actively promote Christian social teaching and draw our principles from the Bible, especially the life and teaching of Jesus Christ." Where do they target? Mainly, those areas of London with large Muslim populations. When members of one religion set up their own political party specifically where members of another religion are prominent, warning bells should begin to ring.
Finally, back to Blair. How was his conversion received by spokespeople for the Catholic Church in Britain? You'd think they'd be delighted at such a high-profile convert, but no. The Catholic Herald, the most conservative of Britain's several Catholic newspapers, made the mistake less than a fortnight before Blair announced his conversion of running a front-page story with the headline "Tony Blair ‘has no plans' to convert to Catholicism". The story read: "The news is expected to come as a relief to many Catholics who expressed horror at the prospect of a Blair conversion..." Horror? Why?
Because Blair, like John Kerry, found that it made political sense (whatever his personal beliefs) to vote in favour of abortion, stem-cell research, gay marriage and other such nasty liberal ideas. Various prominent Catholics have demanded that now he is a Catholic Blair must publicly repent of these sins and recant his former wicked stances. A letter to The Catholic Herald from a Catholic priest called Blair's acceptance into the Church "nothing short of scandalous".
When religion and politics meet it seems that the result, almost invariably, is intolerance. This is a sad indictment on people of religion - and it cannot be good for politics.
