Voices of Reason, Voices of Faith

The disagreements are both subtle and significant

As the debate deepened last week over the proper relation between religion and politics, TIME invited a number of religious leaders and scholars to offer their reflections on the issue. All were asked just how the wall of separation between church and state should be defined, and whether they viewed the current campaign controversy as salutary or harmful. Among the responses:

HARVEY COX, professor at the Harvard Divinity School, Baptist minister and author of The Secular City:

The contribution of religiously committed people to the public arena should not be viewed as a nuisance or a threat. It is a potential source of energy and enlivening of the discussion of public issues. Religion has had an influence on political life in the U.S. from the beginning. Sometimes it has been a positive and constructive one, sometimes negative and destructive; but it has always been there, and the idea that it should not be seems rather idle. We have to realize that in the past couple of years one of the major new actors in public political discourse has been the black churches. Jesse Jackson's campaign is simply not comprehensible unless it is seen as the voice of the religious traditions and values arising from the black church, especially the concern for the poor and the marginal of our society, which is a very biblical message.

Although I disagree with the fundamentalists and evangelical preachers on almost everything, I welcome their participation in the larger political discourse. It is healthy that they are there. If Walter Mondale wants to disagree with Jerry Falwell or Jimmy Swaggart, that's fine. He has a right to do that, and when they begin making political statements they open themselves to that kind of criticism. It is very precarious for religious leaders to back a particular candidate, because their credibility as religious leaders is at a somewhat more basic level, formulating moral principles. But that is a matter of prudence.

The waiver I want to introduce is that people have very strong feelings about religious convictions. Therefore when we enter into a debate like the one we are now having, there is a special responsibility for restraint, for civility, for affirming the right of the other person to have a position that differs from yours and to avoid accusing people of being in bad faith. Religious spokesmen have a responsibility to remember that overheating the conversation is not going to contribute to what any of us want. But an elected official has the most sensitive kind of responsibility for nurturing the diversity that is the most remarkable thing about American religious life.

THE REV. RICHARD JOHN NEUHAUS, Lutheran pastor and director of the Center on Religion and Society:

It is important to make a distinction between religiously based values in the public square, and the role of institutional religion. What is properly thought of in legal terms as Jefferson's "separation of church and state" deals with the role of institutional religion in the public arena. Unfortunately, in the past several decades, a new and unhealthy situation developed, where it was assumed by many people that the separation of church and state meant the exclusion of religiously grounded values from the public arena. Now the religious New Right has kicked a trip wire, alerting us to the fictional character of a proposition that many Americans have been bamboozled into accepting: namely, that this is a secular society.

The religious New Right has shocked the cultural elites of America, because the elites assumed that "those people" had been thoroughly dismissed and discredited, going back as far as the Scopes trial of 1925, the so-called monkey trial. But beginning after World War II, with the emergence of the neo-evangelicals, those people have come back from the wilderness to which they had been consigned by the educational, media and mainline religious leadership.

We can do one of three things in response. We can say, O.K., let's have religion in the public square, and embark on head-on clashes and open-ended religious warfare. That would be disastrous for American society. The second thing is send all those people back to the wilderness. That, I think, is not possible.

The third possibility, and this is the work of many years ahead, will come from recognizing that America lacks a coherent, morally grounded public philosophy. We do not have the vocabulary to debate moral issues in the public square. This could be severely damaging, if not fatal, to the American democratic experiment. The present confusion, however, can turn out to be a watershed moment in American political and cultural life if we begin to reconstruct a public philosophy, one that is responsible to, and in conversation with, the religious-based values of the American people.

SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET, professor of political science and sociology at Stanford University:

The U.S. is the most religious country in the world. Some 95% to 98% of Americans say they believe in God. In most European countries it is less than half that. One of the explanations is precisely the separation of church and state. Churches must go out and recruit their membership. With state support, a religion doesn't have to work to maintain itself.

All of this has never meant that religious people do not take part in politics. The abolitionist movement was very much a religious movement. So, too, were the prohibition and antigambling movements, as were the anti-Catholic nativist movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries. We have issues dealing with civil rights, war and peace, abortion, homosexuality, crime. All of these are seen by some religious people as reflecting religious beliefs.

So having religious people foster political views is not new. If you take the view that abortion is murder, you can't expect that not to be expressed in the political arena. People have a right, and a moral obligation, to push what they believe to be true. If one uses religious arguments, one has a right to do that, just as one has a right to oppose them. It may be dangerous for the nature of the [church-state] debate, but I don't see how you can stop it.

RABBI ALEXANDER M. SCHINDLER, New York City, president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations:

Our understanding as Jews of what the First Amendment is all about is that the state does not in any sense favor one religion above others. That does not mean church groups should not be involved in the political process or should not compete in the marketplace of ideas. American Jews have always claimed that right and exercised it forcefully. But when the state begins the process of favoring one religion, the wall of separation is broken.

At the Republican Convention, fundamentalist ministers were conspicuous. There was the letter by Senator Laxalt, suggesting that God wants Americans to vote Republican and that the Christian thing to do is re-elect Ronald Reagan. The President himself suggested as much. It all amounts to saying that what is desirable is the establishment of a Christian religion. What made matters worse was the implicit assertion that these views alone are true and have God's blessing, and that those who oppose them are not just misguided, but sinful, intolerant and unpatriotic as well.

This issue is a crucial one for the Jewish community, and transcends partisan considerations. For we Jews are not just a minority in this country, we are a minority with a history. We suffered greatly in our wanderings across the globe. We were subject to continuous exile, religious conversion, economic appropriations, legal persecutions, anti-Jewish riots and genocide. These were the hazards faced by our people as they traveled the world. But they are hazards that are utterly absent from the American landscape. The reason is the principle of separation. In all other countries, there was a state religion. Here, there is none. This explains the unanimity and the fervor with which we uphold this principle, and wish to maintain it inviolate. Anything that attacks it may in itself not seem like a great matter -What's a creche paid for with public funds? one might ask. But add them all together, and you begin to see the erosion of the wall that in our judgment is the cornerstone of liberties in America.

JESUIT FATHER JOSEPH O'HARE, former editor of America magazine and newly installed president of Fordham University:

The important distinction is not between public policy and private religious beliefs. You can't have politicians who are schizophrenic. I think the line that must be drawn is between what one believes are moral and human values that should be protected by the law, and the very particular judgment that has to be made about what is the best kind of law, given the social realities of our society. On abortion, for example, one must consider the fact that there are many people who will try to have abortions even if they are declared illegal, that the matter is seen by different groups as an extremely important exercise of their personal rights. The judgment about what is the right law is a judgment on which good people, who share opposition to abortion, can disagree.

I think our religious leaders should enunciate the values and clarify the moral principles involved in public policy issues. But when they get down to the question of particular laws and candidates, our religious leaders would do well -as certain of our Catholic bishops are doing -to say they do not support any specific legislation or candidate.

The President -and nearly everyone else in politics in this debate -has expressed himself poorly. By some of the things he said when he spoke in Dallas, he seemed to suggest that those who oppose prayer in the schools are being intolerant of religion. That kind of arguing is very dangerous. My quarrel with the new religious Right is that they do not simply want to disagree with their opponents, they want to excommunicate them. The idea that there is one Christian position on issues like prayer in the schools violates the rules of debate in a pluralistic society. At the same time, while I understand how much the Jews have suffered from established religion, I think they are being overly cautious about attempts to accommodate religion generally. I am opposed to compulsory prayer in the schools, for example, but I think the idea of giving different religious groups access to school facilities should not be dismissed out of hand.

CLAIRE RANDALL, general secretary of the National Council of Churches:

As I understand church and state separation, it does not say that religious bodies or people of belief cannot articulate their own convictions as they relate to societal issues. There has long been an understanding in this country that they not only can, they should. The difficulty comes when those ideas put forward by religious groups become narrow, sectarian views. Certainly, you can put such ideas before the rest of the society and say, "This is our contribution to the moral thinking of this society, and to the public debate on a given issue." But if you put the ideas out and say, "This is the way you must go," and everyone must go this narrow way, that is totally different.

So the problem really comes when Government officials want to make laws that are based on the more narrow religious tenets or sectarian positions, and try to impose them on the entire society. That is what people are struggling with now. It seems as if there are some religious groups that want the Government to behave in that way, and there are people in Government who agree. At issue are laws that would require activity in the public place that borders on or is a religious activity. That's the school prayer problem.

There is no question that this country has felt a powerful impact from the Judeo-Christian tradition. A great deal of the impact on the founding of this country, on the Constitution, and on people like Thomas Jefferson came from the Enlightenment, which offered a rational, ethical approach to government. If you push that back, it would take you to many Jewish and Christian roots. But it would be a mistake to believe that this country was founded on strict Jewish-Christian faith principles alone, because the Enlightenment influences were broader than that.

THE REV. JERRY FALWELL, founder of Moral Majority and chancellor of Liberty Baptist College, Lynchburg, Va.:

I don't believe that the "wall" exists in the Constitution. It has been a "practical" wall that has been a good thing for the U.S. during its history. However, we have never had in this country a separation of church and state. There never was a time in American history when politics and churchmen haven't merged and blurred, including the evangelical ministers of the abolitionist movement who broke the back of slavery and on up through the civil rights movement. The wall is an imaginary wall intended to keep government off the back of the church, to prevent the officialdom of the church from coercing their followers. But it was never intended to keep churchmen from voicing an opinion or asserting moral values.

It is impossible for a person with sincere religious convictions to divorce his daily actions from those convictions. Our personal convictions always translate into our votes, our lifestyles, our words. Just as it would be impossible for a labor activist to vote for a right-to-work law, so does a person's private beliefs on the right of the unborn translate into policy.

All civilized society is governed by legislation of morality by consensus. In America, you can't commit murder or rape or robbery [with impunity] because some time back there Americans decided that that was a good moral way to live. So it is today.

Intelligent men and women who care about each other have to seek what the founders called in their documents "the general welfare" without oppressing the rights of minorities. Responsible legislation and judicial practice is and always has been morally informed. The general principles of American democracy have always been Judeo-Christian moral principles.

That same generation of Americans who came out of the bondage and darkness of the Old World to found this nation, when they framed a Constitution and wrote the Declaration of Independence, referred to their creator with a capital C, they created a chaplain of Congress, they had prayers in their school from Day 1. Throughout all these 200-plus years, there has been a commitment to basic values. That's what we're coming back to now.

I could be offended by a President who tried to create a Christian republic, or a Jewish President who tried to create a Judaic republic. But regardless of a President's faith, if he were promoting Judeo-Christian values, I would say amen to him. Yes, there is a sense of secularism in the nation and always will be. But this is also a religious society, always has been and always will be. I applaud that, so long as there is the absolute guarantee of total civil rights for the nonbeliever. I could never be offended at the assertion of those basic values as long as there is a clear commitment to pluralism. It is a fine line, but is not too great a risk to reassert that we are a nation under God. qed