Religion and Politics—Looking Forward to 2012 and Beyond

E.J. Dionne, Jr. and William A. Galston—two very smart liberal public intellectuals—have produced a most interesting analysis of religion and the 2010 elections , based in part on the network exit polls and in part on a post-election survey they helped design.

Some of what they have to say is quite familiar —most groups broke the way they usually do, with moderate movement in the direction of Republicans.  This is, as Dionne and Galston would say, “the old politics of faith.”

But there’s also, they argue, a new politics of faith, which has less immediately to do with the “culture wars” conflicts between traditionalists and modernists and more to do with, among other things, how people understand the relationship between “America” and the Islamic “Other” (my language, not theirs).  According to the post-election survey, the country is roughly evenly divided (45-49) between those who affirm and those who deny that “the values of Islam, the Muslim religion, are at odds with American values and way of life.”  This is not the only cleavage Dionne and Galston flag, but it’s one of the interesting and important ones.

Here’s how Dionne and Galston put it:

Strong disagreement with the statement was especially powerful among African-Americans as well as among those under 30 years old, and the religiously unaffiliated. Strong agreement was most common among Americans over 65 years old, among Christian conservatives and white evangelicals. Catholics and white mainline Protestants were close to the national norm.

In our view, a serious threat of further national division lies in the politicization of this question, a genuine possibility in light of the strong differences of view along partisan and ideological lines. Where 33 percent of Republicans said they “completely” agreed that Muslim and American values were incompatible, only 11 percent of Democrats said this. And while 31 percent of conservatives (and 43 percent of Tea Party members) completely agreed, only 8 percent of liberals and 16 percent of moderates did.

They further suggest that attitudes on this question track attitudes about President Obama’s faith:

[T]he political contours of opinion on the question about Obama’s faith were strikingly similar to those on the question about Islam. Among the groups most likely to say that the president’s religious beliefs were “very different” from their own were Tea Party members (66 percent), Republicans (57 percent), Christian conservatives (53 percent), and conservatives and white evangelicals (both at 50 percent). Those who saw the president’s religious view as “very similar” to their own included African-Americans (33 percent), Democrats (28 percent), and liberals (22 percent). It is noticeable, however, that groups generally supportive of President Obama were less certain that they shared his religious views than groups opposed to him were certain that they didn’t.

Let me note one thing here.  On one level I find it very hard to believe that liberals, Democrats,  and young people could seriously regard “Islam” (which in its conservative or traditionalistic versions discourages the education of women and encourages their complete subordination to men) as consistent with “American values.”  I suspect that this affirmation of the consistency between Islam and “American values” is much more an indication of their commitment to toleration and multiculturalism than it is an assessment of what Islam stands for.  Or perhaps it’s an answer to the following question: can a devout Muslim be a good American citizen?  The answer to this question is, yes, a certain sort of devout Muslim can be a good American citizen, but Islam has to be defined so as not to be committed to the extension of the ummah and to be reconciled with a place in principle no different from that of any other denomination in a religiously pluralistic country.

Needless to say, there’s a world of difference between those two possibilities.  Is America defined in principle and above all else by its multiculturalism, openness, and toleration, or is America tolerant, once certain civic prerequisites are met?  It would only be a slight oversimplification to regard the former view as essentially cosmopolitan and post-national and the latter as more closely akin to the traditional view welcoming immigrants who are willing to assimilate.

But Dionne and Galston don’t dwell on this ambiguity or tension, preferring to focus on a potential fault line on the Republican side of the aisle.  Following Vanderbilt historian Gary Gerstle , they emphasize the gap between George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism (which rests on a “multiculturalism of the godly”) and the Tea Party movement.

We believe that Gerstle is on to something important about the Bush presidency, and while we don’t necessarily agree with Caldwell’s views, we think he has identified a central cause of the Tea Party revolt and has shrewdly sketched the substantial difference between Tea Party politics and the politics of compassionate conservatism. While white Christian conservatives and Tea Party supporters are in broad agreement on many issues, there is a harder edge to Tea Party views on immigration, multiculturalism and Islam . . . .

We do not want to exaggerate the importance of these differences, yet we do think they suggest that behind the “take our country back” slogans of the Tea Party lies an assertive nationalism fed in part by a reaction to a sharp increase in immigration in recent decades and a mistrust of Islam created after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. And in at least one contest in which one of the loudest spokesmen for that assertive nationalism gained a large vote as a third party candidate, the evidence for the difference between the Tea Party movement and religious conservatism was especially dramatic . . . .

We believe that what might be called the “Tancredo Difference” has important implications for conservative and religious politics. While many accounts have emphasized the possibility of splits in the Republican Party between its “establishment” and the Tea Party, there is the potential for other divisions between religious conservatives with more moderate views on immigration and more compassionate views on poverty and members of a Tea Party movement still rebelling against certain distinctive aspects of the Bush presidency.

I agree that there is a certain amount of nativism or ethnocentrism in Republican and conservative ranks, but I would distinguish it from a reaction against the cosmopolitan and post-national stance taken by some liberal elites.  It is not ethnocentric or nativist to emphasize national sovereignty and to express political fidelity to the principles of the Constitution.  it is not ethnocentric or nativist to insist that republican citizenship requires a certain sort of character, one that in American history has most readily been cultivated in a Christian or Judeo-Christian context.

Both parties, I think, have a problem.  Republicans have to worry about nativism at the margins, but I think that many of the Tea Party folks are quite open to the traditional American appeal of assimilation to republican citizenship.  (Consider, for example how well Brian Sandoval did in Nevada, as compared with Sharron Angle.)  On the other hand, Democratic post-nationalism is much closer to the party’s heart.  This certainly poses a political problem when the time comes to contest with the Republicans over the political allegiances of the broad American middle.  But this is not merely a political problem: are they trustworthy stewards of the nation’s best interests?

There’s lots more of interest in the analysis, but this post has gotten too long already.