I was very pleased with our last Dialogue on Spirituality and Religion.  I thought that the group did a great job of focusing on the relationship between politics and religion without getting lost on tangents like the abortion issue.  For me, the two most interesting parts of the discussion were the comparison between the United States and Europe and the question of whether you can separate your politics from your religious worldview or not.

As we noted in the discussion, it is interesting to find that Europe, the bastion of Christianity for almost 2,000 years, has comparatively less public religion than the United States.  Religion certainly is not dead in Europe, but it is more privatized than in the United States.  The starkest example comes in the realm of politics.  It is hard to imagine a French presidential candidate showcasing his or her religious beliefs, or that those beliefs would affect the outcome of the election.  The United States, on the other hand, is a very different story.  The most heated debates in the current election do not center on Iraq, taxation, or even gay rights and abortion.  Instead, the critical issue of the 2008 race to the White House is faith.  What are the candidates’ religious beliefs?  This issue has been central to the Republican candidacy—just watch the Values Voters debates—and is becoming increasingly important on the Democratic side.  Despite what some might call America’s longstanding tradition of the Separation of Church and State, then, religious faith remains an essential component of the American political scene.

Why does the United States have more public religion than Europe, especially considering Europe’s relation to Christianity and the separation of church and state in the US?  This is the obvious question after noting the difference between the two regions.  I believe that secularization and the Cold War can explain much.  Most scholars believe that Europe fits the secularization model better than the United States (See Peter Berger, Stephen Warner , and Steve Bruce).  It seems that the United States was following the same path of secularization that Europe was taking in the late 1800s through the early 1930s.  Religious fervor took a major hit following World War I and the Great Depression in the United States.  After World War II, however, the religious zeal produced by the war did not dissipate as it had after World War I.  On the contrary, the 1950s proved to be one of the most religious decades in American history.  I believe that America’s cold war with the materialistic and atheistic political bloc found in the Soviet Union demanded the persistence of religious belief in the United States throughout the Eisenhower years.  It seems that that conflict at least stalled secularization in the United States and that current politics in the US follows the model of that religio-political decade.

As for the issues of whether you can separate your politics from your religious worldview, I thought we began an interesting discussion that must continue.  Using Clauser’s definition of the divine, it seems difficult to separate the two.  But that makes me question if worldviews are inherently religious.  Perhaps they are.  Getting to the heart of this issue, though, is imperative as it will help us to understand religiously justified violence in both national foreign policies like the United States and the policies of terroristic organizations.

 

Matthew Warren

[Fall 2007]