Faith and change -- a paradox for politics

IT’S OLD NEWS that the Supreme Court nomination of Harriet E. Miers has forced both the Bush administration and Christian culture warriors into comical contortions. John G. Roberts Jr.’s Catholicism, the White House told us, was too personal for probing by inquiring minds on the Senate Judiciary Committee, but President Bush wanted to make sure we understood that “part of Harriet Miers’ life is her religion.”

It gets better. Evangelicals, usually all for faith-based politics, now find themselves opponents of the Miers nomination because they don’t know exactly how she’ll decide cases. Suddenly they are shocked, shocked that Bush would inject religion into the debate. So it goes in Washington, where hypocrisy is arguably the established religion.

What is especially interesting about the brouhaha over Miers’ religion is the way it sheds light on a perennial paradox in the argument that public officials should be “people of faith.”

Here is Paul M. Weyrich in a column in which the conservative leader cogently criticizes the “trust me” pitch for Miers from the White House:

“Miers was raised Roman Catholic and found Christ in the late 1970s, according to one evangelical acquaintance. Since conservative Catholics are part of the Bush coalition, the White House would be ill-advised to discuss her conversion too loudly.”

Never mind whether you have to leave the Roman Catholic Church to “find Christ,” a proposition that really does offend conservative Catholics -- and liberal ones too. Weyrich is also pointing a finger at the very fact of conversion -- which may undermine the whole reason people think it’s a good thing for Americans in general and American politicians in particular to be “people of faith.”

It’s a popular point of view, by the way. According to a 2000 Reuters-Zogby poll, when U.S. voters were presented with a hypothetical list of Jewish, black, female, Arab-American, gay or atheist vice presidential candidates, they were least likely to support the atheist.

One explanation for our penchant for electing believers came from the late President Eisenhower, who reportedly declared: “Our government makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply held religious belief -- and I don’t care what it is.”

It’s easy to mock this mantra of what some call “civil religion,” but it’s at the heart of why politicians list their church affiliation in their campaign biographies. In the voter’s mind, religious affiliation is a proxy for other traits: groundedness, humility (“would God want me to push the nuclear button?”) and respect for tradition.

For many believers, religion in the Eisenhower sense -- “and I don’t care what it is” -- is a conservative value. They equate “deeply held” beliefs with the faith of their fathers. That was the case for my mother, who used to rebuff Jehovah’s Witnesses with the brushoff: “Not interested; we’re Catholics.” (She would have said the same thing to evangelists for EST, Scientology or the Club for Growth.) Long before the term “cultural Catholic” achieved currency, Mom distrusted people who flitted from one religion to another.

But the Gospel according to Eisenhower and my mother fits uneasily with Revelation 21:5, in which “he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new.” The early Christians, like some of today’s evangelicals, were not conservatives; just the opposite. In his classic study, “The Rise of Christianity,” the sociologist Rodney Stark compared Jesus’ first followers to adherents of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. “Becoming a Moonie is an act of deviance, as was becoming a Christian in the first century,” Stark wrote.

What does this have to do with Harriet Miers? Not unlike the early Christians -- or Abraham, the patriarch whose encounter with God was so life-changing that he was willing to sacrifice his son -- Miers and other midlife converts to evangelical Christianity are true believers, but not in the Eisenhower Gospel.

My mother wouldn’t approve, and neither might some of the conservative senators who are pondering President Bush’s assurance that “I’ve known her long enough to know she’s not going to change, that 20 years from now she will be the same person with the same judicial philosophy she has today.”

If Miers can migrate from Catholicism to Episcopalianism to the Valley View Christian Church and beyond, to a splinter church, what’s a little journey from strict constructionism to a belief that the Constitution, like God, “makes all things new”?