Why Religion Is Good for American Democracy

Robert Wuthnow

• Editorial: Princeton University Press
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780691222646
• Categoría: Sciences sociales
• Categoría: Sociologie de la religion

How the actions and advocacy of diverse religious communities in the United States have supported democracy's development during the past century Does religion benefit democracy? Robert Wuthnow says yes. In Why Religion Is Good for American Democracy, Wuthnow makes his case by moving beyond the focus on unifying values or narratives about culture wars and elections. Rather, he demonstrates that the beneficial contributions of religion are best understood through the lens of religious diversity. The religious composition of the United States comprises many groups, organizations, and individuals that vigorously, and sometimes aggressively, contend for what they believe to be good and true. Unwelcome as this contention can be, it is rarely extremist, violent, or autocratic. Instead, it brings alternative and innovative perspectives to the table, forcing debates about what it means to be a democracy.Wuthnow shows how American religious diversity works by closely investigating religious advocacy spanning the past century: during the Great Depression, World War II, the civil rights movement, the debates about welfare reform, the recent struggles for immigrant rights and economic equality, and responses to the coronavirus pandemic. The engagement of religious groups in advocacy and counteradvocacy has sharpened arguments about authoritarianism, liberty of conscience, freedom of assembly, human dignity, citizens' rights, equality, and public health. Wuthnow hones in on key principles of democratic governance and provides a hopeful yet realistic appraisal of what religion can and cannot achieve.At a time when many observers believe American democracy to be in dire need of revitalization, Why Religion Is Good for American Democracy illustrates how religious groups have contributed to this end and how they might continue to do so despite the many challenges faced by the nation.

1

Against Tyranny

RELIGIOUS ADVOCACY IN THE NEW DEAL ERA

TYRANNY THREATENS DEMOCRACY from without when a hostile power attacks. Tyranny threatens from within when too much power accedes to persons and agencies in command of the central government. The United States has experienced both, the former on December 7, 1941; the latter from concerns—some more warranted than others—about subversive activities, overreach of the federal government, and chief executives who flagrantly disrespect the rule of law. The threat from within is harder to measure and for this reason is more often subject to partisan debate. The debate itself, as well as the policies that follow from it, contributes to clarifying—and sometimes redefining—what democracy is.

This chapter takes as a case in point the controversy generated by the New Deal—a controversy that has been alluded to ever since in arguments about the scope of government authority. The debate that surrounded the specific proposals put forth by the Roosevelt administration dealt with the power of the federal government and the question of whether that power was being expanded in conformity with democratic principles or was threatening democracy. The debate illustrates how religious diversity contributes when concerns about dramatic shifts in the character of democracy are at issue. I begin by considering how religious leaders in the 1920s regarded disunity as a weakness they wanted to overcome in order to have a greater impact on public policy, then discuss how the Roosevelt administration attempted to cultivate support from religious organizations, and finally show how religious diversity prompted resistance to the New Deal and what lessons that resistance holds for us today.

The Appeal for Unity

In 1922, H. Richard Niebuhr, the younger brother of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, published a book that was to become the touchstone for inquiries about religion in the United States for the next fifty years. The Social Sources of Denominationalism provided an incisive analysis of America’s leading religious organizations. Identifying diversity as the most salient feature of US Protestantism, Niebuhr argued that the reason Protestants were divided into so many denominations was their roots in different nationalities, different regions, different social classes, and different races. Denominational differences, he said, were at heart not about theological disagreements. They were fundamentally the consequence of divergent social conditions.

Had that been all, Niebuhr’s book would likely have been ignored like most other attempts to show that ideas were nothing more than a reflection of circumstances. Niebuhr’s approach included enough Marxism to warrant the dismissal it received in some quarters. Niebuhr, though, was intent on making a larger point. If denominational differences were merely a reflection of circumstances, he argued, church leaders should work to overcome them. The trouble with division was that it prevented people of faith from engaging effectively with challenging social issues. Worse, it was an ethical failure. Divisiveness, he argued, was condemned by the gospel. People of faith should work to replace it with an inner unity, a spirit of harmony.¹

A long and varied perspective on American religion favors consensus over dissensus and unity over disunity. Acknowledging that reality falls short of this ideal, the ideal is for people to get along better, hash out their differences, learn to be tolerant, and seek common ground in shared beliefs or an implicit agreement about moral principles. It may be that they do this by participating in interfaith organizations or simply by recognizing that they share basic human values. To the extent that believers can do this, they contribute to the common good. And to the extent that they fall short, the results are troubling: ineffective divisiveness in addressing social problems, and at the margins intolerance, bigotry, and discrimination.

Granted, much can be said for this view. Why not seek common ground? Why not forge interdenominational alliances that effect mergers across historic lines of division? Why not look for the basic values on which people of all faiths and people unaffiliated with any faith can agree? Nothing is lost in these efforts and much is gained. Why not identify and decry division whenever it raises its ugly head?

The ideal of consensus, though, must take account of the world in which we live. The same writers who argue so fervently for consensus embrace diversity up to a point and beyond that understand that the world is deeply divided. In Niebuhr’s day it was divided between Christians and Jews, Protestants and Catholics, fundamentalists and modernists, and Black Christians and White Christians. Within each of the major faiths, schisms were periodic occurrences, and when organizations managed to avoid schisms, annual meetings of clergy and lay leaders were occasions for engaging in heated discussions of doctrine, morality, and church governance. As much as Niebuhr’s call for unity was hailed by leaders at the top of several large denominations, it was deplored by leaders of other denominations who considered theological differences worth defending.

What Niebuhr understood, even though he hoped for unity, was that religion’s disunity was also a strength. Denominational divisions existed because they articulated with the varied social reality that was America. The fifteen million Roman Catholics worshipped in parishes that bore the marks of Irish, Italian, German, and Polish immigration. Baptists whose regional and racial divisions dated to the 1840s numbered six million. The nation’s two million Lutherans were organized into Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Finnish, German, and Icelandic as well as multiethnic synods. Methodists divided themselves into seventeen varieties and Mennonites into sixteen. Further diversity was evident in hundreds of Jewish congregations, Buddhist temples, Spiritualist groups, and Theosophist organizations. In all, the nation’s religious adherents were scattered among more than two hundred “denominations.”²

The various sects and churches and synagogues and temples distinguished themselves theologically and in styles of worship, but they also expressed the varied experiences that had brought people to America and that continued to differentiate the population in terms of race, ethnicity, region, and social class. The differences reinforced these distinctive identities, accentuating valued traditions and giving them a voice, often in explicit rivalry with other traditions. And in contending for their convictions, their adherents also gave expression to what they thought America should be, which, as Niebuhr observed, meant contending for differing ideas about the state, its policies, and religion’s relationship to the state.

When Niebuhr contemplated the divisions among Protestants, the disagreements that transcended styles of worship and that animated debates about the public life of the nation included Prohibition, evolution, women’s suffrage, race relations, and the differing economic interests of city dwellers and rural inhabitants. Especially the advocacy generated by various temperance proposals, followed by Al Smith’s candidacy as the first Roman Catholic to run for the presidency a few years later in 1928, brought religious leaders into the fray of partisan politics in ways that later critics would see as violations of strict separation of church and state. Whereas Catholics generally opposed Prohibition and favored Smith, Protestants supported Prohibition and feared that a Smith presidency would result in the repeal of Prohibition and give the Vatican a powerful voice in American politics. The two sides were mobilized to influence the election, and the issues seemed important enough that clergy gave up their reluctance to express themselves politically. In many communities, Protestants and Catholics were so deeply divided that they could cooperate on hardly anything.

The stock market crash of 1929 and the dramatic rise in unemployment that followed redirected the nation’s leadership, including its religious leaders’ attention, toward the economy. The political capital the Republican Party acquired in winning the presidency and both houses of Congress in 1928 evaporated. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s decisive victory in 1932 set the stage for a decade of sweeping reforms. It was in interaction with these reforms that religious leaders repeatedly demonstrated the complexities of church-state relationships. The relationships were by no means limited to judicial interpretations of the Constitution. Religious organizations mobilized to express views about concrete actions they thought the federal government should take or avoid taking. They convened meetings, voted on resolutions they wanted sent to the administration, applauded some of the administration’s policies, and condemned others. However much the programs that were put into effect were later hailed as having preserved democracy, leaders at the time faced an uncertain future in which the shape of democracy itself was at issue. What faith communities did to make their values known—and how diversity shaped their actions—is well worth understanding these many decades later.

The New Deal

At its annual convention in Cleveland on May 23, 1934, leaders of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America listened as the evening’s speaker encouraged them to devote their full-hearted support to the New Deal. “The moral aspirations of the church should reinforce the political efforts now being made to establish a new social order,” the speaker asserted. The new order, “certain as it is to be realized in the end,” he promised, will with the churches’ help “be accomplished much more quickly and with infinitely less disturbance.”³

The speaker was Harold L. Ickes, the one-time Chicago journalist and Bull Moose Republican whom Roosevelt had selected in 1933 to serve as secretary of the interior and who subsequently headed the Public Works Administration. Ickes, whom his biographer described as a “righteous pilgrim,” was not only a skilled orator but also a trusted administrator who sought to embrace the Christian values instilled by his devoutly Presbyterian mother.⁴ During a private meeting with Roosevelt a few days before his lecture to the assembled Presbyterians, the president assured Ickes it would be okay to cancel the trip, given Ickes’s heavy travel schedule promoting the New Deal in addition to directing the Interior Department. No, Ickes said, doing so might lose the Presbyterian vote, to which Roosevelt responded, only half in jest, that they might lose it even if Ickes did make the trip.⁵

Roosevelt knew that the New Deal’s success depended on support from the nation’s congregations. Some sixty million Americans—approximately half of all men, women, and children—were members of local congregations. And besides the numbers, the president’s need of religious leaders’ support for the massive reforms he wanted gave those leaders an opportunity to speak in hope of being heard. Since taking office and even before as governor of New York, Roosevelt had cultivated the clergy in efforts to reform government and expand programs benefiting the poor. Ickes was an ideal spokesperson for these efforts. He believed the nation’s Christians should lend themselves enthusiastically to the administration’s reforms because the New Deal’s objectives and those of Christianity were identical. “Christ wanted men and women to live upright lives,” Ickes told the crowd in Cleveland, “but he also wanted them to have for each other understanding and good will and mutual helpfulness. He wished them to be good neighbors.”

This was a message that progressive clergy were already embracing. Close to home, New York clergy hailed Roosevelt’s ideas and prayed for him as they anticipated a new order in economic affairs. One likened him to a new messiah. The same was true in scattered locations across the country. At the First Congregational Church in Portland, Oregon, for example, Reverend Raymond B. Walker—a prominent spokesperson for the principles of progressive Christianity being taught in Protestant seminaries—said the nation might be in turmoil, but hearts were beating with hope because righteousness would ultimately prevail. Walker was persuaded that with scientific study, diligence, and toilsome adjustments a new order was slowly being created. The churches’ role was thus to inspire people to go forth as happy warriors in the cause of moral ideals.⁶

The notion that good-hearted Christians would facilitate the moral uplift of America while Washington went about the task of creating a new social order, though, was insufficiently cognizant of the threat that many observers saw in Roosevelt’s centralization of power. Critics worried that what was happening in the United States paralleled events taking place in Germany as well as events that had already resulted in the communists’ assumption of power in Russia. Americans, they feared, were responding to the economic uncertainty sweeping the nation by seeking the security of totalitarian leadership. With Europe much in mind, writers wondered whether American democracy was being replaced with dictatorial power, soon to echo the Germans’ cry of “Heil Hitler!” with “Heil Roosevelt!”⁷

Roosevelt’s four terms in office have been regarded as one of the nation’s most significant times of crisis. Democracy was threatened by the faltering economy to such an extent that many believed something like central planning or socialism was the only way to save it, while others worried that any such measures would weaken free markets and lead to either chaos or economic collapse. The rise of communism in Russia and fascism in Germany served as frightening examples of what could happen. Others worried that the US government was becoming autocratic. The arguments religious leaders advanced reflected these diverse views, not only as the opinions of individuals but also as resolutions formally adopted, as statements publicized in the nation’s leading newspapers, in sermons, and in editorials expressing alternative arguments in widely circulated religious periodicals. The ways in which religious organizations mobilized constituents on different sides of the issues were fractious, to be sure, but at the same time contributed positively to the debate about what democracy was and how it could best be preserved.

The main lines of religious argumentation that developed in those years have continued to the present. Faith communities that focus on helping the poor through organized publicly funded programs and that worry about the corrupting influences of free market capitalism have mostly supported the kinds of government intervention in the economy that happened under the New Deal. In general, the impression that the New Deal did more to save democracy than to endanger it has made it possible for faith communities at this end of the spectrum to focus on how well or how poorly government programs were serving the needy and contributing to justice, equality, and equal rights as core principles of democracy. At the other end of the spectrum, religious leaders in the 1930s worried that the totalitarianism they associated with Roosevelt’s administration posed a threat particularly to believers. They feared it set rulers above God, diminished the authority of the church, and destroyed believers’ freedom to worship according to the dictates of their conscience.

How religious leaders addressed the threat of totalitarianism they saw in the 1930s is a valuable place to consider how religious diversity contributes to democracy. Because religion was diversely expressed and organized, it tackled the question of how best to safeguard democracy from multiple angles, ranging from strongly affirming the New Deal to warning of its dangers. In between these extremes, religious organizations served as venues for disagreements to be hashed out and for deliberations to be held with experts from labor, business, and universities. Frequently, the venues were clergy...