Mixing religion and politics

WHAT does it mean when the president of the United States sits in the Oval Office around the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks with conservative journalists and wonders whether America is in the midst of another great religious revival?

Or when he talks about the war in Iraq and the fight against terrorism “as a confrontation between good and evil” and mentions that many of his supporters say they’re praying for him and the first lady?

“It seems to me,” President Bush told the journalists, “that there’s a Third Awakening” coming, another huge burst of religious fervor like those that swept the nation in the early 1700s and again about a century later, changing the fabric of Christian worship in the first and evangelizing a growing nation in the second.

God doesn’t vote, but churchgoers do -- more frequently than their less observant brethren. And with the midterm congressional elections less than two weeks away, conservative Christians are being called to the ballot box yet again, this time to help the Republican Party keep its shaky hold on the Senate and the House of Representatives. That religious base is more necessary than ever -- and its loyalty also more in question since the resignation of Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.) over revelations that he exchanged explicit e-mails with underage congressional pages.

In “The Holy Vote: The Politics of Faith in America,” Ray Suarez examines the tight embrace between religion and politics, a relationship the senior correspondent for “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” contends “has nothing particularly good in store” for either the church or the country.

Suarez’s even-handed tour through the nation’s hot-button intersections of religion and politics faults both parties for their cynicism and manipulation and homes in on some of the more egregious examples of hypocrisy on both sides -- especially during the presidential contest between Bush and Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry.

Republicans have been wooing the religious community for years, including Catholics who might be attracted to a Catholic Democrat such as Kerry. In 2004, the GOP attracted enough Catholics to make strategic gains in critical states such as Ohio, which “gave President Bush the electoral college margin he needed to remain in office.”

His dissection of Kerry’s loss to Bush is particularly instructive, as the Massachusetts senator tests the waters for another run in 2008.

In the middle of the 2004 campaign, Bush visited Rome to bestow a Medal of Freedom on Pope John Paul II -- even though the pontiff was publicly critical of the war in Iraq. America’s most conservative bishops announced they would withhold the sacrament of Communion from Kerry because of his stand on abortion. At the time, Kerry was largely silent.

Instead, Suarez writes, the candidate “might have combined his interesting family tree and his life experience to form a compelling pitch to Americans across the religious spectrum.” But until “the waning days of the campaign, it was hard to tell if that had ever occurred to him.”

It’s occurring to Kerry now. A week after Bush’s “Third Awakening” conversation, the senator told Pepperdine University students that fighting poverty and global warming and reducing the number of abortions were “godly tasks” and of critical importance to all people of faith. “Shame on us if we use our faith to divide and alienate people from one another or if we draft God into partisan service,” Kerry said. “As God gives us the ability to see, let us take up the tasks associated with loving our neighbors as ourselves.”

Unlike some other political writers who fear that the United States is being turned into a theocracy, Suarez points to Alabama -- which he describes as “one of the most uniformly Christian places in America” -- as evidence that there is little to worry about. Alabama has removed a granite monument of the Ten Commandments from its Supreme Court building, defeated a Bible curriculum proposed for its public schools and turned its back on an overhaul of the tax code that would have hewed more closely to biblical teachings -- like taking care of the poor -- by putting more of the burden on wealthier Alabamans. “If you cannot get an avowedly Christian government going in Alabama, where can you get one?” Suarez asks.

“The Holy Vote” offers a thorough history of -- and a resounding hymn to -- the separation of church and state. And it is a persuasive exploration of Judeo-Christian values and American politics. But for a book that was researched and written during the war in Iraq, it is strangely silent on the place of Islam and other religions in an increasingly diverse nation.

Where Suarez views America’s purported red-state/blue-state divide through the lens of religion, Brian Mann turns to geography to help explain the nation’s deep cultural divisions in “Welcome to the Homeland.”

Mann, a public radio reporter in New York state who has covered rural America for 20 years, believes that the mainstream has done rural voters (“homelanders”) a disservice with parachute-in coverage of places that city dwellers (“metros”) just don’t understand.

Although he acknowledges that the country’s small towns and agricultural heartland are losing population at a rapid clip, Mann argues that there are 50 million white, rural conservatives in America and they “have managed to seize enormous control over the national dialogue.”

Mann writes persuasively about the fundamental disparities of U.S. democracy, which give an edge to smaller states: Because every state has two U.S. senators, North Dakota (population 637,000) has as much say in Senate votes as California (population 37 million). He also notes that “in every presidential race, the electoral college reallocates huge amounts of voting clout, automatically boosting the influence of low-population rural states while penalizing the urban states, where most Americans live.”

But he is most compelling when talking about the differences between his “metro” beliefs and those of his “homelander” brother, a devout conservative whose worldview Mann just cannot comprehend.

The conversations between Mann and his brother Allen, his ambassador to the other side, do much to illuminate the differences in values between rural and urban America. But they do not solve the tantalizing mystery at the heart of so many families: How two boys with the same upbringing could end up as two men with such different beliefs.

Maybe there’s a sequel out there.

maria.laganga@latimes.com

Maria L. La Ganga covered the presidential campaigns of 1996, 2000 and 2004 for The Times.

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The Holy Vote

The Politics of Faith in America

Ray Suarez

Rayo: 326 pp., $24.95

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Welcome to the Homeland

A Journey to the Rural Heart of

America’s Conservative Revolution

Brian Mann

Steerforth Press: 296 pp., $24.95