Social Science Research Council

A funny thing happened on the way to last Sunday’s Compassion Forum: the politics of religion gave way to the politics of confession.

Over the past few days, Barack Obama’s “More Perfect Union” speech has been accessed millions of times on YouTube and dissected in dozens of articles. Understandably, most of the analyses have focused on race. That, after all, was its central theme. Or was it? [...]

The contested question of whether in a liberal democracy religion – religious rationales – may serve as a basis of coercive lawmaking must be disaggregated into two distinct questions: First, is religion a morally legitimate basis of (coercive) lawmaking in a liberal democracy? Second, is religion a constitutionally legitimate basis of lawmaking in the United States?

Who are evangelical voters supporting in the 2008 primary season? The facile assumption is to look for them in the Huckabee camp. No doubt many are to be found there. Consensus has it that conservative Protestants got Huckabee his win in the Iowa caucuses. And since then the choice between Huckabee and Romney sure went Huckabee’s way more often than not. But the research on conservative Protestant politics makes me doubt that the story ends with Huckabee. [...]

Citizens responding to the current electoral climate of Christian agonistics – if they care at all about the significance and responsibility of citizenship – need to guard against certain crucial and pragmatic dangers. At the very least, they need to be concerned with any aspiring leader who happens to think heaven is a better place than earth, particularly at a time in human history when the planet is taking such a ruthless beating. For, if any future government chooses to take up the business of salvation, then, permit me to say, we’ve all gone to hell.

It is impossible to overstate the significance of the local church pastor in the lives of conservative Protestants. Even in an age of Christian parachurch networks, media outlets, political action groups, and celebrity elites, the primacy of pastoral authority – and the larger congregationalist ethic on which it draws – remains a deep and impenetrable part of the evangelical subculture. But what does this authority mean in the present day and how does it pertain to the renewed prominence of religion in electoral politics?

One of the most important days in the Democratic Party’s presidential contest arrives today. It involves neither a caucus nor a primary, not a kickoff nor concession speech, and no direct confrontations—party leaders hope—between the candidates. Indeed, for many Americans, it’s a holiday. It’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and how it goes will tell us much about the racial and religious politics in the Democratic contest. [...]

Lilla alludes to the fact that “in the Anglo-American orbit, a liberal theological outlook could grow up alongside a liberal politics whose principles derived from Hobbes’s materialism,” but this crucial part of his story he covers only with the cryptic observation that it was made possible by “a strong constitutional structure and various lucky breaks.” At issue is more than a historically accurate understanding of liberal Protestantism. At issue, too, is the role that liberal Protestantism can play in today’s struggles over religion-and-politics.

I agree with Michael Lindsay that Mike Huckabee exhibits many of the qualities of a “cosmopolitan” evangelical. And yet it is impossible for journalists to talk about the second man from Hope without mentioning his populist rhetoric. This combination of economic and religious populism sets Mike Huckabee apart from the rest of the Republican pack. Yet Huckabee’s marriage of cultural conservatism and economic egalitarianism makes sense in light of the social and cultural attitudes of American evangelicals.

“People of faith want a candidate who can beat radical Islam.” So claimed Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, in a statement endorsing John McCain for the Republican primary in South Carolina. Graham’s statement is deeply disheartening, but hardly unexpected, especially for one who watched the Republican candidates debate just before the New Hampshire Primary. Ron Paul, who is loony on just about every other issue, was the one sane voice when it came to foreign policy and the Middle East. [...]