STEPHEN CARTER

Michael Cromartie: We will hear first from Stephen Carter, who is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale Law School. His newest book is called God's Name in Vain: The Wrongs and Rights of Religion in Politics. An earlier book of his, The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion, was a best-seller and brought him national visibility.

Stephen Carter:  “Does God belong on the stump?” is really an issue for God to decide, I suppose, and not for us here present. But that is part of the point I want to make. Those of you familiar with my work know that I am a great believer in an active role for explicitly religious voices in our public life. People are sometimes made uncomfortable by those voices, or are irritated by them, or are just unpersuaded by them. In principle that is no different from the reaction we may have to any of the other voices we hear in politics: they may irritate us or make us uncomfortable, or we may find them unpersuasive. Religious language by religious people in public life has long been an important part of the republic, and I hope it always will be. But when we get to the area of electoral politics, there are some differences and some problems. I want to talk about two aspects of this.

First, the aspect that is most on people's minds is so-called God-talk by the candidates themselves. Some months ago Governor Bush said that the philosopher who had influenced him the most was Jesus Christ, and more recently, Senator Lieberman has made frequent references to his faith and its importance to him. Speaking to a black religious group in Detroit, he said that religion was an indispensable part of the morality of a people. A lot of people have been wondering, isn't it unusual to have so much talk about religion in the political arena? Yes, it is unusual—because it tends to happen only in election years.

In every election cycle we rediscover the fact that candidates talk about their religious faith. I remember in 1992 candidate Bill Clinton, Bible under his arm, speaking about his faith in one interview after another, not just to religious groups but for a lot of different audiences. I think he said much more about his faith than the candidates are doing today. In both the 1988 and the 1980 election there was a lot of God-talk. In 1976 candidate Jimmy Carter helped us to discover, on the national scene, the meaning of the term “born again.” You can go back as many elections as you like and find this pattern repeating itself.

But there are some problems with it. One is that for me as a voter, if a candidate wants to speak about his religion, that suggests to me that he wants me to think that religion is a relevant criterion, that I am learning something about him because I am learning something about his religion. The information I would like to be getting is, “This is an important part of me. It helps form who I am, and therefore, when I reason about the world and about important issues of public policy, my religious faith is a part of my reasoning process.” I think that a candidate who is going to talk about his own faith owes us more than just saying, “Isn't it neat that I'm a religious guy?” That candidate owes us at least some discussion of how his faith affects his thinking about public issues, because only in that way can we judge its relevance. Now, one might object that to make candidates tell us how their faith affects their reasoning gets far too deeply into the personal, protected sphere of religion. If that is so, then they shouldn't talk about it in the first place. The candidate who says his religious faith matters ought to give us some idea of how it matters.

It seems to me that this year's candidates have not been saying much about how their religion actually affects decision-making. It may seem an odd choice, but I remember, for example, that in 1968 Richard Nixon talked on more than one occasion about how his Quaker upbringing affected his views on a variety of issues: war and peace, civil rights, and so on. Now, in retrospect there may be reason for some skepticism about what he said, but my point is that, whether or not he was being forthright, at least as a candidate he was trying to articulate why he thought his faith was relevant. He wasn't just saying, “I want you to know that I'm a person of faith.”

If religion is real, if it has bite, it changes who we are. Through our encounter with the historical and lived traditions and experiences of our faith we are different people than we would be without that encounter. And in making us different, faith opens a world of radical possibilities. I don't mean radical in the usual political sense; I simply mean that faith opens up the possibility of looking at things in ways that are sharply different from the cultural norm. This suggests that, unless the candidate is a member of an extraordinarily convenient religion, there will necessarily be times when, if elected, he or she will feel a tension between duty to faith and duty as a public official. I'm interested in how the candidate would try to resolve that tension. Some may say, “I can fully wall off the demands of my faith and conduct myself as a public official entirely apart from my religious values.” This is one kind of claim that could be made. But I'm more interested in hearing the candidates try to speak frankly about where some problems might arise and how they would work through them.

In 1960, when John Kennedy gave his famous speech in Houston, he tried to diffuse the anti-Catholic issue. “On public matters,” he said in an often-quoted line, “I do not speak for my church and my church does not speak for me.” People sometimes forget what he said later in that speech, that if a conflict arose between his public duties and his private conscience and he could not satisfy both, he would resign the presidency. Now again, as with the story of Nixon, the issue is not whether we believe him or not; my point is that he felt it was important—if his religion was relevant—to deal with that issue, to talk to us about how he would resolve a conflict. My view is that “I would resign the presidency” is probably too quick and easy a way out. What I am interested in is where the tension arises. And again, if candidates would rather not go into that, then why do they talk about religion in the first place?

Let me suggest why they do so. This point will also help to explain why the Lieberman candidacy has been so spectacularly successful, why, far from raising a wave of anti-Semitism as some had feared, it has raised a wave of adulation among all sorts of people. I think that one reason why candidates try to impress us with their faith without relating it to any particular issues of policy or governance is that they sense—correctly—that we as voters are hungering for some sign of strength of character, of virtue, that is hard to articulate, and religion serves as a proxy for that. So candidates who want us to know how religious they are are really trying to convince us that they are moral, upright people, people who are tied to a sense of the good that is larger than the day-to-day strivings of life. That national longing may be reflected in the fact that for the last forty years every elected president has been either a Southern Democrat or a fairly conservative Republican. A lot of voters seem to sense that affiliations can teach us something about the character of the candidates.

Now, I said that I had two points to make about the use of religious language in electoral politics. The first had to do with candidates talking about their faith. But there is another kind of God-on-the-stump issue having to do with organizations and clergy that endorse candidates or work for candidates on the grounds that candidates A and B represent something closer to their religious vision than candidates C and D. That too is a very old tradition in American political life. In the nineteenth century, activism of this kind was fairly common. But I do think there are problems with it, problems that we should take seriously.

In a little essay published about fifty years ago, C. S. Lewis wrote in opposition to the establishment of a Christian party in England. The essay is entitled “A Meditation on the Third Commandment,” and it nowhere quotes or identifies the Third Commandment because Lewis felt he was writing for a literate audience that would know what that commandment was. In this essay he opposes the establishment of a Christian party on a number of grounds. The one that most interests me at the moment is that he felt a Christian party would be an oxymoron. Why? Because if it were truly Christian, he said, it would preach the entire gospel—even the hard parts—and therefore get no votes. If it were truly a party wanting to win, it would craft a kind of modified gospel, emphasizing some parts, omitting or muting others, compromising the purity of the faith in order to prevail in the election, and then it would not be truly Christian. He thought this would be a very bad thing. I agree that it is a very bad thing, and it is what tends to happen. A kind of radical energy can lead, say, clergy into political involvement out of a genuine desire to accomplish a particular goal; but when religion touches politics, politics touches back. The energy gets dissipated and, for lack of a better word, coopted. Think for instance of the radical energy of the black clergy of the fifties and sixties, in the early days of the civil-rights movement. A lot of the clergy who were leaders of the movement had a fairly radical vision for restructuring American society. That vision has largely vanished from the rhetoric of leading black clergy today, in part because of their incorporation into the Democratic Party as part of the power base.

Similarly, the radical energy of the white evangelical clergy from the eighties and early nineties—a different radical vision, to be sure—has largely vanished from the rhetoric of a lot of leaders. By 1995, when the Christian Coalition issued its “Contract With the American Family,” this ten-point public platform of the Christian Coalition had barely a word of explicitly religious language in support of any of the ten points A lot of critics at the time said, “Well, they're just hiding their true purposes; they're not telling you what they really think.” For C. S. Lewis, that's the point. The fact that involvement in electoral politics suddenly makes you feel you have to hide the ball a little, or talk about something a little bit different, translate it into a different language—C. S. Lewis says that is a bad thing. The desire to win the election leads to a muting of certain messages and an emphasis on others, and in the end a secularization or cooptation of radical religious energy.

Some say that this kind of coopting is one of the glories of democracy, that our political system has done a wonderful job of bringing into the mainstream all sorts of radical forces. Maybe that's true. But while it may be a glory of democracy, it's a problem for religion. The prophetic voice, the voice of the outsider, is lost when religious groups are involved in actual activism on behalf of candidates.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER

Michael Cromartie: Thank you, Stephen. Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote a column on September 8 entitled “When Liberals Get Religion.” It begins like this: “Conservatives can only look with bewildered amusement at the contortions liberals are going through over Joe Lieberman's public religiosity. For conservatives public religiosity is no problem. It is a tenet of conservative faith, as it were, that religion ought to have—and until relatively recently did have—an honored place in the public square. It is liberals who for almost a half-century have waged a relentless war on religion in public and political life. Four decades after the abolition of prayer in the public schools, the current crusade is the abolition of prayer . . . at football games. (One of the more puzzling questions of our time: Shouldn't it be the religious, rather than the secularists, who are offended by invocations of the Almighty for the two-point conversion?)”

Charles Krauthammer:  My assignment is to respond to Professor Carter, but there's very little that I would disagree with in his lucid and nuanced presentation. I think he made a strong point when he talked about how the prophetic vision of the churches that had been involved in the civil-rights struggle, and of the evangelicals who were involved in their own struggles in late seventies and the eighties, has been leached away by being coopted or assimilated into political parties. The great danger of too close an association between religion and politics is not that it poses a threat to our politics or our political freedoms but that it poses a threat to religion. The temptations of corruption that accompany the acquisition of political power are the real problem. The classic example, which lasted for a millennium, was the corruption that occurred in the papacy when it exercised not just spiritual but also temporal power.

On the other hand, at a time when Senator Lieberman's candidacy and to a lesser extent some of the remarks of the Republicans have elicited complaints about too much God-talk, I would like to make the case for this kind of speech, the invocation of religious ideas in politics. It is rather astonishing hypocrisy on the part of liberals to complain vociferously when George Bush invokes Jesus or when members of the Christian Coalition engage in politics. After all, the great and glorious victories of liberalism in this nation have been civil rights and the anti-war movement, and those struggles were heavily influenced and supported by the churches. You can almost say that some parts of the civil-rights revolution were operated out of the churches, and of course Martin Luther King always invoked spirituality and a vision of the transcendent in justifying his cause. For a more recent example, recall that when the Catholic bishops issued their letter on nuclear war in the early 1980s, we did not hear a lot of complaints from the left about the involvement of clergy in politics. But when the Catholic clergy speak out on abortion, we do hear loud complaints about the mixing of religion and politics.

What we have—and this seems so obvious that it is almost not worth noting—is a double standard. Why were people on the left so slow to criticize Senator Lieberman for doing in a major way what the Republicans have been doing in a more minor way? There was about a month of silent acquiescence to Lieberman's God-talk before the Anti-Defamation League issued a statement and then others, sort of in embarrassment, joined the chorus—a muted chorus, I might say, hardly the full-throated attack one would have heard had the God-talk come out of, say, Dick Cheney's mouth.

I think that people on the left would answer that Lieberman is different because he speaks for a minority in religion, so that the threat of imposition on others is not there. This of course contrasts with similar talk emanating from Christians. That is a psychological explanation for why many have been silent about Lieberman's God-talk, but it's not a very logical one. I don't think that America, either in its history or in its spirit, is a nation of ayatollahs. For a hundred and fifty years, until the secularist revolution of the early sixties—when school prayer was disallowed and many other secular reforms took place, including the ACLU's stealing of the Christmas crèches from the town square—our republic existed with a heavy involvement of religion in public schools and public life. It was hardly a period where minority religions were in any way suppressed or forced into acquiescence with the majority. In fact, you could almost argue the contrary, that it was a time of flourishing for minority religions like Judaism, and that the secularized climate of the last forty years has seen an alarming decline in the adherence of Jews to their own religion.

About thirty years ago Robert Bellah wrote a brilliant article on America's civil religion. In this distinctive American faith, the God is the God of the Founders. He's Jefferson's Creator, who endows us with unalienable rights; he's Washington's Author, who guides the affairs of the nation; he's Lincoln's Lord, whose judgment even in civil war is just and righteous; and he is the inspiration for Martin Luther King, whom God took to a mountaintop to see the promised land. This is a particular kind of God, a non-sectarian God. There is a sense in America of Providence, a Creator who is involved in American history, who inspires the American experiment, and who does not pick and choose among eras. This inclusive, non-sectarian God enjoys a kind of legitimacy in American public life that the more narrowly construed sectarian God does not.

I remember a House debate on school prayer in the early eighties in which Representative Marjorie Holt said, “This is a Christian nation.” It was a very late-night session, and Barney Frank, who had been asked to come in and preside, stood up and said, “If this is a Christian nation, why is it that a poor Jew has to get up at three in the morning to preside over the House of Representatives?” The God of the American civil religion enjoys widespread legitimacy. Every inaugural address—with the exception of the perfunctory two paragraphs that constituted Washington's second—has a reference to the Almighty, or God, or Providence, but only one makes a reference to Christ or Jesus or any other more denominational divinity, and that exception was the address of William Henry Harrison, who spoke of the Savior and Christ. (I would only note that he took sick soon after his inauguration, and thirty days later he was dead!)

Lieberman speaks of this God of the American civil religion in a way that I think appeals, as Professor Carter indicated, across denominational lines. I'm impressed by the support he gets from denominations that people had assumed would harbor some suspicion of a Jew in such high office. I think it's because he has spoken of religion in general as a guide, has spoken of God as this inclusive American Providence, that his religious stance has been accepted as legitimate.

In 1984 Justice Brennan was trying to explain why he thought crèches on public property should be disallowed but “In God We Trust” on coins as well as the statement at the opening of the Supreme Court, “God save the United States and this honorable court,” should be permitted. His answer was that the latter things were merely “ceremonial deism,” emptied of its meaning by repetition over the years. In other words, an empty religiosity was permissible in public life. That's how he squared his circle of being against the crèches and not against “In God We Trust” on the coins.

I think Justice Brennan was wrong. To say that this God of American civil religion is an empty idea is to say that King's invocations of the God who took him to the mountaintop, the God whose righteousness flows down mightily, is a trivial or empty notion. It's not. I think it's central to the American experience. Invoking it in politics not only is legitimate but ought to be defended because of what it gives and adds to American life.

LEO RIBUFFO

Michael Cromartie: Thank you, Charles. Leo Ribuffo is Society of the Cincinnati George Washington Distinguished Professor of History at George Washington University. Among the books he has written is The Old Christian Right, honored by the Organization of American Historians as the best book in American intellectual history in 1983-84. He is currently writing a book on the Carter presidency.

Leo Ribuffo:  There's nothing the candidates have said this year that could not have been said by Eisenhower, FDR, or for that matter Washington—with one possible exception. I'm going to do what historians do: put this in probably deeper historical context than you want, by referring to the religious faith of various presidents, civil religion, and religion broadly speaking as a factor in American politics, broadly conceived. I see a good deal more conflict than Charles Krauthammer does.

Keep three things in mind at the outset. First, Americans have always had a propensity to put together their own versions of religion, no matter what the orthodoxy of the broad religious stew. Second, presidents are people, too. There were some who were seriously interested in theology (Jefferson, Adams, Carter), at least one with a great knowledge of the Bible but skeptical of orthodoxy (Lincoln), devout believers and practitioners (like most of the Republican presidents of the late nineteenth century), believers who nonetheless thought there were better ways to spend Sunday than in church (Truman, Reagan), and even a world-class womanizer who was a spiritual searcher (Lyndon Johnson). And keep in mind, third, that presidents are people who want to win elections and therefore don't want to offend religious groups in general.

The controversy over the religion of the Founders could be clarified if we could decide what we mean by the Founders. The American Revolution was won by an odd coalition. It was supported disproportionately by deist Enlightenment figures on the one hand and early evangelicals, the heirs to the First Great Awakening, on the other. It seems to me that the Constitution reflects a compromise between those groups. Lieberman said that the First Amendment was not intended to protect people from religion. Well, it might depend on which of the Founders you asked. Some surely would have believed that it was intended to do that. This is the exception I referred to earlier.

Of the deist-influenced Founders, Washington was among the most conventionally religious and started our tradition of civil religion, adding to the presidential oath, for example, “So help me God.” The least conventional was Thomas Jefferson, who said that he was a true Christian, by which he meant a follower of the ideals of Christ stripped of the mythology. Jefferson was a founder of the Democratic Party, which from the outset was more religiously diverse and more secular than its Federalist, Whig, or Republican foes.

When Jefferson became president, a Second Great Awakening was in progress, which by the 1830s or 1840s made the United States a predominantly evangelical Protestant country. But deist ideas still floated around, affecting among others Abraham Lincoln, who was accused by the evangelical preacher running against him for Congress in 1846 of being an infidel. Lincoln answered in a Lincolnesque way: he never denied the truth of the Scriptures (though he never affirmed it either), and he always showed respect for what he called “religion in general.” Of course, he became the great theologian of the United States, being tested during the Civil War. I would say that, though there's a linkage between God and the United States from the outset, many of the earlier figures doubted that God was unambiguously blessing America. But as we move toward the present, that kind of skepticism diminishes.

Lincoln's party tended to be less reflective about religion than Lincoln himself. From the beginning the Republicans were the preeminent party of white Protestantism. They were also the preeminent party, in the mid to late nineteenth century, of anti–Roman Catholic nativism. But of course they sought votes, and so there were interesting mixes. In 1896 William McKinley, a much underrated man, ran against the Democrat Populist William Jennings Bryan—the most devout pair of nominees ever! McKinley was supported by a powerful nativist movement, which he courted. Then he made a Catholic his attorney general and for the first time invited a Catholic to appear at the inauguration. When McKinley died in 1901, it was a Victorian Christian death. To the doctors he said, “It is useless, gentlemen. Let us have prayer.”

McKinley was the last unambiguously evangelical Protestant president until Carter. Religion had been changing in the late nineteenth century, with Protestants splitting between theological liberals and theological conservatives. A minority of the theological liberals promoted the social gospel, explicated by such significant theologians as Walter Rauschenbusch. And it is indirectly from the social-gospel movement that Gore gets his sense that he tries to live every day asking, “What would Jesus do?”

The so-called Progressive era before World War I is sometimes characterized as our Fourth Great Awakening, though its three presidents would not by current standards be considered evangelicals. Theodore Roosevelt apparently doubted the divinity of Jesus. William Howard Taft certainly did, as a proud Unitarian, and that was a minor issue sub rosa in the election of 1908, though to his credit Bryan did not try to use it against Taft.

Wilson is one of the most misunderstood religious figures. A theological liberal uninterested in doctrinal issues, he was essentially a social gospeler and used that in his election campaign. In 1911 he gave an address called “The Bible and Progress,” presenting the Bible as the “people's book of revelation” to spur reform, and roughly a million copies of this address were distributed when he ran for president in 1912. Though he didn't mull over theological issues, there is no question that he saw God directly guiding the United States and guiding Wilson himself. But instead of an era of Wilsonian progress, the twenties were a time when two to five million Protestants joined the Ku Klux Klan, most as casually as they would join the Elks. Perhaps one of those members was President Harding.

By the standards of the day, in 1928 Hoover did not behave badly in his campaign against the Catholic candidate Al Smith. As a Quaker, he was religiously tolerant “by blood and conviction.” Yet there is no question that the Republican Party used religious bigotry against Smith. Both conservative and liberal Protestants opposed him, and it was not always simple bigotry, though sometimes it was. On the other hand, the Democrats tried to win votes by presenting their party with its Catholic candidate as the party of tolerance.

Franklin Roosevelt can be seen as the founding father of the modern version of religious pluralism—tolerant civil religion. With the exception of Newt Gingrich, everyone in public life seems to have forgotten how much Franklin Roosevelt talked about religion—religion as tolerance, religion as belief. He advocated, before the term became popular, respect for the “Judeo-Christian tradition.” And religion is truly all over the place in Roosevelt—as much as in Eisenhower and Reagan. Except for occasional references to godless communism, we get much less of that under Truman. He said that he left religion to Mrs. Truman. This is not simply so. He also claimed to have read the Bible twice by the age of twelve, and he continued to read it regularly all his life. Every day he said a prayer he had composed in his youth, asking God to help him be a good person. He was a Baptist who took very seriously the separation of church and state.

World War II began what we have come to call the Fifth Great Awakening. Claims of church and synagogue membership rose from about 40 per cent in 1940 to roughly 70 per cent by 1960, and the fitting symbol of this was Dwight D. Eisenhower. Although he looked back in misery to what he called the “goddamn” West Point chapel service, Eisenhower believed that as president he needed to set an example. He composed his own prayer for the inauguration. After the inauguration (he refused to do it beforehand), he was baptized in the Presbyterian Church. He liked to begin cabinet meetings with a prayer, but occasionally he forgot, so after a few minutes he might blurt out, “Goddammit, we forgot the prayer!” Nothing in this should be condemned as hypocrisy—he was trying to advocate religiosity as a way of calming the country. It was under Eisenhower that “In God We Trust” became our national motto and “under God” was added to the pledge of allegiance. And Eisenhower is also known for something he said about religion in 1952: “Our form of government makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious belief—and I don't care what it is!” Everybody always laughs at that quotation, but a higher-brow version of it was advocated by Will Herberg's Protestant, Catholic, Jew—those were equally valid ways of being an American. Eisenhower intuited that if we take religion too seriously, we are going to fight about it, and he didn't want religious fights.

Those criticizing this broad civil religion included the great Jesuit John Courtney Murray, who grumbled that the fifties were a time of “religion in general, whatever that means.” They were also a time of considerably more religious conflict than is usually remembered. While many—perhaps most—fundamentalists softened into Billy Graham–type evangelicals and anti-Semitism steadily declined, conflicts between Protestants and Catholics rose—fights over McCarthyism, over school aid, over the fact that Catholics thought their patriotism undervalued by Protestants.

This was the context in which Kennedy ran for president in 1960. It is commonly said that religion was an issue in 1960; I think it is more accurate to say that it was a factor. After Kennedy skillfully deflected the question, it was not discussed in the way of the so-called missile-gap crisis or Castro. The Kennedy-ites weren't stupid. Like Al Smith, but more successfully, they presented their party as the party of tolerance. Nixon grumbled that this put him in a “predicament.” But whether out of residual Quaker decency or out of political prudence, Nixon did nothing to encourage bigots, nor did he seek a public endorsement by Billy Graham, who by then was well on his way to becoming the national pastor. The standard interpretation is that Kennedy's religion cost him a million and half votes.

The “Judeo-Christian” civil religion of the fifties and the assassination of the first Catholic president permanently changed the boundaries of religious debate in the public square. No longer could anyone run for national office and say, “My religion is better than yours.” They were all equal in the political marketplace.

Religion was relatively muted in the 1964 campaign between the half-Jewish Episcopalian Barry Goldwater and the womanizing religious seeker Lyndon Johnson. Johnson was a religious eclectic, baptized in the Disciples of Christ denomination but a lover of liturgy and ritual who often attended Episcopal or Catholic services. Some nativists feared that he might convert to Catholicism as his daughter Luci did.

It was Richard Nixon, not Carter or Reagan, who brought an overtly partisan religiosity back to the White House. He was a Quaker, raised with substantial doses of evangelicalism, and by the time he was an adult he had put together his own religious mix of Norman Vincent Peale's positive thinking plus Billy Graham's evangelicalism. It might seem incongruous, but it was no more so than most Americans' versions of Protestantism. Nixon accepted Graham's open endorsement in 1972, held religious services in the White House, and used religious connections to underscore support for what he liked to call “square America.”

After Nixon's fall, it's not surprising that in 1976 the United States had the most devout pair of presidential candidates since McKinley and Bryan in 1896: Carter and Ford. Recently journalists have said that religion hasn't been discussed so much in politics since 1960. It's not surprising that journalists would want to forget their coverage of the campaign of 1976; at a time when religion-related issues were more central to politics than at any other time since Prohibition, journalistic coverage was stupid, stupid, stupid, and woefully ignorant. Carter was shrewd: he understood that the evangelicals were a growing constituency; he understood that he could appear as a cultural conservative as against a man married to the scarlet woman Betty Ford; he understood that evangelicalism gave him an affinity with many evangelical blacks. On the other hand, he had to balance these considerations with his position as standard-bearer of the more cosmopolitan and tolerant party.

Carter was a sophisticated lay theologian, a born-again Baptist, mostly liberal in his theology, and seriously influenced by neo-orthodox theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who warned that individuals and nations should beware of the sin of pride. Yet he was presented over and over as a holy roller from Hicksville. And that partly explains why he appeared in Playboy. The official explanation was that he was trying to explain the sin of pride to the ungodly. In fact, he was trying to show a cosmopolitan audience that he was not just a hick. There was an uproar of unimaginable proportions. The wisest response in my view came from Martin Luther King, Sr.: to Carter's remark that he had lusted in his heart, King replied, “They can't kill you for looking.” Carter's famous “malaise” speech is, in fact, an interesting Niebuhrian attempt to call Americans back from their pride and their greed. All it did was reinforce what Hamilton Jordan called the “weirdo factor.”

The New Christian Right mobilized against Carter, but much to his credit he would not exploit his evangelicalism, and in 1980 he made religious references much less frequently than in 1976. He was clearly disgusted by what he considered a theological politicization of politics. Unlike Carter, Ronald Reagan had no doubt that God blessed America, no matter how much he tested us. And Reagan had no doubt that evangelicals should be courted. His alliance with the Christian Right should not obscure the fact that he very much fitted the general American religious temper of the 1980s. He was a fairly standard religious eclectic: Catholic father, Protestant mother, raised in the Disciples of Christ, over the years interested in Billy Graham, Bible prophecy, Baha'i, astrology, and the Shroud of Turin. To put it another way, he was the New Age equivalent of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Keep in mind: presidents are people, too! And if they seem bizarre, they often reflect the bizarreness of their country.

By the time Reagan left office, “religion in general, whatever that means” had a high public cachet. It was fashionable as opposed to weirdo to proclaim oneself a born-again Christian, as more than 40 per cent of the population in the polls said they were. Among them was George Bush. A little noticed factor of the 1988 campaign, when Bush ran against Dukakis (the most secular candidate at least since Stevenson), is that a religious issue was raised, but not by Bush. Some bigots pointed out that Dukakis was not in good standing because he had not married in the Greek Orthodox church and had in fact married a Jew. But the issue had no legs—a good sign.

In the years since the Dukakis defeat, the Democrats have tried to recapture the support of “people of faith,” and Gore's choice of Lieberman is clearly part of this effort. The whole enterprise, it seems to me, is tricky both politically and ethically. As was the case with Al Smith and Kennedy, clearly the Democrats are trying to take advantage of Lieberman's religiosity and ethnicity without making the substance of his religion an issue, and they are also trying to present theirs as the more tolerant party. As Nixon might have put it, this puts the Republicans in a predicament.

How should those of us with no vested interests in the outcome of the campaign look at this? So far, there's little sign that Lieberman's religion will be either an issue or a factor. But I hope the press will stop discussing it! Okay, we know he's the first Jewish candidate; we know where Jews stand on civil religion; we know he can go to war on Saturday—fine! Stop it there! Too much discussion of Lieberman's religion, I think, may make religion as an issue a self-fulfilling prophecy. In other words, let me end with my ambivalence. As a historian I would love to know more about the religion of the candidates. I would love to ask George W. Bush, who described Jesus as his favorite philosopher, whether he meant that in the sense of Rauschenbusch or Niebuhr. But as a citizen, I think I'll wait for his memoirs.

DISCUSSION

Michael Cromartie: Thank you, Leo. Before others jump in, I'd like to have the previous panelists respond.

Charles Krauthammer: In London there's a troupe that does all of Shakespeare's plays in an hour and half. I must say, they might envy Professor Ribuffo's tour of American history in twenty minutes. At one point I disagree. This notion of “religion in general” is easy to ridicule, particularly when presented in the context of Eisenhower's famous alleged remark. I would argue that the Founders do make the point that sectarianism is impermissible in a pluralistic society. They would surely be against the sectarianism of some of those who promote religion in public life. On the other hand, I think it's hard to make the case that they were anything but in favor of “religion in general” as opposed to irreligion.

Interestingly, what triggered the complaints about Lieberman's religiosity was his statement about morality being grounded in religion. That is not something he made up. It's an allusion to the farewell address of Washington, in which he said, “Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” So the statement was not a recent invention during a God-talking moment of a candidate; it is rooted in American history. The last point I would make is that I'm always intrigued when I hear Gore say he asks himself what Jesus would do, because I wonder how you would say in Aramaic, “Open the strategic petroleum reserves!”

Stephen Carter: Regrettably, I don't have any anecdotes as good as the ones my fellow panelists used! I agree with virtually all of what both Charles and Leo said, but with some minor differences. First, I don't want the press to stop talking about the religion of the candidates unless the candidates stop talking about the religion of the candidates. The point that “politicians are people too” is one with which I strongly agree. But politicians are very carefully scripted people; they make their living in part by deciding day to day which parts of themselves to open to our scrutiny. Candidates who believe that it's important for us to understand aspects of their faith are inviting scrutiny. When, for example, Reagan at least seemed to flirt with the elevation of creationism over evolution, that was a perfectly legitimate subject for inquiry by the press because Reagan himself had opened it up by his comments—musing, offhand, unscripted comments, to be sure, but nonetheless comments he himself had made publicly.

I also want to say something about the civil religion because it relates to the Washington statement about morality and religion that Charles just quoted. John Adams said things like that, and other people made similar comments in that era also. I think that the religion-in-general point actually is relevant to this question of the link between religion and morality. There's something a little bit Burkean about it. Edmund Burke's view of religion as a stabilizing, civilizing force didn't ever assume that everybody had to share in the religion, or that the people who shared in it were better than the others. It was just that when you looked at a great mass of people and asked what it took for that great mass—or for a single person—to be good, Burke's answer was that we've never found anything better than religion. Now, when he said religion he was really speaking of the Anglican Church, but he didn't seem to say much about how particular religious doctrine made people good. It was simply the connection, the belief in something greater that transcended human striving, that made people good. It wasn't an argument—and I don't think Washington meant, or Adams meant, or Lieberman meant—that you can't be good without a connection to religion. The point is simply: at the margin, when you look at the next person to come along, which way is it safe to bet?

Michael Cromartie: Others are invited to join the discussion now. [All participants will be identified at the end.]

Adam Wolfson: Stephen Carter mentioned that religion was acting as a proxy for character in the current campaign. I had a more cynical thought: when religion acts as a proxy for character, it enables the candidate to wink and nod in a certain direction and suggest things without actually saying them. In the case of Lieberman, the religious display is a way of saying, “We are not the party of Clinton anymore.” And in the case of George W., what he says about his faith lets him nod in the direction of the Religious Right without actually addressing the issues they care about. This is how the candidates stay in the middle.

On the issue of civil religion: Charles Krauthammer made a point about what God we want in the public square. I think he said that in the case of Lieberman, it was a non-sectarian God. My question is, to what extent does a vibrant civil religion with its non-sectarian God depend on sectarian beliefs? Can you have a non-sectarian God without a vibrant sectarian religion? Do the religious allusions in the speeches of Lincoln and Martin Luther King mean anything to a public that has been secularized over the last thirty or forty years?

Charles Krauthammer: To take your second part first: that's a very interesting question. I think the answer is that yes, the civil religion requires a public that has its own sectarian God. The people can then have this sort of coterminous belief in the civil religion, which would be strengthened by the fact that they begin by believing in a God of a certain kind. The counter-example, perhaps the way to suggest a proof historically, is the French Revolution. The civil religion of Rousseau was not rooted in sectarian religion; it was radically rationalist, extremely anti-clerical, and extremely anti-sectarian, and it didn't survive. Rousseau is the one who invented the idea of civil religion, and it failed utterly, because it didn't have an underpinning of more traditional, more historical, more rooted religion. A more complicated belief system is required to have a civil religion than to have a religion in which you learn catechism or songs in the cradle.

On your first point, about religion as proxy for character: I think the God-talk is legitimate; there aren't grounds for attacking it as a violation of American principles. But personally I'm suspicious of it, in the same way that I'm suspicious of any other kind of talk by candidates about their private lives, their families, their tragedies and histories. I think it's almost always done cynically, and it does not reflect on the real character of the candidates. There are exceptions, of course, but in general I would see a candidate's deployment of religion in the same way that I see a candidate's deployment of other privacies: as generally cynical and not very informative. In principle, however, I would never criticize a candidate for speaking about religion.

Stephen Carter: First, on civil religion: I agree that it rests on the underlying presence of a lot of religious traditions, or at least a lot of different denominations. And I think it is very important, for the following reason. A lot of contemporary political philosophy aims very explicitly at trying to craft the common language with which we can conduct debate in the public square. It strikes me that civil religion has served one part of that function by trying to bring together strands of a variety of different traditions, to track their commonalities into something that is recognizably and substantively religious. However, in an era where there are forces aggressively seeking a more secular society, I'm not sure civil religion can serve that function anymore. It begins to look peculiar.

This leads me to the proxy point. Some of the religious appeals by candidates, some of the rote language, like ending speeches with “God bless all of you and God bless the United States of America,” is an attempt to appeal to civil religious sentiment, but it's falling into a different era. Today a lot of the energy of those various religions is dissipated. In surveys, very high numbers of people will strongly identify themselves as religious. But by any measure of religious participation or of religion's affecting people's daily lives, the numbers fall off quite dramatically. My friend Robert Wuthnow at Princeton is fond of saying that the Norman Rockwell image of two white parents sitting with their children in church on a regular basis applies to only 7 per cent of the American populace today. It's not an era of great religious participation, so appeals that might in an earlier era have been thought of as part of the civil religion now seem more cynical. A lot of us doubt whether it matters as much whether candidates say that stuff or not. And that's where my proxy suggestion comes from.

But even if your more cynical interpretation is right, if the God-talk is a way of saying “I'm with you” to some conservative Christians, or of saying “I'm not like Clinton,” that still seems to be a perfectly legitimate function for rhetoric of this kind.

Leo Ribuffo: Civil religion, it seems to me, comes in different versions, ranging from a general religiosity to “God is unambiguously on our side,” with those like Carter and Niebuhr in the middle saying, “Well, maybe, maybe not.” I think the different versions of civil religion have different consequences. As to whether the candidates should be asked about their faith and whether they are using it as a surrogate for high character: sure. Nonetheless, I think they should be asked about religion-related issues, such as abortion and the Hollywood-and-violence thing, without being pressed to go back to the specific theological base of their views. I realize I sound a little bit like Seymour Martin Lipset in 1955, saying that some issues are too hot for the public square, but I think that trying to explain theology is not going to work. I would love to see a nice conversation on TV with the candidates discussing their religion, as Bill Moyers did with Carter, but I don't think that's what we would get. I think we'd get the religious version of Bernard Shaw to Michael Dukakis: “Your wife has been raped! What are you going to do?”

Ming Hsu: I have a two-part question regarding what Professor Carter said about the prophetic voice that's needed and potentially lost in an elected position. First, it seems like a fascinating paradox: the prophetic voice by definition is going to be unpopular—serving, as in the Old Testament, as a corrective to the rule of kings—but it is necessarily associated with an elected position that draws on a majority in a democracy. How can those two functions be embodied in one person—in this case, the president? Second, if there are multiple prophetic voices, then what do you do? For example, if elected officials such as senators and representatives come from different faith backgrounds—especially when it's not just Judeo-Christian faith but Buddhist, Hindu, and other faiths that aren't monotheistic—how do you reconcile those potentially conflicting prophetic voices?

Stephen Carter: Let me make it very clear that I don't expect a prophetic voice from political leaders. I think it would be unreasonable to expect that. The prophetic voice I have in mind is very much the voice of the outsider, one who stands apart from electoral politics. What's striking about the prophets of Israel, with minor exceptions, is precisely this standing outside the corridors of power to try to correct what the ruler is doing. So I think the prophetic voice can come not only from the obvious sources, such as Martin Luther King, but also from people who, without any effort to turn this to partisan advantage, either for themselves (I want to win the election) or for a party (this is God's party over here), simply want to call the nation to a better way. That's the prophetic voice that I think should be an honored and important part of our national life.

Now, the prophetic voice may be unpersuasive. And there are always multiple voices, since even these faith traditions themselves are not by and large univocal. That's fine. It means that most of the prophetic voices will not prevail. But prevailing and surviving are two different things. The prophet will usually not win, not in the short run, and that's fine. Prophets by and large are not people with short-run horizons. In the long run, one of the reasons why I cherish the separation of church and state is as a tool to preserve religious liberty by preventing that great, enormous force of the state from interfering with the development of religious voices, religious truth, and religious communities where the prophets are nurtured. The more religious communities attempt to look a lot like everything else in the culture, the less prophetic they will be able to be. So the prophet is not one who seeks power, whether for himself or for someone he may anoint, but rather is the one who simply tries to persuade people to change. Multiple prophetic voices? Great. The more the merrier. Sometimes they'll be ignored, and occasionally they'll prevail, and it seems to me that that's exactly the way it ought to be.

Terry Mattingly: New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd made the comment that the whole Clinton era has essentially been a fight between people who are pro-Woodstock and those who are anti-Woodstock. I would argue that the third great triumph of liberalism, after civil rights and the opposition to Vietnam, is the sexual revolution. I wonder whether you all think Lieberman simply got a pass on a lot of this because his God is not interested in judging the sexual revolution or the hottest issues involved therein, such as abortion and homosexuality. He's basically with the lifestyle left on those most divisive, pro-Woodstock issues. So what's threatening about his God?

Charles Krauthammer: I think this fits the pattern of giving a pass to the left. And on the issue of separation of church and state, the left gave a pass to the civil-rights movement, to the anti-war movement, and as I mentioned to the Catholic bishops in their opposition to the Reagan nuclear policy. So it applies across the board; I don't think it's specific to issues of personal morality. But I do think that in Lieberman's case it explains part of the pass. The other part of it, and the reason why many people who are not lifestyle liberals—such as evangelicals—have admired him even though he is, as you say, soft on those issues, is that he speaks to a kind of religiosity/piety that is non-sectarian but elevated, and is generally missing in public life. Lieberman promotes it unabashedly and with pride, and I think that appeals across the spectrum.

Stephen Carter: I agree with most of that but would add another small point. In the same way that religions and religious institutions can have political parties and partisan fights, so can ideologies. And so, to the extent that there is a genuine, principled view that says certain kinds of religious conversations do not belong in the corridors of politics, that principled view has become the captive of the Democratic Party and its interests. Therefore, that principled view tends to be asserted only if the Republican Party and its interests are being furthered. One of the reasons I really admire the ADL's Abraham Foxman is that he has been consistent on this issue without regard to whose oxes are gored. Not everyone is consistent in that way.

Michael Cromartie: It did take a while, though, for the ADL to express concern about Senator Lieberman's use of religion in the campaign.

Stephen Carter: Well, it did, it did. And I understand the kind of struggles they had over that issue. Anyway, I do think that part of the pass has to do with the simple point that the candidate in question is a Democrat and not a Republican. Again, I'm a registered Independent, so I have no horse in this race, but I do think that this is a simple line along which a lot of people divide. Law professors at the leading law schools tend to go overwhelmingly Democratic, overwhelmingly liberal. Most of them are giving Lieberman a pass because—and this is exactly what they say—they don't want to do anything to hurt Gore's candidacy. They'll say that quite explicitly.

Michael Cromartie: Leo, do you have something on this?

Leo Ribuffo: I think the main reason Lieberman is getting a pass is that no one wants to appear bigoted. I think in addition that he represents moderation, which is the flavor of the month. But I wouldn't give him a pass. I wonder who gave him the title “Conscience of the Senate.” It seems to me that if you believe in anything like political principles, the Senate has two consciences: Teddy Kennedy and Jesse Helms. A word about the Clintons: theological conservatives do not consider them religious, but they are. They are theological liberals with some twists. And Hillary believes in the literal return of Jesus.

Mark O'Keefe: Both Bush and Gore advocate more government collaboration with faith-based organizations. Are any of you concerned that the state could corrupt the independence, creativity, and integrity of churches?

Stephen Carter: Yes. I don't think that the various charitable-choice initiatives as they are called raise any constitutional questions, nor do I think that school vouchers, applied to religious schools, raise any constitutional questions. But religious groups that are eager to get their hands on this money should think long and hard before becoming, in effect, another set of interest groups feeding at the public trough. Quite apart from the problem of what that says about the nature of religion and where it places its reliance, consider a scenario like this: Members of an inner-city church want to start a church-related school and really do something about their neighborhood. So they take public money and build a school, and it flourishes. A lot of neighborhood kids attend. It becomes a big part of the church's ministry. Then a new administration takes over in Washington, and suddenly the money comes with regulations, some of which are inconsistent with what they preach. Well, they can't afford to run the church's school without the money. Are they going to close it down? The time to think about that is before rushing to take the money in the first place.

Charles Krauthammer: I agree completely. The real danger with taking down the wall is less to political liberty than to the faith-based organizations themselves. I think they can easily become dependent and then easily sacrifice their beliefs in order to stay alive. The only thing I would add is that I sort of marvel at the invention of the term “faith-based organizations.” I think they used to be called “churches”! It's a triumph of language equal to the substitution of the word “investment” for “government spending.”

Richard Cizik: I agree that the Religious Right's identification with the Republican Party was part and parcel of its diminished influence. It probably stepped over some other lines by appearing to endorse candidates. Yet my concern about this election, with all the talk about religion, is that what is being said is not really helping people make the judgments they need to make. Amid all the conversation about Senator Lieberman's religion, for example, it seems to me that Al Gore is getting away without truth-telling on White House scandals. No one seems willing to call him to account. Nor is anyone interested either in Bush and Gore's differing views on implementing “charitable choice.” What evangelicals want from the candidates, more than we want Jesus to be their political philosopher or for them to ask “what would Jesus do?,” is to have them speak essential truth.

My question to you who write publicly about this issue—I was at a White House meeting the other day in which the President invoked your name, Professor Carter—is this: If such fundamental questions that ought to be asked at this election time (i.e., how a candidate integrates faith with policy-making) are ignored or go unanswered, what does that say about the real influence of religion on our country and its politics?

Charles Krauthammer: I think the historians will agree that the effect of Lieberman's candidacy and the buzz about religion he has created has been to deflect from the Democratic nominee the issues hanging over him from the current administration, his own actions with fund-raising, and the taint of the Clinton era. I think that was undoubtedly part of Gore's calculation in choosing him. But I would say in defense of Lieberman that he is saying things today about his religion that he said yesterday and the day before. It is not for him an invention or a tactic. It has tactical effect, but I think he speaks with conviction and principle now in just the same way he has spoken in the past.

Tim Shah: I'm not sure the distinction between civil religion and sectarianism is very neat, especially in a society where the gatekeepers of ideas are not friendly to the idea of allowing any sort of religious meaning to enter the public sphere. It seems to me that the civil religion of the Founders that Charles Krauthammer eloquently described is quite a substantive set of ideas. It includes not just an image of God benevolently presiding over the affairs of the United States, but also the idea that there is a direct connection between our natural rights and God, that those rights do not exist unless we understand them as coming from a transcendent, divine source. Even Kennedy in his 1960 inaugural address gave assent to that. If we lose that connection, our health as a society will suffer. Now it seems to me that someone who tried to make that point today in the public sphere would certainly be called sectarian. Precisely insofar as one tried to invoke the traditional American civil religion, one would be considered sectarian.

Charles Krauthammer: In fact, that's what Lieberman did; he was quoting from Washington's farewell address, where he made precisely that point, rooting morality literally in religion. But Lieberman was not attacked as sectarian; he was attacked as someone who was promoting religion against irreligion. That attack is less supportable than an attack on an openly sectarian comment would be.

Leo Ribuffo: I don't see the animosity to civil religion in the broad sense that others do. My own preference would be, not from politicians but from others, more religious contentiousness, more fighting over religious basics. In that sense, I think it's just horrendous that Bob Jones III is written off as a bigot. He is someone who seriously believes Catholicism is wrong, and he is trying to bring Catholics to what he considers the true faith—which would have been the position of just about every Christian between Saint Paul and the theological liberals of the thirties. I don't want to say that I'm opposing God-talk or journalists' writing about God-talk. I just don't think people running for office are the best people to talk about religion.

Stephen Carter: I think that in the end we won't find the answers we seek simply by analyzing what the Founders and the Framers thought about the appropriate role of religion or the extent to which our institutions rest on it. We can certainly learn from the wisdom of the past and from the errors of our non-infallible Founders, but I don't think it is by understanding their view of the relationship of religion and free institutions that we will come to the right answer. What strikes me as important today is to figure out what we think about it, to make arguments on either side resonant in our terms. That's not something I would do as a constitutional scholar; that's for me as a citizen to do.

DISCUSSION PARTICIPANTS

Stephen Carter, Yale Law School; Charles Krauthammer, syndicated columnist; Leo Ribuffo, George Washington University; Michael Cromartie, Ethics and Public Policy Center; Richard Cizik, National Association of Evangelicals; Ming Hsu, Brookings Institution; Terry Mattingly, Scripps Howard News Service; Mark O'Keefe, Newhouse News Service; Timothy Shah, Ethics and Public Policy Center; Adam Wolfson, The Public Interest.