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Religion in America
US approach is fundamentally different from that seen in the Middle East.
- By Gordon Robison, Special to Gulf News
- Published: 00:17 March 27, 2008
- Image Credit: Illustration: Nino Jose Heredia/Gulf News
The role of religion in American life is, perhaps, the most widely misunderstood aspect of our culture. Viewed from the Middle East we Americans are often accused of a collective Godlessness: America, some say, is little more than a hedonistic land with few morals and an infinite appetite for sex.
This analysis can surprise Europeans, who often find the overt religiosity of America's political culture unsettling in the extreme. European politicians rarely quote scripture or talk about God. American politicians do it all the time.
This is true whether the subject is Barack Obama speaking at length about his relationship with his pastor or George W. Bush dismissing the idea that he consults with his dad, the former president, about policy with the remark that he answers "to a higher father".
Religion is again back at the centre of America's political debate because of the extraordinary speech Obama gave last week. The speech was mainly about race. Obama made it after videotapes of his former pastor making inflammatory statements surfaced.
The first goal of the talk was to put some distance between the Illinois senator and Rev. Jeremiah Wright. But by choosing this template - the relationship between pastors and parishioners - Obama, by definition, put religion at the centre of what was ostensibly a speech about race.
Reaction to the speech only reinforced this. It was most often compared to a speech John F. Kennedy gave during his campaign for president nearly half a century ago.
Kennedy was Roman Catholic and found himself forced to address directly the question of whether as president he would take orders from the pope.
That may sound silly today, but in 1960 we had never had a Catholic president. This fear of the White House being "controlled" by the Vatican was one of the reasons for that question.
JFK eloquently addressed those fears, and the bigotry behind them, at a gathering of evangelical preachers in Texas - an audience chosen precisely because they were hostile and needed to be convinced. He went on to win the White House, and Catholicism died as a political issue.
But the fact that Kennedy had to give that speech in the first place - or that Obama today is being asked both simultaneously to distance himself from his spiritual mentor and to "prove" that he is not a Muslim - says a lot about how we, the most church-going nation in the Western world, treat religion in the public sphere.
In some respects the United States is very much like the Middle East. It is a country where faith is central to the lives of huge numbers of citizens in cultural as well as strictly religious terms.
This translates into political life as a requirement that public respect be paid to religious concerns, even by leaders whom few people believe to be particularly religious in their private lives.
In other key ways, however, America's approach to religion is fundamentally different from that seen anywhere in the Middle East. Most notably, while our places of worship are, indeed, full every week we are more reluctant to discuss religion in public settings.
Social taboo
Along with freedom of speech and freedom of the press the freedom of religion is a core aspect of American life - one familiar even to small children.
The constitution specifically says that no religious test may be required to hold public office. All of that is good. But, in practice, it has evolved into a social taboo on discussing religion with people one does not know extremely well. That, arguably, is not so good.
So we are a religious country where religion is rarely discussed, one where people are tolerant, but not necessarily open-minded. This hidden truth of American life has been on display throughout the presidential campaign.
As former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee learned, we Americans insist that our potential presidents be religious, but we become uncomfortable if they appear to be too religious.
Put another way, we demand that our candidates be grounded in religion, but find it disconcerting when religion seems to be driving a politician's career and ambition.
It is a very American idea. You ought to be religious because, for a politician, having faith in something higher than public policy papers is certainly a good thing.
As Dwight Eisenhower famously remarked: The American form of government makes "no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don't care what it is".
But you ought not be too religious because imposing one's faith on others is a very un-American idea - and that extends to talking about your faith in any setting where someone might disagree with you. It is our ability to require these two worlds of ourselves while also requiring their separation that makes our society unique.
At university I had a good friend who came from a family where religion had been everything. Her upbringing had been so focused on religion that she initially found secular life on campus quite disorienting. Her hometown? Las Vegas.
Only in America.
Gordon Robison is a journalist and consultant based in Burlington, Vermont & Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has lived in and reported on the Middle East for two decades, including assignments in Baghdad for both CNN and Fox News.
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