Faith in the Public Square: Obama’s Approach Is Fine By Me
December 02, 2006
With Illinois Senator Barack Obama (D) joking on The Tonight Show about running for president, it seems like a good time to revisit his June 2006 remarks before the Call to Renewal Conference, a gathering of religious progressives.
In that speech, Obama offered his perspective on the proper role of religious faith in public policy debate. On one hand, the first-term senator chided “secularists” who would “ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square.”
Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, Williams Jennings Bryant, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King -- indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history -- were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. To say that men and women should not inject their “personal morality” into public policy debates is a practical absurdity; our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
But then, in seeming contradiction, Obama warned religious believers about how they should present their faith-based concerns in the public square.
Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God’s will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.
This may be difficult for those who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, as many evangelicals do. But in a pluralistic democracy, we have no choice. Politics depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality.
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Reflections on a Field Trip to George Washington’s Mount Vernon Estate
November 14, 2006
My children had several days off from school last week, so I decided to take my own advice and “make better use of the vast historical resources readily available to northern Virginia residents.” Late Wednesday morning, we hopped in the Bus (a.k.a. our minivan) and charted a course for Mount Vernon, the estate of our first president. My hope was that our exploration of George Washington’s ancestral home would provide a useful opportunity to teach my girls something of “the virtues of courage, honor, sacrifice and civic duty” (id.). Chilly, wet and muddy conditions aside, things still didn’t turn out quite as I had planned.
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Should Christians Fast from Politics?
October 28, 2006
Jeff at Mr. Dawntreader pulls together a collection of thought-provoking perspectives on the question of whether Christians should fast from politics – a question now fashionable following the publication of Tempting Faith, the kiss-and-tell book of former White House aide David Kuo.
Michael J. Fox, Stem Cell Research and Compassion in Political Discourse
October 26, 2006
Actor Michael J. Fox, who suffers from Parkinson’s disease, has attracted a great deal of attention during the last several days for lending his voice in support of various Congressional candidates who support all types of stem cell research, including that which results in the destruction of human embryos. Among the campaign ads drawing attention is Fox’s endorsement of Democrat Ben Cardin in his U.S. Senate race against Republican Michael Steele.
Fox’s appeal is powerful, particularly within the context of our postmodern culture in which narrative is king. “With so much at stake,” including “hope [for] millions of Americans with diseases like diabetes, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s,” it could be argued that the compassionate response would be to do whatever Fox asks. In this case, his request appears simple: he’s asking that we support Ben Cardin and other candidates willing to do whatever it takes to relieve these types of human suffering.
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Racial Inequality: Is the Church Correcting or Perpetuating It?
October 21, 2006
As I matured into and through young adulthood, my worldview solidified into a form of radical personal, political and economic individualism. I conceived of little communal obligation other than the requirement that we all act in our own rational, long-term self-interest. When questions of racial or economic injustice were raised, in law and business school classrooms and private discussions, I was among the more strident defenders of the American meritocracy. I still can hear myself: “We have no caste system. Racial discrimination is illegal and has been for decades. Material success is available to all who are willing to sacrifice and strive.”
I had little to no sympathy or appreciation for arguments that there exist structural inequalities – between rich and poor, black and white – that cause our would-be meritocracy to produce unjust outcomes. I didn’t dispute the existence of apparently unjust outcomes, or that those outcomes might be the result of structural inequalities. I argued that structural barriers were minimal compared to the power and ability of a free individual of strong motivation and will to succeed. “Each of us, from across the demographic spectrum, encounters innumerable barriers to success in life,” I would argue. “Certainly, some have been born into tougher circumstances. But can we reasonably hope to correct such imbalances through the unwieldy hand of government?” As an educated (some would say overeducated), upper-middle-class, white male raised in a safe suburban neighborhood, these were very convenient positions for me to adopt.
Well, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere (e.g., Greed, Political Giving, Halloween), my relatively recent submission to the unbounded sovereignty of Jesus Christ has resulted in His welcome yet uncomfortable intrusion in many corners of my life. That questions of racial and economic injustice are no exception comes as no surprise. What does surprise me is learning that members of His Church may be unwittingly perpetuating racial inequality in America by emphasizing, in part, individualism and free will, much like I used to.
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Practicing Discernment in Political Giving
October 18, 2006
Until recently, I haven’t paid much attention this year to electoral politics outside of Virginia. That changed when friends asked my wife and me to provide financial support to the Congressional election campaign of a non-Virginian Republican in the midst of a tight race. As a way of helping me think through this decision, allow me to explain why I find it to be a difficult one.
Not until the 1992 presidential campaign did I first consider the issue of abortion. As I recall, I was drawn to some candidate’s explanation that, while he is personally opposed to abortion, he would not seek to make his personal view the law of the land. As a budding libertarian raised in a churched environment, this private/public distinction appealed to me, and I made it my own.
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Religious Freedom: Did Christianity Make Any Positive Contribution?
October 10, 2006
Ed Brayton sparked an interesting conversation yesterday with his post Historical Ignorance on Display, in which he criticizes a speech by Gary Lankford, president of the Ohio Restoration Project. I know nothing about Mr. Lankford or the Ohio Restoration Project. I am not particularly interested in Lankford’s speech or much of Ed’s criticisms of it.
What interests me is Ed’s history of the formation of the U.S. Constitution, in particular its inclusion of religious freedoms.
Religious tolerance came only with the Enlightenment-influenced founding fathers, who wrote a Constitution that forbid religious tests for office, guaranteed religious freedom, prohibited religious establishment and had not a single provision that was based upon the Bible. . . .
[I]f religious tolerance is to be credited to Christianity, [s]urely one should be able to point to specific references in the Bible or in Christian tradition that argued for religious tolerance if that was true, but one cannot. There was no Christian society that had religious tolerance or religious freedom prior to the founding of this country, which was an explicit rejection of centuries of religion nitolerance [sic] and religious establishments by Christian rulers. . . .
Prior to the Enlightenment, there simply was no tradition of religious tolerance in Christianity; indeed, the movement toward religious toleration was a reaction to centuries of intolerance from Christian leaders.
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The Christian Right’s Problem: Knowing God’s Truth
September 29, 2006
Former senator John Danforth of Missouri has a new book, Faith and Politics: How the “Moral Values” Debate Divides America and How to Move Forward Together. As reported in yesterday’s Washington Post, Danforth is telling audiences that the “potency of the Christian right in the Republican Party is limited,” “religion is a divisive force in the United States today,” and “GOP leadership [has proven to be] neither humble Christians nor effective politicians.”
I have no intention of reading Faith and Politics, not because I am suspicious of Danforth’s politics and theology – which I am – but simply because my reading pile is already more than ten books deep. Accordingly, I will not analyze all of Senator Danforth’s claims, scrutinize his evidence, or comment on the eloquence of his prose. In fact, I had decided not to say anything about his book, but then I read the following paragraph from the article in yesterday’s Post: “The problem with many conservative Christians is that they claim that [1] God’s truth is knowable, that [2] they know it, and that [3] they are able to reduce it to legislative form,” Danforth writes. “The popular question, ‘What would Jesus do?’ can be difficult enough to contemplate with respect to everyday interpersonal relations. It is mind boggling when applied to the complex world of politics.”
Let’s take a closer look at each of the three components of what Danforth says is “the problem with many conservative Christians.”
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The “Gay Marriage” Debate: Valuable Reminders from a Libertarian
September 16, 2006
Thanks to friends at BreakPoint for pointing me to a thoughtful discussion of the gay marriage debate penned by libertarian blogger Jane Galt. Like Galt, I often hear the following type of exchange between social conservatives, on one side, and progressives, on the other.
The social conservative says:
[M]arriage is an ancient institution, which has been carefully selected for throughout human history. It is a bedrock of our society; if it is destroyed, we will all be much worse off. (See what happened to the inner cities between 1960 and 1990 if you do not believe this.) For some reason, marriage always and everywhere, in every culture we know about, is between a man and a woman; this seems to be an important feature of the institution. We should not go mucking around and changing this extremely important institution, because if we make a bad change, the institution will fall apart.
To which, the social progressive replies:
Why on earth would it make any difference to me whether gay people are getting married? Why would that change my behavior as a heterosexual? . . .
I will get married even if marriage is expanded to include gay people; I cannot imagine anyone up and deciding not to get married because gay people are getting married; therefore, the whole idea is ridiculous and bigoted.
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Why Care About Plan B?
August 24, 2006
Earlier today, the FDA approved an application to allow women 18 and over to purchase, without a prescription, the emergency contraceptive Plan B. As described by an AP report,
“[Plan B] pills are a concentrated dose of the same drug found in many regular birth-control pills. When a woman takes the pills within 72 hours of unprotected sex, she can lower the risk of pregnancy by up to 89 percent. If she already is pregnant, the pills have no effect.”
Let me get this straight. Plan B is nothing more than a high dose of a commonly-used birth control pill. And if a woman is already pregnant, taking Plan B will have no effect. Why has the religious right been fussing about this? Where is the moral crisis?
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The Christian in Politics: Two Key Attributes
August 01, 2006
I recommend reading an interesting interview of Michael Gerson, who until recently served as a speechwriter and adviser to President Bush. Mr. Gerson touches on two particularly important characteristics of the faithful Christian participating in the political sphere.
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Internet Gambling: Why, if at all, should we care?
July 30, 2006
“If an adult in this country, with his or her own money, wants to engage in an activity that harms no one, how dare we prohibit it . . . .”
So argued Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) earlier this month as the House of Representatives was set to approve the Internet Gambling Prohibition and Enforcement Act. If passed by the Senate, an outcome that may be in jeopardy, the Act would prohibit most forms of internet gambling and make it illegal for credit card companies and banks to transmit payments to online gambling companies.
I suspect that a majority of Americans not only would agree with Mr. Frank in principle, they might concur that the government ought not seek to ban internet gambling. According to a recent poll apparently commissioned by the Poker Players Alliance, 67% of American adults believe that the federal government should not “be managing Americans gambling behaviors on the Internet.” So, why is it that more than three out of four of Mr. Frank’s colleagues disagreed, as the House of Representatives passed the Act by a vote of 317-93?
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A Pretense of Knowledge
July 24, 2006
Economist Walter Williams argues that Congress, when it comes to economic matters, not infrequently acts under a pretense of knowledge and beyond its intellectual capabilities. (See Pretense of Knowledge, Washington Times, July 23, 2006.) His lead example of such folly is Social Security law, which indiscriminately forces workers to set aside for retirement with no inquiry into whether any given worker might otherwise devote those funds to more productive uses.
I am sympathetic to Williams’ perspective. In fact, not long ago, I would have enthusiastically embraced it. I suppose it is this past enthusiasm that makes me uncomfortable today.
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Democratic Capitalism: Is Bondage Inevitable?
March 31, 2006
A politically-involved friend recently forwarded to me an email string with a story that has been floating around the internet for a couple of years or more. According to the story, in 1787, about the time the U.S. Constitution was adopted, a professor of history at the University of Edinburgh claimed that:
“A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. . . . The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:
1. From bondage to spiritual faith.
2. From spiritual faith to great courage.
3. From courage to liberty.
4. From liberty to abundance.
5. From abundance to complacency.
6. From complacency to apathy.
7. From apathy to dependence.
8. From dependence back into bondage.”
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"W" Seems Alien To Some
March 31, 2006
President Bush “has refused to indulge anti-Arab sentiment over the Dubai ports deal,” and that has left Washington Post op-ed columnist Richard Cohen, by his own admission, utterly baffled. Cohen says it is “obvious” that a “xenophobic element” has “propelled the squabble” over the Dubai ports deal and is “what sustains it.”
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Faith Is Personal
June 30, 2005
Religious faith is personal. The sentiment has been repeated so often that it nearly seems self-evident. Without doubt, it has become a ground rule for acceptable public discourse and interaction. Author and apologist Ravi Zacharias refers to this phenomenon as the “privatization” of religion:
Privatization may be defined as the socially required and legally enforced separation of our private lives and our public personas; in effect, privatization mandates that issues of ultimate meaning be relegated to our private spheres.
Even George W. Bush, who has been described as “among the most openly religious presidents in U.S. history,” often says that faith is personal.
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Judges, Bishops and Philosopher Kings: A Question of Authority
May 31, 2005
In Plato’s THE REPUBLIC, Socrates denounces Athenian democracy and its rule by the unlearned masses, arguing that only “philosopher kings” possess the wisdom and temperament to govern others.
Today, you would be hard-pressed to find a political or religious leader (in this country) who openly advocates totalitarian rule by philosopher kings. But, in my opinion, there are those in leadership, both political and religious, whose policies suggest a preference for rule by such a cadre of elites.
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