Politics and Policy Archive
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Religion and Politics Today: Tearing Down Walls, Building Bridges
By Michael Gottsegen
In America religion
is not something generic, but something plural and particular, something multiple and
irreducible, something that is increasingly hard to characterize in any uniform way. In
America, then, the question of the right relation between religion and politics is the
question of the right relation between religious pluralism and politics. This question has
both empirical and normative facets. The normative aspect is what interests me here. Thus
the question becomes one of how the plurality of religious convictions, values and
arguments (and hence how differences of religious conviction, value and argument) should
make themselves manifest in this arena where persuasive speech rules, where issues of the
day are debated, and decisions on matters of public significance are taken.[1]
In this context, the public manifestation of religion is not as rite or symbol or as
solemnizing benediction, but as appeal, as argument or as invocation of value. And given
the reality of religious pluralism, the proper question is how the plurality of religious
appeals, arguments and values ought to figure in a political realm that is populated by
citizens who hold different creeds, practice different rites and perhaps worship different
gods (if they worship or believe in any at all).
A number of different
possibilities, with very different implications, present themselves.
But before proceeding
to review these possibilities, we must note that the political process is such that,
whether consciously intended by the political actors or not, the process itself
necessarily expresses an understanding of the political community by its very mode of
proceeding. In other words, when spoken on the political stage, our words do more than
express our interests and opinions; beyond this, by our words we express and perform the
civic union; we enact the practical meaning of e pluribus unum, the “from many
one.” Even if we are gathered to deliberate upon something as innocuous as price
supports for leather shoes made in Alaska, the meaning of e pluribus unum cannot
help but be enacted. This is at once the glory and the challenge of political life.
Thus the seemingly
practical challenge of mediating religious differences in the public square and in the
political process is shown to be at the same time, on the symbolic level, the never absent
challenge of manifesting how we are one people even in the same moment in which we
are disagreeing with one another about whatever topic happens to be under discussion.
Religion is like much
else in our political life (ethnicity, class, race, regionality). At once it can connect
us or separate us - connecting us to some and separating us from others. Appeals to
religious values, beliefs and arguments thus can unite or divide, can signal commonality
over difference or insinuate difference where commonality might have prevailed. Appeals to
religion can differentiate oneself as “the other” or can be used to mark others
as “the other.”
That politics in our
pluralist United States cannot help but to express the meaning of e pluribus unum leaves
open the precise meaning that the political process will impute to this alchemical
metaphor and task. How then shall we enact and constitute the mystery of our complex and
internally differentiated national unity? Shall the norms we adopt render us one over
and against our manyness? Shall they render us one as an assertion of the
numerical majority's right to claim to speak for all and thereby to render invisible those
who fall outside the putative one? Or shall they render us one in a manner that incorporates
our manyness?
According to the
first perspective, religious differences, like racial or gender differences ought not to
figure in political life at all. The public
square is where we appear as citizens - as nothing more and as nothing less - and where
the accidental particularity of our private and social existence is transcended, overcome,
denied standing. From this perspective, such details should be hidden behind a veil of
invisibility. Accordingly, political arguments should appeal to the general interest of
all citizens and should never be couched in the language of particularist or parochial
appeals to a religious heritage or set of values that are not shared by all of one's
fellow citizens. Rather, political argument should speak to each of us in terms of our
common essence as citizens, and in effect define our citizenship as a shared quality that
transcends all of the differences (religious and otherwise) that otherwise divide us. This
view of public life, and of the discourse of public life, as radically secular and
actively neutral has traditionally held a certain appeal for members of minority groups
who have known from experience that a "thicker" and more particularistic
language of political life has often worked to marginalize them and, in effect, to brand
them as un-American and alien.
This conception of
the public square is indeed the conception that Jews and the members of other religious
and ethnic minorities have worked so successfully, since the Second World War, to realize
in America. Knowing all too well that the public appeal to religious values has most
often, in effect, been an appeal to the religious values of the majority and, as such, has
entailed the exclusion and "othering" of religious or ethnic minorities, Jews
and other minorities worked the courts and the organs of national public opinion to
promulgate a vision of a thoroughly secular public life. This vision was largely realized
by the early 1960's.
According to the
second perspective, the e pluribus unum of American political life is understood as
a product of a political process that presupposes that the polity is riven by a range of
differences - economic, regional, ethnic and religious, and that these differences are the
raw material from which a political majority -- and hence the e pluribus unum -- is
to be hewn on an ad hoc, issue by issue basis. This composite and complex political
majority, which is produced through logrolling, coalition building and compromise, stands
for the whole and claims for itself the mantle of democratic legitimacy even when it
commands the slimmest majority. The unum in this case is not the essential (or
metaphysical) unum we considered in the previous case -- an unum that goes
all the way down, as it were -- but a practical unum of common interest that is
built up from, and in no way negates, the real differences that differentiate one group or
section or interest from another. The unum, in other words, is contingent and ad
hoc. It is pragmatic and of the moment. It is an unum born of intersecting
interests, not an unum born of deeper or more far ranging commonality.
From this
perspective, religious differences are regarded as a legitimate object of partisan
political appeals that, in political terms, do not differ from political appeals that are
made on the basis of other cleavages in the body politic. Politics, here, is understood as
interest-group politics and the members of particular religious or denominational
groupings are regarded as having particular interests in common that are proper grist for
the political mill. Political appeals to religious differences are from this perspective
not unlike political appeals that presuppose differences in regional or industry-specific
economic interests or differences in the interests of ethnic groups.
The danger of such a
politics is that the political majority that carries the day - whether narrow or wide -
need not be concerned with the interests, or rights, of the political (and/or religious)
minority. Thus a white majority might use its power to disadvantage non-whites, or a
Christian coalition might act to disadvantage non-Christians. Unlike the prior approach
that, in effect, would privilege the common status of Americans as equal citizens, this
approach would privilege the pre-political differences of race, class, culture and
religion, and ground politics upon them. As a consequence, there is a real danger that
where “difference politics” prevails the unum will come to be defined in
exclusive and exclusionary terms that marginalize discrete religious, ethnic or racial
minorities in psycho-social if not in legal and more practical terms, relegating them to
an inferior or subaltern status.
To date, the United
States has been spared the worst political consequences of multiculturalism, but it is
understandable why the prospect of such a politics makes many Jews nostalgic for the
post-war American ideal of unabashed and unreconstructed liberal universalism. For those
who know what it is to be excluded and marginalized (or worse) by a politics that regards
narrow ethnic or religious appeals to be legitimate, the dream of the multiculturalist
rainbow rings rather hollow. It is
understandable, then, that many Jews (and many others besides) recoil in dread at the
prospect that appeals to religion - and hence appeals to religious differences as well -
might come to play a more prominent role in American political life. It is not hard for
them to foresee how this turn might lead to their de facto if not de jure
disenfranchisement, and hard for them to envision the circumstances under which it will
not. While Jews were generally proud of the
Lieberman nomination, it should come as no surprise then that many Jews were quite wary -
indeed far warier than many Christians - of Lieberman's propensity to wear his religion on
his sleeve. For Abe Foxman of the ADL, Lieberman's public religiosity was no less
discomfiting than George Bush's confession that Jesus Christ is his favorite political
philosopher. Indeed, from Foxman's perspective it was much moreso since Jews should
especially understand the importance of holding the line against the entry of religion
into politics. After all, if it's okay for the Jews to invoke religion, then it must
surely be okay for the Christians to do so. And we know where that is likely to lead.
The two approaches to
conceiving of the relation between religion and politics that we have canvassed so far are
relatively easy to imagine, as they hew rather close to modern experience. What is harder
by far to imagine is a third approach that lies between a difference-denying, rather
abstract civic universalism and a difference-rich, coalition-oriented, multicultural
politics. In this third variant, difference
(and religious difference more especially) is neither denied nor regarded as irreducible,
but is treated as a singular manifestation of the universal and, as such, is both
valorized and transcended at the same time. From this perspective, e pluribus unum
is to be accomplished by each citizen as she goes back and forth between the community of
her cultural origin and the public square in which the thick wisdom traditions of each
community of origin are brought forward to speak (where germane) to the most pressing
political questions of the day.
It was Hannah
Arendt’s profound insight that the currency of politics is not truth but opinion, and
that the political process is not about securing the truth but about producing a consensus
of opinion. In a strange kind of alchemy,
that which counts as truth outside of politics becomes just one more opinion as soon as it
is enunciated in the political realm. Building on her insight, I would argue that upon
entering the political realm, the truth claims of particular religious traditions undergo
an important change that is the sine qua non of political life in general and more
especially of political life in our pluralist and open society. Thus it comes about that
religiously grounded claims that are existentially authoritative for an individual, claims
that an individual regards as true because they are believed to be revealed, communally
sanctioned and/or time tested, are stripped of this authority when they are offered to the
wider political community as pertinent to one or another challenge of our common political
existence. In this movement, what was absolutely true for the individual becomes just one
political opinion among many and it can only achieve a wider political validity if
the individual succeeds in persuading his fellow citizens of its cogency and adequacy.
As a matter of civic
respect for one's fellow citizens, however, it is incumbent upon the individual citizen to
translate his claim into the idiom of secular reason and to forego parochial appeals to
his co-religionists even as he proudly acknowledges the particular religious provenance of
the claims he is espousing. Expediency alone
dictates that members of religious minorities translate their positions into the secular lingua
franca of the public square if they want the majority to embrace a given position, but
in the political culture being envisioned here even citizens who belong to the majority
religion would translate their positions into the idiom of secular civic discourse out of
a principled commitment to a civic culture in which religious differences do not function
as sources of political advantage. In the first approach, this aim was realized by denying
religion any legitimate role in public life, which in effect threw out the baby of
religious wisdom for fear of the bath of religiously based discrimination, as it were.
Here, however, in the articulation of the third approach, a way is sought to save the baby
without getting soaking wet in the process. A commitment to the translation of religiously
derived claims or arguments into the most widely accessible language expresses a
commitment to a broadly inclusive political life that is nourished but not ruined by the
wellsprings of religious wisdom.
By this act of
translation, the good citizen will ideally manifest a laudable dual loyalty to both his
own particular religious tradition and to the wider human community to which he belongs as
a citizen. Love of neighbor demands offering to one's community whatever wisdom one
possesses that may be of assistance, but it also demands that the offering be conveyed in
a manner, and in a language, that can be generally understood and can find acceptance at
least potentially. In public life, this means that when what one has to offer is an idea
or an opinion as to why x should be done and not y, one must set forth good reasons and
good reasons are reasons that have been translated into a secular language of the widest
possible accessibility and appeal.
Whoever accepts this orientation
toward political life as a matter of principle (or even on pragmatic grounds), and is
willing to accept that in political life the common good can only be defined through a
process of mutual exchange of opinion that culminates in a consensus as to wherein the
common good lies, need not be feared as a danger to our political life. My hunch is that
we are living in an era in which more religious people than ever before accept this norm
and are willing to abide by it. And that is why I do not fear and, indeed, strongly
support the return of religious energy and enthusiasm to our public life. I also trust in
the bulwark of the constitutional separation of church and state as providing enough
security to permit the passionate union of religion and politics.
Having benefited
politically, socially and economically from an era in which religion was politically
marginal, Jews are understandably wary of countenancing the renewed commingling of
religion and politics. It is hard for us to imagine how invoking our Jewish faith, history
or values in the public square will not “other” us, will not become politically
self-defeating and lead us to forfeit everything we have gained since the Emancipation. In
reality, however, the wall of separation between religion and politics has become
increasingly permeable and the return of religion to public life is ongoing. Just where
this process will lead is still an open question. But insofar as we want to influence this
process, we should support the emergence of a relationship between religion and politics
that will minimize the potential for injury and maximize the potential benefit to our
public life.
Of the approaches we
have been considering, then, the choice before us comes down to either the second or the
third. Of these, which is more likely to be conducive to increased social solidarity and
increased resistance to political idolatry - the twin goods that religion can contribute
to our public life? Which is less likely to encourage the negative synergies of religious
intolerance and discrimination that have so frequently arisen when religion has been
permitted entry into the political sphere?
In closing, we might
say that politics is all about walls and bridges, about erecting walls and building
bridges. At the beginning of the 21st century, we must ask ourselves whether the political
manifestation of religious difference, in general, and of Jewishness, in particular, is a
wall or a bridge. After millennia in the West in which we experienced our Jewishness as a
wall - and after fifty years in America in which muting our public Jewishness proved to be
the recipe for social and political inclusion -- it is hard to imagine that it could now
be a bridge.
But for religion to play this role, citizens must not be asked to leave their religious identities outside the state house door.
[1]
Even if one accepts that religion
has and should have a role in public life, this does not mean that religion should have a
role in political life. After all, the public realm is broader than the political domain
and includes the domains of cultural and intellectual life from whose interminable ferment
emerges the general climate of opinion or the spirit of the age - which has an indirect
influence upon politics proper. At a minimum, then, one might support the idea that
religious pluralism should find its expression in the arenas of cultural and intellectual
life. Of course, even in this arena the question of how this religious diversity
ought to make itself felt needs to be asked. Suffice it for now for me to invoke John
Stuart Mill, agreeing with him that truths only come alive where they are honestly and
vigorously contested. In this sphere, my maxim would be to let 100 flowers bloom.
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