Rick Santorum is a religious ideologue. He wants to turn the U.S. into a “faith-based” Christian country through the imposition of those “family values” he personally has decided are God-given. He believes that America’s Founding Fathers would agree because they were, supposedly, men of faith just like him.
Quoting the Declaration of Independence to prove this point, Santorum reminds us that it says that people “are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” From this he concludes that rights come from God and not from government. Government’s role is simply to implement and protect those divine rights.
The truth is that the man who penned the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson, was nothing like Rick Santorum. He wasn’t even a Christian. He was a Deist. Jefferson’s phrasing was meant to impress a wider world in an age when religion was interpreted in a more literal fashion than it is in today’s United States. Jefferson certainly did not mean for Americans to take the notion of God-given inalienable rights literally. After all, he was a slave-holder.
The number of Americans who respond positively to Rick Santorum’s message is probably in the range of 20 percent. In terms of the Republican Party, they probably represent about one-third of the membership. Being ideologically driven, these people are motivated to vote. And, that is significant in a nation where voting turnout is traditionally low.
So, Rick Santorum is certainly representative of a politically active part of the U.S. population – a dangerous, intolerant, noisy, in-your-face part. If we let him and his followers get their way, the result will be ever greater divisiveness and decline at home, and war abroad. That is a choice for the rest of us.
theocracy
The modern Republican Party is 100 percent in the grasp of conservative evangelical Christians, far right Roman Catholics, Orthodox Jews (the “Israel lobby”) and Mormons. Its leading candidates either are part of this religious right, or have to pretend to be. The fact that all these people have to pander to that sensibility is instructive.
My parents founded a community, L’Abri, in Switzerland, in 1955 which became a haven for people engaged in scrutinizing Western civilization from evangelical Christian perspectives. In the 1970s and ’80s, my dad Francis Schaeffer and his books, such as “How Should We Then Live?” and “Whatever Happened to the Human Race?” influenced thousands of evangelical Christians, including Jerry Falwell, James Dobson and Jack Kemp.
I embraced my parents’ fundamentalism, became an activist in promoting it, then gradually came to reject it. But I have not rejected faith. Faith need not be opposed to science, or operate its own set of facts about the world. The confrontations between modernity and reason and faith are not necessary. They only become part of “faith” if faith becomes political and thus stops embracing the concept of doubt. And without doubt — if nothing else doubt about our own goodness — faith dies.
But in today’s political/religious climate faith and politics have become so interchangeable that Mitt Romney being a Mormon is an “issue” with evangelicals. And Romney has to pretend he believes everything on the social agenda to “fit in.” It is a lose-lose situation.
Political litmus tests now have been substituted the gospels and the Sermon on the Mount as the new American conservative Christian creed. And conversely the religious creed of politics these days from no new tax pledges to shutting down family planning clinics is pushed as if it was a matter of faith.
The result is that both religion and politics are debased and destroyed. Political leaders pander to faith issues in a destructive way. And religious leaders have met politics more than half way and no longer concentrate on saving souls, but on taking back America for God.
And, of course, the phrase is historically dubious. The founders based the republic more on classical models than Biblical ones, using noncommittal Enlightenment-era terminology for God (The Creator) if and when they deigned to mention him at all. That’s not to say Christianity has not infused the culture of our country at all: it clearly has. But none of the founders would have recognized the phrase “Judeo-Christian,” certainly not in the way it is used today, and they took pains to explain to other countries at the time that we were not a Christian nation, much less a “Judeo-Christian” one.
The agenda for the House of Representatives contains a bill, recently reported out of the Judiciary Committee, that asks our elected officials to reaffirm “In God We Trust” as our national motto. News reports indicate the bill’s supporters appear particularly keen on having public school classrooms display the motto, so that children can spend their days gazing upon it.
Granted, “In God We Trust” has a long public record, dating back to 1864, when the government first started engraving it on our coinage. It became the national motto when Congress voted it as such in 1956. Think those two years might have shared anything? In each case, the nation perceived itself in a life-or-death struggle — the Civil War in the first instance, the Cold War in the second. And given that the principal enemy the second time around was the Soviet Union, the idea of adopting “In God We Trust” as our national motto must have seemed a pretty clear way to distinguish Americans from the godless Commies in Moscow.
An obvious question to ask is why our public servants think now would be a good time to throw the spotlight back on the motto? To be sure, we’re again at war and have very recently enlarged the field of battle to include Libya.
But a more pertinent question — and an enduring one for the country — is, who is this God in whom we are called to place our trust? (I’m not talking about religious pluralism here, the important theological differences among the believing population, whose members call themselves Christians, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, etc.)
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