Political Religion and Religious Politics

Navigating Identities in the United States

David S. Gutterman, Andrew R. Murphy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136339271
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Profound demographic and cultural changes in American society over the last half century have unsettled conventional understandings of the relationship between religious and political identity. The "Protestant mainline" continues to shrink in numbers, as well as in cultural and political influence. The growing population of American Muslims seek both acceptance and a firmer footing within the nation's cultural and political imagination. Debates over contraception, same-sex relationships, and "prosperity" preaching continue to roil the waters of American cultural politics. Perhaps most remarkably, the fastest-rising religious demographic in most public opinion surveys is "none," giving rise to a new demographic that Gutterman and Murphy name "Religious Independents." Even the evangelical movement, which powerfully re-entered American politics during the 1970s and 1980s and retains a strong foothold in the Republican Party, has undergone generational turnover and no longer represents a monolithic political bloc.

Political Religion and Religious Politics:Navigating Identities in the United States explores the multifaceted implications of these developments by examining a series of contentious issues in contemporary American politics. Gutterman and Murphy take up the controversy over the "Ground Zero Mosque," the political and legal battles over the contraception mandate in the Affordable Health Care Act and the ensuing Supreme Court Hobby Lobby decision, the national response to the Great Recession and the rise in economic inequality, and battles over the public school curricula, seizing on these divisive challenges as opportunities to illuminate the changing role of religion in American public life.

Placing the current moment into historical perspective, and reflecting on the possible future of religion, politics, and cultural conflict in the United States, Gutterman and Murphy explore the cultural and political dynamics of evolving notions of national and religious identity. They argue that questions of religion are questions of identity -- personal, social, and political identity -- and that they function in many of the same ways as race, sex, gender, and ethnicity in the construction of personal meaning, the fostering of solidarity with others, and the conflict they can occasion in the political arena.

1
The Present Moment

Religious and Political Identities in the Contemporary United States

It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

George Washington, Letter to the Hebrew Congregation
at Newport, August 18, 1790

I assure you very explicitly, that in my opinion the conscientious scruples of all men should be treated with great delicacy and tenderness; and it is my wish and desire, that the laws may always be as extensively accommodated to them, as a due regard to the protection and essential interests of the nation may justify and permit.

George Washington, Letter to the Yearly Meeting
of the Quakers, September 1789

Consider a Few Recent Episodes

In November 2006, Elaine Huguenin faced a dilemma. When a lesbian couple sought to engage her services as a photographer for their commitment ceremony—a ceremony that celebrated a way of life antithetical to her religious principles—she respectfully declined to take the job. “The message a same-sex commitment ceremony communicates is not one I believe,” she later explained. But the couple, Vanessa Willock and Misti Collinsworth, saw things differently, and filed a complaint with the New Mexico Human Rights Commission, charging Elaine and her husband Jonathan (co-owner of the photography business) with violating the state’s anti-discrimination laws. Despite the Huguenins’ invocation of their First Amendment rights to freedom of religion and expression, the Commission awarded the couple more than $6,000 in attorney fees, a verdict subsequently upheld by a district court, the New Mexico Court of Appeals, and the New Mexico Supreme Court. The United States Supreme Court declined to intervene, and thus the ruling stands. Elaine Huguenin considers the decision part of a larger and ominous national trend: “If it becomes something where Christians are made to do these things by law in one state, or two, it’s going to sweep across the whole United States … and religious freedom could become extinct.” Similar cases involving same-sex ceremonies and gay pride marches have involved florists in Washington, bakers in Colorado and Oregon, and t-shirt makers in Kentucky.¹

A year prior to the dispute between Vanessa Willock and the Huguenins, the Air Force Academy faced a number of explosive allegations, including the pressuring of cadets to attend chapel and the denial of permission for non-Christian cadets to leave campus to attend their own religious services. (More than 90% of the students of the Air Force Academy identify as Christians.) The Air Force investigator assigned to pursue the allegations found that, although they acted with “the best intentions toward the cadets,” faculty members had failed to offer accommodations for non-Christian cadets. But similar allegations—that the Air Force creates a hostile environment for non-Christians—have persisted. During a mandatory meeting with those under his command in February 2012, Lt. Gen. Ronnie Hawkins, recently installed head of the Defense Information Systems Agency, presented “Ronnie’s Rules,” which opened and closed with exhortations to “put God first” and “remember God is good.” (Hawkins’s supporters also raise religious liberty issues in his defense, pointing out the inseparability of his faith and his work, and denouncing efforts to prohibit him from discussing his beliefs simply because he is a military commander.) Most recently, reports of a mandatory Air Force re-enlistment oath including the term “so help me God” brought forth a complaint from the Military Religious Freedom Foundation.²

On April 1, 2014, in what it billed as a “Mission for Migrants,” the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Migration traveled to the U.S.-Mexican border at Nogales, Arizona, to celebrate Mass and lay a wreath in commemoration of those who have died attempting to cross the border. By so doing, they sought to call attention to the continuing inability of American politicians to fix a broken deportation and detention system, and to raise up immigration as a vital issue of public policy on which religious communities have a particular responsibility to speak out. (They also sought to follow the example set by Pope Francis, whose first trip outside Rome was to Lampedusa in July 2013, where he prayed for migrants who had perished while attempting to reach Europe from Africa). As Cardinal Sean Patrick O’Malley put it in his homily at the border,

We come to the desert today because it is the road to Jericho; it is traveled by many trying to reach the metropolis of Jerusalem…. Pope Francis encourages us to go to the periphery to seek our neighbor in places of pain and darkness.

(O’Malley 2013, para. 14)

But not everyone saw it that way; just two days later, George Weigel, distinguished senior fellow and chair of Catholic Studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, criticized the bishops for “turn[ing] the Mass into an act of essentially political theater.” And three months later, Texas Governor Rick Perry—whose 2012 presidential campaign had featured a widely circulated ad in which Perry proclaimed that he was “not ashamed to admit that I’m a Christian”³—patrolled the border personally, gun in hand, with conservative talk show host Sean Hannity.

A month prior to the bishops’ “Mission for Migrants,” nearly 50,000 ultra-Orthodox Jews marched through the streets of lower Manhattan protesting a proposal to draft rabbinical students into the army. The draft in question, however, was not being conducted by the American government, but by the state of Israel. Decrying the Israeli government’s attempt to “destroy religious society and make the country into a secular melting pot,” the march—which was strictly divided into male and female sections—showed the powerful implications that Israeli decisions hold for American domestic politics, on issues far afield from Middle East peace negotiations or the level of foreign aid that the United States provides to Middle Eastern countries. These implications extend far beyond a single march in New York City; signs (in Hebrew) requesting gender-segregated public sidewalks in the overwhelmingly Orthodox community of Kiryas Joel, New York, sparked instant controversy, with defenders claiming they were merely “suggestions” and critics calling them an unconstitutional establishment of religion. And although the child sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church has been a fixture of news coverage in the United States for more than a decade now, claims that Kings County (NY) District Attorney Charles J. Hynes offered preferential treatment to Orthodox Jewish offenders—refusing to divulge their names, turning a blind eye to intimidation and harassment of witnesses and victims—may well have played a part in Hynes’s defeat in the 2013 Democratic primary (and the ensuing general election).⁴

Each of these examples—to which we could add countless others—highlights the tension between American religious and political identities, and frames the central puzzle that we address in this book. How should we—we citizens, we scholars, we concerned observers of American politics at this point in its history—understand the interconnections between “religious” and “political” identities in the contemporary United States? This tension is palpable even as the nation appears to be entering a period in which institutional religion plays an ever-diminishing role in American public life (thanks in large part to the widely discussed “Rise of the Nones” [Pew 2012], to which we return in Chapter 5 of this book).

To begin such a consideration, before engaging with contemporary realities, it will be instructive to return to a formative moment in the nation’s early history. In his celebrated August 1790 letter to the Jewish community of Newport, Rhode Island, President George Washington described the young United States as having moved beyond “toleration.” Unlike the nations of Europe, for whom the management of religious difference remained a fraught and tenuous achievement, characterized by the “indulgence” of those in power toward dissenters from dominant or established faiths, the new American polity would be overseen by a government that respected the “inherent natural rights” of religious exercise.⁵ Washington’s claim that the United States would be a place beyond toleration simultaneously recognized toleration’s status as both a baseline principle of democratic order and as limited, often grudgingly offered, in its grant of political and legal protection. The protection of the “inherent natural rights” of religious liberty represented the aspirational standard against which the nation’s treatment of its constituent religious communities would be measured.

That said, alongside Washington’s stress on the United States’ ironclad political guarantees for the exercise of conscience sat an implicit sociological expectation: that the salience of particular religious identities to citizens’ political standing would decrease, and the importance assigned to civil comportment and loyalty to the national state increase. “The Government of the United States,” he wrote, “requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.” More than a year earlier, just after assuming the presidency, he had written to the nation’s Presbyterian Churches, that

While all men within our territories are protected in worshipping the Deity according to the dictates of their consciences; it is rationally to be expected from them in return, that they will be emulous of evincing the sanctity of their professions by the innocence of their lives and the beneficence of their actions.

(Washington 1789)

Individuals’ status as “Americans” would be tested only by their willingness to offer the government their “effectual support”—a measure, in other words, not of who one “was” or which creed one professed, but rather what one did.⁶

In moving beyond toleration, Washington also sought to move beyond the narrow guarantee of a “right to worship” and toward a broader notion of respect for conscience, while at the same time attempting to safeguard the new nation from the kind of divisive sectarian conflicts that had so vexed early modern political communities. While distinguishing between the protection of rights to conscience and the corresponding expectation of civil and orderly conduct, Washington further expressed to the Quaker Yearly Meeting his “wish and desire, that the laws may always be as extensively accommodated to them, as a due regard to the protection and essential interests of the nation may justify and permit.” It is a striking sentence: at once Washington proclaims the importance of accommodating the religious liberty of all citizens, that their “conscientious scruples … should be treated with great delicacy and tenderness,” while subordinating this liberty to a higher priority, of what the “protection and essential interests of the nation may justify and permit.” This famous celebration of liberty—which subsequent generations of Americans would name their nation’s “first freedom” (Curry 1987)—in fact occupied, at least in the mind of its first president, a distinctly secondary status to the notion of order and national interest.⁷

The distinction between the two aspects of conscience-driven politics—its attempt to accommodate citizens’ sincere beliefs on the one hand, and its limitations within the confines of national interest on the other—sets in place a tension that has framed the intersection of religion and politics in the United States for more than two centuries. What he gave with one hand, in setting out an ambitious goal of treating conscientious scruples with delicacy and tenderness, Washington held back with the other, by reiterating that such tenderness was subject to the limiting conditions of the “essential interest of the nation,” which would ultimately decide just how tender it can afford to be.⁸ Shifting the grounds of inclusion from presumptive identity to civic behavior, Washington opened the possibility of an ongoing inquiry into the question of what it means to be an American.⁹

Debates over the very dynamic that Washington introduced in the late eighteenth century have recurred in every generation, and have often landed in the highest court in the land. From the claim that polygamy represents protected free religious exercise, in Reynolds (1878); to the rights of Jehovah’s Witnesses to refuse to salute the flag in Gobitis (1940)—a decision that was itself overturned, just three years later, in Barnette (1943)—to the receipt of government benefits like unemployment insurance in Sherbert (1963); to the grounds for exemption from military service in Seeger (1965); to the public educational system in Yoder (1972); to the use of drugs in sacramental contexts in Smith (1990): in each of these cases, adjudicated under the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause, individual and group consciences have produced tension and conflict when coming into contact with broader publics or the American state, reinforcing Washington’s caveat about the priority of order and perceptions of national interest when confronted with claims of conscience.¹⁰

Guiding Frameworks and Organizing Themes

We begin with these four examples, and with a consideration of Washington’s letters, not simply because they illustrate the often-contentious relationship between political and religious identities in the contemporary United States (which they do), but because they highlight some of the broad frameworks that we hope to bring to bear on this perennial set of topics. Our goal in this book is not to settle such disputes, but rather to elucidate the ways in which, even in this purportedly secular age, American identity at the individual and collective levels is animated by the often-contentious relationship between religion and politics. As we shall argue throughout the rest of this chapter, as well as in the chapters to come, the religion–politics nexus in this country is best understood by utilizing a few basic frameworks, each of which illuminates some aspect(s) of the American religious and political experience.

First, we point to the notion of Protestantization and assimilation, which has been used by a number of scholars to highlight the ways in which the American experience has shaped immigrants’ religions (and all American religions, with the obvious exception of those that originate in Native American communities, can be viewed as immigrant religions). On this view, world faiths of all sorts have historically undergone a broadly parallel set of processes as they have integrated into the American mainstream: a commitment to American-style individualism, the elevated importance assigned to internal individual religious experience; a congregational emphasis, with its concomitant valorization of the local-level religious body; and an egalitarian sentiment often unwilling to take dictation from elites.¹¹ As a result, alongside the increasingly diverse landscape of religious institutions and affiliations, regardless of their varied theologies, cosmologies, or ritualistic practices, there is something deeply homogenizing in the religious experience of American religious diversity. For many immigrant groups, such transformative assimilation—adapting the faith to a new American social reality—promised a “fast lane” to the American mainstream and cultural acceptance.

Such a view of religion clearly dovetails with Washington’s hope for a peaceful public sphere populated with religiously observant but civilly allegiant believers. With its roots in Enlightenment emphases on rational religion, Washington’s vision embodies a broader set of hopes and expectations about the intersections of religion and public life. As Bruce Lincoln has put it,

In subsequent centuries in those parts of the globe where the Enlightenment’s influence has been most strongly felt, the place of religion in culture has shrunk to ever smaller times, spaces, and topics: Sunday morning church services, children’s bedtime prayers, certain holidays and rites of passage.

(Lincoln 2003, 58)

Contrast such a view—which Lincoln calls religious minimalism—with a very different way of understanding the relationship between religion and identity, one that Lincoln has referred to as religious maximalism. For the religious maximalist, religion is not simply about the structure of private beliefs, nor does it merely refer to acts of worship in the context of a community of the faithful (daily prayers, Eucharist, almsgiving). Rather, religious maximalists hold a “conviction that religion ought to permeate all aspects of social, indeed of human, existence” (2003, 5), that religion infuses the believer’s entire being with existential meaning and makes ethical demands on her behavior across a variety of domains. Everything a believer does, every task a believer undertakes, no matter how mundane, can be—indeed, for maximalists must be—understood as religious exercise. Although it may seem apparent that maximalism represents “the desire for religion to colonize all aspects of culture,” Lincoln argues that in fact, quite the opposite may be the case: religious maximalism “also involves the desire for the other aspects of culture … to secure themselves by grounding themselves in religio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The Present Moment: Religious and Political Identities in the Contemporary United States
• 2 The “Ground Zero Mosque”: Sacred Space and the Boundaries of “American” Religion
• 3 A Nation of Maximalists? The Orthodox Alliance’s Identity of Resistance
• 4 Neoliberalization Theology and the Great Recession
• 5 None of the Above: Religious Independents and Identity in the United States
• 6 Political Religion and Religious Politics: Navigating 21st Century Identities
• Bibliography
• Index