Changing the Soul of Politics, With Civility

In this already tiresome election year, with months of predictable ugliness ahead, who among us would not second a call for American politics to be imbued more generously with the traits of grace and humility?

In his new book, “Active Faith,” Ralph Reed, executive director of the Christian Coalition, makes such a call as part of his effort to define a “theology of political activism” for conservative Christians.

You don’t have to be conservative or Christian to agree with the notion that a little humility on the part of our political leaders could go a long way toward reducing Americans’ alienation from the political process.

Indeed, Reed is only one voice among many who have recently called for greater civility in our public life. The reason Reed’s voice is newsworthy is that it is the voice of the Christian Coalition, the most powerful player in the most powerful political movement in our country today. And that movement, the religious right, has not exactly been synonymous with civility.

The subtitle of Reed’s book is “How Christians Are Changing the Soul of American Politics.” Reed is, of course, referring to politically conservative Christians who are active in groups like the Christian Coalition and its allies. For two decades, though, those groups have been changing the soul of American politics in unfortunate ways, making respectable, or at least commonplace, mean-spirited rhetorical attacks on public schoolteachers, on gay and lesbian Americans and on others whose vilification serves the political purpose of the moment.

So Reed’s call for a different kind of dialogue is welcome, even to those of us who are somewhat wary of accepting it at face value. Our wariness is not based just on cynicism or antipathy toward a frequent political adversary but on the continuing evidence that many within the religious right movement, including within Reed’s own organization, continue to rely on the kind of harsh rhetoric Reed criticizes in his book. Reed’s boss, Pat Robertson, in particular, reaches millions of Americans daily with televised invective.

Groups like the Christian Coalition have relied on harsh rhetoric for two reasons: It motivates members to open their checkbooks and it paves the way for passage of a political agenda. It’s far easier to convince people that they should support legal discrimination against gays and lesbians if you have previously convinced them that gays are out to molest children or destroy Christianity. It’s easier to convince parents that public schools should be abandoned in favor of religious academies if the public schoolteachers have been caricatured as opponents of family and faith.

Reed’s admirably forthright criticism of some of the Religious Right’s rhetorical excesses is at least an implicit acknowledgment that the movement’s reputation for intolerance is not entirely unearned or the product of an antireligious media elite. In fact, many Americans, including many Christians, have been disillusioned by the political use of the sacred language of their faith in ways that seem to run counter to the spirit of their faith.

That disillusionment is largely responsible for the discomfort many progressive Americans feel about the discussion of religious values in the public arena. For many of us, religious faith is the touchstone that anchors our work toward a more just society. But since the rise of the Moral Majority and now the Christian Coalition and others who invoke God and the Bible to promote political and religious intolerance, too many of the rest of us have shied away from speaking about the religious grounding of our social and political commitments. As a result, the news media have too often portrayed political battles as people of faith on one side and antireligious zealots on the other.

As leaders of an organization whose board and membership include Catholics, Jews and mainstream and evangelical Protestants, we feel this false dichotomy most strongly. That dichotomy is beginning to dissolve, as faith-based groups like the Interfaith Alliance and the evangelical Call to Renewal bring to the political arena explicitly religious voices that frequently differ with the Christian Coalition’s political positions.

We would undoubtedly differ with much of the political and historical interpretation in Reed’s “Active Faith.” And we may be skeptical about the Christian Coalition’s commitment to his stated goals. But discussion of the book will benefit us all by encouraging the development of a truly ecumenical theology of political activism.