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An ongoing debate about religion and politics seems to find a place at the forefront of the news during virtually every election season. Of course, in decades past it was a given. There was no debate as to whether the mention of deity was inappropriate or offensive.
To the contrary, you were the odd man out if you didn’t make reference to God, or quote a passage from the Bible. Because the entire premise of our faith, our Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence itself rests upon the principles of Holy Writ.
But perhaps the most frustrating part of today’s debate is the double standard that is demonstrated by the media, hell bent Hollywood and liberal politicians towards the religious right. They are hypocrites when it comes to First Amendment rights for the conservative element of our society.
Recent USA Today commentary contributors Patrick Hynes and Jeremy Lott offered what I believe to be an excellent rebuttal that speaks to this topic quite well. I think its well worth rehashing their arguments.
The facts are the religious right is demonized for pursuing a political agenda that is aligned with its core values. When the religious left acts in kind, shouldn’t the same scrutiny be applied to its liberal persuasion?
Should our laws be based on the Ten Commandments? How much religion in government is too much? When does legitimate participation by the pious in civic life take on troubling theocratic overtones? These are questions that conservative religious leaders wish the press would put to them.
In our political tradition, most evangelicals and other conservative Christians today are really moderates. They want a government that is non-sectarian without being hostile to organized religion and people of faith. That’s a whole lot closer to what the Founders had in mind than the officially godless public square advocated by the ACLU.
What’s more, the creation of the religious right was largely a function of the courts and politicians pushing the boundaries the other way. Evangelicals were moved to civic activism because the IRS threatened to revoke the tax-exempt status of private Christian schools.
And because the U.S. Supreme Court removed abortion from the political process and mentions of the Almighty began to be scrubbed from valedictory addresses for fear that someone somewhere might take offense. Today, the term “goddamn” is treated as protected speech, but remove the “damn” and watch the lawsuits roll in.
So evangelicals did the only responsible thing they could in a democracy. They organized and reached out. They found allies in churchgoing Roman Catholics, mainline Protestants, Jews, and even some agnostics who believed that religion plays a vital role in holding society together.
In this they were not so different from the civil rights leaders of the past, whose rallying cry was the God-given dignity of every American. The new coalition grew over time to the point that the religious right became the single largest voting bloc in American politics.
That fact is intolerable to many intellectuals.
After the 2004 election, historian Garry Wills compared conservative Christians to jihadists on the op-ed page of The New York Times.
In a recent monograph, former senator and Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart claimed to know exactly what “today’s religious right has in mind.” They want to “return America to a pre-enlightenment age, an age in which the church, in this case in the form of one wing of evangelical Protestantism, dictates terms to the political process and sets boundaries of what can and cannot be legislated and regulated by the state.”
This sort of suspicion and insinuation makes it all the more difficult for the pious to participate in politics. Worse, critics such as Dartmouth College’s Lucas Swaine, an assistant professor of government, have demanded that Christians not frame their arguments with reference to the Bible, a book that millions of Americans believe to be the inspired word of God, because that wouldn’t square with “public reason.”
And any pronouncements on “values” are treated with scorn, at best.
It must be rough. Even so, we think Christian conservatives should take solace in the fact that most of their critics don’t mean a word of it. As proof, we offer Exhibit A: the religious left. No comparable group of political activists has received as much news media attention since the last election.
According to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, religious lefties are about 7 percent of the electorate. They are called on regularly by Democratic politicians seeking to win over values voters.
What’s interesting is that leaders of the religious left have not been hit with similar and constant charge of “theocracy.” This despite the fact that religious lefties articulate public policy positions in the context of the Bible and frame their political entreaties in the moral “values” language we are accustomed to hearing from Christian conservatives.
Critics are out of line for lambasting the religious right for advocating their beliefs, and they’d be just as wrong blasting the religious left. Yet for liberal and secular pundits, this has been a one-way street.
It’s time to give the “theocracy!” catcalls a rest.
Randy Sheridan of Burleson is a speaker, counselor and
mediator. He can be reached
at drsheridan@aol.com.
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