“The question that simply won’t go away”
Yesterday I appeared on Air America’s State of Belief with Welton Gaddy to discuss the news media’s handling of questions about presidential candidates’ religious faiths, which I blogged about last week.
Rev. Gaddy did a good job of pushing me to explain why I was glad last week’s Iowa debate featured a question on the candidates’ beliefs about the power of prayer. In defense of the validity of asking personal questions about candidates’ faiths, I said
People aren’t electing platforms, they’re electing other human beings, and they really want to get a sense of who these human beings are. Identity is a very significant component of political campaigns, and this is one manifestation of that.
I stand by that, but at this early stage of the presidential campaign, the media and the electorate haven’t quite defined the role of religion and the proper way in which to discuss it, and you don’t have to look very hard for divergent opinions.
In Saturday’s Boston Herald, Scripps Howard columnist Bonnie Erbe said
If the Democrats are going to make “running against Bush†a hallmark of the ’08 campaign, they must promise to rebuild the now-wrecked wall between church and state. They must also pledge to keep their own religious beliefs out of government policy-making.Dismayingly, Sunday’s debate showed some Democratic front-runners still feel the need to cater to the religious right.[emphasis added]
Erbe then critiques the candidates’ responses to the question about whether they believed prayer could prevent natural disasters. She had kind words only for Edwards and Richardson, calling Edwards “a deeply religious man, so confident in the power of his convictions that he can separate them from his role as a government official,” and Richardson courageous and “surprisingly impressive.”
But Richardson said his sense of social justice is rooted in his Roman Catholic faith. So does Erbe not believe Richardson should allow his sense of social justice to influence his policy positions? I’d think not and hope not. She probably didn’t mean to say that, but it’s a clear implication.
Erbe’s column is important because it’s a great example of the consequences of the religious right’s polarization of America. After seven years of an administration guided by a messianic foreign policy and a fundamentalist-influenced domestic agenda, she says that “a national leader’s belief that his (or her) policies are underwritten by God should be viewed in the same ominous light as a cross on fire.” The problem is her unspoken assumption that because religious motivation lay behind the Bush administration’s destructive policies, religiously motivated policies are inherently bad.
The negative results of Bush’s conservative religious convictions does not preclude the possibility that a future president’s progressive religious beliefs could inspire him or her to advance an agenda for the common good that leaves our nation and our world a better place. It’s tragic that Erbe sees “running against Bush” not as running against war, division, and pollution, but as running away from faith. It doesn’t have to be that way, and we need to talk about faith in order to reclaim it.