ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, December 14, 1995 TAG: 9512140015
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-17 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: E.J. DIONNE JR.
``OH, GOD, in this America where politicians attempt to overrule the prophets, and pundits arrogantly disparage the gospel, help me to speak straight and strong.''
You could think that this prayer was offered at the opening of a Christian Coalition meeting. Or perhaps you'd guess it comes from one of those collections on the virtues that Bill Bennett has been putting together. But, no, it comes from a new book of ``prayers and meditations on loving and working for children.'' The book is called ``Guide My Feet,'' and its author, Marian Wright Edelman, is president of the Children's Defense Fund. She is widely (and correctly) seen as one of those liberals least likely to bend to political fashion.
That particular prayer is one of the more explicitly political in the volume. Many of them could be recited by Christians and Jews of very different political orientations. They are often prayers about personal responsibility, to use a good phrase that is now sadly hackneyed from overuse as a political slogan. A lot of them are the sorts of prayers people say all the time: pleas to God for strength, guidance, courage and comfort.
There should be nothing in the least surprising that Marian Wright Edelman, a preacher's daughter who reveres the faith of her parents, should write such a book. Yet it does not fit at all with the currently popular understandings of who religious people are and how they apply what they learn from their faith to politics. Because the Christian Coalition has come to dominate so much of the discussion of religion and politics, the standard arguments on the subject are pre-programmed shrieks, high on moralism and low on seriousness.
For critics of the Christian right, mixing faith and politics inevitably means the violation of church-state separation and the imposition of ``narrow'' moral norms on everyone else through the force of law. For many of the religious conservatives, being liberal means never saying a prayer, always opposing the interests and values of religious people, and forever upholding the ``immoral'' norms of a deadly ``counterculture.''
This way of casting the question leaves out almost all the interesting issues - and, almost certainly, a large majority of those Americans who consider themselves religious. As a historical matter, the simple equation of ``religious'' and ``right'' ignores those whose faith drew them to abolitionism, to movements for social reform at the turn of the century and to civil rights. It consigns the African-American church to an irrelevant corner of the country's religious life. It seems to presume that Catholics, Jews and mainline Protestants don't exist. It assumes that Christians who are ``evangelical'' or ``fundamentalist'' are automatic supporters of every plank of every Republican platform.
The Christian Coalition is doing all it can to promote the view that this era's particular definition of conservative politics is a kind of infallible expression of what all right-thinking Christians believe. Last weekend, it launched a new project to organize conservative Catholics as part of Pat Robertson's legions.
Now there's nothing wrong with Christian citizens supporting tax cuts, deregulation, legal reform and assorted other items on the standard conservative agenda. In particular, trying to reduce the burdens on families of modest means - including tax burdens - might be seen as rooted in a certain set of values. But there is something strange about sanctifying an entire ideological agenda in explicitly religious or Christian terms. It is hard to understand where the Gospel provides a mandate for capital-gains tax cuts or accelerated depreciation.
The Christian right of the 1990s can be seen as making the same mistake that some on the Christian left made in the 1970s and 1980s by embracing Marxism too closely. When religious faith is overly ideologized, religious people give up the very things that religious conviction ought to bring to politics: a sense of critical distance, an understanding of human imperfection, a belief that the immediate strategies and goals of those in power - and our own goals, too - need to be examined skeptically against higher standards.
Turning faith into ideology also assumes, wrongly, that people of faith can logically come to only one set of conclusions about public matters. True, contemporary Christians can agree on rejecting certain things - for example, policies that are indifferent to the poor or dictatorships that brutalize their people. But that is only the beginning of the debate.
That debate is opening up again as religious people who disagree with the Christian right find their voices not only as citizens but also explicitly as people of faith. The recent declarations of the Catholic bishops on the poor, and the witness of a group of Christians who got arrested last week demonstrating against the welfare bill, are visible examples of this challenge. Edelman's book underscores that this challenge is being launched by people whose own faith is deep and who could not be more in tune with the moral concerns of so many of the Christian right's rank and file.
``I worry with every fiber of my being about our many children who, lacking a sense of the sacred or internal moral moorings, are trying to grow up in a society without boundaries, without respect,'' she writes in her introduction. ``Never have we exposed children so early and relentlessly to cultural messages glamorizing violence, sex, possessions, alcohol, and tobacco, with so few mediating influences from responsible adults.'' Maybe certain ideas really can pass from the realm of ideology back into the sphere of common sense. Or is that too much to pray for?
E.J. Dionne Jr. is a member of The Washington Post editorial page staff.
- The Washington Post
LENGTH: Medium: 99 linesby CNB