Author: James Carroll
Publication: International Herald Tribune
Date: December 17, 2007
URL: http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/12/17/opinion/edcarroll.php
What in the name of God is going on in American
politics? Mitt Romney's "Faith in America" speech, riddled with
mistaken assertions about religion, was itself a warning. But other presidential
candidates, debate moderators, pundits and religious leaders all share a dangerous
confusion about questions of faith and citizenship. Here are only a few:
Is America's goodness grounded in God? When
Romney and others assert that American virtues, generally summed up in the
idea of "freedom," are based on faith, a cruel fact of history is
being ignored. The politics of human rights, like the idea of individual freedom,
were born not in religion but in the Enlightenment struggle against it. When
Thomas Jefferson located "inalienable rights" in an endowment from
the creator, he was decidedly speaking from outside the mainstream of any
denominational faith. Jefferson's point was not to affirm God, but to deny
King George.
It is not an accident that "God"
does not appear in the Constitution. Following the American lead, religions,
too, learned from the nonreligious improvements of modernity, but it is dishonest
to claim after the fact that religions somehow sponsored them.
Were "the Founders" religious? It
is a convention of political speechmaking to ascribe faith to the Founders,
but what kind of faith, and what Founders? The Pilgrims, for whom "freedom"
and "rights" meant nothing, wanted a theocracy. One hundred fifty
years later, the Deist revolutionaries assumed a distant God whose interest
in creation, much less the young nation, was minimal. By Lincoln's time, traumas
of war drove piety, and it was only then that present notions of public devotedness
were born. (It was Lincoln who established the motto "In God We Trust.")
In truth, the power of faith in American politics has waxed and waned. There
is no consistent tradition to be upheld or to be betrayed.
Is "secularism" dehumanizing? When
Mitt Romney praised vital American religion in contrast to Europe where churches
are "so grand, so inspired, so empty," one could wonder what the
collapse of institutional faith in Europe actually means. Romney condemned
the "religion of secularism."
Yet such American smugness seems to miss the
largest point of difference between the Old World and the New. In the very
years that majorities of Europeans were walking away from organized religion,
they were resolutely turning away from government-sanctioned killing, whether
through war or through the death penalty; they were leaving behind narrow
notions of nationalism, mitigating state sovereignty, and, above all, replacing
ancient hatreds with partnerships. All of this stands in stark contrast to
the United States, where the most overtly religious people in the country
support the death penalty, the government's hair-trigger readiness for war,
and the gospel of national sovereignty that has made the United States an
impediment to the United Nations.
Does God send people to hell if they vote
wrong? You would think so if you listened to the American Catholic bishops,
who said in November that forbidden political choices "have an impact
on the individual's salvation." The five Catholics running for president
all hold positions that, in the bishops' view, might earn their supporters
eternal damnation. Whenever preachers appeal to hellfire as a way of reinforcing
injunctions, you can bet they have failed to make a persuasive moral argument.
What is discouraging here is that the bishops,
aiming to reinforce their squandered moral authority, are resuscitating an
image of a threatening, violent God that religious people generally, and Catholics
in particular, have struggled to leave behind. Religion aims not to "save"
from an unmerciful God, but to reveal that God's mercy is complete.
Is Mormonism a religion of myth? The answer,
of course, is that every religion is a religion of myth. The symbols, rituals,
and sacred texts of every faith grow out of contingent historical circumstances
that seem at odds with the transcendent claims that religions make. Joseph
Smith's origins in upstate New York might seem disqualifyingly banal, yet
so did Jerusalem to those who lived in Rome, as did Galilee to those who lived
in Jerusalem. Religions claim to be above such history, and that myths are
revelations - but the glory of God is that God reveals through human invention.
What Mormons believe is outlandish - which is the point.
Politics and religion, like art and music,
aim to accomplish the same thing, which is to overcome absurdity with meaning.
Religion does this by seeing God's hand in history. Politics does it by affirming
that, if history is all there is, it is enough.
James Carroll's column appears regularly in
The Boston Globe.
