Talking Politics and Religion Makes One Nation Divisible

Funny how you remember isolated moments from your childhood. As a young boy, I remember someone in our extended family handing down the maxim that there were two conversational subjects to avoid: politics and religion. “It’ll just start an argument,” was the reason given. We must have been the nonconfrontational types, because I don’t recall any discussions on either subject at family gatherings.

Nowadays, especially in presidential years, you can’t get away from talking about politics and religion. More often than not, the two subjects blend into one.

I wonder, though, whether Americans really enjoy the debate. I suspect that most people are uncomfortable with public discourse on religion. That doesn’t mean they don’t avidly grapple with it in the privacy of their minds, or with like-minded friends, but as a public debate it is guaranteed to rankle. As a society talking about religion, we aren’t able to agree to disagree.

How odd it is that religion should have that effect. The subject should bring out our best instincts, whether those be grounded in true belief or, for the nonbelievers, healthy inquisitiveness or skepticism. Yet, some religious-based groups such as the Christian Coalition are mentioned by political opponents with a disdain approaching that once reserved for groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. Conversely, the religious groups dish it out pretty well too, as they play political hardball with the best of them.

We’re becoming less American and more like other countries, where religious divisions fan eternal flames. Do we really want the Middle East or Northern Ireland as our social-order role models?

Something is out of whack.

I thought of this while noting that the Harvest Crusade is in the midst of a four-day run at Anaheim Stadium. The crusade is similar to the Billy Graham traveling shows that passed through my home state of Nebraska when I was growing up and that still exist. I remember attending one or two of them, but the event never conjoined religion and politics. The notion that the thousands who attended a Billy Graham revival represented some kind of political rear guard would have been laughable.

The Harvest Crusade is also nonpolitical, by design. However, Elizabeth Dole, who wants to be the next first lady, will be one of the speakers this week, and that will automatically politicize the event even if she says nothing about presidential politics.

Her presence captures perfectly the schism in American thought. While some argue that religion and politics should remain separate enterprises, millions of others welcome the overlay of one on the other.

In a new book meant to be a companion for the PBS series, “Searching for God in America,” Irvine attorney and TV host Hugh Hewitt writes: “I have to conclude that a great many Americans want to hear about, talk about, think about God in a serious way.” Much of American history, he says, is bound up in individuals’ quest to seek out and understand God.

A book I picked up just a week ago underscores Hewitt’s point, however odd the connection may be. In a 355-page book otherwise wholly devoted to why the O.J. Simpson case was lost, former Los Angeles prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi (of Manson trial fame) chose to address the question of, “God, Where Are You?”

Bugliosi, who lets us know he’s an agnostic, raises the age-old questions of why God would allow murders and other tragedies to occur and, in the specific case, why he would allow the murderer to go unpunished. Bugliosi neatly frames the religious conundrum by noting that at same time Nicole Brown Simpson’s mother was whispering, “God, where are you?” after the jury exonerated Simpson, friends and relatives of Simpson’s were thanking God for the verdict.

Bugliosi confesses that the ultimate questions regarding religion are beyond his ken. I suspect that sums up the feelings of millions upon millions of Americans, even many of those who like to call themselves believers.

In this political season, I suggest there’s a moral in all of this.

Getting the answers to our religious questions or, at the very least, searching for them has always been the quest for the individual and clergyman. It baffles me why people would want to broaden the scope to the world of secular politics, where divining absolute truths is not high on the list of priorities.

Searching for God, as Hewitt says, is as old as humankind.

I would humbly suggest that the answers people want are more likely to be found at something like the Harvest Crusade than, let’s say, a national political convention.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.