Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robert Benne is Director of the Roanoke College Center forReligion and Society and Jordan-Trexler Professor ofReligion Emeritus at Roanoke College, Salem, Virginia. Hisbooks include Reasonable Ethics: A Christian Approachto Social, Economic, and Political Concerns andQuality with Soul: How Six Premier Colleges andUniversities Keep Faith with Their ReligiousTraditions. For more information on Benne, visit Roanoke.edu.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Good and Bad Ways to Think about Religion and Politics

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Contents

1. Introduction: Why Another Book on Religion and Politics?.....................12. The Separationists...........................................................73. The Fusionists...............................................................254. Critical Engagement: Moving from Core to Public Policy.......................395. The Practical Engagement of Religion and Politics............................81Index...........................................................................114

Chapter One

Why in the world would one want to write another book on religion and politics? Any brief glance at the catalogue of a library or any quick search through an online search engine will bring forth a huge number of entries. Is there anything about the subject that hasn't been said?

It is certainly true that much has been said, but a good deal of what has been said is genuinely bad. There is nothing greater than indignation to stimulate a writer to write, and my outrage has been stirred mightily by reading so many wrongheaded "takes" on how religion and politics ought to be related. In this book I will describe and analyze the bad ways and then offer what I consider to be a better way.

I am so bold as to think that the Christian tradition from which I write — the Lutheran tradition — offers such a better way. It has an approach to faith and politics that has scarcely been heard in the larger public debate about the relation of religion and politics. Indeed, that way of looking at religion and politics is generally neglected even by the church that supposedly bears it. Moreover, though I prize that tradition and will be writing from it, the tradition itself needs some revision in order to grapple creatively with the new challenges we face. I hope to offer that revision for the ongoing conversation.

My contribution will have to do mainly with how religious persons, institutions, and the religious claims they make ought to interact with the political process. I will argue with those who have very different versions of how religion and politics ought to be related, or in many cases, unrelated.

This normative task needs to be distinguished from the descriptive task of showing how religion in fact makes an impact on the political process. Both tasks are currently very important to both scholars and the general public in the contemporary world. The Pew Trust, for example, with its massive study of American religion, includes extensive information about how religious factors influence political behavior. And of course we have many examples of religious organizations and individuals trying to influence political decisions, some praiseworthy and others more dubious.

Oddly enough, neither the normative nor the descriptive tasks were considered to be very important fifty years ago. There would have been far fewer books on the subject then, and of course there were no computer search engines to look up the subject because there were few computers available to ordinary people. Even the computers would not have found much, except for the controversy in 1960 over John F. Kennedy's successful effort in becoming the first Catholic President. In the run-up to that election Kennedy assured alarmed Baptist pastors that not only would his church have no influence over his actions as President, but that his own religion — such as it was — would have no influence on his political decisions.

After that flurry the relative uninterest in the relation of religion and politics returned, though there were many examples of organized religion's effect on American political life. The major example of such effects came during the civil rights movement of the late 50s and the 60s. The black churches, aided by a number of white denominations, and led by a black Baptist preacher, Martin Luther King Jr., exerted great political pressure to get rid of racist laws and practices and to bestow long-denied civil rights to minority blacks. There was also religious involvement in the anti-war movement during the Vietnam War, as well as incursions into the newly born ecological, feminist, and gay rights movements. The Catholic and mainline Protestant denominations exerted political clout amid the political controversies of the day.

This religious involvement in politics was pretty much ignored in academia, as well as in the book-publishing world. In those elite worlds religion was no longer supposed to have political potency. Even the strong religious elements in the King-led civil rights movement were often ignored in the academic accounts of that phenomenon. Academics were long schooled in modernization theories that assumed that people would become less religious as living standards and the level of education rose. If religion was becoming weaker as America modernized, why bother studying something that was about to disappear?

Since most of the historians, sociologists, political scientists, and even scholars of religion of the time believed in and participated themselves in this "modernization" process, they were very unlikely to take the religious factor in political life seriously. Moreover, modernization theory was abetted by a related powerful intellectual perspective of the time, the Enlightenment paradigm, which held that only reason and science could arrive at reliable knowledge. The Enlightenment, partly in response to the wars of religion, viewed religion as arbitrary, unreliable, irrational, and therefore potentially oppressive if it were asserted in the public sphere. Therefore religion, if adhered to at all, ought to remain private and politically unimportant.

Intellectuals, then, were blinkered by two convictions — that religion was waning in the modernizing world and that whatever was left of it ought to remain private. In their eyes, religion did not and ought not have any discernible effect on politics. So they ignored it. This posture endured, with a few notable exceptions such as Peter Berger, until the recent past in academia. However, events made such obliviousness impossible.

First came the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976. Conservative evangelicals — scarcely known and much defiled — seemed to come out of the woodwork to elect a fellow evangelical. Little did those evangelicals know what they were getting at the time. Soon after the Carter election came the crisis in Iran, which signaled the rise of radical Islam. That resurgence became impossible to ignore, as it deeply affected the Muslim countries of the Middle East. Radical Islam was quintessentially political — it aimed at capturing the political centers of power and imposing Islamic law on the newly "pure" nations. It also aimed at dramatically extending the reach of Islam. Religion was becoming intensely political. The academic world belatedly began to take account of it.

What really got the wheels turning, however, was the rise of organized conservative religion in America. The Supreme Court decision of 1973 that found a constitutional right to abortion was an early stimulus to the rise of conservative Protestantism. The Court seemed to usurp the will of the people and to trample on religious values. Soon thereafter ensued an increasing number of court decisions that seemed to drive religious...