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September 5, 2008
Faith and Politics
Ira Rifkin
Special to the Jewish Times
A recent Pew Center survey found that Americans are rethinking the role of religion in public life. For a decade, a majority of Americans have favored organized religious involvement in the political arena. Now, a narrow majority believe the nation would be better off if religious leaders stayed out of the political discourse, says Pew, a leader in religious polling.
Tellingly, most of this reconsidering has taken place among Christian religious conservatives, the group most identified with the mingling of religion and politics.
How do we reconcile this with the presidential candidates and their parties falling over each other in an effort to establish their religious bona fides?
A flip — but not entirely incorrect — answer is that politicians are always hopelessly behind the times, no matter how visionary they strive to sound. So why should this issue play out any differently? A better answer is that surveys are invariably superficial, and that when Americans say they want religion out of politics they do not mean they want religious values removed from the process.
In short, while Americans favor separation of church (synagogue, mosque, temple or whatever) and state they do not favor the separation of faith and politics.
Here’s how Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, president of CLAL—The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, put it on the Washington Post Web site “On Faith” section: “The separation of church and state is one of the great ideas of the modern world. It attempted to end the thousands-year-old tradition … of people using state power to kill other people in order to make God happy. But the idea that faith should be separated from politics is one of the worst expressions of ‘baby-out-with-the-bathwater’ thinking that has come along in almost as many years.”
Faith, he rightly explained, informs our values, which give rise, in turn, to our political leanings. This means there simply is no getting around individual religious beliefs — personal faith — in the political sphere. Nor should we want to.
Whether we are aware of it or not, the religious culture into which we are born shapes our thinking about everything under the sun. Nor does it matter whether we are personally religiously observant. American culture — any culture! — is infused with religious values because all civilizations spring from religious ideals. As Huston Smith, the renowned religion scholar, notes: “It’s [religious] revelations that set civilizations in motion and establish their trajectories.”
Here’s how this works, using “justice” as an example. We take it for granted that justice is a good thing, that the moral person strives to act in a just manner and that justice is a human right. Where do these notions come from? From Torah, of course, the root of all Western religious thinking (including Islam) and, hence, all (even competing) notions of justice.
By way of comparison, Eastern religions traditionally did not speak about justice. Their closest equivalent was harmony. One acted not out of a sense of what is just but out of what supported worldly and spiritual harmony — a subtle difference but equal to justice in ordering human activities.
America consistently ranks among the most religious of Western societies. We are, I believe, also among the most just, not withstanding our obvious failings over time. So don’t be fooled.
Americans may be fed up with religious leaders who have loudly sought to orient the political conversation. But our desire for political leaders who espouse faith-derived values remains undiminished.
Ira Rifkin’s column runs monthly. He lives in Annapolis.