Religion & politics: let's not mix the two

As we move toward the election, there has been some discussion of religion as a factor in the choices that voters will make. A few studies have shown that regular churchgoers tend to vote Republican, while less regular worshipers and secular sorts tend to vote Democratic. There have been calls for Democrats to talk more explicitly about religion.

Should we call this "the God card"? Please, let's not take this route. It's an almost classic definition of idolatry. Idolatry is not so much a case of worshiping false gods as it is a case of worshiping something other than God, and in the case of a politician, it means using God for what is perceived as a higher end ... winning. Any time any American politician mentions God I begin to feel like a European, a feeling I don't enjoy; but there is something literally obscene in the use of God to promote any political agenda, right or left. This is surely taking the name of the Lord in vain.

It is not that religion has no place in our consideration of who might be the president. It should have more of a place than it does. It should, first of all, lead us to distrust those who would use it to gain votes. And it should lead us to consider what both major parties have come to in recent years, and to look more seriously at the idea of single-issue voting.

The sad fact is that the Democrats have become the party of abortion, and both Republicans and Democrats are largely in agreement about the death penalty--they like it. It would mean the death of any candidate to denounce the American preference for killing at one end of life or the other, and some candidates (Northeastern "moderate" Republicans, for example) are happy with a both-ends policy. Our coarseness--our murderousness--as a nation and a culture should inform the way we think about who leads us. Here Europe has a point. Most European nations that allow abortion have more restrictions than the United States; all have rejected the death penalty.

But to care too much about this is called single-issue voting, and it is deplored. I think we should look at it more seriously. As long as people who oppose abortion and the death penalty are willing to bracket their feelings in an effort to do something else (beat Bush, beat Kerry) neither party can be made to take responsibility for its stands on issues that ought to be central to Christian voters.

Think of those matters that should demand that we focus on a single issue. During the war in Vietnam, I was certainly willing to be a single-issue voter. Segregation is another issue where single-issue voting made sense. It is interesting that politicians (usually Democrats) deplore single-issue voting where abortion is concerned, but would not say the same about segregation ... except in the old days, when in fact they maintained something of the same attitude toward segregation as they now maintain about abortion. At least it was squeamish silence in those days ... morally bankrupt, but it wasn't an outright, party-wide endorsement of an awful policy, as it seems to have become in the case of abortion. When the Democrats refused to allow Pennsylvania's Governor Robert Casey to deliver a prolife message to the 1996 convention, they lost me. I had never voted a straight ticket before, but this assured that I would be unlikely to vote for most major Democratic candidates again, particularly if they were vocal in their support of abortion. I think that they lost others as well--and they deserved to.

But the ease with which George W. Bush allowed any execution to proceed under his watch in Texas should be just as alarming to people who may be tempted to think of him as the Christian candidate. The callousness with which the poor have been treated under both Bill Clinton (with a welfare reform which could work minimally well when the economy was booming, but tanked when it began to slow) and now Bush (under an economy in which jobs are nearly stagnant and deficits are blooming) is another issue which no one addresses head on.

I wish we had a "none-of-the-above" vote to be able to register that this is not just apathy or alienation. It isn't that some serious moral questions won't come up during this presidential campaign. The combination of hubris and naivete which led us into Iraq may be one. Given recent events in Massachusetts and San Francisco, gay marriage is likely to be a source of some particularly ugly politics. Yet on the very important life-and-death questions of abortion, capital punishment, and treatment of the poor both parties are likely to welcome silence. Something is seriously wrong with parties, with nations, that are unwilling to engage such serious political questions, questions which have much to do with our collective morality. Something is also wrong with people who say that these issues--who lives, who dies, who suffers--are important, but are willing to put them aside for something ... more important? Isn't this a little like the politician's idolatrous use of God?

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