Does the GOP have a lock on God?'Religious vote' could suprise us"I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute. . . where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the pope, the National Council of Churches, or any other ecclesiastical source -- where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials -- and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all."
When John F. Kennedy spoke those words before the Houston Ministerial Association in June 1960, America's "religious vote" was much on his mind. He was a Catholic running for president in Protestant America, and the majority's ancient fears of "rum, Romanism, and rebellion" were far from dead. Forty-four years later, the "religious vote" issue in America's presidential race still isn't dead -- it has just taken on new forms. Over the past 30 years, evangelical whites in the South and Midwest have left the Democrats in droves, thanks in no small part to Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and other conservative preachers who seem to think G-O-D is spelled G-O-P. In the past four years, President Bush's constant claim to see the Almighty's hand in everything from his tax cuts to war with Iraq has only underscored his own highly partisan idea of the divine. But does that mean -- as many fear -- that this November America's "religious vote" will go Republican, and thereby place America's secular tolerance at risk? It seems a sensible question -- after all, in 2000 didn't 91 percent of Bush's voters tell pollsters they were "religious"? It's a stunning number -- until you realize that 81 percent of Al Gore's voters told the same pollsters they were "religious" too. Contrary to conservatives' heated claims, America hasn't really been fighting a new "culture war" between the "religious" right and the "secular" left these past 30 years. Instead, this remarkably religious country -- where nine out of 10 Americans profess to believe in God -- has more accurately been fighting the same old culture wars it's fought since the 1600s, between tolerance and exclusivity, between those who welcome pluralism and disagreement and those who don't. Massachusetts has known those battles from the start. The Salem witch trials, and the beating of Quakers and banishment of Baptists by Puritans in the 1600s were followed after the American Revolution by fierce (though nonviolent) battles between the Congregationalists and their Unitarian offspring. Then, in pre-Civil War Boston, a virulent anti-Catholicism gave the Know-Nothing Party control of every seat in the state Legislature save one. Yet today the Bay State, still quite religious, is among the most liberal in the nation -- as its recent expansion of marriage rights will attest. Continued... |
