PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE : GOP Moderates Must Be Brothers’ Keepers

Just as many Democrats felt uncomfortable four years ago sharing a tent with an outspoken trained minister, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, many Republicans this year feel uneasy sitting in a political pew with a prominent leader of non-mainline churches, Pat Robertson.

At issue is a widening philosophical and social chasm within the Republican Party. Historically, the party of conservatism has been buffeted by two, sometimes conflicting, philosophical principles: one stemming from Edmund Burke’s emphasis on stability and gradual change, the other from John Locke’s radical assertion of individual rights. Today, conservatives like Patrick J. Buchanan and Robertson, in speaking of an impending cultural--or religious--war, assert the need for the socialization of American values. Individual-rights conservatives like Barry M. Goldwater and before him, Robert Taft, in advocating the primacy of the individual over state interests, tend to be pro-choice and adamant about maintaining the separation of church and state.

Sociologically, the Republican Party has expanded its tent in the past three presidential elections to embrace groups who, by and large, are less likely to be members of mainline churches. As these new supporters have grown in numbers, traditional Republicans have felt increasingly challenged in ways similar to their Democratic counterparts, who watched their party cede more and more influence to special-interest concerns. With members of the cultural right making it clear, through party politics, that they deserve more attention and power, the crucial question has become whether or not mainstream Republicans will stay in the tent or exit through the rear door.

As a pro-choice, pro-Israel, pro-public education, pro-arms control, non-isolationist Republican, I would argue that George Bush is far more tolerant than his party’s platform, and that he deserves the support of mainstream Republicans. Furthermore, for believers in two-party coalition politics, warning bells should be going off: A desertion of the Republican ticket by moderates could be the catalyst for the development of splinter parties, for the rise of an American version of the fragmentized politics of multiparty Europe.

To avoid this outcome, mainstream Republicans must understand and respect what motivates the new cultural conservatives and recognize that large tents imply the existence of healthy, unavoidable tensions. More important, it is crucial that Republican descendants of the Taft-Goldwater and the Dwight D. Eisenhower-William P. Scranton wings of the party get their philosophical houses in order and find principled common ground with the newcomers.

A good place to begin is to acknowledge that non-mainline churches and their pastors are playing an important and underrecognized role in addressing the quandaries faced by many families disoriented by changes in modern society. But such an acknowledgment need not imply that because they proclaim religious authority for their views, they should enjoy a monopoly on moral or family-value themes.

Religious values, to be sure, anchor individual morality. But in our constitutional democracy, individuals of faith have a responsibility to ensure that the line between faith and bigotry, between tolerance and coercion, is not crossed.

It is impossible not to be troubled, for example, when the religious right suggests that witchcraft is on the rise in the feminist movement and several Republican state platforms shelter this idea in party dogma. It is also difficult not to be concerned when an influential public figure like Buchanan, a man who, by profession, chooses his words carefully, frames his address to the Republican convention in the jihad code of a “religious war.”

Our founding fathers established a nation “under God,” one in which revolution against British authority was justified by “self-evident” individual rights and an appeal to a higher law of conscience preceding the civil laws of society. But America’s first citizens labored carefully to construct, in Thomas Jefferson’s terms, a wall between church and state.

In erecting this barrier, the crafters of the Bill of Rights turned a wary eye toward the American as well as European experience. They understood that it was religious authoritarianism in Europe that pushed many of the early settlers to our shores. They also knew that Puritans and others in the New World invoked a discipline of their own to enforce conformity, with witchcraft trials and stocks and pillories to coerce “non-believers.”

“Who does not see,” James Madison warned, “the same authority which can establish Christianity in exclusion of all other religions may establish, with the same care, any particular sect of Christians in exclusion of all other sects?”

The strength of the haven we have built for oppressed people the world over comes from a tolerance of diversity rather than a compulsory conformity.

Several days after the Republican National Convention, Buchanan told a convention of the Religious Right that the rioting in Los Angeles stemmed from “barbarians” educated in public schools, where God had been “long ago expelled.” Americans may reasonably differ on whether state-crafted prayer should be authorized in public schools, but it is an insecure, if not manipulative, view of the Christian faith to imply that an agency of the state can block the presence of God. God is not excludable from any place. A U.S. Supreme Court cannot keep an omnipresent God out of our schools any more than Congress is needed to put him back in.

The best reflection of faith and inspiration for ethical conduct stems from models of personal behavior. Moral exhortation, while a function of all leadership, is more appropriately the principal province of churches and deacons than political parties and candidates.