God and Campaign 2000

The Internal Revenue Service’s recent denial of a tax exemption for the Christian Coalition seemed clear-cut. The organization, long politically active, has backed individual candidates who supported the views of religious conservatives, and the IRS finding meant it could not claim an exemption as a nonpartisan group. There are plenty of instances where religious organizations and even clergy in the pulpit have spoken out on causes ranging from abortion to the environment. But now the IRS rightly has put down a marker delineating the separation of church and state. It has done so by suggesting that organizations fundamentally political in their activities cannot expect a tax break.

Separation, however, is not the same as disregard, and the continuing challenge is to make room for faith-based concerns in the political arena.

To function well, a democracy must resolve conflicts arising from deeply held values. Americans of all religious perspectives have shown they cared about nuclear arms, Vietnam, hunger and prayer in schools. Conservatives and liberals alike have weighed the moral dilemma of abortion.

Because of the diversity among Americans, it is hard to strike a constructive balance between our fractious politics and our belief systems. But the nation is trying, and in the young presidential campaign leading contenders are saying they want religious groups to help solve social problems.

On the right, there is talk about whether the Republican Party can retain fundamentalists after recent decades of activism. Some religious conservatives are urging their faithful to back off politics entirely, in effect echoing a Colonial-era notion that church-state separation springs from a need to keep politics from corrupting religion.

Yet some moderate Republican strategists warn that turning the party over to religious conservatives in 2000 would court disaster. They, and the campaign-seasoned conservatives who want to downplay a hard-line abortion litmus test, are trying to work pragmatically around insoluble conflicts of values.

But there are less fractious arenas where citizens want policies and laws to reflect what they believe. The Democrats are polling and vowing to “take back God this time,” in the words of one advisor to Vice President Al Gore. Texas Gov. George W. Bush, in announcing his candidacy last weekend for the Republican presidential nomination, used language similar to that used by Gore on this subject. The nation is not going to solve every one of the big policy questions to everyone’s satisfaction across the partisan spectrum. However, it is significant and hopeful that the search today for constitutional ways of bringing religious points of view into public debates is based so broadly.

The key goal in law and policy will be to identify the principles that arise from faith that can be applied universally. Among these are: from the Democrats, a high regard for economic fairness, compassion, and toleration and inclusion for minorities; from the Republicans, concern with individual responsibility, individual freedom and moral accountability. Americans can seek common ground in these principles, which are separate from religious dogma and all of its sharp divisions.