Is it so hard to be humble?

One Electorate Under God? A Dialogue on Religion & American Politics EJ Dionne Jr., Jean Bethke Elshtain and Kayla M. Drogosz (eds) (Brookings Institution Press and the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, 2004, 239pp) 0 8157 1643 5, $17.95

ONE ELECTORATE UNDER GOD has been divided by its editors into two main parts. The first is a kind of debate between Mario Cuomo, former governor of New York, and Representative Mark Souder from Indiana. These two eloquent public servants offer differing, but not in my view wholly opposing, views on the role they think that faith commitments should play in the public actions of government officials. The second, much longer, part is a cavalcade of 39 short responses to this debate from an impressively wide array of academics, religious practitioners, journalists and political operatives. While the sheer volume of the opinion and commentary can be overwhelming (39? Do we really need 397), on the whole the volume is thought provoking, and given the present nature of religion's intersection with American politics, very timely. We have just elected a president who offers explicitly religious justifications for policies as diverse as the war in Iraq and the future of stem cell research. This book makes a valuable contribution to the national debate over whether this president's overt religiosity should be viewed as a worrisome threat to tolerance and pluralism, or as a welcome reinforcement of America's traditional religious commitments.

Put in its simplest terms, the opening exchange between Cuomo and Souder hinges on whether or not policy positions based on particular religious beliefs are appropriate in a pluralist democracy. Souder thinks it foolish to expect, for example, Christian politicians to check their faith in Jesus at the office door. Cuomo, on the other hand, argues that government officials should restrict themselves to moral arguments and to policies that are based either on societal consensus, or on a kind of least common denominator natural law, accepted by all relevant religious communities. Souder would have no problem, for example, with politicians framing their opposition to abortion within their understanding of God's law, while Cuomo, as a Catholic governor for 12 years, eschewed any effort to "impose" his church's position on his non-Catholic fellow New Yorkers.

THE ARGUMENTS PUT FORWARD here by Mario Cuomo will surprise no one even vaguely familiar with the views he has been forwarding for years. And Mark Souder's response to Cuomo could probably best be described, perhaps oxymoronically, as respectfully dismissive. For Souder, the matter is less one of religious imposition, I think, and more one of simple intellectual honesty. He is a religious man, both in his private life and his public life, and he wishes to deny either the value, or even the possibility, of dividing those two selves meaningfully. My main reaction to the debate (and I do not mean to add to the 39 already included, by the way) is that the whole matter has been skewed by the editors towards the religious end of the political spectrum. The decision to present Mario Cuomo and Mark Souder, two devoutly religious Christians, as the central contestants in a debate over the role of religion in American public life probably tells us more about the state of that debate at the moment than anything the two men actually have to say. This is not a dispute, in other words, between religiosity and secularism. Far from it. This is a dispute between two different versions of accommodating religion in the public realm.

So be it.

That opening debate is then followed by a great variety of responses from an equally great variety of sources. Some, like those contributed by Michael Barone or Gary. Bauer, point out that religion has always been closely related to politics in the United States, and that it is only our own ignorance of our national history that leads us to find the contemporary circumstances so remarkable. Others, like those by Jon Dilulio Jr., extol President Bush's faith-based initiative, and a couple, like Jeffrey Stout's, criticize it. One particularly interesting theme that runs throughout the volume is the possibility of a religious left arising to join and contest a religious right that has had the moral playing field to its self for a very long time. Paul Begala, Michael Kazin and, perhaps most interestingly, John Sweeney all ask why religion, or specifically Christianity, should be given over to conservatives when the New Testament is practically bursting with calls for social justice and with emphases on the importance of caring for the poor. Mark Noll, writing in the tradition of the late Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, lists his seven most deeply held policy positions as a religious man and laments a modern American party system that does not offer him a partisan home where he can support all seven. Finally, a few (and too few in my judgment) responses try to offer a bit of social scientific context and detail to ground a discussion that can at times seem a bit abstract and ethereal. The always-informative John Green is particularly noteworthy in this regard.

WITH SO MANY T0 CHOOSE from, I would like to end by mentioning just three responses that I thought were particularly provocative, or particularly portentous in the current context. The first was Matthew Spalding's helpfully drawn distinction between the separation of church and state and the separation of religion and politics. He uses this distinction to arrive at an accommodationist position that I do not share, but the distinction is a valuable one nonetheless. Second, Anna Greenberg is the clearest of all contributors in flaming the serious challenges facing the Democratic Party in the wake of the 2004 election. Should the Democrats talk more of God and of their own faith commitments? Should they tack to the right on issues like gay marriage and late term abortion in order to neutralize Republican arguments on these and other so-called "values" questions? Greenberg may be whistling past a very scary graveyard, but she offers another option to the Democratic Party, and that is for it to be true to its traditionally liberal convictions on these issues and to ... wait. She cites data suggesting that American young people, even conservative young people, are more tolerant, more libertarian (for lack of a better word) than their elders, and that the long-term trends on these "values" issues look much better for the Democratic Party than current snapshot polling may suggest.

Finally, David E. Price, a Democratic congressman from North Carolina (and a political scientist to boot), does the valuable service of placing the whole discussion in a completely different context when he reminds his readers, and I suppose his fellow contributors as well, that their God's grandeur surpasses their understanding and that their God's will is, in its essence, beyond their imaginations. Price is not a nihilist--he is a Christian--and he is not claiming that human beings ought not to struggle in the dark to discern the good and to find God's will in the world. He is simply reminding all concerned of the central necessity of remaining humble as we, both individually and as a society, turn our attention to discussions of ultimate value. In a volume practically bursting with confident certainty and fervent conviction, I thought Price struck the most appropriate note--a simple plea for human humility in the face of the inscrutable divine.

DR. TIM BYRNES is professor of political science at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York.