Religion and Politics

by Fr. Roger J. Landry - September 14, 2007

Labor Day has passed and, as predicted, the political season has begun to heat up both locally and nationally. On the basis of recent elections in which faith-inspired and values-based voters have had a decided impact, political operatives and commentators are continuing to pay much attention to the intersection of religion and politics.

We have seen it already in several ways. Much ink has been dedicated to whether Mitt Romney's Mormon faith alone will be enough to keep him from the White House, as our former governor has continually sought to invoke the much-flawed principles articulated by John F. Kennedy in 1960. The Democratic Party has established a "Faith Advisory Council" to guide Democratic candidates in addressing issues of faith, as a clear sign both of the importance of speaking about religious issues as well as the unnaturalness with which many Democratic candidates do so. The moral issues surrounding embryonic stem cell research, the redefinition of marriage, abortion, the war and immigration are still very much on the front burner and even the most teflonesque candidates have not been able to duck them. There have also been questions about the political impact of various immoral choices candidates have made with regard to their marriage vows.

What is becoming clearer, however, is that more voters — both religiously motivated and secularist — are growing increasingly intolerant of receiving vacuous religious platitudes from candidates seeking their support. They want to know, and think they have a right to know, how a person's faith actually marks a person's character and decision-making ability.

In a September 6 article in Time, Michael Kinsley — the one time liberal counterpart to conservative Pat Buchanan on Crossfire, who thinks that "all religious are hard to believe" and that "any candidate who believes in the literal truth of the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Book of Mormon … is probably too credulous to be President — weighed in from the secularist side. With his characteristic candor, he targeted by means of example Mitt Romney, but he easily could have picked almost any presidential candidate from either party. And his words could just as easily be found in the writings of the U.S. Bishops' Conference on political participation.

"Mitt Romney wants the J.F.K. deal with voters: If you don't hold my religion against me, I won't impose my religion on you. But that deal made little sense in 1960 and makes no sense today. Kennedy said, 'I believe in a President whose religious views are his own private affair.' But the Roman Catholic Church holds that abortion is the deliberate killing of a human being. Catholic liberal politicians since Mario Cuomo have said they personally accept the doctrine of their church but nevertheless believe in a woman's right to choose. This is silly. There is no right to choose murder. Either these politicians are lying to their church, or they are lying to us." Or, we can add, they're trying to lie to both.

"If religion is central to their lives and moral systems," he continues, "then it cannot be the candidates' 'own private affair.' To evaluate them, we need to know in some detail the doctrines of their faith and the extent to which they accept these doctrines. … What a person deeply believes says something about his or her character, which voters may wish to take into account."

Not everyone on the secularist side, however, is ready for Kinsley's open call for a more serious discussion of religion in politics and what it means about those in politics. We see this playing out now in the gubernatorial race in Louisiana, where perhaps the most articulate candidate about Catholic beliefs in a generation is being smeared on the basis of his well-argued Catholic beliefs alone. Many have begun to notice that the issues at play extend far beyond who becomes the next leader of the Bayou.

The favorite for the governor's mansion, two-term Republican Congressman Bobby Jindal, is a 36 year-old Rhodes Scholar who converted from Hinduism to Catholicism as an undergraduate at Brown in Providence. While still in his 20s, he became head and led a turn around both of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals as well as Louisiana's state university system. Prior to running for Congress, for three years he was assistant Secretary for Health and Human Services in Washington.

He is being attacked in political ads, however, not for any of the items on his resume, but because of articles he wrote about his conversion and in defense of the Catholic faith in America and New Oxford Review in his early twenties. In those articles, he gave a crisp and accurate double-"apologia," first for his life with regard to the reasons behind his conversion and the suffering he encountered as a result of it from his Hindu family; and secondly, for the faith he has fully embraced, and why he is convinced on the basis of Sacred Scripture that the Catholic Church is more than "one denomination among others," but the true path established by Christ to lead human beings to salvation. The articles are nuanced and consistent not only with his Rhodes-Scholar training and brilliance, but with the teachings of the Catholic Catechism.

Despite the respect Jindal gave in the articles to non-Catholic Christians and stated appreciation for the achievements of ecumenism, The Democratic Party in Louisiana, however, has been using these articles to say that Jindal, essentially, hates Protestants.

Nationally syndicated columnist Michael Gerson adroitly summarizes the articles and the reaction. "The whole basis for the Democratic attack [is] that Jindal holds an orthodox view of his own faith and rejects the Protestant Reformation. He has asserted, in short, that Roman Catholicism is correct - and that other religious traditions, by implication, are prone to error. This is presumably the main reason to convert to Catholicism: because it most closely approximates the truth."

The reaction by the state Democratic party, however, "reveals a secular, liberal attitude: that strong religious beliefs are themselves a kind of scandal; that a vigorous defense of Roman Catholicism is somehow a gaffe. This is a strange, distorted view of pluralism, which once meant civility, respect, and common enterprise among people with strongly held and differing convictions. In the liberal view, pluralism means a public square purged of intolerance - defined as the belief in exclusive truth-claims and absolute right and wrong. And this view of pluralism can easily become oppressive, as the 'intolerant' are expected to be silent."

Jindal's reaction to the controversy has revealed not only his willingness to suffer on account of the Catholic faith for which he converted, but also the type of candor for which secularists like Kinsley and people of genuine faith long. "This would be a poorer society," he told Gerson, "if pluralism meant the least common denominator, if we couldn't hold a passionate, well-articulated belief system. If you enforce a liberalism devoid of content, you end up with the very violations of freedom you were trying to prevent in the first place."

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.