This removal of the religious from the political vexed religious and political thinkers throughout the ensuing two millenia. Luther in particular spent a great deal of mental energy trying to square the teachings in the New Testament with his instinct that any polity, to have political legitimacy, ought to be a religious polity. More recently, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrestled with the New Testament teachings divorcing religion from politics in the context of resisting an unethical state: Nazi Germany. In the United States, the debate most famously took the shape of Jefferson and Madison's writings, including the U.S. Constitution, on the separation of church and state. It must be noted that the United States constitution appears to be the first Western polity to explicitly accept the position seemingly articulated in the New Testament: that the realms of faith and politics should be separated.
I am not so naive as to think that the debate in the United States has ever been so clear cut as I stated above. Religious and political leaders have long held divergent positions on what role religion plays in politics. The fact that religious proclamations were long considered innocuous in their relation complicates matters because such innocuous proclamations are often taken to suggest that the formal position articulated in the U.S. Constitution means something other than the plain language of the First Amendment suggests. As society developed, the challenges to the separation of church and state changed in tone through the development of legal arguments advanced from philosophical positions that simply would not have occurred to anyone at the time the U.S. Constitution was drafted and in the first century of its existence. I specifically refer to the growing influence of atheism and agnosticism that arose with scientific and technological advances and the growing influence of litigation in setting the boundaries of individual rights and government limitations. Once American society reached this point, lawsuits regarding the appropriate level of entanglement between politics and religion flourished and became a preferred method for aggrieved parties (on all sides of the issue) to assert their claims.
This development obscures a greater conundrum involving the role of religion in American politics because it resulted in the piecemeal development of the contours of the First Amendment based on the individual cases that the federal judiciary decided. Hence, we have all this silliness over whether a creche on public property constitutes an impermissible establishment of religion. I do not doubt that the parties to such litigation legitimately feel their position is crucial and of societal importance, but such issues cannot get to the conundrum inherent in the New Testament. I would like to address the conundrum, which is nowhere more ironically constituted than in the current tendency Americans to consider religious belief a necessary component of patriotism.
We hear examples of individuals stating that Christian belief is a prerequisite to being a patriotic American. I will set aside for a moment any particular issues with this sort of theo-jingoism to deal with the belief itself and why it has become so common. The individuals often argue that one cannot fully embrace the American ideals without fully embracing the Christian religion. George W. Bush articulated this position in his frequent arguments about America being a freedom loving nation. He frequently tied his own notion of American freedom with his conversion to born-again Christianity. Conservative organizations do the same thing when they explicitly state that only a believing Christian can be trusted to ensure American freedom. Obviously this is ironic since the condition freedom unconditionally on a particular set of social and religious beliefs.
What we do not hear are religious leaders wrestling with the conflict between the New Testament's command to be tolerant and to leave the political to the political. This to me seems a peculiar absence in the culture's political dialogue. I believe that the absence is due to the fact that American patriotism as formulated by those embracing what has been termed (inaccurately, I think) the religious right does not in fact have a strong religious component. Instead, the insertion of Christian belief as a necessary condition of American patriotism serves as a proxy for a particular kind of American experience that its proponents regard as legitimate, in contrast to other kinds of American experience that are regarded as illegitimate.
Perhaps there is no better example of this than the current presidential race between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. The bottom line is that Barack Obama practices a form of Christianity that is essentially mainstream evangelical Protestantism. Mitt Romney practices Mormonism which is at odds with much in evangelical Protestantism. Nevertheless, the right embraces Mitt Romney and ascribes to him many of the values that Barack Obama must have as a practicing evangelical Christian. The instability of the rights' arguments against Barack Obama demonstrate the psychological quandary in which the right finds itself. For example, rather than deal with the inconsistency in the right's open embrace of Mitt Romney, many on the right simply refuse to believe that Barack Obama is a Christian. No evidence supports this contention, but it certainly makes it easier to disavow Barack Obama if his Christianity is simply denied.
More to the point, I believe that those who deny Barack Obama is a Christian do so because they have tied Christian belief into their cultural position such that they cannot accord anyone who does not share their cultural position with being a Christian. In this regard, the conflation of Christian belief and patriotism reflects a hardened position that has little at all to do with Christianity and has everything to do with the right's experience.
A great many of the religious right belong to a group or a collection of groups that has seen their position in the cultural diminished over the last 50 years or so. The adoption of Christianity as a badge of identification serves as a cultural marker rather than a religious belief. For example, many on the religious right lack the employment skills and educational experience to profit in today's economy. Instead of embracing unionism or liberal positions, these persons resort to a cultural position of blame. They do not have the right education because affirmative action kept them out of college. They do not have the right job because affirmative action kept them out of the factory. The jobs left because the unions screwed the companies. They oppose public education because schools teach about slavery and Jim Crow and the civil rights movement instead of celebrating the achievements of true American heroes. They wail against the culture because, in their opinion, when the culture shifted left it left them behind. Never mind whether this is in fact the case, such persons believe it.
There is a longing among the dispossessed for an Eden that never was. If we hadn't lost our family values, we wouldn't have lost our influence. If we hadn't kowtowed to every special interest under the sun we'd still have our factory jobs and our pensions. They hearken back to a time when people like themselves were prosperous and secure. They find like-minded comfort in the pews of their Sunday services, where the preachers rail about the godlessness of liberals and the Democratic party. They find like-minded comfort in hearing that their position in society isn't their fault. The fault lies in the non-Christians that took over the country, the colleges, and the public schools. This is what their preachers tell them and they believe it.
Outrage or discontent at being dispossessed, or at least in occupying a cultural role fraught with anxiety and economic uncertainty, is nothing unusual. What makes the turn ironic, though, is the use of the pulpit to motivate persons to channel their cultural frustration into political change under the auspice of their Christian faith. The turn is ironic because the very book upon which their discontent is fomented and channeled into political action commands tolerance and the separation of the religious from the political. In this regard, their Christian faith is not in essence a faith in Christ as that faith is received and codified in the New Testament, but rather is a faith in the injury that the ascendant portion of the culture (or so they believe) did to them.
Religion and politics become intertwined, patriotism becomes imbued with a particular religiosity because it is the only resource available that trumps the formal legal edifice that has allowed the newly ascendant to have risen above them. The newly ascendant are the recipients of such hated policies as affirmative action or equal pay because the dispossessed consider these policies to be responsible for their plight. The entanglement of religion and politics marks out the dispossessed from everyone else. If you want to espouse Christianity, it will not be considered legitimate unless you also espouse discontent at being dispossessed. Christianity will not be recognized as such if one adopts a nuanced position separating religion and politics. Neither will patriotism be recognized as such if one advocates the separation of religion and politics. So intertwined have the religious and the political become for this class that any person who does not hold like views cannot be patriotic because such a person belongs to the class that caused the dispossession in the first place. Even resort to the New Testament itself is not sufficient to convince the dispossessed that they have accepted an inconsistent position because their identity and their complaint of injury are so firmly entrenched that if they were to accept New Testament teaching on tolerance and separating religion from politics that very identity would be compromised. The dispossessed would have to accept that they cannot scapegoat liberals or immigrants or minorities for their own cultural or socioeconomic woes.
As a result, we do not find ourselves in the midst of great intellectual struggles with the teaching of Christ akin to those of Luther or Bonhoeffer. Instead, we find ourselves in the midst of what can appear to be a baffling struggle against intellectualism; a struggle characterized by the reflexive and dogmatic rather than the nuanced and thoughtful. The struggle is ever more disturbing because of the dispossessed's bellicosity toward the rest of us. And so we find ourselves in a nation founded on a belief that the religious and the political ought to be disentangled that in part finds support in the New Testament in which any attempt to espouse the separation of religion and politics brands one as unpatriotic regardless of the actual affection one feels for the nation.
