Religion and Politics

According to President Bush’s speech at the National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast on June 26, his administration “has provided unprecedented support for the compassionate work performed by faith-based and community groups.” He continued this thought by saying that the “government can hand out money, but government cannot put hope in a person’s heart.” The President remarked that his legacy has been to lower “the barriers that kept government and faith-based groups needlessly divided.” The U.S. President also addressed the National Conference of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives and said that when he came to office his goal was to change the fact that faith-based organizations were “often barred from receiving support from the federal government.” His method of change was “compassionate conservatism.” The President also recalled that compassionate conservatism was his main agenda item as a candidate back in 1999.  In reality, it was his main focus until the foreign policy of the U.S. dramatically shifted after September 11, 2001. Afterall, his first executive order established the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives itself.  In essence, this order was meant to ensure that faith-based organizations “do not have to give up their religious character to receive taxpayer money.” To be clearer about how his initiative could coincide with true U.S.-style separation of church and state, President Bush said, “Government should never fund the teaching of faith, but it should support the good works of the faithful.” The President further spelled out three policies advanced for this cause: 1) The tax code was amended to provide greater incentives for charitable donations; 2) The Compassion Capital Fund was established; and 3) The Pro Bono Challenge was launched this year. The President said that “the movement is bigger than politics or any political party;” 35 governors have faith-based offices – 19 of them Democrats; and last year the government provided “more than 19,000 competitive grants to community and faith-based organizations.”  The areas where faith-based groups have been active are listed in a White House Fact Sheet, with interesting facts such as: “Of the 60 million people who give their time to others, more than one-third do so through faith-based groups.” 

(Photo from the White House website)

Presidential Candidate Barack Obama still has the support of a majority of American Muslims, but a New York Times article from June 24, 2008 questions whether there is a “disconnect between Mr. Obama’s message of unity and his campaign strategy.” One reason for questioning his sincerity is Obama’s failure to visit a single mosque during the campaign season. Muslim Americans interviewed for the NYT article said that the implication is that there is something wrong with being Muslim, particularly because on Obama’s website, “he classifies the claim that he is Muslim as a smear.” The article reflects on Representative Keith Ellison’s concern that Obama’s aides are not considering carefully enough that Muslim Americans are being alienated from the campaign process. The questions about Obama’s evasiveness picked up intensity after reports that two Muslim women were recently prevented from sitting behind Obama at a rally in Detroit. The reason for the exclusion of the women may have been, according to a report on politico.com, that Obama’s aides are almost paranoid about the need to deny rumors that Obama is Muslim, leading many members of the Muslim American community to “feel betrayed.” Questions are being raised in two directions: Whether Obama is really driven to create a unified America and whether Muslim Americans are a sufficient political force that Obama cannot afford to ignore them.

From all the media coverage of the current U.S. presidential election, it seems that the “liberal” or “progressive” voice has once again entered U.S. politics. According to a recent Q&A at the Pew Forum, “the religious left” is more active. John Green, the Senior Fellow in Religion and American Politics, provides clear definitions of the religious right and religious left in the interview. He distinguishes “red-letter Christians” from “progressive centrists” and the “core religious left.” Despite the subgroups in the body of people making up the religious left, John Green says that they are united by social welfare issues, environmental protection, and foreign policy. Other issues, such as abortion and same-sex marriage are “potential points of division.” The religious left also has “in common a negative reaction to the religious right.” Based on a 2004 Survey of Religion and Politics, the Senior Fellow estimated in the interview that the religious left totaled a little more than one-quarter of American adults.   

AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee is an organization that lobbies to promote and secure greater U.S. support for Israel and a stronger U.S.-Israel relationship. This past week, AIPAC held its Policy Conference 2008. All three of the U.S. presidential candidates spoke at the conference, as well as prominent speakers such as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Barack Obama spoke at the conference on Wednesday, June 4, 2008. Obama directly stated that as President he would “never compromise when it comes to Israel’s security,” while making pledges for aid and support.  As part of the justifications for this decision to stand firm for Israel were: “voices that deny the Holocaust” and “terrorist groups and political leaders committed to Israel’s destruction.” Obama brought the politics of the Middle East into his speech by referencing “government-funded textbooks filled with hatred towards Jews.” The politically clever aspect of Obama’s speech was his ability to refute media allegations that he would have negotiations with country leaders like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad without preconditions. The brilliant part of the speech was the connection he drew between the African American community and the Jewish community. Obama said, “Jewish and African Americans have stood shoulder to shoulder. They took buses down South together; they marched together; they bled together; and Jewish Americans like Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner were willing to die alongside a black man, James Cheney on behalf of freedom and on behalf of equality.”  

Jack Leonard, for the Los Angeles Times, has written about the upcoming “political showdown” in California over gay marriage. Yesterday, the California secretary of state said that the gay marriage initiate would be on the November 4 ballot. Voters will have to decide whether there should be a state constitutional amendment to define marriage as a union “between a man and a woman.” 1.1 million people signed a petition for the ballot measure after the California Supreme Court overturned a ban on same-sex marriage.  Officials “are expected to begin performing same-sex marriage ceremonies this month.” There is also an article in today’s New York Times about a lawsuit filed by New York lawmakers to block Governor David. A. Paterson’s “order for state agencies to recognize same-sex marriages performed outside New York.”  The suit is supported by the Christian group, the Alliance Defense Fund.

While Israel has been celebrating its 60^th anniversary, US President George W. Bush took a five-day trip to the Middle East (May 13-May 18). On May 15, President Bush addressed members of Israel’s Knesset. His remarks were controversial in the US domestic arena on account of his supposed criticism (attack?) of presidential candidate Barack Obama and other influential people, who “believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along.” However, the President’s words were also geared towards religion. He said, “We believe that religious liberty is fundamental to a civilized society.” Later in the speech, he said, “The killers claim the mantle of Islam, but they are not religious men.  In order to prevail, the President said that the values of justice, tolerance, freedom, and hope were values that are “the self-evident right of all people, of all religions, in all the world because they are a gift from the Almighty God.”

On May 18, President Bush spoke in Egypt for the World Economic Forum. He refuted the idea that democracy is merely a Western value that America wishes to impose on people. He said, “In a recent survey of the Muslim world, there was overwhelming support for one of the central tenets of democracy, freedom of speech: 99 percent in Lebanon, 94% here in Egypt, and 92% in Iran.” He reminded his audience that America is a religious country, where more than 75% of the people believe in a higher power. The President remarked that in “our democracy, we would never punish a person for owning a Koran. We would never issue a death sentence to someone for converting to Islam. Democracy does not threaten Islam or any religion.”

Meanwhile, the US military has announced that the American sniper in Iraq that shot at the Quran for target practice has been sent home. The very eloquent apology from Major-General Hammond to local elders calmed the resulting anger and tension. The military has also purchased for them a new holy book.

(Photographed by Karin Esposito, 2004, Tehran)

The organization Search for Common Ground (SFCG), on April 7, 2008, published the results of a second poll that it took of 710 Iranian adults – both in rural and urban areas. The first extensive survey it took of Iranian citizens was published in January 2007. SFCG has complemented the survey of Iranians by asking similar questions to 703 respondents in the United States.

As the U.S. has now successfully managed to get the UN Security Council to support a third round of sanctions against Iran, the timing of this follow-up poll of Iran-U.S. attitudes and perceptions is excellent. Although the survey addressed many specific topics, such as Iran’s nuclear program and Iranian influence in the Persian Gulf, this blog is interested in the poll results related to religion, politics, and tolerance. Here are some of the main findings of SFCG’s poll:

·        “A growing majority of Iranians believe that it is possible for Islam and the West to find common ground.” – “64% percent – now say it is possible to find common ground (up from 58%)”

·        “The United States is widely perceived as seeking not only to assert control over the oil resources of the Middle East, but to weaken and divide the Islamic world and to purposely humiliate Muslims.”

·        “The United States is seen as pursuing goals hostile to Iran and to Islam in general.”

·        “64% saw the United States as purposely seeking to humiliate the Islamic world. Twenty-one percent thought the United States is disrespectful, but out of ignorance, and only 5 percent thought the United States mostly shows respect.”

·        “Seventy-eight percent said the United States is not very (16%) or not at all (62%) committed to the goal of creating an independent and viable Palestinian state.”

·        Only 32% of Americans surveyed (as Americans were also polled) said that it is a US goal to weaken and divide the Islamic world.

·        “Only 14% [of Iranians] wanted Shari’a to play a smaller role” in the way Iran is governed.

Perhaps you are from one of the countries that U.S. presidential candidate John McCain criticized yesterday in his Vision for Defending the Freedom and Dignity of the World’s Vulnerable. Despite his Straight-Talking Express view of the world, Senator John McCain has this to say about the countless differences in today’s world:

“There is a tendency in our age to accede to the spurious excuse of moral relativism and turn away from the harshest examples of man’s inhumanity to man…”

            The first part of that sentence must be the most obscure language used to date in the presidential campaign. According to Senator McCain, there are countries in the world that are “protecting traditions that should have been ended long ago.” If he were referring to genocide or torture, this blog entry might have had a slightly different tone. Although we may all agree that forced marriage and FGM is beyond our comprehension in the U.S., the language in his speech reflected more the typical paradigm we have known for too many years now: Good versus Evil.

He summed up his vision of the world as such:

“No society that denies religious freedom can ever rightly claim to be good in some other way.”

But to what extent must a society limit religious freedom before every other positive aspect of its government is erased from popular imagination and U.S. rhetoric becomes uncompromising? If a Central Asian country, for example, insists on excessively tough registration procedures for one or two Christian sects, how do we grade their level of religious freedom – and do all state initiatives to provide welfare and security to their people then become meaningless?  

The presidential candidate is, at the least, being direct with voters about his agenda: “I will make respect for the basic principle of religious freedom a priority in international relations.” Prediction: If Senator McCain wins the general election, he will “confront this evil” by challenging Iran (and only Iran?) to accept this most ”fundamental” of rights.