(~) Believing and Doing: The President's Religion
Sightings 5/12/05
Believing and Doing: The President's Religion
-- Andrew R. Murphy
Asked to comment on the role of faith in contemporary politics at his
April 28, 2005, news conference, President Bush responded with three
salient statements, enumerated here in order of their delivery: 1) "I view
religion as a personal matter"; 2) "I think a person ought to be judged on
how he or she lives his life, or lives her life. And that's how I've tried
to live my life, through example"; 3) "The great thing about America ...
is that you should be allowed to
worship any way you want, and if you choose not to worship, you're equally
as patriotic as somebody who does worship. And if you choose to worship,
you're equally American if you're a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim."
There is, of course, an obvious sense to calling religion "a personal
matter" (statement 1). Across traditions, the notion that religion
ultimately resides in personal commitment and individual conscience is a
familiar one. But we should think carefully about what the
president means when he calls religion "a personal matter." After all,
this is a president who, in the third presidential debate, said that "I
believe we ought to love our neighbor like we love ourself [sic]. That's
manifested in public policy through the faith-based initiative .... I
believe that God wants everybody to be free .... And that's one part of my
foreign policy." In his 2004 State of the Union address, the president
drew on his religious faith to justify
the Iraqi invasion: "The cause we serve is right, because it is the cause
of all mankind .... We can trust in that greater power who guides the
unfolding of the years. And in all that is to come, we can know that His
purposes are just and true." In that same address, he referred to
religious values in approaching the debate around gay marriage: "Our
nation must defend the sanctity of marriage. The outcome of this debate is
important -- and so is the way we conduct
it. The same moral tradition that defines marriage also teaches that each
individual has dignity and value in God's sight." Examples
could be multiplied.
It is clear that religion is not merely a personal matter, but is
intertwined with the president's politics -- hardly a controversial point.
More interesting is the way in which President Bush's
description of religion as "a personal matter" and his equation of faith
with worship (statement 3) suggest precisely the sort of "privatization of
religion" that for decades has made evangelical activists and other public
figures motivated by religious values cringe. As University of Chicago
Divinity School professor Jean Bethke Elshtain points out, "a private
religion is no religion at all." Critics as politically divergent as
Stephen Carter and Richard
John Neuhaus claim that American liberalism relegates religion to the
sphere of individual belief, undercutting the legitimacy of religion in
politics.
Of course, this view -- the one that Elshtain, Carter, and Neuhaus
denounce -- is clearly not the president's. He did not mean to sever
values from the public realm. As we see in statement 2, the president
shifts from an emphasis on religion as something personal, or as the way
in which one worships, to the doing of deeds: What one believes is second
to what one does. The practical payoff of religion, then, lies not in
theology but in ethics. And in
emphasizing ethics, the president mutes theological questions and reaches
out to non-evangelicals with similar ethical systems, toward a more
inclusive conservatism that encompasses not only evangelicals, but also
pro-life Catholics, orthodox Jews, orthodox Muslims, and secular
traditionalists.
There are intriguing echoes, in this emphasis on ethical action over
theological belief, of the imagery of sheep and lambs in Matthew 25. What
separates those welcomed into paradise from those thrown into the lake of
fire? Not religion as "a personal matter," but as a matter of benevolent
actions: visiting prisoners, giving up coats, providing food. People will
be judged, to use the president's terms, according to how they lived their
lives, by the examples they set. Charitable deeds "toward the least of
these," elevated by the president's emphasis on doing, are also political
tasks having to do with how we divide our collective prosperity.
Feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and visiting prisoners are,
however, precisely the sort of tasks that the president continues to
reject as budgetary priorities, ranking them, in terms of
governmental commitment, far below tax cuts for the wealthy,
militarization of global politics, reliance on foreign fossil fuels, and
draining Social Security coffers. Perhaps most insidiously, the
president's description of religion as "a personal matter" insulates the
refusal to engage in such charitable acts from the censure of a religious,
or any other, community.
If religion truly is "a personal matter," if the "great thing about
America" is the freedom of worship (and not, for example, the freedom to
take one's deepest commitments into the public realm on issues of war and
peace, care for the needy, and so on), then we retain only a
stunted version of what a robustly religious polity might look like. The
president's truncated religious sensibility runs counter to a deeply
American, and deeply religious, tradition of charity, compassion,
inclusion, and justice.
Andrew R. Murphy is Assistant Professor of Humanities and Political
Philosophy in Christ College, the honors college of Valparaiso
University.
----------
The May Religion and Culture Web Forum, featuring "Red Medicine, Blue
Medicine: Pluralism and the Future of Healthcare" by Farr A. Curlin
and Daniel E. Hall, is now available at
http://marty-center.uchicago.edu/webforum/index.shtml.
----------
Sightings comes from the <http://marty-center.uchicago.edu/>Martin
Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
Submissions policy
Sightings welcomes submissions of 500 to 750 words in length that
seek to illuminate and interpret the forces of faith in a pluralist
society.
<http://marty-center.uchicago.edu/sightings/index.shtml>Previous
columns give a good indication of the topical range and tone for
acceptable essays. The editor also encourages new approaches to
issues related to religion and public life.
Attribution
Columns may be quoted or republished in full, with attribution to the
author of the column, Sightings, and the Martin Marty Center at the
University of Chicago Divinity School.
Contact information
Please send all inquiries, comments, and submissions to
<mailto:%20sightings-admin@listhost.uchicago.edu>Jeremy Biles,
managing editor of Sightings, at
sightings-admin@listhost.uchicago.edu. Subscribe, unsubscribe, or
manage your subscription at the Sightings
<https://listhost.uchicago.edu/mailman/listinfo/sightings>subscription
page.
----------
Peace,
• Ninure Saunders aka Rainbow Christian
The Lord is my Shepherd and He knows I'm Gay
http://Ninure-Saunders.tk
My Yahoo Group
http://Ninure.tk
Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches
http://www.MCCchurch.org
The Bible Site - help provide free scripture
http://www.thebiblesite.org
To send e-mail, remove nohate from address
.
|
