Brahma Blogs

This team blog is designed to allow a group of friends who have known each other for 20+ years to share their thoughts on culture, politics, religion, relationships, etc.

Sunday, October 24, 2004

Church and State

Since most of our political threads have turned into discussions of religion and faith-based voting, I thought y'all might be interested in reading this op-ed piece about the presidential candidates.

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-op-gumbel24oct24,1,195799.story

You might not agree with the writer's views, but you can't deny its implications on this election and how people are going to vote.

posted by cvo @ 2:03 PM  

9 Comments:

  • At 2:15 PM, Blogger R said…

    I'm kind of sick of sending newspapers and everyone else on the Internet my personal information just so I can read their articles. Maybe you can paste the article as a comment, or summarize it for those of us who are not registered with the LA Times (and don't want to be).

     

  • At 4:20 PM, Blogger cvo said…

    Sorry, Russell. Didn't realize it was a members-only page.
    Here it is:

    "What can I say, John Kerry is an equivocal guy," retired Presbyterian minister Dana Smith said last week in Arizona. That has not stopped Smith's grass-roots campaign efforts on behalf of the Kerry-Edwards ticket, but it hasn't exactly gladdened him either. When I asked him what impression the Kerry style probably would have on undecided voters in his part of the country, he replied: "Not much."

    Kerry has a problem. Something is preventing him from connecting with those crucial last few voters and converting his strong debate performances into a clear-cut lead over President Bush in the polls. The Republicans like to characterize him as a flip-flopper, but that is not quite the point. All politicians flip-flop, including the president.

    The difference between the candidates is, rather, one of mentalities, of intellectual and religious culture. Although it is not fashionable to say so, this election cuts straight down the same Protestant-Catholic divide that so often has been a fault line in U.S. political history.

    Bush and Kerry do not just hold divergent views on where the country and the world are headed. They have radically different notions of truth, knowledge and the relationship between man and God. All that has left an unmistakable stamp on their politics.

    If the president often seems so much more certain of himself, it is because, as an evangelical Protestant, he sees the truth as something concrete that is revealed through a direct personal bond with Jesus Christ.

    If Kerry seems more questioning, it is because, as a Catholic, he sees the truth as something wrapped in divine mystery, something to be approached with caution and humility, if indeed it is ultimately knowable at all.

    In the evangelical Protestant mind, attaining the approval and support of the Almighty is a matter of faith alone.

    To a Catholic, it is a far less certain process, requiring humility and forbearance in the face of human frailty. Kerry's theology teaches him, in fact, that faith on its own is meaningless; it is by his acts that a man should be judged. As Kerry put it in the third presidential debate, quoting the Epistle of St. James, faith without works is dead.

    Why should any of this matter? It matters because Catholics, for all the progress and social integration of the last 150 years, are still outsider figures in U.S. politics. They no longer are scapegoated by nativist gangs as they were during the great immigration waves of the 19th century. They no longer are held responsible for big-city corruption and resented by rural Protestants, as they were in the heyday of Tammany Hall and the other urban political machines. They no longer are deemed unelectable, as they were when Al Smith ran for president in 1928.

    Still, a vestige of all these historical struggles lives on, as a matter of political culture if not directly one of religion. Kerry is not just a Catholic. He is a Catholic from a big East Coast city and something of an intellectual to boot.

    Americans, especially in the Protestant heartlands of the South and parts of the West, tend to like their politics simple, straightforward, unwavering. They don't want to be lectured by some egghead, and they don't want to be told that the world is any more complicated than the moral schematics of a western.

    Kerry sees tentativeness as a virtue. In his autobiography, "A Call to Serve," he asserts the existence of absolute standards of right and wrong but sees them as anything but simple. "They may not always be that clear," he writes. " … It is our duty to honor them as best we can."

    Such equivocation and appreciation of complexity have always been reviled by a certain segment of the American public. As the 19th century revivalist Dwight L. Moody put it: "When the word of God says one thing and scholarship says another, scholarship can go to hell!"

    One of the most telling moments of the campaign came during Kerry's acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, when he chastised Bush for the repeated insinuations — made directly and through various surrogates — that God had chosen him and guided him through his most crucial life-and-death decisions. Kerry countered: "I don't want to claim that God is on our side. As Abraham Lincoln told us, I want to pray humbly that we are on God's side."

    Although Kerry made a powerful point about the arrogance of the Bush White House, I would guess many American Protestants are perfectly comfortable with the notion that God is on their president's side — by extension, on their side too. After all, if God is not on America's side, whose side is he on? Al Qaeda's?

    Likewise, the Protestant tradition has no problem with Bush wearing his religion on his sleeve. If anything, Kerry's shyness on the topic has done him damage. For a long time, the perception was that his reluctance to talk about religion indicated an absence of faith. And it did not help that certain conservative bishops said they would refuse him Communion because of his pro-choice stance on abortion. Only recently has the public learned that he once contemplated the priesthood, that he attends Mass and that he always travels with a rosary, a prayer book and a medal of St. Christopher.

    How far we have traveled in 44 years: In 1960, John F. Kennedy almost failed to be elected because he was deemed too Catholic and therefore susceptible to political interference from the Vatican. In 2004, John F. Kerry may fail to be elected because he is deemed not religious enough.

     

  • At 4:48 PM, Blogger R said…

    Thanks Curtis, for posting the article and for accommodating my whininess. A weekend with the parents will tend to do that...

    I think the article has some truth to it, but the view of the Catholics that he postulates is, from what I hear, becoming less and less true, and supposedly this trend is worse in the eastern than the western half. In comments to the Hangin with Republicans (HWR) thread (I know, it's a really old post, and I'm the one complaining...), I mentioned some of what I consider really egregrious examples of just the sort of thing the Protestants were upset about in the 1960 election, i.e. the Church hierarchy telling people (more or less) how to vote. Tom, Julia, and I came up at a time when the Catholics were much more tolerant and thoughtful, and Tom does this tradition a lot of credit in his comments to the HWR thread. I would put Kerry in a similar branch of the same tradition.

     

  • At 5:03 PM, Blogger Edith said…

    Am I truly the minority even in this group were I to say I'd like God off our currency, out of the schools, a more than respectable distance from the Supreme Court, and preferably not incessantly rolling off the President's lips (at least he can pronouce it AND use it in a sentence) so we can all get back to trade, jobs, the environment, local and global economics, energy policy, something akin to a balanced budget, lest we forget education from the education president, and if we're going to join or create every war we can imagine, how about weapons that work in the hands of our troops, and boots, flak jackets, and batteries for them while they're out there. You know, the normal workings of "gubment"... Again, please someone just tell me when this is over.

     

  • At 7:36 PM, Blogger Michelle said…

    Thanks for the article Curtis. I think the characterization of Protestants from the article was a bit simplistic ("they don't want to be told the world is any more complicated than the moral schematics..."), but the general contrast was interesting as I do not know a great deal about the Catholic church (I am enjoying the dialogue between Russell and Tom). I believe every voter tends to vote according to a hierarchy of what is important to him or her, and what takes priority in their life whether it be moral issues, economic issues, the environment... Many Evangelical churches teach that a personal hierarchy should be God, family, church then business, which is why so many evangelical voters are voting upon social issues first such as abortion, marriage etc. even if they do not agree with other issues such as the economy, the environment, tort reform etc. In this election, given the polarization of the country, I believe voters from each side are supporting the Party platforms more than the actual candidates.
    As far as whose side God is on from the article, I believe if you read about the Israelites, God showed favor upon them as a nation when they were following his mandates, and not so much when they weren't. Protestants believe that America is falling far from the mandates of God, thus that is why the strong push for voting this election. The concern for the election of the President has even more relevance this year for many Evangelicals due to the Supreme Court nominees that will probably come out of this term. Kerry, though skirting the issue in the debates pretty well, has in stump speeches referred to appointing judges who would not overturn Roe v Wade.
    I know that often times Protestant view points are deemed as narrow minded and intolerant, but they stem from faith and beliefs in the absolutes from God not the relativity created by man.

     

  • At 7:42 PM, Blogger Unknown said…

    In the article, the author writes:
    If the president often seems so much more certain of himself, it is because, as an evangelical Protestant, he sees the truth as something concrete that is revealed through a direct personal bond with Jesus Christ.

    If Kerry seems more questioning, it is because, as a Catholic, he sees the truth as something wrapped in divine mystery, something to be approached with caution and humility, if indeed it is ultimately knowable at all.
    Although there is some truth in the article, there is also grave error about the Catholic mind. The quote above contains the kernel of that error. Contrary to the author's claim, the Church has always advocated---indeed, confidently asserted---that truth is knowable by man.

    In fact, the Church distinguishes between (1) truth (for example, the Ten Commandments) that is knowable without revelation and (2) truth (for example, that the One God subsists in three truly distinct Persons) that is knowable only if God were to reveal it to the mind of man by intervening in history. Moreover, the conscience in each person determines in his mind that which seems morally true, and so each person will be judged against this determination. One who follows his conscience, even if doing so is sure to result in suffering, is a practitioner of natural religion. According to the Church, even an atheist may therefore be naturally religious, though he would probably deny it for himself. If the conscience be enlightened by revealed truth, then its studious follower is a practitioner of revealed religion.

    Much of what follows in the article is a fictitious distinction between Catholic and Protestant. So take it with a grain of salt. There are indeed grave and real distinctions between the Catholic and the Protestant, but those are a topic for another thread.

     

  • At 8:17 PM, Blogger cvo said…

    I agree that the author takes a simplistic view, but given the space constraints of an op-ed piece, I'm sure he had to stake out basic positions to make his point which in my view was the role that faith has now assumed in the voting patterns of America.
    I think Michelle laid that out in her comment about the hierarchy that Protestants have about God, family, business, etc.
    This has probably been going on since our democracy started, but religion just seems to be so much more a part of the debate and discussions going on around these candidates and this election.
    I'm with Edie in that I wish other issues (economy, foreign policy, constitutional rights, civil rights) should take priority when voting for a President, but I certainly understand why Protestants and Catholics alike would be affected by their strong religious convictions.

     

  • At 8:28 PM, Blogger Unknown said…

    Russell wrote:
    >
    > Tom, Julia, and I came up at a time when the Catholics
    > were much more tolerant and thoughtful, and Tom does
    > this tradition a lot of credit in his comments to the
    > HWR thread. I would put Kerry in a similar branch of the
    > same tradition.

    I am thankful for Russell's kind words on my behalf, but I have seen no evidence that the Church in her teaching authority is less tolerant or thoughtful now than she has ever been. As to the behavior of individual Catholic persons, many of whom like Kerry seem sadly uninformed of certain basic principles (despite displaying some outward signs of religion), I can only attest to what I see in person and in the news. Again, though, I see no clear evidence of recent change in thoughtfulness or tolerance.

    As for me, I learned almost nothing of what the Church actually teaches (or why she teaches it) before graduation from high school. The Church (and our parents) in most cases absolutely and catastrophically failed to catechize my generation. Rare among cradle Catholics of my generation, I had to catechize myself. And it took more than a decade for me to become a real Catholic after going to college. More commonly, someone of my generation might persist into adulthood as a nominal Catholic, ignorant of the most important issues of the faith. Occasionally, someone like Russell would out of a (misguided but heartfelt :^) sense of philosophical integrity do the nobler thing of actually breaking with the family tradition rather than play the hypocrite.

    Anyway, I have seen precious little that would make me feel comfortable classified in the same category with Kerry.

     

  • At 8:24 AM, Blogger Unknown said…

    What I meant to say is that I was rare among cradle Catholics of my generation in that I sought catechesis as an adult, and I did a lot of work over many years to learn what the Church actually teaches, why she teaches it, and what happened in Church history. In my experience, most cradle Catholics my age have a rather poor grasp of history and theology in comparison with recent converts to Catholicism.

     

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