John Danforth - The Relevance of Religion: How Faithful People Can Change Politics

R eligion in politics can be a negative or a positive. A decade ago, I wrote Faith and Politics, a book that emphasized the negative and argued that the exploitation of wedge issues for the purpose of energizing the base of the Republican Party was dividing and harming the country. This book, by contrast, emphasizes the positive and attempts to show how religion can play an important and constructive part in American politics. It is written for people of faith who are concerned that our government is dysfunctional, who believe that their religion offers much of importance for them to say, and who think that they have a duty to help make government work.

The well-deserved attention the negative has received, not only from me but from Madeleine Albright, E. J. Dionne, and others, has had the salutary effect of decreasing the misuse of religion for political purposes. Playing to religious passions is easier done discreetly than in the glare of public attention it has recently received. The alarm that some have expressed at what they see as the decline of religion in America is, in part, a recognition that the energy of last decades religiously fraught issues such as embryonic stem cell research and end-of-life care has lost much of its steam. Even the hot-button subject of gay marriage isnt as hot as it was just a few years ago, with an increasing percentage of our population now accepting of or at least resigned to the new reality. Big issues eventually become old ones as public passion grows and then dissipates. What I and others wrote about divisive religious issues contributed to this maturing process, and it was in line with an American tradition dating from Jefferson and Madison that warned against the entanglement of religion and politics.

My one-sided emphasis on the negative, on the dangerous divisiveness of religion in the public square, was unsatisfying to some people who take religion seriously and believe that it should influence all of life, including politics. Their belief is squarely within the biblical tradition that calls faithful people to engage themselves actively in the world.

The Old Testament tells of a leader who confronted Pharaoh, a people who went to war, and prophets who spoke truth to kings. This activist understanding of religion carried into the New Testament. Jesus repeatedly told his disciples that faith was more than a private matter. They were expected to do things, to invest their talents, to bear fruit, to turn seeds into high-yielding grain. They were to go into the world and make disciples. Nowhere does the Bible suggest that the responsibility of religion is to stay out of peoples hair.

But that is exactly how some people understandably took what I said a decade ago. After I had expressed concern that the Christian right had taken over the Republican Party, Rush Limbaugh claimed that I want religious people to get out of politics. In fact, that is the opposite of what I want. I want political people to stop using religion to divide Americans, but I want religious people to become more engaged in fixing politics that is currently broken. And as the American people clearly understand, todays politics is most certainly broken.

Nearly every day, I hear variations of the same comment: I bet you dont miss itit meaning Washington, D.C., which I left when I retired from the Senate in 1994. Whats interesting is both the certainty and the frequency with which people make that comment today. Even when put as a questionDo you miss it?there is a rhetorical ring, as if to say, Of course you dont miss Washington, how could you? As for frequency, I dont recall hearing people say this in my early post-Washington years. Back then, some people wondered if the slow pace of Congress could be frustrating, but there wasnt what now appears to be a universal assumption that service in Congress is such a miserable condition that any sane person would head for the exit.

After I announced that I would be retiring from the Senate, I made a final tour of Missouri to thank my constituents for electing me. I told them that I loved my years in office, and that I was retiring only because I thought it was time to come home. That was true. I did love it then, and I would hate it now. When people bet I dont miss the Senate, they are expressing a widespread belief that government is ill serving the nation. In October 2013, Pew Research Center reported that only 19 percent of Americans say that they trust government to do what is right at least most of the time. Simultaneously, Pew reported that 81 percent of the public was dissatisfied with the state of the nation.

Some religious people, Mennonites for example, separate themselves entirely from the world of politics. But manyI believe mostreligious people believe that their faith relates to all of life: to their community, to their world, and to their politics. Today the faithful, despite some sharp differences on important questions of moral principle, share a common sense that something is terribly wrong in American politics, and they want to make it right.

They sense that government has become nothing more than a grab bag for interest groups wherein politicians will do whatever it takes to keep themselves in office.

They sense that Americans are losing what has connected us, that individualistic isolation is suffocating community, that we are holing up in front of our television sets, that as modern communication and transportation make the world smaller, we are dispersing to the suburbs and growing further apart.

They sense that government doesnt work, that every issue devolves into endless bickering, that the permanent condition of politics is gridlock.

Gridlock is an expressive term, because, like cars stuck in traffic, government seems incapable of moving in any direction. The national debt approaches $20 trillion, and there is no real effort to contain it. In most years, Congress doesnt pass a budget controlling how much government should tax and spend, and it doesnt pass appropriations bills to decide where to do the spending. For decades we have known that our most important domestic programs, Social Security and Medicare, are unsustainable on their present course, yet nothing is done to change course. Twelve million or so illegal immigrants reside in our country, and more arrive daily, but government cannot enact an immigration policy. Our roads and bridges deteriorate without Washingtons response. In foreign affairs, Russia reverts to its czarist ambitions and Islamist radicals proclaim a caliphate, while our belief that political divisions should end at the waters edge is a distant memory.